It’s also easy to question methodology for anyone who has done academic modeling and knows how easy it is to get the result you want. Much harder to argue against the basic first principle that injecting trillions of barrels of oil into the atmosphere is literal geoengineering and it’s gonna have consequences.
This is not going to happen. The EU can't even convince itself to stop buying from China.
The us on the other hand is well you know blowing up oil all over the world with military conflicts that are wars but aren't wars but are wars that are over but evolving and over and evolving. They are also rolling back green energy projects , fueling data centers with gas, etc.
Given the significant consequences this is worth paying attention to.
They’ve blown their attention budget for the layman and aren’t getting it back unless someone serious guides their attention.
the things are happening though.
e.g. if you read a headline in the 70s that said something like "ski seasons will shorten by an average of 1 day per year, leading to only 5 inches of snow water equivalent in Colorado resorts by 2026, and eliminating the economic viability of skiing in the northeast by 2060" that would have been completely correct.
The point is that it's unactionable. The people who care could all pour their life savings into climate action and commit suicide to cancel all future carbon footprint and it still wouldn't move the needle. Even if the Democrats in the US took over both branches of Congress, the white house, and the supreme court, they wouldn't move the needle. There isn't any practical action any ordinary person could take.
So why are we writing about it for general consumption? Convince billionaires, politicians, oil execs, other scientists, literally anyone with the ability to do anything. If we're at the point the research claims, trying to get people to go vegan or fly less often isn't even shaving off fractions of a percent.
There is and should be pressure to decarbonise at this point - it is still going to help and we can vote to make that happen.
Tyrants like Putin want you to think you are powerless, but you are not.
Politicians thought (and some think to this day) that climate warming is "too political" to listen to experts. Most of them will think that Atlantic current is too political, till it stops.
It is easy to say "convince a politician", but it is hard to do. Politicians think politics, and you have to be a genius among politicians to transform a game field, so some concerns of scientists became a political issue that is not possible to ignore. Geniuses among politicians as as rare as in any other discipline, the most of them will just play existing games, without even thinking of rewriting the rules of the game. BTW, when they try to rewrite, the boring old "play by the rules" might start to look pretty good.
Politics is the hardest unsolved problem the humanity faces. We could send humans to the Moon, or it seems increasingly likely we can create an AGI, but we can't make politicians to listen to the reason.
The solar panel install stats give me hope. It’s unfortunate the US is burying its head on new alt energy projects but our grifting culture is just too strong.
I think generally the effects climate skeptics have over climate policy is overstated. And corporations with vested interest in being able to continue releasing massive amounts of CO2 into our atmosphere have much more say over climate policy then climate skeptics. Now these companies often do weaponize climate skeptics in order to lobby government into continued inaction, but that behavior will continue regardless of how scientists frame their climate models.
This would be compeling if they were actual sceptics who care about evidence. We are talking about people who will bad faith deny everything.
Censoring yourself is exactly what they wanted to achieve and did achieved.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adx4298
Basically newer modeling has shown a stronger weakening of the system. Lots of uncertainty, but 1/3rd loss by 2100. There's a lot of unknowns with feedback loops and tipping points where the whole thing might collapse if a threshold is crossed.
One of the issues with slow moving catastrophes is that we get used to it and then we stop worrying about it.
I believe this is because humans are not good generally at long term planning past a couple years when there is no clear feedback (or it is purposely muddied.)
So essentially we are likely screwed.
Many climate change skeptics like to claim that Earth’s climate has been radically different at various points in its history, therefore current anthropogenic climate change is fine. Other climate change skeptics like to claim that we’re currently in an ice age, therefore warming the planet is not a bad thing. Yet others claim that this is natural and humans shouldn’t try to stop it.
What these arguments miss is that all available evidence suggests that CO2 levels and global temperatures have never changed this fast outside of mass extinctions. All available evidence strongly supports the ideas that humans released the excess CO2, that CO2 is a powerful greenhouse gas, and that human-produced CO2 is causing the planet to retain more heat. There are competing theories on how catastrophic anthropogenic climate change will be and how fast it will happen, but the broad consensus is that these drastic changes will impact both humans and the broader environment.
People argue against preventative measures to slow down anthropogenic climate change because it can harm economic growth. The attitude seems to be “we shouldn’t sacrifice profits for the polar bears”. I argue that it’s not a matter of trying to save other species, it’s about saving our own species. Given the overwhelming evidence that humans are causing climate change and that the results will involve drastic changes in climate patterns, I don’t think we’re panicking enough. For the vast majority of us who are not ultra wealthy capitalists, faster economic growth won’t matter if extreme weather events threaten our lives every year and large areas of agricultural land become unusable. We need to slow down our production and consumption and study climate change more carefully, not defund climate research and charge blindly into a future we can’t control or predict.
(1) Gulf Stream is a wind-driven western boundary current and the equatorial Atlantic is getting warmer and warmer so heat delivery is probably stable;
(2) Greenland melt rates are real and fresher ocean water won’t sink as much and could push northern surface currents south;
(3) Wind-driven upwelling (other end of the AMOC) is likely to stay stable so you have the suction pump effect;
(4) Atmospheric warming and overall climate conditions today are very different from that 12,000 ya system the article cites;
Regardless, dumping all this fossil CO2 and CH4 into the atmosphere is definitely changing the climate system; but rather than cooling Europe and the UK I’d guess this will just reduce the warming rate in that region over the next 100 years, and it might cause problems with ocean hypoxia due to slower rates of deep water formation, impacting fish populations.
P.S. If you want to vet these claims, plug it into an LLM with this header: “ As an expert in global planetary science, give me some critiques with positive/negative paper references that both support and push back against each point (eight papers total please, prefer recent, then critique summary).”
The answer can't be, let's just consume 10x less. We have to engineer our way out of it.
And at least in the US we do not have it and are actively going in the opposite direction, mostly in the name of money.
Yes tech can help but implementation depends on human nature.
We will have to do both I am afraid
I love technology but optimism about it is incompatible with the current capitalist system. Tech is exploited to make capital not to further our optimism.
Edit: if you’re gonna downvote at least offer a counter. lol pathetic.
All to say, Capital at large seeks out the profit. Until climate change effects the profit considerably, mitigation will be the path less traveled.
The only real way to approach this problem is to reduce consumption across the board which as you might guess, isn't profitable.
my semi-superstitious take is that the race to achieve ai is grounded in needing something that knows whats going on and is able to make decisions aligned to generational time horizons. whether that works out or not time will tell, but i get the sense a "good enough" ai is probably our best shot at saving us from ourselves. it's clear we can't do that on our own.
We need a human civilization that is run for the benefit of human beings, not paper-clip maximizing overlords.
Government is the only apparatus that can govern unregulated motivations of capital, and we need regulations on pollution and investments in clean energy and waste creation/collection to stop things like climate change.
Gen X and forward grew up in a world that by default was cleaner due to regulations like the Clean Water Act, better for seniors due to things like Social Security and Medicare, and safer due to things like food regulations and vaccine mandates. The people who rail against these things are railing against the very things that made their world safer and in some instances kept them alive.
Energy absolutely is something that you can engineer. It is one of the most fundamental things engineering is about. Nothing we can do will make a difference without serious investment in carbon-free power systems. There is a lot of money being invested in energy technology, the real question is if we will build enough of it.
Selfish humans. "Capital" is a mental model, it's not some force of nature or hand of god.
EDIT: got to love how anytime you write something even remotely critical of capitalism you get auto-downvoted. Fine, "climate change is only because of bad, selfish people". Is this explanation more palatable?
It's very real, but the notion that it's changing over a 5 year period is nonsense.
things aren't "shutting off".
In the same place where I live now, when I was young there was permanent snow cover for 3 to 4 months.
During the last 10 years, there have been years with no snow and in the others a little snow has been present for 3 or 4 days of a year, when it melted the second day after falling.
I have not used again my winter boots and my winter jackets for the last 15 years or more.
This is really a huge change during less than a human lifetime.
What you perceive as change isn't macro, it's micro.
It doesn't mean macro change isn't happening, but it's not happening on our timescale.
I'm 50 FWIW.
Maybe climate is more stable wherever you live
When I was a kid in the midwest USA, 100 degrees in the summer happened every once in a while. Still does. July and August were always hot. Still are. As a kid the heat didn't bother me so much, I'd go out and play in the sprinkler or go to the pool. Now, I've got to wear clothes and work. Makes the heat more noticable.
I wonder how people like you end up so hostile to experts.
https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/products/ocean/sst/contour/
I am seeing changes, unprecidented changes, in my decades of watching, and they do not match any predicted scenario.
1. even if there was something humans could do about it, we won't, ever
2. insurance rates are the only "control". they will skyrocket and thereby the only change to select behavior
human society allows "privatize the profits, socialize the costs"
so that scales from the smallest to the largest models
After COVID it feels doom is unavoidable.
We can actually make petty good estimates because of things like carbon layers in the ice. It's happened in the past, you're right, and usually it precedes large scale extinction events.
But when making actual predictions, the models need to make assumption about anthropogenic parameters like CO2 and methane emissions. That's the largest remaining uncertainty at this point. Given the same assumptions, climate models generally agree on the outcome.
Science is best when it’s purely that, I’ve seen plenty of living examples and read about past ones where science mixed with politics or overt profit motives don’t end well. Surely there must be examples where the contrary has been the case, but I am biased, and I would wager that it ended poorly more often than well.
I would much rather have politicians that heed scientific results than scientists springboarding into politics.
https://tellusjournal.org/articles/10.3402/tellusa.v13i2.949...
It’s going to shut down
The ice caps and antartic ice are going to melt entirely
The Gulf Stream is going to collapse
Global emissions have skyrocketed with no brakes since then
1.5C target was a joke. 2.0 target is a joke. There is no world where humans can coordinate in a way that reduces global emissions
MAYBE by accident with enough selfishness around not wanting to die. I don’t see it though
