'A Crisis Entirely of Humanity's Making': UN Chief Issues Climate SOS on Trip To Pacific (theguardian.com) 164
Pacific island nations are in "grave danger" from rising sea levels and the world must "answer the SOS before it is too late," the UN chief has warned during a visit to Tonga. From a report: The UN secretary general, AntÃnio Guterres, urged the world to "look to the Pacific and listen to the science" as he released two new reports on the sidelines of the Pacific Islands Forum, the region's most important annual political gathering. Sea-surface temperatures in the south-west Pacific have risen three times faster than the global average since 1980, according to a regional report compiled by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and released on Tuesday. It also found that marine heatwaves in the region had roughly doubled in frequency since 1980 and become more intense and longer-lasting.
The report said 34 mostly storm or flood-related "hydrometeorological hazard events" in the south-west Pacific last year led to more than 200 deaths and affected more than 25 million people. In a second report published on Tuesday, the UN's climate action team warned that the climate crisis and sea-level rise were "no longer distant threats," especially for the Pacific's small island developing states. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded with high confidence in 2021 that the global mean sea level was rising at rates unprecedented in at least the last 3,000 years as a result of human-induced global warming.
The report said 34 mostly storm or flood-related "hydrometeorological hazard events" in the south-west Pacific last year led to more than 200 deaths and affected more than 25 million people. In a second report published on Tuesday, the UN's climate action team warned that the climate crisis and sea-level rise were "no longer distant threats," especially for the Pacific's small island developing states. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded with high confidence in 2021 that the global mean sea level was rising at rates unprecedented in at least the last 3,000 years as a result of human-induced global warming.
Hawaii (Score:2)
Don't worry about Hawaii (Score:3)
It would be ironic if after billionaires buy the entirety of the Hawaiian islands that the island ended up under water in a few decades
It would indeed be ironic, but the Hawaiian islands are mountains that stick up WAY above sea level: they won't be underwater in a few decades, nor a few centuries.
The discussion is about low islands that rise only a few feet above sea level.
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They never will be under water.
If you wait long enough, the Pacific plate will move northwest enough for the Hawaiian Islands to start subducting under the Eurasian plate. Somewhat before then they'll probably be underwater. That's maybe a billion years from now, true, but never say never.
Erosion will probably deal with them before then, though.
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It is, but you said "never."
Never is a very long time.
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Hawaii is being pushed up by a volcanic plume, not tectonics directly.
But what causes magma plumes?
At least according to Wikipedia, the science is not settled: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Likewise. I'm not particularly educated on geology. I was curious about the difference between volcanism and tectonics because my rudimentary many-years-ago schooling on the issue made them seem pretty mutual processes. I read your comments and went looking for more, and enjoyed reading all of it.
Bigly storms (Score:2)
More heat energy in the atmosphere results in bigger and wetter storms in a good many places. Civilization needs to prepare, and it ain't gonna be cheap. We juiced our weather.
But AI and Crypto! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: But AI and Crypto! (Score:2)
I'll take crab hands over squid hands. (Except in bed)
Re: But AI and Crypto! (Score:2)
They'll just ask for a bail out won't they.
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Also, look at where the funding for the USA's current presidential election campaigns is coming from. Do you think those do
Once again... not even about deniers... (Score:5, Insightful)
The reality, though, is that it's insanity to pretend you can put out an SOS and we'll collectively say, "Woah! Sorry guys... Didn't realize our behavior started putting some of your small islands under water. We'll just spend billions of dollars on some changes and turn this right back around for you!"
Every time I look at this stuff in a big picture sense, I come to the same conclusion. And basically, it's one that says Ok ... humans managed to cause some changes to our climate with all of our activities producing energy to improve our lives.We can't just take melted arctic ice from polar ice caps and put it back, though. We can't just shut down some power plants burning fossil fuels and pretend all the tropical storms and heat waves will just subside immediately as a result.
Am I advocating doing nothing? No... but I think people ARE trying to do a lot to make changes. Most of these changes that will turn out to have true benefits, though, will take a lot of time to perfect and mature. Many others will simply be "shell games" where you hide the negative environmental impact they create at one end to show how they improved things at the other end.
Ultimately? What the modern world demands is adequate "base load" power. There's only so much use for any technology that doesn't consistently generate power 24 hours/7 days a week. Wind doesn't consistently blow 24/7 in most places to power wind farms. The sun doesn't ever shine at night. Fossil fuels were burned in large quantities because they're extremely energy-dense. You get so much power for every gallon of them consumed, it's hard to find anything else equivalent. Nuclear power looks like the real solution - but more research is needed to build safer power plants that don't waste so much energy as radioactive waste.
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Many others will simply be "shell games" where you hide the negative environmental impact they create at one end to show how they improved things at the other end.
Not to sound like a troll, but I've often wondered about the massive electronics industry and resources required to produce LED lighting and EVs. Does that ever get considered, or is only the last stage looked at (tailpipe, watts-per-lumen)? A "classic", carbureted car may be less efficient but it's much more recyclable, no? Same with incandescent bulbs.
I thought it was funny during the closing ceremonies of the Olympics when they pointed out the use of recycled metals to make the giants rings that the
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There are simple and easy things we can do that are highly effective.
We aren't doing them though. China is, so it's not that they are impossible or even hard.
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We aren't doing them though. China is, so it's not that they are impossible or even hard.
Isn't China the #1 consumer of coal powered energy and continuing to build new plants? Or is that propaganda? (Serious question. I don't go too deep into this stuff but coal always sounds like the largest offender of both greenhouse and particulate pollution.)
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There was a story here about how coal is dying in China. They are expected to hit peak emissions this year, or next at the latest, 5-6 years ahead of their agreed Paris goal.
The rate at which they are installing renewables really puts everyone else to shame. More than the rest of the world combined last year. More than the US has installed in its entire history, in just the first 8 months of last year. If they can do it, so can we.
We can start (Score:5, Informative)
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Or we can start at least with symbolic behaviour: private jets, luxury yachts ...
Optimally do both.
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I mean, it's literally a 10 to 15 point reduction if you knock that out and vacation / tourism.
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Yeah...well, good luck with that.....
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Nice try, though. Straight out of the MAGA playbook: to suppress a truth, you need simply find a completely unrelated truth and imply that it disproves whatever it is you need to suppress. Taxes aren't force. Soldiers carrying rifles with bullets, that's force. Strategic military forces, that's force. Taxes are how my government raises money to do what I tell them to do (God, I love living in a representative democracy, technically a Republic but that'll do).
I envy you your representative democracy where your taxes are a resource which pays for what sounds like a legitimate set of discrete government operations to produce the goods and services the people want. That sounds awesome. Please keep your country on the right path.
Meanwhile, over here in the United States - where I live - taxation is not a resource used for funding a discrete set of operational needs that output goods/services people ask for. Taxation is used as both the carrot and the stick in a soci
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Both items are the result of humans. Reduce the population and both the items you mentioned will cease to be a problem.
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And where do you think the overwhelming vast majority of CO2 is coming from? Humans are the cause of the CO2 rise so clearly if you reduce the population you reduce the amount of CO2 being produced.
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The trouble is (Score:2, Interesting)
that nobody will pay the slightest attention. /s
We must preserve our right to drive F-350s to work and enjoy the convenience of plastics!
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Indeed. As a group, the human race is unfit for survival. How pathetic.
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But plastic and microplastic accumulation is (also) a severe problem.
Basically we are shitting in our own nest.
We are fucked, and we will continue to deny it until we die off from hunger, war, and disease.
Oh well, not in my lifetime - that's where we are at now.
No problem (Score:2)
China will just come along and build the islands up above the new sea level for use as military bases.
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profits people (Score:4, Informative)
Did he travel on zero-carbon transport? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think not. Do as he says not as he does.
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I think not. Do as he says not as he does.
I like this line. It's almost as if you think that his flight had even the tiniest impact on climate change, unlike say the organisation and the message they are promoting along with the agreements that they make.
But hey, what ever you need to do to feel better about your wasteful self.
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He contributed to global warming for no real purpose. There was no need to be there physically. That is literally the problem. The solution is easy. Stop doing that.
We aren't going to do anything (Score:5, Insightful)
If the slashdot crowd won't support policies that will actually make a dent in our current green house gas emissions what hope does an elected politician have of staying in office if they actually try and do something?
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While you're talking about the "easy" stuff you missed the fact that many of the things you listed can be collectively summed up by one word: "Pointless waste". Okay that was two words, but the point is fucking off plastic scraws, insane gas guzzlers used for school runs, and bitcoin miners *IS* the easy stuff.
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Just read the posts on here from people who believe climate change is a threat and you will see we all think it is someone else's problem. Ban ICE, China, the bitcoin miners, the F-150 drivers, the billionaires, volcanoes, plastic straws.... Just don't do any of the easy stuff that might affect me.
What is this 'easy' stuff that you are referring to? How would it affect me? I have no idea what you are talking about but you are effectively pointing the finger at individual action and saying that it is easy, but because it is inconvenient, that I (we) will not do it. So... what are these easy things that I can do that will make a difference?
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Re: We aren't going to do anything (Score:2)
This is news? (Score:2)
I haven't heard this before. Thank goodness he warned us!
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Declare War on Climate Change (Score:2)
It won't change (Score:3, Insightful)
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Leadership is top down not bottom up and no one is going to listen to the dictates of a hypocrite.
Privilege is top down. Responsibility is bottom up. Leadership is completely nonexistent.
Easy to debunk. (Score:3)
Just go to one of the island nations and walk along the beach. Find some dry sand. Take it to their house of government, stand at the podium, show the sand, and confidently declare, "See? Not happening."
Bad timing (Score:3)
In other news scientists are puzzled by a rapid drop in sea surface temperatures in June 2024 compared with 2023. Phew, another crisis averted! As NOAA writes "In contrast, since the beginning of June, sea surface temperature (SST) in the central equatorial Atlantic has been 0.5–1.0 degrees Celsius (0.9–1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) colder than average for this time of the year."
https://www.climate.gov/news-f... [climate.gov]
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Not very puzzled admittedly.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Informative)
Does the UN climate faction has any credibility at this point?
They have been correct so far.
But the deniers have to jump in
Re:Really? (Score:5, Interesting)
Deniers cherry-pick and magnify mistakes of scientists and believers, yet are making the biggest mistake of them all: hearing only what they want to hear.
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Does the UN climate faction has any credibility at this point?
They have been correct so far.
But the deniers have to jump in
This is true. The predictions have pretty consistently been conservative and the actual measurements have usually been more extreme than the predictions. The climate scientists understand what the deniers would claim if the predictions were not at least met, so they are conservative.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Funny)
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Every time I cook a steak for dinner, I cook an extra one and just throw it away. Just trying to do my part!
I think you should have commented that to the article about cows, not the one about Pacific Islands.
Re: Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
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No you don't :D
I think I'm entitled to have my own personal delusions!
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Sacrifice is for the others, right?
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Yup.
Are you trying to go somewhere with this...?
I see no compelling reason to curtail my eating habits whatsoever.
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I'm not giving up my beef hamburgers, steaks and smoked briskets....
Good news, you won't have to [teamblind.com]. What you should give up, however, is your echo chamber.
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Funny, until you posted that link, I had never heard of any so called "Biden Burger Ban"....
But there are plenty of green types out there...pushing to stop eating meat...and the old WEF mentioning eating bugs....shit like that.
There's plenty out there legitimately trying to curtail beef consumption.
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There's plenty out there legitimately trying to curtail beef consumption.
Nah, there isn't. You just want it to exist. "The extreme left wants affordable health care!" -- too hard to sell.
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Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
If climate change was not really happening, then people wouldn't want to migrate to the US.
People were wanting to come to the US long before climate change was on any news reader's lips.
You'd think that would make the anti-immigrant people want to be on the "climate change is real" wagon, but not.
Why? They could just plan on refusing the theoretical refugees. That's not a tough leap of logic.
Short term profits over sustainability is all right-wingers think about for the last 30 years.
Maybe some fat-cat factory owner somewhere thinks this, but most people aren't feeling those "profits". I'd say it's more realistic to believe them, they think the media is selling them a bill of goods and rabid lefties are pushing their political agenda via false or exaggerated claims. Since it's easy to find false and exaggerated claims, it's not that hard to believe. Then another significant portion probably think the whole thing is unfair and they are unwilling to sacrifice since China always gets a pass and never commits anything to the climate treaties and neither do the rich hypocrite fuckers preaching about it out of the door to their private jet etc... despite being the biggest producer of carbon and pollution.
Despite both of those being real, valid concerns, it also doesn't mean AGW isn't real or isn't a problem. It also does not somehow nullify the polluters (personally I consider pollution an even bigger problem than climate change).
Demonizing people's beliefs or reasoning won't help you push whatever authoritarian agenda you want to force refuseniks and deniers into. What would help is some better technology to change consumer habits and energy production so they pick options that will mean less pollution and carbon emissions. Politicians have got ya'll fully divided and conquered with this issue, abortion, and a small handful of others. That was the point, in my opinion. It's not as if they really cared about AGW or pollution (and that includes both partisan sides).
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Yes and the fat-cat owner is one of the people funding the bad faith right wing think tanks and media outlets that are trying to sell this story to the rank and file.
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the fat-cat owner is one of the people funding the bad faith right wing think tanks
Plenty of partisan fat cats fund pet think tanks. Brookings ring a bell since you're upset over Cato and friends ? They all do that and there is a lot more left wing media than right wing, not that it matters. People just stay in their little partisan bubbles anyhow.
many consider CO2 a type of pollution
While I can see the logic, CO2 isn't really toxic compared to say Benzene. All I'm saying is that I have priorities and pollution is a bigger problem right now.
This is why we need government regulation to deal with externalities.
Are you sure? I'm only asking because folks keep saying this but the CO2 levels keep
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I'm more concerned about the ones tasked with coming up with bad faith arguments they know are wrong but are used to dupe people. For example, the ones dealing with climate change. Nothing wrong with honest research.
It's a big government, for good or bad, so it can do more than one thing. Don't use this as an excuse to limit activity on climate change.
Already too many [Re:Really?] (Score:3)
So, ask the important question. Who is going to take in all the refugees when these islands become uninhabitable?
To be fair (and without denying that a problem exists), the population of the low-lying Pacific Islands is so small compared to the number of refugees worldwide [unhcr.org] already that even evacuating them all wouldn't make enough difference to even notice. It's really not an issue.
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Does the UN climate faction has any credibility at this point?
They've had their shysters for sure. I'd still believe the Pacific has been warming over the last few decades. China didn't really get their industrialization going until the 1950's, so that likely kicked things up a notch.
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Does the UN climate faction has any credibility at this point?
Yes, but only among people with a functioning brain. Sadly intelligence seems to be a trait that we are evolving out of our species.
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Re:Prove it (Score:4, Interesting)
Here's what the EPA says: https://www.epa.gov/climate-in... [epa.gov]
Put quickly, the frequency of hurricanes has not increased but the severity has. Cyclones have increased in frequency and intensity. A hurricane is a tropical cyclone, cyclones is a broader category including the subtropics.
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Hurricanes, cyclones, and typhoons are all the same thing, just different names for different oceans.
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Re: Prove it (Score:3)
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What you'd think would be a net loss actually turns out to be a long-term profitable industry. You just have to think big, i.e. in terms of national infrastructure, like Spain, France, Japan, & China, rather than one-off corporate contracts & business propositions, like they tend to do in neoliberal, privatisation-obsessed countries.
The fun part is that what you describe has been happening for decades. The massive infrastructure projects that build things like 16-lane highway sprawl systems in the USA are often run by... contractors from Spain and China.
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Re: The vast bulk of the work (Score:2)
Most environmental scientists don't have the emotional bandwidth to deal with the loudest people on both sides. They just try to do their part and avoid being a target of the loud people.
I'm married to one and rent a room to another.
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Megagrams? [Re:UN chief has warned during a vi...] (Score:2)
I hope he told off that underwater volcano for erupting and putting billions of megagrams of greenhouse gas into the upper atmosphere.
Megagrams! That sounds like such a huge number! Millions and millions of... grams.
A megagram is a word meaning one metric ton. Last year, humans put 37 billion metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere.
Re: with love from Tonga (Score:3)
"The report said 34 mostly storm or flood-related "hydrometeorological hazard events" in the south-west Pacific last year led to more than 200 deaths and affected more than 25 million people."
Yeah, this was definitely about Tonga going under, and nothing else! No twisting words either!
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Re: Quit Complaining (Score:2)
Tbh in the extreme latitudes I find the unending sun more disrupting. When it's always dark, I can run on my body's natural 27hr cycles without going mad(der)