It reemphasizes the climate sceptists standpoints. They (most) are not denying there is a problem, but claiming there is widespread misinformation and propaganda around this topic and a strong exaggeration of the scale of the problem.
We have a kernel of truth around climate change. Let us cherish the kernel, instead of watering it down by popular media and scientists trying to jump the bandwagon by making vaguely substantiated claims.
The indisputable observable facts are:
1) The polar jet stream is slowing down.
2) This creates meandering air currents which produced the current heatwave in Europe and the so called polar vortexes in the US.
For many countries this is also a domestic divide rather than the traditional nationalism soaked debate that most people or news orgs focus on.
Southern US stands to lose a lot more from the charts I've seen. Surprised it isn't raised a lot more by their representatives.
One top comment said "Over the next 40 years, (those 250 million tress) will absorb about as much carbon as the United States emits in a week."
[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/c6lj7u/nonprofit_pl...
- Step one: _stop_ polluting (in like 1995).
- Step two: Work out ways to get the genie back into the bottle or co2 back into the ground.
It seems like we forgot to enact step 1 and now step 2 will pretty much be pointless because we are still spewing out co2 faster than ever.
If we're too survive we need to do both steps as of yesterday, unfortunately I don't think there are very efficient says to sequester enough carbon yet, so I think we might be in some trouble.
Huge supporter of climate change action, but scientifically is there any basis for the idea that current models point to human extinction? (Don't answer if you don't have a hard source, but I'd like what the projected point is for that)
> This image should terrify you. It should be on billboards.
> As you can see, in either scenario, global emissions must peak and begin declining immediately. For a medium chance to avoid 1.5 degrees, the world has to zero out net carbon emissions by 2050 or so — for a good chance of avoiding 2 degrees, by around 2065.
> After that, emissions have to go negative. Humanity has to start burying a lot more carbon than it throws up into the atmosphere. There are several ways to sequester greenhouse gases, from reforestation to soil enrichment to cow backpacks, but the backbone of the envisioned negative emissions is BECCS, or bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration.
> BECCS — raising, harvesting, and burning biomass for energy, while capturing and burying the carbon emissions — is unproven at scale. Thus far, most demonstration plants of any size attaching CCS to fossil fuel facilities have been over-budget disasters. What if we can’t rely on it? What if it never pans out?
...
> Check out that middle graphic. If we really want to avoid 1.5 degrees, and we can’t rely on large-scale carbon sequestration, then the global community has to zero out its carbon emissions by 2026.
To state the obvious, we will not reach 0 CO2 emissions in the next 7 years. Everyone better strap in, because it only gets worse from here.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/06/21/carbon-engineering-co2-captu...
After 5 in 15 years, and on course for a sixth, the benchmark looks way off. At what point should it simply become a 1:3 year summer, or just "summer"?
How deniers can experience it and keep acting like nothing's happening beats me.
I look around my workplace, nobody seems to be compelled to change their lifestyle. Nobody seems to mind using a disposable cup every day, buying latest gadgets they don't need, talking about traveling to new places, etc.
I bought people on my team reusable coffee mugs to reduce the amount of disposable waste, but inevitably they get too lazy to clean it and they are back on disposable cups.
We need political action and economic incentives. Individuals changing their lifestyle isn’t going to accomplish anything.
Have people really got that lazy? Or is their work really that important?
In all fairness though, in America the power is only 110v not 240. So boiling a kettle is not going to happen. Plus the Boston Tea Party thing means y'all don't have a nice sharp cup of tea. So it is kind of not economically viable to just have a cup of tea, which for me, with no milk or sugar, comes in at less than 1p per cup + electricity. (58 tea bags cost 80 pence). Even then I often re-use the same tea bag, so totally different economic level.
I imagine my blood wouldn't be too useful if it was laced with caffeine, sugar, dairy products and/or artificial sweeteners on an hourly basis and that I might get too lazy to wash a cup. Maybe this is what happens.
There is a feedback loop that goes on with the wasteful lifestyle with people not able to regulate their body heat in winter or summer. So everything has to be air conditioned the whole time. In the USA this is a requirement but in England there was no such thing as air conditioning in the 1970's. You would open a window instead. Nowadays the windows have to be closed and the AC is on. Also in the 1970's you put lights on when it got dark. You didn't have the lights on mid day in mid summer, the glowy thing in the sky was considered sufficient.
Try turning off the lights in your workplace and see how people moan. Don't tell them that you are saving the environment, just say you had glare on your screen. See how they react.
I would like to see an office segregated into two zones much like how places used to be segregated into smoking and non-smoking areas. In one zone there would be the planet trashers. Then in the other the people who can do actual work without having to be overly nannied.
The 'eco' work zone would have no AC in places like England, instead there would be a breeze, some silence (instead of fans), nobody moaning about the weather but enjoying it and some sensible hours worked, so nobody sauntering in at 10 to moan all day, more of a decent lunch time, French style.
Meanwhile, in the other zone would be the people who are no longer able to regulate their body temperatures due to weight considerations. They would be paid slightly less as in their part of the building there would be the fizzy drinks machine to pay for, the disposable cups, the air conditioning, the excess lighting and the excess trash to landfill.
If this were in place then I am sure productivity would increase.
(Max time on top chart goes back to 1919)
Each year's high and low in the same line so there's no chance of noticing a trend or moving average, without plotting one.
Is it an obscure idiom (Native English speaker, so hard to tell)?
I had to read the article to finally made sense of it.
The article explain later what that means:
> Europe’s five hottest summers in the past 500 years have all occurred in the last 15 years, not including this summer.
And that means window units are not an option.
So if you don't have A/C, it's certainly not because you physically can't. I personally get by with a fan.
Though I definitely have culture shock when I return to Texas and remember people will have their A/C on 24/7 at 69F.
Wonder what sort of change that will bring to countries or regions in the world.
It's not really about the population it's about usage and greed.
edit: sorry, wrong calculation:
2 Steaks a week produce about 300Kg Co2 per year, which is the same as 7 People living DR Kongo produce
Who would pitch in to help me build a giant Mr Burns sun blocker in space?
If everyone on this site simply 1) exercised their right to vote fully, 2) invested enough research time to make sure their vote helps fight global heating, in even a tiny way, and 3) made one change per month, no matter how small, in their individual routine in a way that diminishes their contribution to global heating...
... That would contribute more to saving the world than all our “world-saving” startups combined.
But that would require admitting that we’re not as special as we think we are, which is hard.
Compared to a visionary engineering team raising let’s say $100 million to push forward new methods of sequestration?
YC has specifically called for startups in this field. Startups like SKH are pushing to get sequestration under $100 per tonne — compared to US per capita average of 20 tones, of which 8.5 tones is considered “innate” just for living in the US...
So while the absolute maximum personal impact an individual can have is around 10 tones, cost effective sequestration is the path forward to pricing and taxing carbon.
Once we have a reasonable sequestration cost, we can charge everyone and everything for their own emissions and use that money to actually negate it.
At current rates it would be ~$3,000 per capita which is still politically untenable. But at $300 per capital it becomes trivial. Somewhere in the middle in there it becomes economically and politically possible to actually eliminate the entire carbon emissions of the US, without even having to ask anyone to change their footprint.
So the question is what’s more important to you? Moralistically preaching to everyone how they should be living their lives, or actually reaching zero net emissions?
For example, you don’t need to eliminate international travel in order to eliminate the carbon footprint of international travel.
