Climate Scientists Say South Asia's Heat Wave (120F) is a Sign of What's To Come (npr.org) 162
Summer has arrived in South Asia WAY too early. A punishing heat wave has pushed temperatures past 120F (50C) in some areas. Some schools have closed early for the summer. Dozens of people have died of heatstroke. From a report: The region is already hard-hit by climate change. Extreme heat is common in May. But not in April and March, both of which were the hottest across much of India for more than a century. "It's smoldering hot! It's also humid, which is making it very difficult," Chrisell Rebello, 37, told NPR in line outside a Mumbai ice cream parlor at 11 p.m. "We need a lot of cold drinks, air conditioning -- and multiple baths a day." Only a fraction of Indians -- mostly, the wealthy -- have air conditioning. Instead people soak rags in water and hang them in doors and windows. Still, electric fans and AC have pushed India's electricity demand to a record high.
The problem is that 70% of India's electricity comes from coal. So the government is converting passenger trains to cargo service, to rush coal supplies to beleaguered power plants, and also importing more coal from abroad. And rolling blackouts are hurting industrial output. In the short term, experts say India has no choice but to burn coal to keep fans and ACs on. But in the long term, it must transition to renewables, to avoid a vicious circle of warming, says Ulka Kelkar, a Bengaluru-based economist and climate change expert with the World Resources Institute. "[With] heat plus humidity, at some stage [it] becomes almost impossible for the human body's organs to function normally," Kelkar explains. "Basically the body just cannot cool itself, and a large fraction of our population in India still works outside in the fields, on building construction, in factories which are not cooled." More than a billion people are at risk of heat-related illness across South Asia. Hospitals are preparing special wards. Further reading: India's Heatwaves Are Testing the Limits of Human Survival.
The problem is that 70% of India's electricity comes from coal. So the government is converting passenger trains to cargo service, to rush coal supplies to beleaguered power plants, and also importing more coal from abroad. And rolling blackouts are hurting industrial output. In the short term, experts say India has no choice but to burn coal to keep fans and ACs on. But in the long term, it must transition to renewables, to avoid a vicious circle of warming, says Ulka Kelkar, a Bengaluru-based economist and climate change expert with the World Resources Institute. "[With] heat plus humidity, at some stage [it] becomes almost impossible for the human body's organs to function normally," Kelkar explains. "Basically the body just cannot cool itself, and a large fraction of our population in India still works outside in the fields, on building construction, in factories which are not cooled." More than a billion people are at risk of heat-related illness across South Asia. Hospitals are preparing special wards. Further reading: India's Heatwaves Are Testing the Limits of Human Survival.
Ministry For The Future (Score:3)
ban cryptocurrency / make rolling blackouts shutdo (Score:2, Informative)
ban cryptocurrency / make rolling blackouts shut them down 1st.
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Just make electricity so expensive that mining the crap simply isn't profitable anymore and the whole thing comes crashing down pretty fucking quickly.
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That's a dumb idea which will likely be even worse for the environment.
Electricity is about the cleanest way we transfer and use energy. If it's more expensive for people, they'll turn to other sources. Instead of electric heat they'll burn fossil fuels. Instead of electric cars they'll stick with ICEs. They'll use more shelf-stable foods instead of fresh foods if they're downsizing fridge and freezer space.
The only way to hurt crypto mining and not the environment and everyone else is to make crypto less v
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Electric heating? Are you fucking nuts? Electricity is about the WORST way to heat your home. I don't know if you noticed that electricity isn't just coming out of the socket, it has to be generated in some way.
Take a wild guess how that's done.
But aside of that, we could use the additional income from electricity to actually subsidize the things people should do. You know, like a sane government does. Promote the things people should do by subsidizing them, punishing the thing people should not do by taxin
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Electricity is about the WORST way to heat your home.
Resistive heating, sure, heat pump, in most weather/climates quite efficient and feasible. Sure if there's no where to suck heat in from, it falls back to resistive heating, but a lot of the time heat pump is good.
Take a wild guess how that's done.
Well, that depends on the area. For me most energy comes from solar or nuclear, in other places, natural gas or coal. The use of genericized 'electricity' at the household means the changes can be made in a more centralized manner. If a house uses natural gas, there's not a trivial path to unob
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In my area wood is cheap and plentiful, so pellet stoves are the big thing now. Heat pumps are probably good if the average temperature gets above freezing most of the time, I could see that.
Re: ban cryptocurrency / make rolling blackouts sh (Score:2)
If you look into modern air source heat pumps, you'll find that they're more efficient than gas all the way down to 5F (cost wise), and effective down to -15F, for the most efficient standard ones. That's good enough for practically anywhere. There are even models that can work at lower temperatures still for people who live in truly cold places, like Minnesota. I live in Michigan, and there hasn't been one day in the last decade that a heat pump wouldn't have beaten gas on cost during that time. Same with
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Beating gas is easy, twice so with the current prices (quite literally so, gas prices have almost doubled since last year).
Pellets cost a fraction of gas (per calorific value).
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Electric heating? Are you fucking nuts? Electricity is about the WORST way to heat your home.
Clearly you have never been poor. When I was a child, we had a fireplace and later a coal stove for heating... electricity is fucking awesome.
Modern electrical heating (heat pump) is efficient and clean.
Coal doesn't make sense for heat waves. (Score:3)
Heat from the sun increases demand for electricity, so why not use the same sun to generate that electricity when it's needed?
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Agreed. The sun emits tremendous amounts of energy at us every day. Only a fool sees that and says no thank you.
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Agreed. The sun emits tremendous amounts of energy at us every day. Only a fool sees that and says no thank you.
The only thing the human race has im ample supply is fools...
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Makes sense. Although those photoelectric stations are going to get very hot indeed.
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This only works if you have the solar power plants already installed. Otherwise there's a time delay problem.
Then I guess we'd better get busy (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Go nuclear
2. Figure out how to sequester carbon
Or just keep blaming ... whichever feels better, I guess.
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1. Go nuclear
2. Figure out how to sequester carbon
Or just keep blaming ... whichever feels better, I guess.
0. Install low carbon energy that is actually viable in a timescale before we all die.
1. Go nuclear, so that we have some baseload energy if we survive the apocalypse.
Nuclear is not a solution for global warming. We could not get a single plant online before any of the "deadlines" listed to limit warming. And even if we could get them online by then, all those deadlines were made assuming a stead ramp down in carbon emissions, and not cutting emissions on the 31st December 2034 or whatever comes immediately
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We already have a bunch of scientific methods that would sequester carbon the problem with most of them is that they are being fought by the environmentalist groups.
No, they are just expensive as so far they are all very energy intensive. So far, energy conservation (e.g. insulating homes, double glazing, painting roofs white, etc.) as well as changing methods of generation have simply proved to be more cost-effective ways of reducing CO2,
Nuclear power (Score:5, Insightful)
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https://www.world-nuclear-news... [world-nuclear-news.org]
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If you oppose nuclear energy go fucking kill yourself.
"Opposed" - past tense. Then your statement is perfectly valid.
On the flip side in the present tense there's many reason to oppose nuclear power, namely it's an expensive way of diverting resources from viable means of limiting global warming and spending them on things which will not be in operation even remotely before we actually need them.
We could start building 1000 reactors today. They won't offset a single gram of carbon before any of the deadlines by which we need to have reduced the amount of carbo
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Opposing nuclear energy in the future results it continued fossil fuels. We could build the equivalent of 1000 reactors using solar/wind and it will not displace enough fossil fuels due to intermittency.
Fastest decarbonization efforts in world history involved nuclear (see France and Sweden). Germany failed to decarbonize after spending a decade and 500 billions euros on renewables.
By the way storage is orders of magnitude more expensive than a nuclear basaload.
climate extremes (Score:2)
Hot up there and it's still raining down here. The ground here has been waterlogged for well over a year. Some of my gardens are a write off, too wet to even grow weeds. Only raised beds still grow anything. We had massive floods and this might be another heavy patch.
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Meanwhile, parts of my northern-flyover state got a foot of snow last week, and we're having an extremely late and cold spring. Guess this global warming thing only affects places that make good headlines.
Re:Sensationalist Nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
But yes, keep on dismissing this and countless other reports.
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... for more than a century.
So, over a century ago, conditions were hotter.
What does that tell you about the nature of the climate over the long term and our ability to deal with it?
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Nothing. Take your strawman home.
Unless your home is in India, as it might conceivably catch fire if left out in the sun.
Climate Change is Real (Score:2)
If you have to feed the troll, can't you at least change the Subject?
Local temperatures here are currently at levels I would have regarded as normal for mid-July.
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Re:Sensationalist Nonsense (Score:5, Informative)
Please, if this rise in temperature was happening due to us coming out of an ice age it would be happening over the course of thousands of years https://www.cdm.org/mammothdis... [cdm.org]. , not decades.
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Exactly, the point is not that the temperature is going up or down, its the speed at which it is happening. All the âoeit used to be hot beforeâ excuses conveniently skip over this bit.
Yes, the world will overcome global warming, but it will take thousands of years to do so. Untill then itâ(TM)s chaos. The point is that this tranitional period will be very nasty for a community that thinks on a day-by-day basis
Re: Sensationalist Nonsense (Score:2)
Also earth hasnâ(TM)t had humans for most of its time, so just because Earth was hotter before doesnâ(TM)t mean we can survive it.
Re: Sensationalist Nonsense (Score:2)
Re: Sensationalist Nonsense (Score:2)
Re:Sensationalist Nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
amazing how the global warming trolls have adopted "it's all part of a natural cycle" rallying cry.
remember when it used to be outright denial ?
That's the way of it though, distort and oversimplify a truth to push your erroneous viewpoint.
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My favorite above that is the people who went from denial to "it's too late". Just the worst...
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Denial => Anger => Bargaining => Depression => Acceptance
That is stage 4!
almost there....
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My favorite above that is the people who went from denial to "it's too late". Just the worst...
To be fair they aren't actually wrong. But being too late isn't a reason to do nothing. At this point it's very clear that we're not going to achieve the targets. That said we absolutely should all be driving EVs as quickly as possible. If I'm going to die due to some disaster caused by severe weather spurred on by global warming at least I want to die not breathing in diesel fumes.
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What are the 5 stages (of grief)?
Denial => Anger => Bargaining => Depression => Acceptance
They are at stage 3 now!
"It's all just part of the natural cycle, sure maybe we contributed, but..."
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remember when it used to be outright denial ?
That was so long ago I almost forgot. I mean in between we've had "the world is actually cooling" and we've also had "it's the sunspots".
It's getting to the point where we need some dedicated RSS service to keep up with the rapid changing of excuses.
Not unlike COVID deniers:
1. It's fake.
2. It's real but it's no worse than the flu.
3. It's slightly worse than the flu but only old people die.
4. Everyone dies but it can be beaten with drug X.
5. Drug X only works if you combine it with Vitamin D.
6. Ok Drug X did
Re:Sensationalist Nonsense (Score:4, Insightful)
The industrial revolution started 200 years ago, but we have been seeing record temperatures since 10,000 years ago when much of the world was frozen.
Faulty logic:. The rise in temperatures is not attributable to any natural process that can be identified. That’s like saying: the death rate in the last 100 years is higher than in the last 10,000; therefore it cannot be due to anything man made like wars.
Re:Sensationalist Nonsense (Score:5, Interesting)
We are NOT coming out of an ice age.
https://xkcd.com/1732/ [xkcd.com]
Re:Sensationalist Nonsense (Score:5, Informative)
+1
The Earth is not "coming out of an ice age." That's just a lie that people need to stop repeating. The Earth is in an interglacial period in the current ice age [nasa.gov], and the global average temperature is spiking far, far beyond what would naturally occur.
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You miss the fact that we came out of an "ice age" 10,000 - 12,000 years ago.
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It has been warming at much quicker rate now than in the past. Are you really that daft?
IPCC (Score:2)
Hmm, according to the IPCC the effect of anthropogenic emissions was not apparent until 1950. Yet the temperature rise from 1900-1930 is almost exactly the same in trajectory and scale as 1960-1990. Data is fun.
Re:Sensationalist Nonsense (Score:4, Insightful)
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But for the obtuse, the implication is: "Let's continue what we're doing and change nothing."
It's one of the many different shades of climate denial, which range from "we don't see temperatures increasing" over "it's natural, we can't and shouldn't do anything about it" over "we caused it to speed up, but it's still natural, we can do nothing about it" (which is happening here) up to stuff like "it's actually a good thing"
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So we should put climate policy decisions in the hands of people who have training in using statistics to understand climate. I don't think that ends the way you think it will.
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I'm not saying one word about real climate change or policy, just that this thing in south asia is normal and recurring, and so agenda drive hype is not warranted.
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How do you reconcile that belief with https://static.toiimg.com/thum... [slashdot.org]">actual temperature measurements that show the opposite?
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https://static.toiimg.com/thum... [toiimg.com]
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Actual measurements? ZOMG!
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Sir, this here is hyperbole, you want sensible discussion, that's down the hallway.
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It is obviously not normal. Or why do you think it is:
a) news
b) a record heat wave
?
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People who have common sense would be better. But I don't think you'll find any in the hierarchy.
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Common sense tells you that if a coin comes up heads three times in a row, it's due for a tails.
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And math tells you: it is not ...
Re: Sensationalist Nonsense (Score:2)
Re:Sensationalist Nonsense (Score:4, Informative)
CO2 traps heat. This can be easily demonstrated in lab conditions.
Humans have been pumping a shit ton of carbon stored for millenia in the ground to burn it into the atmosphere.
Seriously, which part do you not understand?
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Ya, Biden has a large lever in the Oval Office. It has two settings: oil prices go up and oil prices go down. It's rather mysterious no one knows about this except...you.
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Well, considering fuel expenses were going up at a pretty quick rate BEFORE the Ukraine war broke out...yes, Biden's policies are a huge cause of it.
He put policies in place to block and hinder fossil fuel productions to be replaced by green renewables.
The problems is, we're not ready on the renewables place yet to replace them....so, shortages, etc.
A smart man would pound fossil fuel production as much as possible right now in parallel to green renewable rese
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When oil gets expensive, it's because of oil companies. Every time.
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Maybe people who are shit at statistics shouldn't be making decisions for the rest of us.
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Remember: He gets the same number of votes as you.
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And isn't that just sad?
A poll tax is unfair, that is something we can all agree on, but a dimwit having the same amount of voting right than a smart person is a-ok?
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One strategy would be to produce more smart people. Drag the idiots kicking and screaming to a high school diploma and community college. Assuming high school isn't already a mix of adult daycare and non-denominational proselytism.
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There should be a way to earn more votes. IMHO.
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How about a spiffy idea, we could call is "social credits".
Wait, that sounds familiar...
This door is closed (Score:2)
Here's the problem. When there were tests for qualifying voting, they were intentionally gamed in order to lock out people who could have been well informed on political issues, but were the "wrong" color.
This resulted in a backlash against such testing that persists to this day. The very people who actually want smarter voters to do the voting because they have better policies are the ones who would firmly reject and such a qualifying test. Regardless of if it simpl
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The problem is that you can lead the donkey to the well but you cannot force it to drink.
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I quite agree. It would be great if smart people had more voting rights than idiots.
Now, your challenge is to design a system that will ensure that such a system does not become a system to ensure some in-crowd are "smart" and an out-crowd are "dumb". No hand waving.
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Statistics is always backward looking and as such only gives one an approximation of something in the future which in many cases can be completely irrelevant. For example, statistically speaking, the lowly mosquito kills more people every year than any other critter (indirect killing by passing on pathogens).
However, you will never see anyone in Iceland die from a mosquito. Therefore, all the statistics about
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I find it rather disingenuous to lump bad science in with good science and dismiss the entire field because of it. Science as a tool boils down to the question of: does this knowledge have predictive power? If your statistics aren't representing reality in a reproducible way, then it's just a silly game. If you can show your work and have statistics that lead to confirmation of new insights into the future. Then you've done something productive with math.
It's dumb that anyone expects me to trust a random st
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Many. This is a short list [greatergood.com] of things that kill more people, statistically speaking, than sharks. And yet, it is highly doubtful anyone in the U.S. will be killed by a falling coconut even including if they go to places where coconut trees exist. However, they would be more likely to be killed by a shark since they would be at places where both sharks and coconut trees exist, but spend more time in the wat
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The record high temperature for the city I live in (Boston) was 104F, set way back in July of 1911. So by your way of thinking it would not be remarkable if the temperature hit 80F every single day next January.
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Since this happened before in mid spring 72 and 122 years ago, no not saying anything of the sort. If your city had a (near) record every half century, what of it?
Re:Sensationalist Nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
You are focusing too much on individual record event days, which are only the most extreme of outliers. You need to be focused on the frequency of extreme and prolonged weather events. 12 of India's 15 hottest *years* have been since 2006. That is not insignificant change.
Many popular media accounts are so simplistic they do make a convenient straw man: we're experiencing global *warming* and this is a *heat* wave after all. But globally temperatures have gone up on the order of 2C, which is not very much from the perspective of whether you need to put a sweater on. But it's a *huge* amount of kinetic energy in the troposphere as a whole which affects major global circulatory patterns like the polar vortex and the jet stream.
In this case, the proximate cause of the Indian heat wave is a northward bulge of the jet stream [upi.com]. This kind of disturbance obviously *could* happen in a 280ppm CO2 world. An isolated instance of that is just *weather*. But the increased *frequency* of it happening in a 400ppm CO2 world is a change in *climate*.
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Sure, but of all the bad ways to divvy up states, picking out outliers has got to be the worst.
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If you deny this happened befpre in March-April about 1950 and 1900, you are the denier.
Science, bitch, not alarmist headline hype.
Current end of the null Subject (Score:2)
It's about 2/3 of the way into the discussion. I suspect AC counts that as a win.
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India should have about 30 reactors running by 2032, a 30% increase over today. In comparison the United States currently runs 93 reactors and by the same time only 8 more are certain and an uncertain number of decommissioned reactors could potentially offset that miniscule gain.
P.S. if you make the right kind of power reactor you can make a lot more bombs. That's the trick to making way more bombs than you could possibly need.
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Compared to what? Raising living standards?
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In 1941 George Orwell wrote that it was impossible to give independence to India, as that would result in massive famines, and the immediate conquest of the country by some predatory power.
Today India is a nuclear power and no one is going to try to conquer it. In many ways it is more civilised and more scientifically advanced than Britain. (Such as trusting nuclear energy, for instance).
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In 1941 he was probably correct. That was, after all, in the midst of WWII. Japan was contesting for control of much of SEAsia. https://www.ibiblio.org/hyperw... [ibiblio.org]
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It's not exactly right for North America and Europe to look at a country like India and say "We were allowed to pollute all the live long day in the push for industrialization, but since you are a few decades behind you're not allowed to". We have the luxury of switching to renewables, we already put the dirtiest eras of our development in the past (and they were *very* dirty, likely even worse than how India is operating today)
So if we don't want them to pollute we can't just wag our fingers we have to ac
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Firstly I am American, not from India...
I am talking about the past century and a half that the US has been industrialized, so yes, the actual industrial revolution where we were burning coal and oil and polluting the bejesus out of everything.
Let's not forget the great evolution Peppered Moth example came about because factories were putting out so much soot at the time that the moths actually changed color from it
So despite a small population the amount of pollution per capita was likely staggeringly high
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Yup, pretty much.
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Indeed.
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Nope. The current upcoming existential threat-level climate change is mostly man-made, to a level that the far, far slower natural changes get overriden. Anybody with some actual scientific education knows that there is ongoing natural climate change all the time. Anybody with that education _also_ knows that it is very slow and leaves ample time for adaption. What we are facing now does not. You are the stupid one here.
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Have a look at climate history. There is absolutely no need for me to define anything. There is need for you to stop cherry-picking things and look at actual facts.
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You are an idiot.
No one refuses to admit that those climate events happened. Why do you claim such bullshit?
And: what have those events to do with the current climate change, which is man made? NOTHING, dumbass!
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Can someone list out for me the top five energy sources on lowest CO2 emissions per power out?
Hydroelectric, wind, nuclear, solar thermal and geothermal/solar PV (essentially tied), in that order.
Can someone list out for me the top five energy sources on fewest deaths per energy out?
Solar, hydro, wind, nuclear, gas, in that order. (https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/death-rates-from-energy-production-per-twh)
Top five on energy return on energy invested?
Nuclear, hydroelectric, offshore wind, coal, natural gas.
Top five on lowest resource demands per energy out? By resources I mean land, labor, steel, cement, copper, fresh water, etc.
That's at least 7 or more questions, and undefined as it doesn't indicate the time period. Generally, hydro, wind and nuclear are pretty much tied given that there are a range of estimates. You can go and look in the IPCC rep
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I'ts all Jewish Space Lasers, man!
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Message us again when we have -30F in Delhi or Mumbai.