A Catastrophic New Climate Report

[homersapien 11,393]

 

Climate change is here, it’s a crisis, and it’s caused by fossil fuels.

By Robinson Meyer

A new United Nations-led report from hundreds of climate scientists around the world makes it clear: The human-driven climate crisis is now well under way. Earth is likely hotter now than it has been at any moment since the beginning of the last Ice Age, 125,000 years ago, and the world has warmed 1.1 degrees Celsius, or nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit, since the Industrial Revolution began—an “unprecedented” and “rapid” change with no parallel in the Common Era. What’s more, the recent spate of horrific heat waves, fire-fueling droughts, and flood-inducing storms that have imperiled the inhabited world are not only typical of global warming, but directly caused by it.

Climate change has arrived, in other words, and it will keep getting worse until humanity reduces its greenhouse-gas pollution to zero, which can be accomplished only by dethroning oil, coal, and gas as the central energy sources powering the global economy.

But the speed of that transition matters—and preventing every last ton of carbon pollution, and averting every additional tenth of a degree of warming, will not only lessen the harm over the next few decades, but resound for centuries and even millennia to come.

These are the conclusions of the newest assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a UN-sponsored body that has periodically released a synthesis of current climate science since its founding in 1988. The group’s reports tend to punctuate the otherwise slow immiseration of climate change; its previous synthesis report, released in 2013, helped inform international climate policy, including the writing of the Paris Agreement.

This is its sixth report and its most definitive. The group’s findings must be agreed to by 195 countries; this famously makes it more conservative than some scientists believe is prudent. But compared with previous reports, there is little restraint here. In its strongest statement of culpability ever, the IPCC declared that humanity is “unequivocally” responsible for climate change. “In past reports, we’ve had to make that statement more hesitantly. Now it’s a statement of fact,” Gregory Flato, a vice chair of the group that authored the report and a senior research scientist within the Canadian government, told me.

Some of the worst impacts of climate change can still be avoided. “There are still emissions pathways that would lead us to limiting warming to 1.5 degrees, but they require deep, rapid cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions,” Flato said. “That leaves a glimmer of optimism that we could limit warming to levels like that.” But it would require much more expedient action from the United States than is contemplated in, say, the bipartisan infrastructure bill that Congress is currently considering.

The report is 3,949 pages long and synthesizes the past eight years of advances in climate science; altogether, it cites some 14,000 studies. It would be folly to try to summarize all that work here. But the bottom line is that climate science, and the cataclysm of climate change, has lurched into the present tense. Where scientists once warned of disasters in the distant future, now they strive to understand what has already happened—and what is too late to save.

1. Climate change is now a fact of modern life—and it will only get worse.

Climate change has been happening now nearly since before it first became a public issue. When James Hansen, the head of climate science at NASA, first warned Congress about climate change in 1988, he framed it in what might be called the tentative present tense, saying that the agency could now say “with a high degree of confidence” that global warming was under way.

And it was. As the new report notes: “Each of the last four decades has been successively warmer than any decade that preceded it since 1850.” Yet in the past few years, global warming has moved from a statistical property to an ambient condition of modern life. A mega-drought seems to grip the American West without end. A series of wildfires have passed, like a baton, from one part of the world to another, going from California to the Amazon to Australia to Greece to California again. And then there was the morning, a few weeks ago, when Americans on the East Coast and in the Midwest woke up, thousands of miles away from any wildfire, and smelled smoke in the air.

“We’re reaching a point where the impacts of climate change are becoming too hard to ignore for many people,” Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and a co-author of one of the report’s chapters, told me.

For the first time, the report establishes that those extreme events are happening because of climate change. Scientists’ ability to attribute individual events to the warming atmosphere is the “biggest advance” the field has seen in the past decade, Ben Cook, a climate-science professor at Columbia University, told me.

“Every inhabited region across the globe” has seen a well-documented increase in heat waves, heavy rain, or drought, the report says. Human activity is also behind the demise of glaciers since 1990, the hemorrhaging of the Greenland ice sheet, and the decline of snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere since 1950, the report says. No part of the world has been left untouched by humanity’s prodigious carbon pollution.

2. Sea-level rise will be worse than once thought—and could occur quickly and catastrophically.

In the past decade, climate scientists have arrived at more pessimistic views about sea-level rise, and those views are reflected in this report. Most researchers now believe that the oceans will rise roughly half a foot more than once projected. In a relatively optimistic “intermediate” emissions scenario, for instance, the IPCC once projected that oceans would rise about one and a half feet by 2100. The new report finds that just under two feet is more likely, and two and a half feet is not out of the question.

The authors could not eliminate from their models the small chance that some of the largest glaciers in West Antarctica could catastrophically collapse this century. In that scenario, humanity could see more than six and a half feet of sea-level rise by 2100 and perhaps as much as 16 feet of sea-level rise by 2150.

3. Sea-level rise is also essentially irreversible.

If humanity successfully learns how to remove carbon from the atmosphere, some of the impacts of climate change, such as ocean acidification and the rise in land temperatures, may be reversible.

But some will not. Sea-level rise is chief among them. “Once you have melting under way, it’s very hard to rein it in, even if you go full-scale into reversal of global warming,” Kim Cobb, a climate scientist at Georgia Tech and a co-author of the report, told me. The slow increase in sea levels could continue for millennia.

“When I say those words it almost chokes me up. It scares the crap out of me, frankly,” Cobb said. “This is a horrific long-term consequence to the decisions we’ll be making this decade on our watch.”

4. The climate is now changing on political time.

If climate change is happening now, then its time scales—which once seemed distant—are suddenly ticking by at the speed of the political or business calendars. An earlier draft of this report cautioned that the world could see more than 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming by the early 2030s. Although that language was removed because researchers could not guarantee that a fluke event, such as a once-in-a-century volcanic eruption, would not briefly cool the planet and delay the inevitable for a few years, the broad point remains. The IPCC now warns that the world is likely to exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming by 2040 even if humanity cuts carbon pollution as rapidly as is plausible. In fact, the agency estimates that enough greenhouse gas is already in the atmosphere today to raise the planet’s temperature by 1.5 degrees Celsius—only the cooling effects of smog and other forms of conventional air pollution are keeping temperatures depressed.

But humanity may still avoid warming the planet by 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2100. On all pathways, the world’s temperature will increase more than 1.5 degrees Celsius by the middle of the century; the only question is whether it then begins to cool down or keeps going up. Current policies suggest that the planet is set for 3 degrees Celsius, or more than 5 degrees Fahrenheit, of warming by the end of the century.

“We’re already seeing extreme rainfall, heat waves, and droughts that are all implicitly or explicitly tied to climate change—and this is just a 1-degree world,” Cook said. “I would not want to live in a 4-degree world. And a 3-degree world … would be quite challenging.”

 

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/08/latest-ipcc-report-catastrophe/619698/

Edited August 9, 2021 by homersapien

[jj3jordan 2,056]

Looks like the IPCC has been “adjusting” their temp data again. Must be time to fund raise. Assuming they get their wish and rid the earth of carbon dioxide, does that mean plants have no future on the planet? Asking for a friend.

[creed 1,641]

To add more perspective everyone should watch A Life on Earth by David Attenborough.  

[metafour 4,969]

1 hour ago, jj3jordan said:

Looks like the IPCC has been “adjusting” their temp data again. Must be time to fund raise. Assuming they get their wish and rid the earth of carbon dioxide, does that mean plants have no future on the planet? Asking for a friend.

Unfortunately for "climate scientists", COVID really took the wind out of their sails in terms of preoccupying everyone's interest in fear-porn. So now it's time to drum up some new "research" to regain some momentum. Of course the new findings show that not only is climate change still here, it's actually worse than we predicted....again! 

Does nobody else follow the mantra of "do not listen to what they say, look at what they do”? If sea levels are rising (and worse than initially suggested supposedly), why did the Obama's just spend ~$12 million on a waterfront mansion on Martha's Vineyard - a literal island off of Cape Cod? Shouldn't they be up to date on all the latest climate research which would indicate that this would be a terrible investment? How come so many of these politicians and celebrities who campaign on looming climate disaster still own, and continue to purchase waterfront property all over the globe? Al Gore - literally the same exact deal LMAO. 2 + 2 = 5, apparently.

[johnnyAU 3,634]

LOL. It was always going to be "catastrophic"...and "existential threat" even.  Delivering this ridiculous hyperbolic report every year is the reason the IPCC was formed in the first place. 

[DKW 86 7,431]

6 hours ago, metafour said:

Unfortunately for "climate scientists", COVID really took the wind out of their sails in terms of preoccupying everyone's interest in fear-porn. So now it's time to drum up some new "research" to regain some momentum. Of course the new findings show that not only is climate change still here, it's actually worse than we predicted....again! 

Does nobody else follow the mantra of "do not listen to what they say, look at what they do”? If sea levels are rising (and worse than initially suggested supposedly), why did the Obama's just spend ~$12 million on a waterfront mansion on Martha's Vineyard - a literal island off of Cape Cod? Shouldn't they be up to date on all the latest climate research which would indicate that this would be a terrible investment? How come so many of these politicians and celebrities who campaign on looming climate disaster still own, and continue to purchase waterfront property all over the globe? Al Gore - literally the same exact deal LMAO. 2 + 2 = 5, apparently.

 

6 hours ago, johnnyAU said:

LOL. It was always going to be "catastrophic"...and "existential threat" even.  Delivering this ridiculous hyperbolic report every year is the reason the IPCC was formed in the first place. 

The IPCC never fails to deliver, year after year. You can almost set your watch by it. Most....Worst....Existential...Catastrophic....They just make a "Word Salad of Hyperbolic Predictions" and re-release year after year after year. Maybe...they need to quit doing the same thing year after year after year and try something new that isnt failing. Like engaging in a real dialogue? Rewarding Industries and People that do good with real tax breaks and Solar Loans? How about a new national recognition award? The Sollies! Hell Naw! Let's  give them one more 1300 Page Report from the same Doofi that the last 20 1300 page reports came from...Yea! That'll change everything...NOT! 

If you wanted to actually change the world view, why would you not try something new after seeing so much fail? That was the point of my talking about Invictus and Mandela, Mandela rejected the Reactionary Desires of his own family to do the right thing. Maher, certainly no Mandela, recently told the world: "Alabama, you complete me" in his talk about doing it differently. We cannot keep doing what fails and patting ourselves on the back. I know it is tired but the old "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over thinking you are going to get a different result" still holds true. Why do people keep supporting these two parties? They both fail daily. Why give them money? Why vote for them? They just continue to fail. You want to see the real cultic religions in America? Just look at the two parties. See what the Scientologists do for their critics? The DNC did to GG. 

If what you are doing is FOR THE PUBLIC GOOD, BUT IT IS FAILING, THEN TRY SOMSETHING NEW. Now, this radical concept of stopping the fail is not going to sit well with the mind-numbed DNC/RNC Talking Points Crowds that only want to spend the rest of their lives repeating the SSDD for the rest of eternity.

GG went on TC's Show to reach a new audience. Condemn him!!!! GG dared to criticize the DNC....take away his ability to make a living!!!!!! Many of the people I watch and listen to, that does not mean that I believe nor support all of what they do or say, have come to the same conclusion. Allegiance to these two sorry ass parties got us here. Staying slavishly loyal to them is going to keep us here.

I mean are you really wanting to do something good for the nation, or are you just in it for the Snarky-do-nothing-isms and your PARTY of choice?

 

Edited August 10, 2021 by DKW 86

[homersapien 11,393]

17 hours ago, johnnyAU said:

LOL. It was always going to be "catastrophic"...and "existential threat" even.  Delivering this ridiculous hyperbolic report every year is the reason the IPCC was formed in the first place. 

So, you think it's a hoax and is not really happening?

[homersapien 11,393]

The Far-Right View on Climate Politics

As the world reckons with the grim reality of the climate crisis, right-wing populists are adapting their message.

By Yasmeen Serhan

Perhaps the 234 scientists behind this week’s landmark climate assessment had hoped that their report—published during a summer of deadly flooding, wildfires, and heat waves—would act as a wake-up call, one that would unite the world’s governments and parties.

But political consensus on the issue of climate change, much like the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, is unlikely to be achieved: Although most mainstream political parties have at the very least acknowledged the reality of human-induced climate change and the need to implement sweeping new policies to address it, several populist parties continue to reject the scientific consensus. Even those that accept it tend to oppose mainstream solutions, including multilateral efforts to address the problem.

Europe, which has experienced some of the summer’s worst climate disasters, offers a preview of the populist right’s next political battleground. What has emerged so far is not a change of heart but, rather, a shift in tone. Populist parties have traded outright denialism for the position that climate policy, like that of immigration and the coronavirus pandemic, represents yet another top-down elite agenda that stands to hit ordinary people, particularly those in the working class, the hardest.

If this line of argument sounds familiar, that’s because it is. In recent years, right-wing populists have positioned themselves as Europe’s staunchest defenders—against immigration and threats to national sovereignty; against pandemic restrictions and the influence of global institutions; and against what they regard as national governments’ hysteria over climate change, which populists have described as “degenerate fearmongering” at best and “totalitarian” at worst.

This isn’t to say that Europe’s populist right is united in its opposition to climate change. According to a 2019 study by Adelphi, an environmental-policy think tank based in Berlin, only two of Europe’s nearly two dozen right-wing populist parties—Hungary’s far-right Fidesz and Latvia’s National Alliance—explicitly support the scientific consensus on the climate crisis. But among the others, differences exist. Some, including the far-right Alternative for Germany and the Dutch Party for Freedom, reject the idea of anthropogenic global warming, whereas others, such as France’s National Rally and Spain’s Vox, have begun to advocate their own brand of nationalist environmentalism—one that supports local policies to tackle climate change but simultaneously rejects international agreements aimed at doing the same.

In practice, this means promoting conservation at the local level (through policies such as favoring local consumption and preserving limited resources) while repudiating international-led initiatives such as the Paris Agreement. In the case of Vox, it has meant advocating to preserve Spain’s “natural heritage” on the one hand and opposing efforts to rein in the country’s carbon emissions on the other.

Read: It’s grim

The populist right’s about-face on climate is partly driven by politics. As voters become more attuned to the threats posed by the climate crisis, the repercussions of which are already being felt in countries such as Germany, Italy, Greece, and Spain, some of Europe’s populist parties have been forced to change tack. Vox, which once dismissed climate change as a hoax, has since promoted its own version of environmentalism as an alternative to what it describes as the “green religion” of the left. France’s National Rally has experienced a similar transition in recent years, from the climate skepticism of its founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, to the identity-based environmentalism of his daughter, and the party’s current leader, Marine Le Pen.

Populist parties realize that “there are diminishing returns in playing the denialist card,” Catherine Fieschi, a political analyst who tracks dissent against climate policy in Europe, told me. Unlike issues such as immigration or the European Union, climate change simply isn’t as divisive in Europe (something that can’t be said for other parts of the world, including the United States). Until recently, it wasn’t considered a top priority for voters.

Even parties that haven’t explicitly changed course on climate change have found ways to incorporate the issue into their worldview. Climate change, after all, fits neatly within the populist narrative of the “pure people” versus the “corrupt elite.” In the populist right’s telling, green policies such as fuel taxes and decarbonization incentives represent an elitist attack on the lives of ordinary people. “Populists have been very good at saying, ‘We’re not just going to protect you from climate change,’” Fieschi said. “‘We’re going to protect you from an elite that doesn’t give a damn about the cost that climate policy is going to take on you.’”

Beyond the economic argument is another classic from the populist arsenal—the anti-expertise argument. According to Ralph Schroeder, the director of research at the Oxford Internet Institute and a co-author of a recent study on the link between climate skepticism and support for right-wing populists, populist rejection of climate science “is not so much correlated with economic hardship that it may impose,” but rather with the belief that “experts shouldn’t tell us what to do.”

Helen Lewis: I’ve hit my climate tipping point

But perhaps the most cogent argument populists are beginning to make about climate change is one that they’ve been pushing for much of the last year: that this is another example of the establishment trying to restrict people’s basic freedoms. “It’s all the more easy to do in the wake of the pandemic,” Fieschi told me, noting the restrictive measures imposed by European governments to curb the spread of the coronavirus, many of which have been met with protests. “What [populists] are saying is ‘This is the thin end of the wedge, this pandemic thing. Now they’re going to really curtail your freedoms.’”

The biggest challenge facing this populist argument, however, is time—something that, as the United Nations climate report made clear, the world is in short supply of. Extreme weather events are becoming more common; urgency to tackle global warming will grow. While populist arguments against “climate hysteria” may provide temporary reassurance, they are no substitute for real policy solutions. For people displaced by worsening fires and floods, blaming elites will offer little comfort.

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2021/08/far-right-view-climate-ipcc/619709/

 

[PUB78 1,359]

23 hours ago, homersapien said:

 

Climate change is here, it’s a crisis, and it’s caused by fossil fuels.

By Robinson Meyer

A new United Nations-led report from hundreds of climate scientists around the world makes it clear: The human-driven climate crisis is now well under way. Earth is likely hotter now than it has been at any moment since the beginning of the last Ice Age, 125,000 years ago, and the world has warmed 1.1 degrees Celsius, or nearly 2 degrees Fahrenheit, since the Industrial Revolution began—an “unprecedented” and “rapid” change with no parallel in the Common Era. What’s more, the recent spate of horrific heat waves, fire-fueling droughts, and flood-inducing storms that have imperiled the inhabited world are not only typical of global warming, but directly caused by it.

Climate change has arrived, in other words, and it will keep getting worse until humanity reduces its greenhouse-gas pollution to zero, which can be accomplished only by dethroning oil, coal, and gas as the central energy sources powering the global economy.

But the speed of that transition matters—and preventing every last ton of carbon pollution, and averting every additional tenth of a degree of warming, will not only lessen the harm over the next few decades, but resound for centuries and even millennia to come.

These are the conclusions of the newest assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a UN-sponsored body that has periodically released a synthesis of current climate science since its founding in 1988. The group’s reports tend to punctuate the otherwise slow immiseration of climate change; its previous synthesis report, released in 2013, helped inform international climate policy, including the writing of the Paris Agreement.

This is its sixth report and its most definitive. The group’s findings must be agreed to by 195 countries; this famously makes it more conservative than some scientists believe is prudent. But compared with previous reports, there is little restraint here. In its strongest statement of culpability ever, the IPCC declared that humanity is “unequivocally” responsible for climate change. “In past reports, we’ve had to make that statement more hesitantly. Now it’s a statement of fact,” Gregory Flato, a vice chair of the group that authored the report and a senior research scientist within the Canadian government, told me.

Some of the worst impacts of climate change can still be avoided. “There are still emissions pathways that would lead us to limiting warming to 1.5 degrees, but they require deep, rapid cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions,” Flato said. “That leaves a glimmer of optimism that we could limit warming to levels like that.” But it would require much more expedient action from the United States than is contemplated in, say, the bipartisan infrastructure bill that Congress is currently considering.

The report is 3,949 pages long and synthesizes the past eight years of advances in climate science; altogether, it cites some 14,000 studies. It would be folly to try to summarize all that work here. But the bottom line is that climate science, and the cataclysm of climate change, has lurched into the present tense. Where scientists once warned of disasters in the distant future, now they strive to understand what has already happened—and what is too late to save.

1. Climate change is now a fact of modern life—and it will only get worse.

Climate change has been happening now nearly since before it first became a public issue. When James Hansen, the head of climate science at NASA, first warned Congress about climate change in 1988, he framed it in what might be called the tentative present tense, saying that the agency could now say “with a high degree of confidence” that global warming was under way.

And it was. As the new report notes: “Each of the last four decades has been successively warmer than any decade that preceded it since 1850.” Yet in the past few years, global warming has moved from a statistical property to an ambient condition of modern life. A mega-drought seems to grip the American West without end. A series of wildfires have passed, like a baton, from one part of the world to another, going from California to the Amazon to Australia to Greece to California again. And then there was the morning, a few weeks ago, when Americans on the East Coast and in the Midwest woke up, thousands of miles away from any wildfire, and smelled smoke in the air.

“We’re reaching a point where the impacts of climate change are becoming too hard to ignore for many people,” Zeke Hausfather, a climate scientist and a co-author of one of the report’s chapters, told me.

For the first time, the report establishes that those extreme events are happening because of climate change. Scientists’ ability to attribute individual events to the warming atmosphere is the “biggest advance” the field has seen in the past decade, Ben Cook, a climate-science professor at Columbia University, told me.

“Every inhabited region across the globe” has seen a well-documented increase in heat waves, heavy rain, or drought, the report says. Human activity is also behind the demise of glaciers since 1990, the hemorrhaging of the Greenland ice sheet, and the decline of snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere since 1950, the report says. No part of the world has been left untouched by humanity’s prodigious carbon pollution.

2. Sea-level rise will be worse than once thought—and could occur quickly and catastrophically.

In the past decade, climate scientists have arrived at more pessimistic views about sea-level rise, and those views are reflected in this report. Most researchers now believe that the oceans will rise roughly half a foot more than once projected. In a relatively optimistic “intermediate” emissions scenario, for instance, the IPCC once projected that oceans would rise about one and a half feet by 2100. The new report finds that just under two feet is more likely, and two and a half feet is not out of the question.

The authors could not eliminate from their models the small chance that some of the largest glaciers in West Antarctica could catastrophically collapse this century. In that scenario, humanity could see more than six and a half feet of sea-level rise by 2100 and perhaps as much as 16 feet of sea-level rise by 2150.

3. Sea-level rise is also essentially irreversible.

If humanity successfully learns how to remove carbon from the atmosphere, some of the impacts of climate change, such as ocean acidification and the rise in land temperatures, may be reversible.

But some will not. Sea-level rise is chief among them. “Once you have melting under way, it’s very hard to rein it in, even if you go full-scale into reversal of global warming,” Kim Cobb, a climate scientist at Georgia Tech and a co-author of the report, told me. The slow increase in sea levels could continue for millennia.

“When I say those words it almost chokes me up. It scares the crap out of me, frankly,” Cobb said. “This is a horrific long-term consequence to the decisions we’ll be making this decade on our watch.”

4. The climate is now changing on political time.

If climate change is happening now, then its time scales—which once seemed distant—are suddenly ticking by at the speed of the political or business calendars. An earlier draft of this report cautioned that the world could see more than 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming by the early 2030s. Although that language was removed because researchers could not guarantee that a fluke event, such as a once-in-a-century volcanic eruption, would not briefly cool the planet and delay the inevitable for a few years, the broad point remains. The IPCC now warns that the world is likely to exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming by 2040 even if humanity cuts carbon pollution as rapidly as is plausible. In fact, the agency estimates that enough greenhouse gas is already in the atmosphere today to raise the planet’s temperature by 1.5 degrees Celsius—only the cooling effects of smog and other forms of conventional air pollution are keeping temperatures depressed.

But humanity may still avoid warming the planet by 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2100. On all pathways, the world’s temperature will increase more than 1.5 degrees Celsius by the middle of the century; the only question is whether it then begins to cool down or keeps going up. Current policies suggest that the planet is set for 3 degrees Celsius, or more than 5 degrees Fahrenheit, of warming by the end of the century.

“We’re already seeing extreme rainfall, heat waves, and droughts that are all implicitly or explicitly tied to climate change—and this is just a 1-degree world,” Cook said. “I would not want to live in a 4-degree world. And a 3-degree world … would be quite challenging.”

 

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/08/latest-ipcc-report-catastrophe/619698/

It’s the end of the world coming, Homer. Are you ready?

[johnnyAU 3,634]

14 minutes ago, PUB78 said:

It’s the end of the world coming, Homer. Are you ready?

Oh Noooeessss! "It's even worse than we thought the last time we said it's even worse than we thought!" 

 

[jj3jordan 2,056]

The weather does what it does. We don’t control it.  These are the people that built 5000 plywood clapboard apartments on a pier at sea level in New Jersey and acted surprised when (SuperStormSandy), in reality a small category ONE (1) hurricane (we don’t even cancel a tee time for a cat 1 storm)  blew all their domiciles into the bay.  Hey Homer, if we get rid of all the carbon dioxide, will the plants get to live? Don’t they need CO2 to respirate and produce oxygen so we can respirate? Who is controlling that? Does the IPCC know when to shut off the hysteria so we don’t choke ourselves out?

[homersapien 11,393]

2 hours ago, PUB78 said:

It’s the end of the world coming, Homer. Are you ready?

I'll likely be gone before it peaks anyway. 

How about your kids?

[homersapien 11,393]

2 hours ago, johnnyAU said:

Oh Noooeessss! "It's even worse than we thought the last time we said it's even worse than we thought!" 

 

Again, do you think it's all a hoax?

  If so, then just say it.

Edited August 10, 2021 by homersapien

[CoffeeTiger 5,135]

12 minutes ago, homersapien said:

Again, do you think it's all a hoax?

  If so, then just say it.

[johnnyAU 3,634]

1 minute ago, homersapien said:

Again, do you think it's all a hoax?

  If so, then just say it.

The climate has always changed, and always will. The IPCC exists to drive policy through these fanciful reports. Apocalyptic predictions of doom and end of the world scenarios are their propaganda of choice. Overdramatization and unverifiable predictions of 50-100 years out to gain near term trillions of $$$$ is nothing more than a fear tax. Dropping the emissions to net zero by 2030 will do more harm than good. It is especially stupid if we intend on relying on mostly wind and solar to cover the loss in fossil fuel use and not seriously considering nuclear. And that's just the U.S. If China and India continue building fossil fuel plants at the same rate, this is one enormous, and dangerous exercise in futility.

[homersapien 11,393]

44 minutes ago, johnnyAU said:

The climate has always changed, and always will. The IPCC exists to drive policy through these fanciful reports. Apocalyptic predictions of doom and end of the world scenarios are their propaganda of choice. Overdramatization and unverifiable predictions of 50-100 years out to gain near term trillions of $$$$ is nothing more than a fear tax. Dropping the emissions to net zero by 2030 will do more harm than good. It is especially stupid if we intend on relying on mostly wind and solar to cover the loss in fossil fuel use and not seriously considering nuclear. And that's just the U.S. If China and India continue building fossil fuel plants at the same rate, this is one enormous, and dangerous exercise in futility.

You don't understand the time scales involved.  Natural climate change occurs in geologic time.  AGW started only a few centuries ago.

And it is possible for us to act quick enough to curb the effects. This is more of a political problem than a scientific one. (And yes, nuclear will play an important role.) 

[johnnyAU 3,634]

Just now, homersapien said:

You don't understand the time scales involved.  Natural climate change occurs in geologic time.  AGW started only a few centuries ago.

And it is possible for us to act quick enough to curb the effects. This is more of a political problem than a scientific one. (And yes, nuclear will play an important role.) 

I fully understand the time scales. Anthropogenic contribution (which includes more than CO2, methane) may only have started a few centuries ago, but it does not mean it is the driver of the climate.  Blaming everything on the magic molecule is a simplistic band-aid approach to a complex, non-linear, chaotic problem. It is NOT possible for us to act quickly enough to do anything significant to the climate, in either direction. Throwing trillions of $$ at it won't do anything but wreck economies and put people's lives at risk when not enough power is available to either cool or heat homes/bldgs, etc... It's the intersection of arrogance and stupidity.  No the seas didn't stop rising when Obama was elected, and won't stop if emissions go to zero (not that they ever will). They've been rising for 11,000+ years. 

[PUB78 1,359]

4 hours ago, homersapien said:

I'll likely be gone before it peaks anyway. 

How about your kids?

If Christ doesn’t come back, then I dread the world that my children and grandchildren will endure.

[Leftfield 2,617]

Anyone else astounded that people will believe Christ is coming, but not rising sea levels?

[abw0004 10,125]

I do find it astounding that many still are ignoring the issues of climate change and saying that it does not exist.  It is one of those things where if you aren't impacted by something, you ignore it.  Every year we are breaking heat records with worse and worse wildfires in the West.  Miami is at its breaking point of keeping the rising sea level out of it's city.  Even here in Atlanta, the winters are warmer than they used to be and the trees are blooming earlier in the spring than normal.  I just don't understand how we can ignore these changes until it is too late.

I mean, what is the downside to being better stewards to our planet?  Keeping trash out of our oceans?  I just do not get it.

One thing to point out as well, why are we ignoring the scientists here?  What gain do they have for lying?  You know who is saying it is a hoax and telling you to ignore it?  Politicians that are being paid by oil companies to say so.  What do politicians that say climate change is real get out of it?

[abw0004 10,125]

On 8/9/2021 at 6:17 PM, metafour said:

Does nobody else follow the mantra of "do not listen to what they say, look at what they do”? If sea levels are rising (and worse than initially suggested supposedly), why did the Obama's just spend ~$12 million on a waterfront mansion on Martha's Vineyard - a literal island off of Cape Cod? Shouldn't they be up to date on all the latest climate research which would indicate that this would be a terrible investment? How come so many of these politicians and celebrities who campaign on looming climate disaster still own, and continue to purchase waterfront property all over the globe? Al Gore - literally the same exact deal LMAO. 2 + 2 = 5, apparently.

Martha's Vineyard is 311 feet above sea level.  Comparing that to Miami that is only 4 feet above sea level it is a much better investment.  Because of this, Miami's beachfront properties have been dropping in value since 2013.

[Leftfield 2,617]

2 hours ago, abw0004 said:

One thing to point out as well, why are we ignoring the scientists here? 

It challenges an ingrained world view of many, and that is always difficult to change. To an extent, I get this. Many years ago when I began to hear about Global Warming, there were reports of flawed data sets (hockey stick graph being the most obvious example), measuring equipment that was set up in locations that would purposefully skew temperatures warmer, insufficient or ignored calibration programs, etc. It was plausible at the time to believe that this was a group of scientists that were drumming up controversy to alarm people into funding research, or just simply to get noticed, and it was comfortable to believe that there was no rush to significantly change the way things were.

However, it's long past the point where it was plausible this was all a scam. There are too many experts that agree, enough that even a significant portion can't be receiving any financial or professional gains from sounding a false alarm. There can be some disagreement as to the how rapidly things will change, and to what extent human activity is responsible, but there is no longer any reasonable argument to say it doesn't exist and humans have no impact. 

One other thing to consider: those at the vanguard of sounding the alarm made a serious mistake in calling it a scientific "consensus" very early on. Consensus, at least the way I've always defined it, means that everyone agrees, which was clearly not the case in the late 80's/early 90's. That was enough to raise eyebrows for many, including me, because it seemed to be an attempt to stifle debate. That was a huge reason I was a skeptic far longer than I should have been.

I would also point out, the same excuses for ignoring Climate scientists is now being used against against Public Health officials and epidemiologists: "they're all getting paid by the people that want to use fear to stay in power and increase their control. Nothing to worry about. Move along."

 

Edited August 11, 2021 by Leftfield

[homersapien 11,393]

18 hours ago, PUB78 said:

If Christ doesn’t come back, then I dread the world that my children and grandchildren will endure.

That really doesn't sound like much of a plan to me.

Edited August 11, 2021 by homersapien

[homersapien 11,393]

21 hours ago, johnnyAU said:

I fully understand the time scales. Anthropogenic contribution (which includes more than CO2, methane) may only have started a few centuries ago, but it does not mean it is the driver of the climate.  Blaming everything on the magic molecule is a simplistic band-aid approach to a complex, non-linear, chaotic problem. It is NOT possible for us to act quickly enough to do anything significant to the climate, in either direction. Throwing trillions of $$ at it won't do anything but wreck economies and put people's lives at risk when not enough power is available to either cool or heat homes/bldgs, etc... It's the intersection of arrogance and stupidity.  No the seas didn't stop rising when Obama was elected, and won't stop if emissions go to zero (not that they ever will). They've been rising for 11,000+ years. 

I don't think you do.  Otherwise, you would have never lead off with "The climate has always changed, and always will. "

And exactly what are your qualifications to suggest the greenhouse effect (CO2 and other gases introduced by man) isn't the problem?  Of course it's the problem.    

Speaking of arrogance and stupidity, you have it is spades.

You really think changing to a "green" economy represents a greater threat to our society than simply continuing along the same path that got us here?  We are less than 1.5 degrees C warmer now than we were decades ago and the global impact is now obvious.  I cannot even imagine what the earth will be like if we get to 2.5 degrees or higher but that's the path we are on. 

And the problem is not a "zero sum" game of investment.  There will be a lot of economic stimulation and opportunities that arise from transitioning to a carbon free energy economy.  Change is always challenging.  But in this case, we don't have the option.  We know what the future will be without changing.  And it's not good.  It will be far worse than the pain caused by technological change, no matter how bad the latter is.

Think of the earth as a spaceship we are all traveling on.  If we destroy the ecology of that spaceship, there is no back-up plan.

Personally, I am reaching the point of not caring.  I decided in 1974 one of the major problems with humans - and the earth - is that there are too many of us.  Accordingly, I decided not to have children.  At 70, I likely won't see the worst of what is coming.  It will be bad.

 

 

Edited August 11, 2021 by homersapien

[homersapien 11,393]

4 hours ago, abw0004 said:

Martha's Vineyard is 311 feet above sea level.  Comparing that to Miami that is only 4 feet above sea level it is a much better investment.  Because of this, Miami's beachfront properties have been dropping in value since 2013.

And gentrification is starting to happen inland because of the higher elevations.  That was where the poor people used to live and now they are being displaced by the wealthy.

https://sealevel.climatecentral.org/news/floria-and-the-rising-sea