Whenever you hear a politician say "carbon neutral by 2050", interrupt them. The real goal is to avoid getting too far over 1.5 degrees warming. We need to avoid reaching tipping points that will cause non-recoverable damage to the earth system. The year 2050 is meaningless. Actual global average temperatures is what should be measured.
You're still hearing politicians talk about climate change? This could be an American bubble but I haven't heard talk of climate change from US politicians, or the other global leaders that filter through our news cycle, since 2023.
I would imagine it's a relevant political football in most first world countries. I avoid American news, but the bits I see make me think it's probably still focused on culture war garbage.
2050 is not meaningless. Its close enough to feel like its achievable but far enough away that you can put off immediate action and still feel there is time to get it done. Reminds of the lyrics of the spirit of the west song:
Berkeley Earth berkeleyearth.org › home › global temperature report for 2023
Global Temperature Report for 2023 - Berkeley Earth
February 29, 2024 - 2023 was the warmest year on Earth since direct observations began, and the first year to exceed 1.5 °C above our 1850-1900 average. ...
> We need to avoid reaching tipping points that will cause non-recoverable damage to the earth system.
Then I'd be far more worried about nuclear war than minor temperature excursions. Aside from that "non recoverable" damage happens every day. What do you think mining is?
> Actual global average temperatures is what should be measured.
On average it was 10 degrees Fahrenheit cooler last year than it was the previous where I live in northern CA.
I’m amused that the argument is that we are in a Mr Burns position where different kinds of pollution we were emitting was balancing out and somehow fighting pollution is the reason global warming is worse? While I’m sure it has some effect, the amount of co2 we pump out every year as a species is insane. The effect of ship pollution mitigating that is marginal at best
Stratospheric aerosol injection is the leading geoengineering proposal for a reason. If you have well-supported reasons to be skeptical, you should share it, but just saying "idk doesn't sound right to me" isn't convincing.
Even if it were meaningful, is the proposal to fight global warming to keep dirty ships? That’s an insane strategy.
More realistically, there’s vested interests in existing ships and shipyards not being made obsolete so any minute effect is overhyped as “this is how we solve global warming”.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with an acquaintance - he was convinced that anthropogenic global warming was impossible because a volcanic eruption emits so much CO2 and was completely unwilling to consider evidence that perhaps humans emitting annually 200x more than all volcanoes combined might have an effect.
The amount of aerosol you need to I next is enormous, it needs to be sprayed at an altitude higher than realistic means of injection are feasible, and it has to be done in a way that doesn’t produce so much CO2 that it defeats the point.
Can you imagine an extant tech that can come close to doing that at the required scale? I can’t.
It would be cheaper and more practical to talk about space-based sunshields, and that’s about as practical as prayer. At the altitudes any realistic glider can reach you’d have to use sulfur aerosols and not ice, and in either case you’d need to inject gigatons per year, every year because at that altitude aerosols are very short-lived.
A realistic aircraft capable of those payloads will burn avgas, no solar craft comes close to the capability. The side effects such as a significant increase in acid rain, are not trivial either.
These are fantasies of people who cannot accept the reality of what we’re facing.
Some systems pulling the average up and some pulling down but the average of them is net up. I wonder though if it would have been better or worse for us if the net change ended up negative (dropping temps every year) instead. Probably worse, right?
Is there a real practical solution to this? It seems like all proposed solutions in last 40 years are a drop in the ocean, or just a money grab scams. Only thing that really worked for such global scale is the ozone layer repair. Global warming/climate change I guess we should just accept it and adapt?
Plenty of solutions, but politicians will never make it happen.
We calculated that capping personal emissions (mostly doable via peer pressure should we get this moving as normal people) to some top 1 percent 25 metric carbon ton and going plant based would get us net-zero while additionally getting rid of the zillionaire problem and adding extra 50-100 gigaton rewilding effect to the table.
With no bigger than marginal effect on anyone's QOL.
But we're SOL as the propaganda machines of the zillionaires keep dividing normal people to fake dichotomies.
No, there's really just a few select politicians standing in the way. Governments around the world have implemented tons of policies to attempt to address the crisis, but unless every country participates, it's economically suicidal. Carbon-intensive industries can simply move to the US, strengthening them, while those countries attempting to carry the burden of preventing climate change will be equally affected by looming disasters.
Which was, stop using CFCs, and stop venting them into the atmosphere to "dispose" of them. We also stopped lighting rivers on fire for mostly the same reasons, stop dumping industrial waste in them.
> I guess we should just accept it and adapt?
Ocean shipping produces more pollution than most countries. There are only like 5 countries that produce more carbon than the worldwide shipping fleet. If they cared then "cheap crap from China" wouldn't exist.
It's a scam. They want to monopolize the economy and they're using your environmental consciousness as the wedge to push you against your own best interests.
There are a lot of money scams out there to be sure.
It's unlikely that something like carbon capture will ever significantly reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere. It's just too energy intensive.
But there are a lot of practical solutions to significantly curb emissions that mostly just require regulations and taxes.
Things like building out rail transport. Heavily taxing air travel. Taxing all forms of carbon emission (fuel taxes would be pretty effective). Subsidizing non-co2 emissions, pushing for electrification when possible and power generation which uses non-CO2 emission. Stop wasteful pipedreams like "clean coal". Force data centers to be better citizens. For example, make them buy the battery/solar systems to offset their consumption. Make them participate in district heating schemes.
There's also some hope that even without intervention some of this will happen somewhat naturally. Solar and battery is already very cheap. Both are causing changes in the shipping and transit equations.
Before areas become completely uninhabitable, we will see areas become increasingly stressed: heat waves, more extreme weather events, poorer crop yields, depleting aquifers.
Stress increases conflict risk. Fights for essential resources (land, water, food, shelter) will break out long before those essential resources are completely gone.
If we skip past the immense suffering and death part, we will probably end up on a planet where national borders have been redrawn by war and desperation, and a smaller population that lives in more northerly climes.
Our politicians are already thinking about them, which is why they are cracking down on immigration and generating relentless propaganda demonizing refugees and asylum seekers.
Yes, we got to adapt, we won't cool it down and "repair" what is broken.
However we can slow down the effects and try to stop the effects. So it's "only" 1.5° or whatever, not 3°, 5° or 10°. And if we raise average by 10° at least not by the years 2100, but 2200 to give time to adapt.
"Adapting" means resettling people, restructuring agriculture and food production, etc.
(All numbers are quite arbitrary picks, just as any goal one tried to set before)
CO2 output per person in the US (all sources including industry, etc): ~13-14,000kg
Average distance driven per year per capita in the US: ~20,000km
Average CO2 output of current private vehicle fleet: ~250g/km
Therefore, over one third of total CO2 output per person is personal vehicle use. Considering only CO2 output due to personal choices driving has to be well over half.
Most people don't - or refuse - to consider the obvious choice to take personal responsibility. Drive less.
I guess returning to the office isn't so great. Pointy hair bosses rage everywhere.
But beyond driving less, surely eating further down the foodchain helps as well. Plants and shellfish are efficient. Cows are not. Eat fewer burgers and a few more lentils and mussels. Unless you are RFK Jr then of course please eat lots and lots of fatty cow, tallow, butter. Go full on Atkins please and follow right behind him.
This also means two thirds of emissions are not due to vehicular emissions. Let’s tackle that first, more bang for the buck?
Also - does that per capita figure include cargo? If so, how much? Does it matter if random individual takes personal
Responsibility and stops driving when all those long haul trucks will still be on the road?
My point is that in terms of personal responsibility nothing comes remotely close to driving but a vanishingly small proportion of people are willing to consider this.
I heard about this[1] recently, essentially spurring a massive plankton bloom to capture carbon where it ends up on the sea floor and becomes future oil deposits in a few millenia.
The nice thing about it is that it doesn't require global cooperation.
I was under the impression that there have been multiple large extinction events in the past caused by excessive anaerobic decomposition underwater that led to the oceans becoming swamps and giving off nasty toxic gasses.
Nobody has to "like" them. The centralized command and control structure is mostly in place to just force them down everyone's throats. Once we have centralized digital currency it will be a foregone conclusion
If only. Given how power and influence works currently, I would guess that those that have real control over these currencies would most likely use that power as they do now - to further their exploitation and pillaging of the earth with environmental considerations coming a distant second (or third, fourth, whatever...)
How will a centralized digital currency affect whether I decide to burn carbon fuels? If it gets obnoxious enough I can just use a different currency instead.
As with most difficult problems, this is a messy political problem, not a technical one. There is zero chance we avoid 1.5C gain. The best you can do is make life decisions for yourself to make your lifetime as comfortable for you as you can, assuming it will happen. I started doing that 5 years ago.
Technologically practical? Certainly. Kick renewables and electrification into high gear. Treat it like the emergency that it is.
Politically practical? Not a chance. It was already a major struggle a decade ago when the political climate was much more favorable to addressing the problem. Now, even the countries that want to do something about it are going to be more concerned about more immediate threats like being invaded.
Our best hope is that green technology quickly gets to the point where it so heavily outcompetes CO2-emitting technology that the latter disappears on its own. But this will take longer than it should.
I'm not sure what we should do, it's very hard to determine what minimizes harm and maximizes benefits at a global scale. It's certainly not as simple as extremists would like to believe. Certainly it would be much (MUCH) less risky to slow warming as much as possible and maintain constant or slowly reducing CO2 levels.
I think from the standpoint of predicting what will happen, my best guess is that people will use fossil fuels until it is economically not viable to do so. If you want hasten it at an individual level, buy solar panels and have your house disconnected from the grid until fees you pay no longer subsidize fossil fuels. Frown at people and refuse to give them positive social cues when they buy a car that isn't electric. Instead of "oh nice car" just say "it would be so cool if they had a plugin version!". Support electrification of things like heat and water heating so long as it can be powered by non-fossil sources.
In the long run I think solar power, effective battery technology, and the peaking of the global population combine to cause fossil fuel usage to reduce over the next 100 years or so until CO2 levels stabilize. Lots of large CO2 emitters are already leveling off - the output is too high to sustain but at least it's no longer increasing year over year - such as from cement production.
Honestly it's not much but that's what you can do, larger social movements and political action do not work when someone's decision is whether to spend $800 a month or $100 a month to heat their house. Anyone who says it does should buy a thermometer, but instead they will get a plane ticket to the next big city to run around in the street yelling at police (literally the only people paid to not care about your slogans) while nobody really notices.
Electric cars are the savior of the auto industry, not of the climate. It needs to become viable for most people to get around without cars at all. The intensity of their resource consumption, both for manufacture and for infrastructure, independent of their fuel source, cannot scale up for the world population.
If we are in overshoot scenario even reducing emissions may not be enough. There are warming gases currently trapped in permafrost, the natural carbon storage capacity is very dynamic, so global warming may target new (worse) equilibrium beyond what we think we can achieve in best case scenario.
Were you aware that the last time the planet was estimated to have co2 levels over 420ppm the global temperature was 10 degrees Celsius warmer overall? This is the global equilvant of being locked in a car in a sunlit parking lot.
30 years ago I attended a university lecture in an economics class and the professor spoke about the economic consequences of global warming - some places will be better off and plenty of places will be worse off. There will be water shortages in some places, while heavy rainfall in others. He presented it as a given fact that the global warming is coming - and pretty much the whole audience was shocked. Finally someone asked if he really thinks that it is unavoidable. And his answer was yes, that is human nature. As long as fossil fuels are there and cheap to explore someone will use them.
A change in attitudes is not enough. Structural change is needed to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Currently, the population is unable to achieve results.
The population is achieving results. Most of these results are occurring in China, which has begun an unimaginably huge deployment of renewables and nuclear. Europe is also making progress. The rest of Asia will go next, and then (as it develops industrially) so will Africa. Even parts of North America will quickly electrify: for example, Canada just agreed to reduce tariffs on Chinese EVs to 6% from 100%.
Our ecological goals are to make biosphere damage scarce, but our economic practices aim to make scarce things plentiful. We need something to balance out the effects of scarcity-based economics.
In the very fun board game ‘Evolution : Climate’ you “breed” animals designed to survive the climate conditions on the board. One strategy is to switch to breeding ‘carnivores’ that then can feast on the creations of other players. They downside tho is that once other players evolve their animals to have carnivore protections (fight back, scales, protective shells etc) the carnivores start to quickly starve and that player must quickly change out of this eat everything strategy back to a more sustainable strategy.
In a similar way I think what works is to push back against growth only and growth at all costs approaches and back practises and models and communities that are working in other ways.
The trouble is, when I receive my paycheck, it just comes as "dollars". I don't know whether my employer got them by providing services to communities which are working in other ways, or whether they come from more nefarious behavior--and I have no way to refuse one sort but accept the other.
The kind of community action you're describing happens, but we need to find ways to help it scale.
I can't think of a single time in history that humanity responded to a threat in a fully coordinated manner. Maybe this is the first time, but the incentive stack from the individual voter all the way up to geopolitical grand strategy argues against it.
Trying to tell poor nations to remain poor -- or telling rich nations to consume less -- is a losing game. There's evidence that as societies get richer, their populations demand cleaner air, water, etc. And, as another commenter mentioned, a realistic hope is that the whole green-tech stack matures to the point where it can compete on price.
We'll either make lower-carbon/lower-warming solutions work at near-market rates, in a way that allows personal and national economies to grow, or it'll just be talk for the next 50 years as well.
nevermind satellites, just diff the temp records from say, 1950-2000 and the ones reporting that data today and there's a lot of jank. urbanization around the thermometers also makes it appear as though global temperatures are rising, but all the data really says is that cities are heat islands.
first order: verify satellite data. Secondly, move all sensors to locations where they are unaffected by heat islanding and other man-made influences.
yes, if a city gets hotter in temperature because it grows, that obviously is a concern, but it doesn't affect people in the countryside, or on the other side of the planet, etc. (1/1000th as much if anything, i'll hedge).
the second thing will never happen. I am sure someone will reply why it's literally impossible and stupid to put thermometers someplace where the weather is natural. Because if we did move all of the sensors, suddenly there wouldn't appear to be any 1.5C change or anything, and there's thousands of egos at stake, here.
If you initially make factually wrong comment then you should at least apologize and say that you are sorry for being wrong, not keep pushing your agenda further.
Your behaviour is both incorrect (you were shown at the specific place) and intentional (you have ignored that). So, I have downvoted all your posts in this topic because I have observed the efficiency of the correct words to your ignorance. Usually I am glad to argue about the climate topic, but sometimes downvotes work better.
Ok, so why not just be specific? “On record” usually means since we started recording history , at least 5k years ago.
And have you looked into the records? satellite surface temps and high resolution recording have not been around for very long. 1880 methods were very crude and narrowly scoped.
> “On record” usually means since we started recording history , at least 5k years ago.
I'm a journalist who has published "highest/lowest on record" statistics tens, if not hundreds of times, and I've never heard of anyone thinking it means "since Herodotus" or anything like that.
and scientists edit the historical temperatures because of, and i hope you can see my eyeroll here "anomalous readings" - but they're overwhelmingly erroneous in only one direction. that's strange.
That’s not the raw data. The original recordings were made by merchants on parchment. They measured the volume of water in a wooden box, to set the buoyancy for their loads
Hah. Shall I present it to you on a silver platter then?
If you read the NASA page, they explicitly cite GHCNd, a raw surface temperature and precipitation dataset that goes back quite far. There's many other similar datasets you can find if you're willing to look.
Check out the readme for the csv format description, and /by-year for the raw rows:
picked four stations at random[0] and it's just precip numbers, no temps, no humidity, no insolation, etc.
are you sure you linked what you think you linked?
[0] /by-station and then unclutched my scroll wheel and spun it for arbitrary amount of time, re-engaged clutch and clicked what was under the cursor. repeated 3 more times. i did a fifth, where the one i was looking at was identical to the fourth one, but had a 1 in the least significant portion of the station ID instead of a 4, in case it was like, "4" is precip, "1" is temps, and i happened to click "4" 4 times in a row.
There are tons of raw data available freely and publicly. In my estimation, there is no comparable scientific discipline with a better curated data environment.
What exact raw data would you want? I am sure ChatGPT can throw together some python that will download the relevant data.
Climate deniers are perfectly trained for finding some weak spots in any data anytime they want. It would be better for them to be trained enough to show at least any links to any studies though. It is so hard to convince a climate denier to give at least one climate-denying source for the sake of experiencing some laugher together.
you're right this is much to complicated and important for anyone to understand. just take our word for it that we have to make things more expensive, raise taxes, and restrict freedoms to fix it.
Whenever you hear a politician say "carbon neutral by 2050", interrupt them. The real goal is to avoid getting too far over 1.5 degrees warming. We need to avoid reaching tipping points that will cause non-recoverable damage to the earth system. The year 2050 is meaningless. Actual global average temperatures is what should be measured.
You're still hearing politicians talk about climate change? This could be an American bubble but I haven't heard talk of climate change from US politicians, or the other global leaders that filter through our news cycle, since 2023.
Of course. Here's the Australian PM 4 months ago:
https://www.pm.gov.au/media/setting-australias-2035-climate-...
Here's the NZ PM last month:
https://www.ruralnewsgroup.co.nz/rural-news/rural-general-ne...
I would imagine it's a relevant political football in most first world countries. I avoid American news, but the bits I see make me think it's probably still focused on culture war garbage.
I don't think it's that easy to interrupt politicians, especially these days as more and more protections are justifiably given to them.
Do you have an example where you personally interrupted a politician effectively?
2050 is not meaningless. Its close enough to feel like its achievable but far enough away that you can put off immediate action and still feel there is time to get it done. Reminds of the lyrics of the spirit of the west song:
It's a ways outside of town
But the distance has its uses
Close enough to make the effort
Far enough to make excuses.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZXgl5KxUQY
https://theshovel.com.au/2021/10/26/man-announces-he-will-qu...
This.
The biggest problem with 2050 is everyone in power now will be dead or retired in 25 years. (Most will be dead, statistically)
“Close enough to feel achievable” is a bug, not a feature.
Even if we stop all emissions right now, we'll exceed the 1.5C target, so...
Every point of a degree we can mitigate will matter a lot.
A couple years back I saw articles about how we're basically less than a year from the tipping point.
Then nothing.
My guess is we passed the tipping point. It's inevitable by now.
Berkeley Earth berkeleyearth.org › home › global temperature report for 2023 Global Temperature Report for 2023 - Berkeley Earth
February 29, 2024 - 2023 was the warmest year on Earth since direct observations began, and the first year to exceed 1.5 °C above our 1850-1900 average. ...
> We need to avoid reaching tipping points that will cause non-recoverable damage to the earth system.
Then I'd be far more worried about nuclear war than minor temperature excursions. Aside from that "non recoverable" damage happens every day. What do you think mining is?
> Actual global average temperatures is what should be measured.
On average it was 10 degrees Fahrenheit cooler last year than it was the previous where I live in northern CA.
Congratulations, you know the local weather
Related: Earth is warming faster. Scientists are closing in on why (https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2024/12/16/...)
I’m amused that the argument is that we are in a Mr Burns position where different kinds of pollution we were emitting was balancing out and somehow fighting pollution is the reason global warming is worse? While I’m sure it has some effect, the amount of co2 we pump out every year as a species is insane. The effect of ship pollution mitigating that is marginal at best
Stratospheric aerosol injection is the leading geoengineering proposal for a reason. If you have well-supported reasons to be skeptical, you should share it, but just saying "idk doesn't sound right to me" isn't convincing.
Even if it were meaningful, is the proposal to fight global warming to keep dirty ships? That’s an insane strategy.
More realistically, there’s vested interests in existing ships and shipyards not being made obsolete so any minute effect is overhyped as “this is how we solve global warming”.
This reminds me of a conversation I had with an acquaintance - he was convinced that anthropogenic global warming was impossible because a volcanic eruption emits so much CO2 and was completely unwilling to consider evidence that perhaps humans emitting annually 200x more than all volcanoes combined might have an effect.
The amount of aerosol you need to I next is enormous, it needs to be sprayed at an altitude higher than realistic means of injection are feasible, and it has to be done in a way that doesn’t produce so much CO2 that it defeats the point.
Can you imagine an extant tech that can come close to doing that at the required scale? I can’t.
High altitude solar drone gliders that collect low level water vapor and spray it to form ice.
It would be cheaper and more practical to talk about space-based sunshields, and that’s about as practical as prayer. At the altitudes any realistic glider can reach you’d have to use sulfur aerosols and not ice, and in either case you’d need to inject gigatons per year, every year because at that altitude aerosols are very short-lived.
A realistic aircraft capable of those payloads will burn avgas, no solar craft comes close to the capability. The side effects such as a significant increase in acid rain, are not trivial either.
These are fantasies of people who cannot accept the reality of what we’re facing.
Are you sure? There is a lot of it https://www.shipmap.org
Some systems pulling the average up and some pulling down but the average of them is net up. I wonder though if it would have been better or worse for us if the net change ended up negative (dropping temps every year) instead. Probably worse, right?
https://archive.ph/jXcuJ
Why: reduced albedo (less reflective clouds) because ships don't have so much sulphur in their fuel any more.
Is there a real practical solution to this? It seems like all proposed solutions in last 40 years are a drop in the ocean, or just a money grab scams. Only thing that really worked for such global scale is the ozone layer repair. Global warming/climate change I guess we should just accept it and adapt?
The real practical solutions are trivial, the politics are not. It's a collective action problem, where the US is one of the actors.
Yup.
Plenty of solutions, but politicians will never make it happen.
We calculated that capping personal emissions (mostly doable via peer pressure should we get this moving as normal people) to some top 1 percent 25 metric carbon ton and going plant based would get us net-zero while additionally getting rid of the zillionaire problem and adding extra 50-100 gigaton rewilding effect to the table.
With no bigger than marginal effect on anyone's QOL.
But we're SOL as the propaganda machines of the zillionaires keep dividing normal people to fake dichotomies.
No, there's really just a few select politicians standing in the way. Governments around the world have implemented tons of policies to attempt to address the crisis, but unless every country participates, it's economically suicidal. Carbon-intensive industries can simply move to the US, strengthening them, while those countries attempting to carry the burden of preventing climate change will be equally affected by looming disasters.
> is the ozone layer repair.
Which was, stop using CFCs, and stop venting them into the atmosphere to "dispose" of them. We also stopped lighting rivers on fire for mostly the same reasons, stop dumping industrial waste in them.
> I guess we should just accept it and adapt?
Ocean shipping produces more pollution than most countries. There are only like 5 countries that produce more carbon than the worldwide shipping fleet. If they cared then "cheap crap from China" wouldn't exist.
It's a scam. They want to monopolize the economy and they're using your environmental consciousness as the wedge to push you against your own best interests.
There are a lot of money scams out there to be sure.
It's unlikely that something like carbon capture will ever significantly reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere. It's just too energy intensive.
But there are a lot of practical solutions to significantly curb emissions that mostly just require regulations and taxes.
Things like building out rail transport. Heavily taxing air travel. Taxing all forms of carbon emission (fuel taxes would be pretty effective). Subsidizing non-co2 emissions, pushing for electrification when possible and power generation which uses non-CO2 emission. Stop wasteful pipedreams like "clean coal". Force data centers to be better citizens. For example, make them buy the battery/solar systems to offset their consumption. Make them participate in district heating schemes.
There's also some hope that even without intervention some of this will happen somewhat naturally. Solar and battery is already very cheap. Both are causing changes in the shipping and transit equations.
What about poor people that live in areas in the world that will become completely uninhabitable?
Before areas become completely uninhabitable, we will see areas become increasingly stressed: heat waves, more extreme weather events, poorer crop yields, depleting aquifers.
Stress increases conflict risk. Fights for essential resources (land, water, food, shelter) will break out long before those essential resources are completely gone.
If we skip past the immense suffering and death part, we will probably end up on a planet where national borders have been redrawn by war and desperation, and a smaller population that lives in more northerly climes.
Our politicians are already thinking about them, which is why they are cracking down on immigration and generating relentless propaganda demonizing refugees and asylum seekers.
Whose politicians are you referring to?
It's going to happen, so that's exactly what we should be prepared for.
I'm sad all ocean megafauna are going to be extinct.
Are you sure the whole world won't become completely uninhabitable? It's not like we have a trial earth to test this out on.
Perhaps they are part of the depopulation agenda.
Yes, we got to adapt, we won't cool it down and "repair" what is broken.
However we can slow down the effects and try to stop the effects. So it's "only" 1.5° or whatever, not 3°, 5° or 10°. And if we raise average by 10° at least not by the years 2100, but 2200 to give time to adapt.
"Adapting" means resettling people, restructuring agriculture and food production, etc.
(All numbers are quite arbitrary picks, just as any goal one tried to set before)
Drive less.
CO2 output per person in the US (all sources including industry, etc): ~13-14,000kg
Average distance driven per year per capita in the US: ~20,000km
Average CO2 output of current private vehicle fleet: ~250g/km
Therefore, over one third of total CO2 output per person is personal vehicle use. Considering only CO2 output due to personal choices driving has to be well over half.
Most people don't - or refuse - to consider the obvious choice to take personal responsibility. Drive less.
I guess returning to the office isn't so great. Pointy hair bosses rage everywhere.
But beyond driving less, surely eating further down the foodchain helps as well. Plants and shellfish are efficient. Cows are not. Eat fewer burgers and a few more lentils and mussels. Unless you are RFK Jr then of course please eat lots and lots of fatty cow, tallow, butter. Go full on Atkins please and follow right behind him.
This also means two thirds of emissions are not due to vehicular emissions. Let’s tackle that first, more bang for the buck?
Also - does that per capita figure include cargo? If so, how much? Does it matter if random individual takes personal Responsibility and stops driving when all those long haul trucks will still be on the road?
My point is that in terms of personal responsibility nothing comes remotely close to driving but a vanishingly small proportion of people are willing to consider this.
A few decades ago we explained that personal responsibility isn’t the solution.
Please catch up. Why we’re having a conversation from the year 2000 now is beyond me.
I also suggest reviewing the “nuclear isn’t part of the solution. Besides it takes a decade” discussion.
I heard about this[1] recently, essentially spurring a massive plankton bloom to capture carbon where it ends up on the sea floor and becomes future oil deposits in a few millenia.
The nice thing about it is that it doesn't require global cooperation.
[1]https://www.onepercentbrighter.com/p/the-no-bullshit-way-to-...
Edit: I should probably link where I heard about it to give credit to someone who deserves it
https://uncomfortableconversations.substack.com/p/the-climat...
I was under the impression that there have been multiple large extinction events in the past caused by excessive anaerobic decomposition underwater that led to the oceans becoming swamps and giving off nasty toxic gasses.
Look at the degrowth movement. There are solutions but nobody, especially the leadership, are going to like them.
Nobody has to "like" them. The centralized command and control structure is mostly in place to just force them down everyone's throats. Once we have centralized digital currency it will be a foregone conclusion
If only. Given how power and influence works currently, I would guess that those that have real control over these currencies would most likely use that power as they do now - to further their exploitation and pillaging of the earth with environmental considerations coming a distant second (or third, fourth, whatever...)
How will a centralized digital currency affect whether I decide to burn carbon fuels? If it gets obnoxious enough I can just use a different currency instead.
As with most difficult problems, this is a messy political problem, not a technical one. There is zero chance we avoid 1.5C gain. The best you can do is make life decisions for yourself to make your lifetime as comfortable for you as you can, assuming it will happen. I started doing that 5 years ago.
Technologically practical? Certainly. Kick renewables and electrification into high gear. Treat it like the emergency that it is.
Politically practical? Not a chance. It was already a major struggle a decade ago when the political climate was much more favorable to addressing the problem. Now, even the countries that want to do something about it are going to be more concerned about more immediate threats like being invaded.
Our best hope is that green technology quickly gets to the point where it so heavily outcompetes CO2-emitting technology that the latter disappears on its own. But this will take longer than it should.
I'm not sure what we should do, it's very hard to determine what minimizes harm and maximizes benefits at a global scale. It's certainly not as simple as extremists would like to believe. Certainly it would be much (MUCH) less risky to slow warming as much as possible and maintain constant or slowly reducing CO2 levels.
I think from the standpoint of predicting what will happen, my best guess is that people will use fossil fuels until it is economically not viable to do so. If you want hasten it at an individual level, buy solar panels and have your house disconnected from the grid until fees you pay no longer subsidize fossil fuels. Frown at people and refuse to give them positive social cues when they buy a car that isn't electric. Instead of "oh nice car" just say "it would be so cool if they had a plugin version!". Support electrification of things like heat and water heating so long as it can be powered by non-fossil sources.
In the long run I think solar power, effective battery technology, and the peaking of the global population combine to cause fossil fuel usage to reduce over the next 100 years or so until CO2 levels stabilize. Lots of large CO2 emitters are already leveling off - the output is too high to sustain but at least it's no longer increasing year over year - such as from cement production.
Honestly it's not much but that's what you can do, larger social movements and political action do not work when someone's decision is whether to spend $800 a month or $100 a month to heat their house. Anyone who says it does should buy a thermometer, but instead they will get a plane ticket to the next big city to run around in the street yelling at police (literally the only people paid to not care about your slogans) while nobody really notices.
Electric cars are the savior of the auto industry, not of the climate. It needs to become viable for most people to get around without cars at all. The intensity of their resource consumption, both for manufacture and for infrastructure, independent of their fuel source, cannot scale up for the world population.
> Electric cars are the savior of the auto industry
You should check with Ford on that. 19B write off this year
If we are in overshoot scenario even reducing emissions may not be enough. There are warming gases currently trapped in permafrost, the natural carbon storage capacity is very dynamic, so global warming may target new (worse) equilibrium beyond what we think we can achieve in best case scenario.
Were you aware that the last time the planet was estimated to have co2 levels over 420ppm the global temperature was 10 degrees Celsius warmer overall? This is the global equilvant of being locked in a car in a sunlit parking lot.
30 years ago I attended a university lecture in an economics class and the professor spoke about the economic consequences of global warming - some places will be better off and plenty of places will be worse off. There will be water shortages in some places, while heavy rainfall in others. He presented it as a given fact that the global warming is coming - and pretty much the whole audience was shocked. Finally someone asked if he really thinks that it is unavoidable. And his answer was yes, that is human nature. As long as fossil fuels are there and cheap to explore someone will use them.
30 years later it looks like he was right.
https://archive.ph/KVTqO
A change in attitudes is not enough. Structural change is needed to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Currently, the population is unable to achieve results.
The population is achieving results. Most of these results are occurring in China, which has begun an unimaginably huge deployment of renewables and nuclear. Europe is also making progress. The rest of Asia will go next, and then (as it develops industrially) so will Africa. Even parts of North America will quickly electrify: for example, Canada just agreed to reduce tariffs on Chinese EVs to 6% from 100%.
Agreed.
Our ecological goals are to make biosphere damage scarce, but our economic practices aim to make scarce things plentiful. We need something to balance out the effects of scarcity-based economics.
In the very fun board game ‘Evolution : Climate’ you “breed” animals designed to survive the climate conditions on the board. One strategy is to switch to breeding ‘carnivores’ that then can feast on the creations of other players. They downside tho is that once other players evolve their animals to have carnivore protections (fight back, scales, protective shells etc) the carnivores start to quickly starve and that player must quickly change out of this eat everything strategy back to a more sustainable strategy.
In a similar way I think what works is to push back against growth only and growth at all costs approaches and back practises and models and communities that are working in other ways.
The trouble is, when I receive my paycheck, it just comes as "dollars". I don't know whether my employer got them by providing services to communities which are working in other ways, or whether they come from more nefarious behavior--and I have no way to refuse one sort but accept the other.
The kind of community action you're describing happens, but we need to find ways to help it scale.
I can't think of a single time in history that humanity responded to a threat in a fully coordinated manner. Maybe this is the first time, but the incentive stack from the individual voter all the way up to geopolitical grand strategy argues against it.
Trying to tell poor nations to remain poor -- or telling rich nations to consume less -- is a losing game. There's evidence that as societies get richer, their populations demand cleaner air, water, etc. And, as another commenter mentioned, a realistic hope is that the whole green-tech stack matures to the point where it can compete on price.
We'll either make lower-carbon/lower-warming solutions work at near-market rates, in a way that allows personal and national economies to grow, or it'll just be talk for the next 50 years as well.
Banning CFCs. But that didn't require giving anything up really so it was an easier sell.
Oh, look, another left wing article about how we’re all gonna burn up while the liberal elites jet around and gobble up all the coastal real estate.
Because “3rd hottest year since the 1970s” didn’t get as many clicks.
Uh, no, it’s the 3rd hottest year since 1880. You can click “Download Data” and look the table yourself.
https://science.nasa.gov/earth/explore/earth-indicators/glob...
Funny they don’t mention it. And how many satellites were making observations in 1880?
nevermind satellites, just diff the temp records from say, 1950-2000 and the ones reporting that data today and there's a lot of jank. urbanization around the thermometers also makes it appear as though global temperatures are rising, but all the data really says is that cities are heat islands.
first order: verify satellite data. Secondly, move all sensors to locations where they are unaffected by heat islanding and other man-made influences.
yes, if a city gets hotter in temperature because it grows, that obviously is a concern, but it doesn't affect people in the countryside, or on the other side of the planet, etc. (1/1000th as much if anything, i'll hedge).
the second thing will never happen. I am sure someone will reply why it's literally impossible and stupid to put thermometers someplace where the weather is natural. Because if we did move all of the sensors, suddenly there wouldn't appear to be any 1.5C change or anything, and there's thousands of egos at stake, here.
If you initially make factually wrong comment then you should at least apologize and say that you are sorry for being wrong, not keep pushing your agenda further.
it’s right about the article.
Your behaviour is both incorrect (you were shown at the specific place) and intentional (you have ignored that). So, I have downvoted all your posts in this topic because I have observed the efficiency of the correct words to your ignorance. Usually I am glad to argue about the climate topic, but sometimes downvotes work better.
Third hottest year on record, so far.
Uhm obviously. It would be difficult to have a year from the future on record wouldn't it?
the article is particularly dodgy. “On record” is a crime. They hint at it being satellite recordings since the 1970s.
The Economist used to be a good publication until McElthwaite left for Bloomberg about 10-12 years ago.
This isn't some big conspiracy. "On record" is since recordkeeping began in 1880.
https://science.nasa.gov/earth/explore/earth-indicators/glob...
Ok, so why not just be specific? “On record” usually means since we started recording history , at least 5k years ago.
And have you looked into the records? satellite surface temps and high resolution recording have not been around for very long. 1880 methods were very crude and narrowly scoped.
> “On record” usually means since we started recording history , at least 5k years ago.
I'm a journalist who has published "highest/lowest on record" statistics tens, if not hundreds of times, and I've never heard of anyone thinking it means "since Herodotus" or anything like that.
and scientists edit the historical temperatures because of, and i hope you can see my eyeroll here "anomalous readings" - but they're overwhelmingly erroneous in only one direction. that's strange.
I’d love to see the raw data.
Here's a raw table in .txt format from NASA
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/graph_data/Global_...
That’s not the raw data. The original recordings were made by merchants on parchment. They measured the volume of water in a wooden box, to set the buoyancy for their loads
What are you even talking about. They had weather stations with mercury thermometers and wrote down temperatures in a logbook.
That’s useless.
Hah. Shall I present it to you on a silver platter then?
If you read the NASA page, they explicitly cite GHCNd, a raw surface temperature and precipitation dataset that goes back quite far. There's many other similar datasets you can find if you're willing to look.
Check out the readme for the csv format description, and /by-year for the raw rows:
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/daily/
picked four stations at random[0] and it's just precip numbers, no temps, no humidity, no insolation, etc.
are you sure you linked what you think you linked?
[0] /by-station and then unclutched my scroll wheel and spun it for arbitrary amount of time, re-engaged clutch and clicked what was under the cursor. repeated 3 more times. i did a fifth, where the one i was looking at was identical to the fourth one, but had a 1 in the least significant portion of the station ID instead of a 4, in case it was like, "4" is precip, "1" is temps, and i happened to click "4" 4 times in a row.
There are tons of raw data available freely and publicly. In my estimation, there is no comparable scientific discipline with a better curated data environment.
What exact raw data would you want? I am sure ChatGPT can throw together some python that will download the relevant data.
https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/datasets
No raw data there just post processed data. Give me the raw data.
Petabytes of it around. Here's a small sunset: https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/
Would you like more, or do you plan on analyzing the first few petabytes first?
He means the original recordings. There were no digital recordings in 1880. Different apparatus, different methods. That’s the point
They can speak for themselves, you and I don't really know what they want, or what they think counts as "raw" data.
Ah, so a painfully obvious attempt at moving goalposts and showering people with bullshit.
And what will you do with the raw data? Are you trained in processing and interpreting it? How good is your math?
Climate deniers are perfectly trained for finding some weak spots in any data anytime they want. It would be better for them to be trained enough to show at least any links to any studies though. It is so hard to convince a climate denier to give at least one climate-denying source for the sake of experiencing some laugher together.
you're right this is much to complicated and important for anyone to understand. just take our word for it that we have to make things more expensive, raise taxes, and restrict freedoms to fix it.
You are capable of operating Google, right?