June was the hottest month recorded in human history: https://weather.com/en-IN/india/news/news/2019-07-16-earth-e...
It crushed the record and July is tracking to break that record.
There's not a socially acceptable way of conveying how bad it is. Running around and screaming "we're all going to die" is more accurate that saying things will be fine.
When a country like India lacks drinking water a huge mass of people will be on the move.
In Europe food production is in trouble. This will also cause a lot of trouble and people will start to move to better places.
Maybe we will survive but that's indeed different from 'we will be fine'.
In this case the "royal we" is hiding a lot of death. I'm sure even in a 5 deg C worst case model maybe a couple of hundred million people can survive by the poles. But that means 90-95% population die-off. That's ignoring trophic web collapses and ecological damage to the world that human beings have adapted to for hundreds of thousands of years.
Its my understanding Pepsi and Coca Cola have been an economic boon for the country, but in the process, monopolizes a large quantity of the water supply.
Maybe doing away with these two companies might be a positive first start?
https://www.thoughtco.com/coca-cola-groundwater-depletion-in...
Not just India,"Two million in Zimbabwe’s capital have no water as city turns off taps" https://www.climatechangenews.com/2019/07/15/two-million-zim...
No it was not - it was the hottest JUNE on record. Not the hottest MONTH. Your source even says so.
This is very serious. Errors like this make it easier for denialists to find a technical issue and then disregard the entire message.
That being said, "Errors like this make it easier for denialists to find a technical issue and then disregard the entire message" ... it is better to entirely write them off at this point. It has been decades of proven predictions. There is no standard of proof that will change minds.
That said, it's horrible. Not even a strong El Nino year.
But what solutions are you proposing? Can we afford them, without having to change any of our laws, or our lifestyles one whit? Are they going to raise cost of living for the poor, or reduce economic growth? /snark
I mentioned this in another comment, but it's striking how much this resembles all of Earth collectively going through various stages of the Kubler-Ross model of grief. I feel like those types of responses fall between denial and bargaining. Fair number of people still in denial/anger stages.
No, but without too much inconvenience we can outlaw cattle ranching. Cattle are nowhere near a natural species at this point from millenia of animal husbandry and there are 1.3-1.5 billion alive at any given moment. Under extremely ideal conditions you need 1.5 acres (in other parts of the world you need tens of acres) to feed one cow for 12 months. Imagine if we let even 2 billion acres go wild in the next 2 years (it takes 18 months~ to get a cow to slaughter weight), imagine how much water that saves from land that has to be irrigated, imagine what happens if you start letting grasslands reclaim much of that land.
Better, outlaw cattle for beef. Only allow dairy cows to remain, that leaves you 250-300 cattle. Now require those to be pasture fed in months that they can be. This allows them to not only be healthier but to work their own manure back into the soil which will improve the soil quality if they are rotated from field to field. In some places you simply return it to the natural grasslands, in others you actually start replanting forests that were cut decades or centuries ago to use for farmland. Simply removing a BILLION cows makes an immediate impact over 18 months. Some of the land you still have to use for growing crops for feeding humans but only a fraction. The rest can be well on it way to restoration in 1-2 years.
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Also tackle zoning/city planning. Set up rules for new construction where commercial and retail is evenly distributed throughout residential, with solid grid roads with dedicated bike and walking paths.
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Then place quite high tariffs on fruits and vegetables to reduce out of season consumption considerably. At one point oranges in the United States, outside of states like Florida, were a special treat you got once a year if your family had some money to throw around - now you can go to the grocery and get oranges, bananas, dragon fruit, tomatoes, peppers, pineapple and coffee beans like you're some kind of Mansa Musa-rich ruler.. Most of the produce you see in stores, most of the year, comes from another country, a notable percentage of the time from another continent. Not only does this result in massive amounts of waste/spoilage, it requires massive amounts of fossil fuels for ships, trains and truck not to mention regional and local warehouses to store the stuff for days at a time before moving to retail outlets. If you buy a piece of fruit, especially one not native to the United States, at the grocery it might have been handled by a dozen people, been in a ship then on a train then on a truck, and traveled thousands of miles (in fact, the average American meal is estimated to have travelled 1500 miles to get to a plate [1]).
[1] https://cuesa.org/learn/how-far-does-your-food-travel-get-yo...
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These are three fairly simple things to implement. Will you be eating grapes in the winter in Arizona? Probably not. Will people miss hamburgers (I sure as hell will, but chicken sandwiches are good and chicken is an order of magnitude better as far as greenhouse emissions goes per pound of meat).
Or we can watch city after city in India and Africa, millions upon millions of people, go without water and say "oh how unfortunate, not my problem" and wake up one day, go to the tap to get a glass of water, only to hear some sputtering only to find, there's no water.
We can wait until we go to the grocery and corn is 5$ a cob and looks pathetic, until pork butt is 37$ a pound because the grain crops largely failed from drought or excessive rain cough which we've seen a taste of this year with the rains, there's corn knee high by my home that should already be tasseled cough or until we're paying 100$ for a 20lb bag of black beans, thinking how lucky we were to find them because Dave on Facebook just posted a picture of his grocery selling them for 110$.
edit: oh look, within 3 minutes of posting this someone went through and down voted my last few comments, in different threads.
Crushing it
Do you have additional info to claim it was this temp in 1880?
Recently people have been suggesting "climate crisis" which isn't going to help on the "less frightening" aspect, but I think that's a feature.
Showing more physical evidence and pushing developed plans is the only way forward I can see.
Except that the planet has been warming and cooling for millions of years.
To put into perspective:
Age of Earth: 4.6 billion years
How long Dinosaurs lived: 400 million years
Age of humans: 200,000 years.
The human species is literally less than a blip on the earth's historical radar. I'm convinced whatever we do to the planet, it will recover, like it always has. Humans not adapting? That's the real problem.
From https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/magazine/wp/2019/07/10/f...:
"Chakrabarti had an unexpected disclosure. “The interesting thing about the Green New Deal,” he said, “is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all.”
EDIT: for those downvoting me. Please feel free to leave a comment. Am I wrong to believe that we should concentrate on the main issue?
assuming it's not ready in the necessary quantities, the amount of carbon needed to produce and deploy it means that there's /necessarily/ an increase in carbon output required to produce and deploy said tech, not to mention environmental ruin e.g. mass cobalt/lithium/etc. production.
the only real alternative that i see is decimating current consumption levels. there doesn't seem to be any real willingness to talk about the necessary uncomfortableness people will have to go through in order to do that yet, though - people's mindsets seem to be stuck on growing or teching our way out.
Global warming is a risk to organized human life and it's possible we won't be doing anything related to computers in 20-30 years. It's not crazy to think people will collectively lose the ability to make microchips and computers. Progress and technological development cannot be taken for granted and requires the right conditions to function.
Global warming is an existential risk to our industry!
I can always work construction, electrical and plumbing lol
Oh, well. That settles it! I guess the climate scientists who have been researching this for half a century should go find other jobs.
People and animals have been asphyxiated by massive CO2 releases because they can happen very quickly, and CO2 has a molecular mass of 44, making it stay near the ground for longer, displacing lighter oxygen and nitrogen gases.
0.656 kg/m³ methane
1.98 kg/m3 carbon dioxide
1.225 kg/m3 air.
Quick look indicates asphyxiation at 16-21%. At 5-15% concentration it is explosive. Current levels are about 2000 parts per billion.
It will not release that quickly on anything more than a localized level, and it would probably kill you via explosion, first. Since it would be gradually released we would all be long dead from the greenhouse effect.
[1] https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/01/climate-change-s...
Maybe not gas clouds of rolling death, but some think it would be pretty catastrophic.
2) And if it releases land and resources.. how happy will Russia to increase their economy through uses of gas/oil ? (not helping permafrost)
if anything, it destroys the existing infrastructure there which often (especially for transport and pipeline paths) relies on the permafrost as a permanent solid foundation.
Alaska just reported their hottest June ever (It's in the 90's in a lot of places now), and the Yukon is seeing massive, massive climate changes in recent years.
The annual Redezvous festival used to be held ON the Yukon River in downtown Whitehorse. Friends tell of driving onto the river, having huge bonfires, etc. etc.
It hasn't even frozen over enough to walk on in a decade or more, and now it actually goes above freezing in January most years..... even 20 years ago it wouldn't go above -40 for all of Dec/Jan.
Things are changing very, very fast in the North.
> even 20 years ago it wouldn't go above -40 for all of Dec/Jan.
This seems to be contradicted by [1].
Climate has changed dramatically in the Yukon, see Fig. 5 in [2] (open access). The average temperature in the Yukon has increased by >2 deg C since 1900 AD and >1 deg C relative to the 20th century average.
[1] https://www.currentresults.com/Weather/Canada/Yukon/temperat...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/permafrost-melting-1.5119...
I understand this function to be such that any doubling of the atmosphere's CO2 concentration (while holding the other factors constant) will increase the equilibrium temperature by the same fixed number of degrees.
One thing I know nothing about is how to expect the earth's actual temperature to change over time when there is a difference between actual and equilibrium temperatures.
Suppose A(t) is the earth's actual temp at time t and E(t) is the earth's equilibrium temp at time t.
Presumably, dA/dt = F(A,E), for some function F.
It doesn't tell us how bad this is however. And it is bad: https://xkcd.com/1732/
so, while i agree to some extent, the more people that mobilize and e.g. influence the next round of policies/politicians, perhaps suffering can be reduced, however slightly you think that is.
https://worldoceanreview.com/en/wor-1/ocean-chemistry/climat...