Era of Global Boiling Has Arrived, UN Chief Says (theguardian.com) 453
The era of global warming has ended and "the era of global boiling has arrived," the UN secretary general, Antonio Guterres, has said after scientists confirmed July was on track to be the world's hottest month on record. From a report: "Climate change is here. It is terrifying. And it is just the beginning," Guterres said. "It is still possible to limit global temperature rise to 1.5C [above pre-industrial levels], and avoid the very worst of climate change. But only with dramatic, immediate climate action." Guterres's comments came after scientists confirmed on Thursday that the past three weeks have been the hottest since records began and July is on track to be the hottest month ever recorded.
Global temperatures this month have shattered records, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the EU's Copernicus Earth observation programme, stoked by the burning of fossil fuels and spurring violent weather. The steady rise in global average temperatures, driven by pollution that traps sunlight and acts like a greenhouse around the Earth, has made weather extremes worse. "Humanity is in the hot seat," Guterres told a press conference on Thursday. "For vast parts of North America, Asia, Africa and Europe, it is a cruel summer. For the entire planet, it is a disaster. And for scientists, it is unequivocal -- humans are to blame. All this is entirely consistent with predictions and repeated warnings. The only surprise is the speed of the change. Climate change is here, it is terrifying, and it is just the beginning. The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived."
Global temperatures this month have shattered records, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the EU's Copernicus Earth observation programme, stoked by the burning of fossil fuels and spurring violent weather. The steady rise in global average temperatures, driven by pollution that traps sunlight and acts like a greenhouse around the Earth, has made weather extremes worse. "Humanity is in the hot seat," Guterres told a press conference on Thursday. "For vast parts of North America, Asia, Africa and Europe, it is a cruel summer. For the entire planet, it is a disaster. And for scientists, it is unequivocal -- humans are to blame. All this is entirely consistent with predictions and repeated warnings. The only surprise is the speed of the change. Climate change is here, it is terrifying, and it is just the beginning. The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived."
Too little, too late (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody will do anything, as usual. You know who to thank for the oncoming climate catastrophe your parents and grandparents in the "developed world". It was nice while it lasted. See you on the other side.
Re:Too little, too late (Score:5, Insightful)
It won't be changed overnight, but people are working on the change.
Re: Too little, too late (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Too little, too late (Score:5, Interesting)
Technology saving us *alone* is a fantasy. You need the will to develop and use it. If we simply *internalized* the external cost of pollution, market forces would throttle greenhouse gas emissions faster than any regulation anyone would dream of proposing. But somehow sitting passively letting the unintended consequences of our actions transform the world around us is seen as more conservative than recognizing we have a problem and taking steps to moderate our behavior.
The phrase 'Someone ought to do something' was not, by itself, a helpful one. People who used it never added the rider 'and that someone is me'.”
Terry Pratchett
Re: Too little, too late (Score:5, Insightful)
Carbon credits was just a way to pretend to care about the costs but it was quickly gamed into a way to do nothing about the problem while pretending to be green. When there are profits to be made, morality goes out the window.
Re: Too little, too late (Score:4, Insightful)
Which really sucks because I went out of my way years ago to select a power provider that provided wind power. They got replaced with a company that sells credits, which is not the same thing. There are people who are willing to vote with their dollars, but there's no honest way to do it since the carbon credits system is too much of a sham.
Re: Too little, too late (Score:5, Insightful)
Green power providers are also a sham. If you pay more to get wind-only power, it usually means someone else (paying the basic price) will see his share of renewable power reduce from say, 15% to 5%.
Anyways the solution is to ensure everyone pays for his own pollution. You emit twice as much CO2 as your neighbor? Then you should pay twice as much in carbon tax.
You then let the market decide whether it's still worth it to drive that pick up truck just because once a year you purchase big furniture from Costco.
Re: Too little, too late (Score:4, Insightful)
Carbon taxes (which I favor) are the simplest and fastest way to implement lower carbon behaviors on paper, but the mechanics of them are very unpalatable not just to global warming denying conservatives but also progressives. Which is why they don't go anywhere politically.
How can that be? Because fundamentally those externalized co2 costs manifest as cheaper energy prices. A tax on carbon is basically a tax on energy, and that falls disproportionately on poor and urban people. The wealthy can invest in efficiency measures, and since things like food and shelter make up much smaller percentages of their budgets the impact of a carbon tax is much less. The poor spend most of what they make on food, shelter, and transport for work... all of which get a sizable increase in cost from an energy tax. Also the increased cost of energy in grneral means increased cost of production of goods, which stands to cause job losses that hit the working poor hardest.
Now there are certainly ways to try and work around this by giving rebates, etc., but all of that undermines the initial goal of simplicity and low overhead that are the major advantages of a carbon tax. Those workarounds also run counter to the very behaviors you're trying to incentivize with the tax. There's a good argument to be made that in the end you're better off just increasing taxes generally and spending the extra tax revenue to explicitly fund lower carbon energy production.
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It's the only thing that's ever saved us. Pretty good fantasy.
Re: Too little, too late (Score:4, Insightful)
Ever heard of acid rain? Have you heard about it in any doomsday scenario since the late 80's?
Scrubbers in smokestacks are a "technology" guess what they do.
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Scrubbers in smokestacks are a "technology" guess what they do.
And how many operators saw the technology and decided to install it at their own expense out of the goodness of their hearts?
Pollution causing corrosion was known about in the 1600s. Acid rain specifically was known about in the 1850s. The problems were studied heavily in the 1960s. It then took a lot of publicity to drive a legislative effort to force polluters to use scrubbers decades later.
So, in other words, technology alone won't fix it.
Re: Too little, too late (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot isn’t much for old-school mechanical and industrial engineering. We build a lot of things out of steel. LOTS AND LOTS of things. Most buildings, every major industrial facility, every factory, large medium and small, pipelines, signs, towers, the list goes on and on and. And steel is very susceptible to acid attack. Paint helps a lot, but paint isn’t totally impervious and it wears away. Corrosion is a MULTI TRILLION DOLLAR problem every year, and acid rain was making it an order of magnitude worse. I’m not exaggerating when I say that hundreds of trillions of dollars worth of infrastructure was facing rapid dissolution. And when I say “dissolution” I mean that it was literally dissolving.
We aren’t gonna address climate change until we reach a similar level of urgency. The worlds power players need to look at the physical stuff within their borders and say “wow, if we don’t address this, we’re gonna lose hundreds of trillions of dollars worth of capital and people”. Note that I put capital first and people second. Yes, I’m getting old and cynical.
We’re clearly not there yet when it comes to climate change. It’s going to get VERY bad before we address it.
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But technology created the problem. So say that technology can't save us is the same as saying there is no solution and we may as well just speed up our doom without trying to save ourselves.
Agreed though that magical tech solutions probably aren't going to solve all of it, you need people to understand that there is a crisis and that lifestyles need to change.
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Well, sure, there's some theoretical work.
I suspect the solution, if there is one, likely lies in massive-scale carbon recapture. Not the post-combustion capture we're doing at power plants, which is too little to have any impact, but global carbon recapture.
And how can that be done? Well, possibly with biotech. We've run the numbers on questions like "What if we cultivated vast fields of bamboo and seaweed and sequestered them miles underground," and they don't really show much promise. But perhaps if we c
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But perhaps if we could engineer a photosynthesizing organism that divided at a rate far beyond what natural selection would lead to on its own...
And what will we feed those organisms with? They need phosphors and nitrates to grow and divide at that accelerated rate. Currently we are feeding the planet with unsustainable mining of these plant foods. If we start sequestering the dead organisms, we sequester the nutrients that it took to grow them.
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Recapture the K, P, and N once the organism has developed. Convert them to graphite [nih.gov] and bury it underground, use the tailings as fertilizer.
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Modern internet was definitely on the horizon in 1985, with all protocol specifications ready and even a deployment or two. And not having it in 1995 would not have been a huge environmental catastrophe.
And no, pouring "trillions" into a very hard problem will not guarantee a solution, especially when a tight timeframe is involved.
Sorry, the real world just doesn't work like that.
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Carbon capture isn't going to save us. If you're talking about "biotech", you're talking about carbon-fixing organisms. To reign in the vast emissions over the last three centuries would require monumental numbers of such organisms, and apart from how these organisms would cause even more damage to various biospheres, it would take decades to "grow" sufficient populations. Like all forms of carbon capture, it's basically a perpetual motion argument, because if you have enough energy to grow all those trees
Biological carbon capture [Re:Too little, too late (Score:3)
...Like all forms of carbon capture, [biological carbon capture] is basically a perpetual motion argument, because if you have enough energy to grow all those trees and algal mats and a greatly accelerated rate, then you've already solved the energy problem.
Biological organisms are solar powered; they are not perpetual motion machines.
Yes, there is enough sunlight hitting the Earth (~173,000 terawatts) to solve the energy problem. This is a rather indirect means of using solar energy (burn fossil fuels for energy, then employ plants to harness solar energy to remove the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere [wouldn't it be simpler to just convert the solar energy directly?]), but it doesn't violate any laws of thermodynamics, and there's plenty of solar energy.
Re:Too little, too late (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, it's funny how fast the tune changes from "there isn't any problem" to "this problem is too big to deal with". The common beat to both tunes is "we don't have to do anything".
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I think the common beat is actually "I'm not going to sacrifice anything to fix it". Developed countries are not going to lower their standard of living, developing countries are not going to slow down development, poor people are not going to sacrifice freedoms, wealthy people are not going to sacrifice their power. So nothing will be done.
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I think you have to ask what "autonomy" is autonomy from.
Ultimately what climate denialists want is autonomy from the consequences of our actions; autonomy from having to choose the future you want. Sure, it'd suck of government regulators made you drive a car that got 50 mpg a decade ago; or to have to insulate our houses or subsidize renewable fuels; or to pay a carbon tax. That's all
It also sucks to have a summer like the one we're having now, and that's something our own actions have force on us.
its perpetually doomsday.
Curious
Re:Too little, too late (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, isn't it fun to be a doomsayer? It's all over, let's give up! Cynicism is so awesomely cool.
To the contrary, people are doing things. You may question whether it's enough, but yes, there are people working on new energy technologies,
Specific examples would be welcome, but they won't be forthcoming.
Well, to start, here are four technologies being worked on: Photovoltaic power. Nuclear power. Next-generation battery storage. Fusion energy.
There is literally nothing on the horizon, even theoretical work, than can help "save the planet".
"Not even theoretical"? Well, I just listed some. Once you get into "theoretical," there are hundreds.
In any case, "save the planet" is hyperbole. The planet has, in the geologic past, been much warmer than it is now. It would be uncomfortable for the current version of human society, and thus very undesirable, but for most of the history of Earth, the planet didn't even have ice caps.
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None of these undo the harm that's already done. For example, if methane is indeed spiring upwards into the atmosphere because it's no longer sealed under ice, then the thick, insulating gas isn't going to become less insulating because we're now using solar energy.
And as long as businesses decide to stick to using cheaper fossil fuels as a primary energy s
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And to finish, the problem we're facing is the accumulated CO2 in the atmosphere, and not one of the things you list helps with that. So, no, this won't help.
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And to finish, the problem we're facing is the accumulated CO2 in the atmosphere, The CO2 we have accumulated in the atmosphere is responsible for the warming we have now. Turns out, we're not dead yet. The article we're responding to suggests attempting to stop by 1.5 degrees C. We are not there yet.
The accumulated CO2 has warmed the planet, but the real problem to be addressed is keeping the planet from warming more.
and not one of the things you list helps with that. So, no, this won't help.
Since you include "even theoretical work", yes, there is plenty of theoretical work on dealing with that as well. Approaches include carbon dioxide removal, both biological and technological; methods to modify the albedo; methods to increase the IR emissivity; and even direct modification of incident solar radiation. You claim that there does not exist even theoretical work to solve the problem. Even a minute's worth of google search would show that to be inaccurate.
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Methane breaks down into CO2 and water, so while the half life of methane in the atmosphere is short, while it's there is magnifying the effect, and when it finally breaks down, it's still leaving CO2 in the atmosphere. And it's not like all the methane sequestered in permafrost, clathrates and other geological features is just going to go into the air in one big burp (which would likely be a civilization ending event, BTW), it's going to take decades to leak out of those reserves, meaning as methane breaks
Re: Too little, too late (Score:4, Insightful)
Nuclear is the most expensive kind of generation we have
If it was an actual emergency money would be no object, but by all means carry on with your solar panels. Totally going to save us.
First, the more you build, the less intermittent it is.
You need to read up more on how power grids actually work. You can't just HVDC the renewable energy from point A to point B where points A and B (and the rest of the alphabet) change constantly. The grid in your imagination does not exist.
Re: Too little, too late (Score:5, Insightful)
We don't accept your level of idiocy.
So much for disagreement without being disagreeable.
Nuclear is the most expensive kind of generation we have, and it's not the least co2 emitting either.
Nuclear emits 4 times less co2 than solar. Costs require holistic evaluation not simply comparison shopping of cost to produce a watt of energy whenever it is most convenient to do so. The lack of something like Nuclear in the mix means higher costs in terms of overprovisioning, buffering and grid outlays or burning more hydrocarbons forever.
There are at least two options which are superior in both regards.
Name them.
The other options can also be built faster. This makes it patently obvious that nuclear is not the best option.
I'm not so sure industry would even be able to keep up with the churn rate of old equipment retiring given the level of over provisioning that would be required without something like nuclear in the mix.
.A lot is made out of renewables' intermittency, but that is idiotic as well. First, the more you build, the less intermittent it is.
How do you know what is idiotic? Have you done the required modeling? Can you cite any studies that have done so? I would love to see credible modeling to support an economically and environmentally feasible grid that doesn't burn hydrocarbons. We should keep in mind it will need to support 2x the capacity of today's grid to stand any realistic chance of enabling substantial decarbonization.
Second, if only making hay while the sun literally shines is part of the AGW solution, it's a small price to pay. We should just be happy that there is a working solution.
The grid is required to provide power when demanded not simply when it is convenient to do so. When the grid fails people die.
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Sounds like a job for AI controlled arms that can see cans in garbage and pick it out. Amazon is making strides on this kind of technology for it's warehouse as we speak, so it's not really that far fetched.
But really, we need a greater emphasis on reusing stuff and to seriously get away from one time use objects. No reason why we need so much stuff sold individual packaged and for drinks, we need to move to a bring your own container situation.
Of course industry will wail away at such a thought. So money/p
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You could personally stop burning fossil fuels?
Then your neighbor could. Then their neighbor...
Think of the possibilities.
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Whatever device you posted this from, I can assure you that its manufacture was not carbon-neutral. Nor was the process of shipping it to you.
Re: Too little, too late (Score:4, Insightful)
The neighbor driving a 2000-era dodge caravan because thatâ(TM)s all they can afford, working full timeâ¦they donâ(TM)t have the means to âoejust stop burningâ. In Washington, we jumped the carbon taxes to reduce gas usage, except it hurts mostly the people who canâ(TM)t afford the next step, and still need reliable transportation to survive.
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If they are driving a 23 year old vehicle then they are doing their part in a different way. Getting a new car every 5 years is wasteful and unnecessary. Better to keep a car and repair it. Sure, it's going to be inefficient compared to a new model, but the act of creating the car uses an immense amount of energy that's most certainly not carbon free. Even getting your energy from solar or wind still requires you first make the panels or turbines, which is burning more energy.
At some point, sure a new car w
Re:Too little, too late (Score:4)
Or you could just stop personally burning fossil fuels?
Why do you want to go all systemic and culture pervasive on this? Start with yourself, branch out once you've got that under control.
If you can't control you, who can you control?
Re:Too little, too late (Score:4, Insightful)
Might help if the people who keep saying it's a crisis actually acted like it's a crisis.
In the meantime, wtf is "global boiling"? I mean, besides some made up term used so that a) a UN bureaucrat can get his 15-seconds of fame and b) everyone can point and laugh at it and say that even these clowns don't take it seriously.
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The problem has been around for decades, at least in the US. Here's a chart from the US EPA, a well-known Left-leaning agency of the US Federal Government. The same web page includes a link to a worldwide temperatures chart over the same time period, 1900 to NOW
https://www.epa.gov/climate-in... [epa.gov]
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Blame the marketing as well, they're the ones who convinced people to engage in consumerism, planned obscolescence, to use more and more energy, etc.
Mostly it fell apart when this all become political. Way back when, conservatives and Republicans were big on conservation, they loved national parks, they hated littering, but then that got swapped around so that conservation was something only hippies cared about.
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Nobody will do anything, as usual. You know who to thank for the oncoming climate catastrophe your parents and grandparents in the "developed world". It was nice while it lasted. See you on the other side.
I think you and I are in the same boat, if not same row. As soon as I saw that Indian crying on TV over the garbage I've tried to do my part. I still do. But at this point I'm getting older and the real climate catastrophes are not on the schedule to start till after I die. At this point I'm just going to do what I can to live a low foot print life. An if people do get their shit together and fix this, fuck'em.
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An if people do get their shit together and fix this, fuck'em.
An if people don't get their shit together and fix this, fuck'em. preview damn it.
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"The entire problem." Lol.
Assuming you're American, you have some of the highest per capita carbon emission of anyone on the planet, and the second highest as a country.
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You're dissembling. You said "the entire problem is coming from nations outside of our control like China."
Ladies and Gentlemen, the "leaders of the free world!"
Leaders of the free world: "China is worse than we are (by some metrics) therefore we are completely helpless."
Bravo.
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70% of the accumulated CO2, which is actually warming up the climate, was produced between the 40s and now in the US with little help from Western Europe and Japan. At the current rates of output, China will catch up with that amount in something like 40 or 50 years. Please stop pretending the US isn't the largest part of the climate problem.
I won't even mention the other part - the US actively interfering with most efforts to stave off the process for decades.
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What is missed is none of this matters. Physics does not care about fairness or who is to blame.
If you want to go down that route though...
Ok ton of us output was manufacturing, manufacturing all of the things war torn Europe wanted to buy from us!
Now a ton of Chinese output is manufacturing, manufacturing a things the whole darn world wants to buy! The same goes for a lot Eastern Europe and South Asia.
They want money, the US and EU want cheap consumer things. Who is blame well we all are. Wanna know what a
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Please go back to the Mesozoic and don't come back if you like it so much. You obviously belong there and not with us.
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Have you actually looked at the NOAA data? If you look at the data for station MNBF1 [noaa.gov] located a Manatee Bay it shows a reading of 38.44C (101F) on July 24th.
It just doesn't matter anymore (Score:3, Interesting)
Let's face it, it's over. The few people who actually understand are few and far between, the rest gets blitzed by people and organizations that have far too much to lose if we actually started to try to keep the planet inhabitable, science gets discredited to ensure nobody listens, the religious nutjobs only add to this because not only is science pretty much killing their god off but living on the end-times is always a good way to squeeze the desperate for some money so these worthless spongers can have a comfy life on the back of their dupes, and the planet is going to shit.
OK. I accept defeat. I'm 50. I have no kids. I'm on the way out. I just hope I live long enough to see the idiots that are now being duped into believing those bullshit peddlers suffer from it and see them cry for aid from government and science and all they get is a boot to the face and a "suck it, idiot, you wanted it, now die with it".
Re:It just doesn't matter anymore (Score:5, Insightful)
History suggests things will get really shitty and then the masses will demand the people who actually understand what's happening do something about it.
Right now it's, "Your children will suffer in bad but vague ways unless you drop your standard of living significantly" and almost nobody is on board with that option.
Once it's, "You're going to suffer tomorrow, in really bad ways, but if we direct the suffering in a particular direction things should start to improve"... that's when people will get on board and demand action.
Humans are really bad at trans-generational altruism.
Re:It just doesn't matter anymore (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It just doesn't matter anymore (Score:5, Insightful)
DING*DING*DING.... We have a winner!!
Yep...telling people that they have to basically give up modern life and conveniences, and make extreme new world order level societal changes is not the way to push a simple message of moving to cleaner energy, new tech that will Improve your live and quality of life...etc.
Re:It just doesn't matter anymore (Score:5, Insightful)
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Selfishness is an instinct for us.
Altruism is too, to some degree. We are pack animals after all, and things done that benefit the pack tend to have a reciprocal benefit to the self, so at least that level of altruism is in our make-up.
But basic selfishness is older and more fundamental, and still provides benefits even in a pack context. We can lament this all day long, but these behavioral inclinations are much older than the strange environment we have created for ourselves, and they aren't going away
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I don't buy that. Yes, there were some false starts involving selected and since retracted studies in the 1970's, but for the last thirty-five years at least they've been saying that we should use less fossil fuels. The only time that tone changed was when they said really, guys, we need to use less and fewer! with varying increases in intensity. Then they offered t
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Once it's, "You're going to suffer tomorrow..."
Sorry, I think you actually meant that to read "You're suffering now and will continue to suffer even worse..."
Nobody will do anything today about what might happen tomorrow. But that's because they don't understand when someone says something might happen tomorrow, they're speaking from probabilities, and they don't understand that a scientist will never say something will happen tomorrow because probability is never 100%... They can only say might with a 99% percent possibility, and everyone focuses on th
Re:It just doesn't matter anymore (Score:4, Insightful)
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No, it's not over.
Global warming is a long term thing. It has bad effects, and the longer we take to address it the more the effects will be, but no, we're not making the planet uninhabitable any time soon.
The solution will also be a long term thing. Typically infrastructure changes on a time scale of ~50 years.
Change is slow.
Alarmist (Score:5, Insightful)
"Global boiling" suggests that the temperature is rising to a point where the surface water (eg oceans) are boiling. That isn't the case, nor will it ever be the case due to AGW.
The reality is most people are not going to care much about until its the more convenient, cheaper option to go green. EG, I love LED lightbulbs vs incandescent. They're truly a better technology. You want to replace internal combustion engines? We need cheaper electric cars. And if you want to get rid of coal plants quit NIMBY'ing nuclear energy.
People are always going to act in a short sighted selfish manner. That's not even worth trying to change. What you have to do is improve technology so that the short sighted selfish choice IS the environmentally friendly one.
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"Global boiling" suggests that the temperature is rising to a point where the surface water (eg oceans) are boiling.
Only to the pedantic literalist. Have you never said, "Good lord, it's boiling out"? There are uses for the word that don't revolve around 212F.
"Global warming" was neither global, nor universally warming. The phrase is not a scientific term, nor was it intended to be. It's a useful shorthand. "Global boiling" evokes what the speaker intended - that we're entering a different time with escalated danger. I suppose they could have said, "Enhanced global warming"... but that carries no concern.
Problems Scales (Score:5, Funny)
"Global boiling" suggests that the temperature is rising to a point where the surface water (eg oceans) are boiling.
Perhaps he was listening to all the reports of 100+ degree temperatures in the US and did not realize that they don't use Centigrade? In Canada, we manage to avoid such confusion when talking to Americans because -40 degrees is the same temperature on both scales.
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Yeah, but I've been to Canada, and it isn't always -40 up there.
That's true, it's not always so warm. A few years ago we got to -45C in Edmonton and it was below -50C if you included wind chill.
I went in June, and it wasn't even snowing.
I know, global warming is giving us crazy hot summer heat waves too!
Re:Alarmist (Score:5, Funny)
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"Global boiling" suggests that the temperature is rising to a point where the surface water (eg oceans) are boiling.
So when the AC isn't working in the office and someone says "it's boiling in here" do you complain that no, your drink isn't actually boiling on your desk?
He's obviously not meaning literal boiling, he's just trying (and failing) to say something dramatic.
The reality is most people are not going to care much about until its the more convenient, cheaper option to go green.
Oh they care already, especially in the middle of a brutal drought or heat wave. That doesn't translate to significant personal sacrifice, but it can translate into policy pressure
EG, I love LED lightbulbs vs incandescent. They're truly a better technology. You want to replace internal combustion engines? We need cheaper electric cars. And if you want to get rid of coal plants quit NIMBY'ing nuclear energy.
People are always going to act in a short sighted selfish manner. That's not even worth trying to change. What you have to do is improve technology so that the short sighted selfish choice IS the environmentally friendly one.
The part of your narrative that bugs me is it seems to suggest "we can't cha
And now cue the nationalism and partisanship (Score:5, Insightful)
Never mind that if the country you live in cut its carbon emissions to *zero* - if it literally enforced national Mennonite-style living, whether or not that was going to lead to a massive famine - the planet would continue to warm.
In America, liberals point their fingers at conservatives and say "It's them doing it." Conservatives point their fingers at China and say "It's them doing it."
Then both of them drive their cars to restaurants and eat beef and then drive back to their houses that are three times the size of what they need and go on Amazon and order bullshit they don't need and have it shipped across the Pacific Ocean so they can say "look at this neat thing I have acquired; it is neat and it makes me feel happy; I should order more neat things."
It's not a "those guys are doing it to us" problem. It's a "Humanity radically changed its lifestyle after the World War era and we like it a lot more this way" problem.
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Never mind that if the country you live in cut its carbon emissions to *zero* - if it literally enforced national Mennonite-style living, whether or not that was going to lead to a massive famine - the planet would continue to warm.
OK, I won't mind it, because it's a straw man. We've always had the ability to turn this around, and if we'd done it *promptly*, say 20 years ago, it would have been painless unless all your wealth was in oil company stocks. Now actually stopping warming is probably too painful, but we can surely slow it so things to don't get much worse than they are today. Because really, it's not too bad today, the problem is we weren't prepared for the change. And we won't be prepared for the changes that are coming
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We've always had the ability to turn this around, and if we'd done it *promptly*, say 20 years ago, it would have been painless unless all your wealth was in oil company stocks.
US emissions peaked in 2007 (not quite 20 years ago, but close) and are down ~20% since. However, in the same period, China's emissions have increased ~65%, to the point where their delta between 2007 and 2022 is larger than US emissions at the start of that period. To achieve what you suggest would have required halting Chinese growth (which would have taken a war on the scale of WW2).
TL;DR: "painless" was never an option, and "turning it around" is no longer an option if it ever was. Anyone who cares a
Re:And now cue the nationalism and partisanship (Score:4, Insightful)
The oil companies' stock prices are a result of the fact that they *sell* the oil. To everyone.
They also market oil, which is why they've been fronting climate disinformation.
If we had stopped them from selling that oil
Straw man. The thing that makes tackling a problem *earlier* is that you have more time and can phase things out.
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China has been a disaster in terms of growth of emissions. They are the largest emitter and still are growing. Less than 1/6 of world population and sh [europa.eu]
The great news... (Score:2)
... is that all the pointless arguing about fantasy versus fact will become irrelevant. We'll all be busy dealing with whatever the planet/climate does or doesn't do, and if it's as severe as things seem, the collection of non-contributing yammerers on the fringes can be safely ignored. Bigger fish to fry. If you can't grow food because your fields are all burning, what "Pinhead the Political Clown" thinks about AGW isn't really important.
Meaningless (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no actual content here; this is pretty much meaningless. This is a UN bureaucrat with no actual power telling us things that we already know but phrasing it in scary language.
Yes, global warming is real. Yes, it will have bad effects. No, it's not true that "the era of global warming has ended and the era of global boiling has arrived." The era of global warming has not gone away, it is most definitely still here, and I don't even know what that term "global boiling" even means (it most certainly isn't a term ever used by scientists.)
And finally, 1.5 degrees C is simply a nice even number. There's nothing particular that happens at 1.5 degrees C that hasn't already started to happen at 1.4 degrees C, and it is also most definitely not true that if we don't stop warming at 1.5 C we might as well give up because it's over.
Let's stick to facts.
"Humans are to blame" - so get rid of humans (Score:2)
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Well, nature gave us a perfectly good pandemic a few years back, but instead of holding COVID parties, we took the stance that every possible year of human life must be preserved at all costs.
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I'll entertain your premise! (Score:2)
With the democrats working on getting rid of people, and the republicans bent on ensuring that those that remain regress to the stone ages socially, culturally, and intellectually, the US is kind of screwed.
New language: "Global Boiling" (Score:5, Interesting)
from https://www.fastcompany.com/90... [fastcompany.com]
"Word choices by the press in this field matter because they are influential on public opinion, says Todd Ehresmann, senior linguist at Babbel. “News outlets have a strict duty to accurately represent the true state of things,” he says. “By using phrases that reflect the urgency of the situation, media outlets are conveying the importance of addressing these issues.” As the climate situation has escalated, those more emphatic and urgent terms like “emergency” and “catastrophe,” as well as “climate crisis” and “climate breakdown,” are necessary."
"Similarly, Ehresmann says “global warming” is no longer accurate enough. As temperatures have risen by 0.32 degrees Fahrenheit per decade over the past 40 years, a more accurate term is “global heating.” In 2018, a leading climate scientist at the U.K. Met Office declared that was the preferred term, and a German scientist, founder of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, agreed: “‘Global warming’ doesn’t capture the scale of destruction,” Hans Joachim Schellnhuber said. “Speaking of hothouse Earth is legitimate.” Meanwhile, “greenhouse effect,” prevalent in the early 2000s in the years following An Inconvenient Truth, is a clearly defined scientific term, but doesn’t have a sense of urgency or trigger an emotional response."
That was 2021. Now "the era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived". Will everyone get on board with "Global Boiling"? I don't think "Global Heating" or "Hothouse Earth" caught on. Maybe "Global Incineration" or "Eternal Hellfire" or something will evoke a better emotional response
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You do get regional heating, but that's regional, not global.
The term "climate change" is also accurate. Global warming causes climate change.
What about... the era of "Asphalt Grilling"? (Score:2)
Or the Great Phoenix Depopulation of 2024?
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Sounds like it's time for humans to return to seasonal migration as a way of life. If the weather is not stable living in one place, then obviously it's up to the humans to migrate with the season.
The people who are already occupying the places to be migrated to might have objections.
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Species level concerns typically involve killing the other species.
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I was just thinking the same thing. What's the problem with shifting to a different area that has a more livable climate?
If the alternative is to stay put and experience the heightened levels of warmness, then great have fun with that. Now would be a good time to invest in some good reliable air conditioning. Before the doomsday scenario arrives you'll probably also want to secure access to some alternative sources of potable water and electric power generation. Although it will probably be easier to ju
Whelp, that settles it. (Score:2)
We're as dumb as frogs... (Score:2)
We will sit here in our pot of water as the temperatures continue to rise, and we will do nothing because of fake science, indeterminate time frames, cost, impact on developing nations, ...
Meanwhile the water is getting warmer, and (maybe soon) will begin to boil and we'll be dead frogs.
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Still in the fight (Score:2)
The binary thinking here ("doomed" or "saved") is the worst. It's a spectrum. We are already very much on-track to prevent 4C, which is, as the man said, "incompatible with organized civilization", so three cheers for that. The IRA and responses to it from Europe and Asia will surely hold it below 3C, which would be really bad. We have a great shot, if we work at it, of staying below 2.5C and many are thinking 2.2C. Those levels are considered compatible with continued economic activity that will
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Oh, and I got that from a speaker on David Roberts "Volts" podcast, at volts.wtf.
David has been instrumental in improving my mental health about the future prospects; he slums into politics, but the real focus is on the engineers and inventors who are in the thick of the R&D fight.
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So, I guess we're now at a place where we can use less gas and electricity to boil water, since apparently you no longer need 100 degrees C.
It's almost like we're all living in the stratosphere, with less pressure :)
Re:Covid didn't put a dent into emissions (Score:5, Informative)
It actually did, the lockdown year - 2020 - was "what needed to be done every year thereafter to achieve 1.5C" , aka 5% YoY reduction [1].
The rebound went pretty much as expected. 1.5C is gone...
[1] https://www.nature.com/article... [nature.com]
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Apparently that's how we "solve" global boiling
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> Nobody can possibly afford that, COVID lockdowns put us to the brink of much bigger disaster.
The reductions don't have to happen in such a haphazard manner, had it been planned and agreed upon, the edge of the knife could be walked successfully. Maybe even not be an edge, but a rather comfortable walking space.
That is why I'm no longer an optimist. After 2 centuries of always more, where no thinking ahead was necessary, because we could almost always "wing it" , there is no school of thought that is c
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