Earth is Trapping Much More Heat Than Climate Models Forecast (theconversation.com) 120
What happens if you track how much heat enters Earth's atmosphere and how much heat leaves?
You discover that Earth's energy budget "is now well and truly out of balance," three climate researchers write at The Conversation: Our recent research found this imbalance has more than doubled over the last 20 years. Other researchers have come to the same conclusions. This imbalance is now substantially more than climate models have suggested... These findings suggest climate change might well accelerate in the coming years...
[T]he burning of coal, oil and gas has now added more than two trillion tonnes of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. These trap more and more heat, preventing it from leaving. Some of this extra heat is warming the land or melting sea ice, glaciers and ice sheets. But this is a tiny fraction. Fully 90% has gone into the oceans due to their huge heat capacity...
The doubling of the energy imbalance has come as a shock, because the sophisticated climate models we use largely didn't predict such a large and rapid change. Typically, the models forecast less than half of the change we're seeing in the real world. We don't yet have a full explanation. But new research suggests changes in clouds is a big factor. Clouds have a cooling effect overall. But the area covered by highly reflective white clouds has shrunk, while the area of jumbled, less reflective clouds has grown.
While we don't know why the cloud are changing, it "might be part of a trend caused by global warming itself, that is, a positive feedback on climate change. These findings suggest recent extremely hot years are not one-offs but may reflect a strengthening of warming over the coming decade or longer...."
"We've known the solution for a long time: stop the routine burning of fossil fuels and phase out human activities causing emissions such as deforestation."
You discover that Earth's energy budget "is now well and truly out of balance," three climate researchers write at The Conversation: Our recent research found this imbalance has more than doubled over the last 20 years. Other researchers have come to the same conclusions. This imbalance is now substantially more than climate models have suggested... These findings suggest climate change might well accelerate in the coming years...
[T]he burning of coal, oil and gas has now added more than two trillion tonnes of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. These trap more and more heat, preventing it from leaving. Some of this extra heat is warming the land or melting sea ice, glaciers and ice sheets. But this is a tiny fraction. Fully 90% has gone into the oceans due to their huge heat capacity...
The doubling of the energy imbalance has come as a shock, because the sophisticated climate models we use largely didn't predict such a large and rapid change. Typically, the models forecast less than half of the change we're seeing in the real world. We don't yet have a full explanation. But new research suggests changes in clouds is a big factor. Clouds have a cooling effect overall. But the area covered by highly reflective white clouds has shrunk, while the area of jumbled, less reflective clouds has grown.
While we don't know why the cloud are changing, it "might be part of a trend caused by global warming itself, that is, a positive feedback on climate change. These findings suggest recent extremely hot years are not one-offs but may reflect a strengthening of warming over the coming decade or longer...."
"We've known the solution for a long time: stop the routine burning of fossil fuels and phase out human activities causing emissions such as deforestation."
Excellent (Score:3)
We can be parboiled even faster.
Like boiling a frog (Score:2, Interesting)
The heating has been sufficiently gradual that much of the public is in denial about it.
(an obsolete metaphor, a frog really will generally jump out when the pot is gets too hot, no matter how slowly you increase the temperature)
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(an obsolete metaphor, a frog really will generally jump out when the pot is gets too hot, no matter how slowly you increase the temperature)
The frogs in those experiments were basically lobotomized. Which might actually make it a more apt analogy these days.
Re:YOU are the one in DENIAL (Score:4, Funny)
I only do this because George Soros has a party every year on his yacht for the scientists, journalists, and influencers working to propagate the climate change hoax. Last 10 of them have been epic and I hope to attend again.
Re: Elites took 90 jets (or yachts) to Bezos' Wedd (Score:1)
But, but, it's only 90 private jets
Re:Elites took 90 jets (or yachts) to Bezos' Weddi (Score:5, Informative)
>> Elites who lecture you
Completely unrelated to this study, and most of those 'elites' attending Bezos' wedding don't give a damn about global warming.
Re:Elites took 90 jets (or yachts) to Bezos' Weddi (Score:4, Insightful)
Elites who lecture you about climate change took 90 private jets (or super-yachts) to Jeff Bezos' wedding https://notthebee.com/article/... [notthebee.com]
I don't remember the elites having lectured me about climate change, though it's entirely possible I wasn't paying attention. Do you have any examples?
Re:Elites took 90 jets (or yachts) to Bezos' Weddi (Score:5, Interesting)
Elites who lecture you about climate change took 90 private jets (or super-yachts) to Jeff Bezos' wedding https://notthebee.com/article/... [notthebee.com]
Look. The mega-rich aren't without blame. Granted. But it's a counter-productive point.
Why? Because the environmental impact of those individuals is minuscule compared to us normies en mass. There are 45,000 passenger flights per day handled by the FAA. Statistically, mathematically, factually... those 90 flights don't matter.
Thinking about the mega-rich is just yet another way of shifting responsibility. You can't control their behavior and even if you forbade that wedding, the reduction in pollution output is irrelevant. Mandating a one-tenth MPG improvement in mileage for commuter cars would be astronomically more effective. But no, the American populace voted in the guy who's busy cancelling every pollution regulation he can find. Those votes... those mattered. Not Bezos' wedding.
Next time you or a loved-one is looking at an F-150 or an Expedition or a Wrangler remember... that's what you have control over. And that's what matters. Also, when you're thinking "that's not fair; Bezos gets to fly in his friends so why do I have to make sacrifices and buy a less-massive car", remember your life isn't fair. Most people on the planet are worse-off than almost every Western citizen. If things were fair, you'd be struggling in Somalia or most of Africa, or Central-America or South America.
Re:Elites took 90 jets (or yachts) to Bezos' Weddi (Score:4)
these mega rich have immense power and influence, arguably more than the 99% combined, and a good part of them run high emission industries. they could easily do a whole lot more than using 90 jets to attend a photo op in an inconsequential meeting about climate change, not to mention using those jets nearly daily as many of them probably do.
Re: Elites took 90 jets (or yachts) to Bezos' Wedd (Score:1)
They are setting an example, do as I say not as I do
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They are setting an example, do as I say not as I do
Precisely.
If these celebrities can give themselves permission to fly in a private jet than fly first class on a commercial flight, because that change is a drop in the bucket on global warming, then I'm going to give myself permission to get the biggest truck I can afford (maybe even bigger, one I can't afford) because what I do isn't going to fix global warming either.
I saw some video clips recently about Australia having debates on nuclear power, and a repeated claim was that it was pointless for a small
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If these celebrities can give themselves permission to fly in a private jet than fly first class on a commercial flight, because that change is a drop in the bucket on global warming, then I'm going to give myself permission to get the biggest truck I can afford (maybe even bigger, one I can't afford) because what I do isn't going to fix global warming either.
Indeed, although also this goes for asking people in China or wherever else to cut down on emissions when they are less than yours per capita.
I can forgive world leaders going to a climate summit by plane as meeting other world leaders in person is still an important way to get deals done as we are social animals, and the effects of a positive deal outweigh the emissions. However, where possible the least carbon-intensive method of meeting should be use that doesn't reduce the effectiveness of the meetin
Re:Elites took 90 jets (or yachts) to Bezos' Weddi (Score:5, Insightful)
Next time you or a loved-one is looking at an F-150 or an Expedition
... or you begin to compose a ChatGPT query ...
Re:Elites took 90 jets (or yachts) to Bezos' Weddi (Score:4, Interesting)
It's actually the most productive point in this discussion. The mega-rich own the companies and assets that enable the economy. It's the economy that affects the climate.
The top 1% of people in America own 30% of valuable assets. If you wiped them off the map like Thanos overnight, nothing would work any more. Things work the way they do because the 1% impose their own governance upon their own assets. It's a trickle down effect of power, which affects 1/3 of the world, and then spreads out.
Your job exists because people in that group want things done a certain way, and they tell underlings what needs to be done, who tell underlings all the way down to you. You either work for them, following their rules, or you work in an independent company that serves their companies, doing what they want done.
Your argument is flawed because you are equating one person flying economy class and one person flying a private jet. They do not have the same impact. The person flying economy class is in the bottom 90%, their carbon footprint equals half of one airline seat travelling once a year. The person in the private jet is in the 1%, their carbon footprint equals half of 30% of all airline seats in the country doing business all year round. The factor of 1/2 comes from the fact that there are two sides to every transaction.
If you want change, you have to impose strong constraints on the 1%, so that they can't do what they want with the assets they own.
Re:Elites took 90 jets (or yachts) to Bezos' Weddi (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the economy that affects the climate.
No, it's the combustion of fossil fuels that affect the climate.
There's certainly a fossil fuel industry propaganda claim that that's tied inseparably from the economy, but this place is news for nerds, not news for gullible idiots. We can see that just because only 8.5% of France's power generation is fossil fuels, that doesn't mean that their economy in general is in any way reduced from what it would be if they were from fossil fuel sources, nor that Norway's 1.2% of power generation is fossil fuels is having a huge negative impact on the economy. Power is important to an economy, but not all economic products have energy as the same proportion of their cost, and in the very common case of the power being electrical, that it is generated by nuclear, geothermal or renewables compared fossil fuels, has no negative effect.
If anything, the opposite. It insulated the cost of the power from the machinations of OPEC, providing a more constant cost, improving the accuracy of business planning.
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It's quite underhanded to say treat "the economy" and "fossil fuel industry" as synonyms.
We need energy, it's true, and no matter which industry we choose to take us forward in that endeavor, they're going to externalize some of their costs... but the externalized costs of the fossil fuel industry are fucking existentially impactful.
And that fuckstick is currently sitting at +4.
This site truly is moderated by morons.
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And that fuckstick is currently sitting at +4.
This site truly is moderated by morons.
Wow. So he is. This place is normally better than that.
It's an especially good time to meta-moderate..
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It's an especially good time to meta-moderate..
And meta-moderation has indeed been accomplished.
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And that fuckstick is currently sitting at +4.
This site truly is moderated by morons.
And now he's Score:0 so perhaps not all moderators are morons.
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We were discussing this comment, here [slashdot.org]
Where poster implies that "it's the economy that's destroying the environment", and that "it's the 1% imposing their own governance on their own assets".
This is of course pure-fucking-poppycock.
It's a problem of energy policy and insane externalized cost structures.
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remember your life isn't fair.
Buying a smaller car won't make it more fair. Enjoy your life, however fair or unfair it is. You only get the one.
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I plan to use my capital to buy up some poor fuckers to engage in gladiatorial combat below my balcony. Nothing wrong with that. Just enjoying my life. Only get the one.
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Not my place to judge whatever your fetish.
It is when it hurts other people.
Try and keep it legal.
In the grand scheme of things, laws are quite cheap.
If your idea of right and wrong is legal or illegal, you're a fucking sociopath.
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It is when it hurts other people.
There are actual judges for that. I'll let them do their job and leave living in a permanent state of outrage to others. Chronic anxiety is bad for your health.
laws are quite cheap.
As a taxpayer it does not show.
If your idea of right and wrong is legal or illegal, you're a fucking sociopath.
No, I consider laws more as guidelines. They may or may not be related to morality, which can also get surprisingly gray.
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There are actual judges for that. I'll let them do their job and leave living in a permanent state of outrage to others. Chronic anxiety is bad for your health.
No, there aren't. There are judges for legal and illegal.
Slavery was quite legal. Would you have sanctioned it on that grounds, or fought to abolish it because it was wrong?
As a taxpayer it does not show.
That's because relatively speaking, you're poor.
No, I consider laws more as guidelines. They may or may not be related to morality, which can also get surprisingly gray.
And yet, when I said it is your place to judge when people are being hurt, you said:
There are actual judges for that.
Your moral relativism is fucking repugnant.
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Re: Elites took 90 jets (or yachts) to Bezos' Wedd (Score:2)
Why? Because the environmental impact of those individuals is minuscule compared to us normies en mass. [...]
Thinking about the mega-rich is just yet another way of shifting responsibility. You can't control their behavior [...]
You're wrong, and the reason you're wrong os because you're projecting your own resource consumption mechanism (where 90+% of the environmental cost aassociated with your person goes towards your everyday life) onto the megarich.
But with them, barely 0.000x% count towards their personal consumption habits. The largest part of their energy footprint is the very thing that makes them rich in the first place: 8 mostl wealthy people in the world.have as much as the bottom 50%.
All this wealth had to be generated
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Elites who lecture you about climate change took 90 private jets (or super-yachts) to Jeff Bezos' wedding https://notthebee.com/article/... [notthebee.com]
Look. The mega-rich aren't without blame. Granted. But it's a counter-productive point. Why? Because the environmental impact of those individuals is minuscule compared to us normies en mass. There are 45,000 passenger flights per day handled by the FAA. Statistically, mathematically, factually... those 90 flights don't matter.
Ummm .... actually no. The travel habits of the mega rich may be insignificant but that is also the wrong thing to look at. The mega rich have by far the most environmental impact because it's the mega rich that either rent, or outright buy politicians and then use these mindless puppets to set policies and manipulate markets. It's was the mega rich corporate oligarchs that killed off the attempts to popularise electric cars back in the 1990s. The only reason we have sales of BEVs taking off in a big way n
Re: Elites took 90 jets (or yachts) to Bezos' Wedd (Score:2)
There's a 70% chance you'd be in the ocean.
Re:Elites took 90 jets (or yachts) to Bezos' Weddi (Score:4, Insightful)
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There's the Genetic Fallacy. Global warming isn't false because some Elites that we don't like communicate about it.
There's Ad Hominem, specifically appeal to spite. The argument is entirely against a hated subset of the people making the argument, not the argument itself.
The whole thing is a Non-Sequitur fallacy, althou
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Oprah and Bill Gates own and use private jets?
What should be do about it?
Does that mean that we should not reduce the use of fossil fuels, or that the increasing energy imbalance at the top of the atmosphere is problematic?
But the Koch familiy owns several Cessna Citations, five Learjet 45s and three Bombardier Challenger 300s. [simpleflying.com]. Does that mean that cancel out Oprah's jet, and we should reduce fossil fuels again?
I humbly suggest that perhaps the fact that people with all different abilities
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Elites who lecture you about climate change took 90 private jets (or super-yachts) to Jeff Bezos' wedding/p>
I will explain climate science to you, and I did not take a jet not a yacht to Jeff Bezos' wedding. In fact, I have never been on a private jet.
The greenhouse effect is real. It is based on basic radiation physics that has been known for well over a hundred years. It is the theory by which we understand the temperature of all the planets with atmospheres, not just the Earth, and is well supported by massive amounts of measurements. Many people have worked hard to come up with an alternative theory in whic
Re: Elites took 90 jets (or yachts) to Bezos' Wedd (Score:2)
Re: Elites took 90 jets (or yachts) to Bezos' Wedd (Score:2)
Elites aren't really the problem. Sure, their per capital emissions are much higher, but even if you got rid of all of the emissions from the elites, you wouldn't make a dent.
You want to make a difference, you raze the suburbs and move everyone to the city. The suburbs are the driver of most of our emissions.
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Graph to consider (Score:2)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
So the question is how hot does it have to get to move Earth's radiating wavelength to 13 microns, off the CO2 peak.
Is there a physicist in the house?
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The long term carbon measurement has been proxied, has the long term cloud population and transparency. My bet is more temp, higher c
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Wien's Displacement Law is:
T = (peak)/ 5.879 x 10^10 K
Raise your hand if you're surprised (Score:5, Insightful)
Between all the permafrost melting across Russia to methane to massive fossil fuel use, how can anybody be surprised? I have long viewed the worst possibilities as the most likely. The most likely predictions always seemed pretty damn optimistic. We fucked.
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Between all the permafrost melting across Russia to methane to massive fossil fuel use, how can anybody be surprised?
I recommend this NOVA episode Arctic Sinkholes [youtube.com] (full episode) from Feb 2022, described in the articles below.
In the Arctic, enormous releases of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, threaten the climate.
Colossal explosions shake a remote corner of the Siberian tundra, leaving behind massive sinkholes. In Alaska, a huge lake erupts with bubbles of inflammable gas. Scientists are discovering that these mystifying phenomena add up to a ticking time bomb, as long-frozen permafrost melts and releases vast amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. What are the implications of these dramatic developments in the Arctic? Scientists and local communities alike are struggling to grasp the scale of the methane threat and what it means for our climate future.
- Methane craters documentary highlights rapid Arctic warming [woodwellclimate.org]
- Nova episode explores Arctic methane explosions [uaf.edu]
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No need to depress myself. As I said, we fucked. Even scientists can grasp this.
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Melting ice is a national security issue now. It's opening up routes for Russian ships that were previously closed for most of the year, or entirely.
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Being you were stupid enough to write what you did, I'll just tell you: It won't.
They didn't say what kind of power they wanted to replace fossil fuels- they merely stated that they needed to be replaced. Supplementing them with nuclear power doesn't reduce carbon one iota. They must be replaced, precisely as they said.
I look forward to you dying of old age. You and morons
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You build a Mr. Fusion nuclear reactor and use it to power your DeLorean time machine with which you go back in time several decades and get a whole planet's worth of nuclear reactors started in time to contribute to solving today's global warming problems.
Orrr you could build lots of renewable power today which is cheaper and way faster and doesn't require a time machine, but may cause damage to conservative feefees.
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Orrr you could build lots of renewable power today which is cheaper and way faster and doesn't require a time machine, but may cause damage to conservative feefees.
This seems to be the solution that China is taking, whereas the USA is reversing all the progress they were making along this path. I see it in my own state where the newly elected conservative government has decided that wind farms need to be cancelled but many other non-renewables projects can skip environmental regulations entirely.
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If there was a solution that didn't threaten the interests of the fossil fuel industries, then we would have done it. Nuclear power is certainly something we can do, but nuclear power alone will not save us. If the entire world went all in on nuclear power the same time France did, that certainly would have helped. But there's still steel, concrete, planes, cars, natural gas, and a shitload of other greenhouse gas producers.
Human history is full of examples of civilizations that collapsed because they faile
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All of our Homo cousins- gone.
We alone dodged all the bullets. Collapse human civilization, render cereal crops extinct outside of the poles, and there's a very solid chance that humanity doesn't dodge all the bullets in its reduced form.
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If we were that advanced we would be doing it.
You aren't until you are.
Geoengineering and "high-tech approaches" fucking suck, but we're frankly out of options.
The boffins will have to save us from the capitalists, yet again.
Maybe after, if there is an after, we'll learn to fucking clamp down on the pieces of shit who keep using this planet as their industrial fucking waste dump. And yes- emitted CO2 is industrial waste. Pumped directly into the goddamn atmosphere.
Even if we stopped today, nobody has any fucking real idea how the hell the carbon
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geoengineering and other high-tech approaches. But none of those are satisfying for the people who want to control how you run your life.
Of all the things an elite group of people could do to control everyone else's lives, geoengineering schemes have to rank up there at the very top.
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They posit one set of solutions, which happens to be the favorite of the woke anti-growth "environmentalist" crowd, but there's also nuclear energy and geoengineering and other high-tech approaches.
This is 180 wrong. Even without "environmentalism", reducing fossil fuels is many times cheaper for the global economy than paying for adaptation to the changing climate that results [lse.ac.uk]. Where "many" is about 7.
It is also incautiously framed if you are genuinely interested in presenting a point of view that you take seriously, and hope that others will take seriously. Environmentalism isn't anti-growth. And transitioning to other energy sources than fossil fuels isn't "controlling your life".
In particular,
Collapse is coming sooner then (Score:4, Insightful)
Implications of the New Reality
Doubling of heating speed shortens response windows, fuels feedback loops, and spikes instability.
Collapse trajectory is now steeper; best-case scenarios require immediate, unprecedented global action.
Timeframes are collapsing: impacts once expected in the late 2030s-2040s are now unfolding today.
Feedback loops (cloud cover loss, methane, permafrost) are likely to compound rapidly.
Policy inertia is now active harm, as the climate system accelerates beyond our response capacity.
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The optimists-at-any-cost are nearly as complicit as the deniers.
It's been pretty fucking clear for a long time that we weren't on the middle-of-the-road projections.
Re: Collapse is coming sooner then (Score:2)
Oh yes they will. The will shut down the time honored policy of over-producing food and giving away the surplus through SNAP, through a Big Beautiful Bill, so the starvation can hit harder!
Re:We know the solution. (Score:5, Insightful)
If nuclear power could help then why couldn't renewable? They both produce electricity which faces similar challenges for fueling vehicles and producing fertilizer. Nuclear is more expensive than renewable and far, far slower to build. If waiting for a solution is dangerous, then nuclear power is the most dangerous of potential solutions. Reactor build time is measured in decades. We should start building reactors now for areas that don't have the geography for renewables, but they'll only be possible to complete in time to put the finishing touches on a mostly-renewable solution.
The reason fossil fuel use isn't in rapid decline in favor of renewables is mostly that existing fossil power is cheaper than new renewables. It's the same problem for an ICE-powered vehicle you already own vs. a new EV, or an existing LNG plant vs. a new wind farm.
A big part of the problem is economic, this won't be cheap to fix and we have an economy where an ever-increasing share of humanity's productive output goes toward pointlessly filling up the Scrooge McDuck vaults of the ownership class, and when they do spend a decent chunk of their wealth it's on stupid shit that often makes the problem worse. Instead of having a middle class that can afford new EVs and renewable energy we have billionaires with full-scale rocketry hobbies and ruined social media sites accelerating the spread of pro-fossil-fuel fascism.
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If nuclear power could help then why couldn't renewable?
Because renewable energy is intermittent and dilute, while nuclear fission is not.
They both produce electricity which faces similar challenges for fueling vehicles and producing fertilizer.
Nuclear fission does not produce electricity, it produces steam. Steam that is at a high temperature and/or high pressure, steam that is very useful and efficient at producing fuels, fertilizers, and also electricity.
The reason we aren't using nuclear power for anything than electricity right now, excepting maybe water desalination, is new nuclear power plant construction came to a crawl in the 1980s and fossil fuels are stil
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Because renewable energy is intermittent and dilute, while nuclear fission is not.
Renewables use storage now, so a solar plant still puts out energy in the dead of night. You should look into it.
Nuclear fission does not produce electricity, it produces steam. Steam that is at a high temperature and/or high pressure, steam that is very useful and efficient at producing fuels, fertilizers, and also electricity.
Synthetic fuels won't work as a mainstream solution, they're incredibly energy-intensive to produce and then they go into engines that turn most of the energy the fuel holds straight into waste heat anyway. So having an advantage for synthetic fuel production isn't much of a positive.
First, the average build time for a civil nuclear power plant is under eight years.
That's just an average of construction time over roughly the entire history of nuclear power, which doesn't accoun
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Renewables use storage now, so a solar plant still puts out energy in the dead of night. You should look into it.
How much does that storage cost?
If you want to make an honest comparison between renewable energy options and nuclear fission then the costs of storage needs to be added in. Nuclear fission will need storage too, and for reasons of matching supply to demand like renewable options, but nuclear fission can use low cost thermal energy storage without the conversion loses that comes with doing the same with renewable energy. Further, there's an inherent long term energy storage system to nuclear fission in th
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How much does that storage cost?
Not enough to affect overall costs signficantly.
Why should I believe you over subject matter experts that say otherwise? I hear the same outdated bullshit all the time on why synthesized fuels will not work in the future. Maybe you should look into how the technology has developed in the last decade or two.
I remember seeing a study that came out around the pandemic that found that at that time, replacing all fossil fuels with synthetic e-fuels would require world grid electricity production to be tripled to quadroupled, in which scenario at least 1/3rd of this theoretical world's grid power, more than the entire output of the real world's electrical grid at the time, would end up being turned into waste heat through combustion engines (vs EV powertrains which ar
Re: We know the solution. (Score:2)
Re: We know the solution. (Score:2)
it's a rare rejection and for a valid reason. You can't use NRC rejections as an argument for low nuclear build out rate because it rarely happens.
Re: We know the solution. (Score:2)
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Not enough to affect overall costs signficantly.
Citation needed.
I remember seeing a study that came out around the pandemic that found that at that time, replacing all fossil fuels with synthetic e-fuels would require world grid electricity production to be tripled to quadroupled, in which scenario at least 1/3rd of this theoretical world's grid power, more than the entire output of the real world's electrical grid at the time, would end up being turned into waste heat through combustion engines (vs EV powertrains which are well over 90% efficient). How much have things improved since then?
The term "e-fuels" are fuels produced from electricity. I'm not talking about e-fuels. I'm talking about synthesized hydrocarbons. With nuclear fission there's an abundance of cheap steam to short circuit a lot of loss of energy due to conversions. The focus on e-fuels follows from the focus on solar and wind, because it is not easy to get cheap steam from electricity that means consuming a lot of energy with less to show for it in the end. It's not that the technology improved all that
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It's not that simple though, isn't that obvious? If it were so simple as putting an end to fossil fuel use then we'd have done that already.
But it really is that simple. We've known about this for decades. The most developed countries during that time had some form of representative government, and we did what people often do when they receive a horrible diagnosis. We pretended it wasn't happening.
We could have shifted to more renewable forms of energy. We could have stopped all rural and suburban development and lived in cities that used public transportation as the primary means of getting around. We could have made a strong push for urban ga
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We could have shifted to more renewable forms of energy.
I believe Germany gave that an honest effort. Ask them how well that's been working out so far.
We have at least one good example in France on a nation that has maintained a high standard of living while keeping CO2 emissions low. They did that with nuclear fission. France did have a plan to phase out nuclear fission, following Germany's lead on moving to renewable energy, but that didn't survive Russia cutting back on natural gas supplies to Europe. It appears that now it is Germany following France no
Re: We know the solution. (Score:2)
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But then there's China and Asia, and now we're finding that the effects of GHG are worse than we thought.
Models Wrong but Actually Right (Score:2, Informative)
> the sophisticated climate models we use largely didn't predict such a large and rapid change
Our models failed but we know what the outcome will be based on our models. :shakes head in complexity theory:
Anybody else old enough to remember the scares about global warming snapping the ocean currents into a new ice age?
Those models may have been the right ones. And nobody is including the accelerating pole shift.
I am surprised the Europeans aren't hedging that one hard. +4 in Britain is nice; -15 is total
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Anybody else old enough to remember the scares about global warming snapping the ocean currents into a new ice age?
Vladivostok, Russia is slightly south of Oza, Spain. In January, the mean daily maximum temperature is 10C in Oza, but -8C in Vladivostok. The difference is about half due to the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC).
So the collapse of the AMOC, would cool Europe and the UK by something like 10C, and correspondingly increase the heating of tropical West Atlantic. It is still considered an approaching tipping point. Physics-based early warning signal shows that AMOC is on tipping course [science.org]
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It's pretty simple. Know what the difference between London and Moose River, CA? Other than the fact that Moose River is further south, and has Polar Bears, and rivers that are frozen for 4 months of the year? AMOC.
People don't realize just how far north most of the "Western World" is.
Without the AMOC, the Vikings would have been able to walk to Newfoundland.
That shit is scary.
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You're making the mistake of thinking of it as one model. There are multiple different models involved in a climate simulation. Here we have the situation that when a bunch of mostly correct models run end-to-end, the final radiated heat is less than expected due to a cloud component of the simulation not working correctly - doesn't mean the whole set of models is wrong.
The ocean models that you then comment about seem to be accurate and we do have some evidence that the circulation in the Atlantic is weake
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> the sophisticated climate models we use largely didn't predict such a large and rapid change
Our models failed but we know what the outcome will be based on our models. :shakes head in complexity theory:
Models fail to be 100% accurate all the time. You then revise them. It's called sci-ence. Maybe you have heard of it? Probably not...
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I'll bet (Score:2)
It's more of less and less areosols that's making the difference and the models not accounting for that, more countries are scrubbing soot and SO2 out which makes the climate hotter because areosols in the upper atmosphere have a cooling effect
Re: I'll bet (Score:2)
As good a bet as any, theyâ(TM)ve observed it in a localized way in shipping lanes. What I do not understand is why the higher ocean temps are not increasing evaporation rates and cloud cover.
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Sounds like ... (Score:2, Troll)
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... the climate model forecasts are garbage.
No, they're accurate. Even 50-year-old climate models correctly predicted global warming [science.org].
Remind me again why we should pay attention to them if they are wrong?
Leaving aside that they're right. The reason you should pay attention to them is that they can be used to uncover the mechanisms at play, and therefore the have insight into the impacts of various actions or inactions.
Re: Sounds like ... (Score:2)
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The models said, "Do something, for Christ's sake!"
The climate said, "DO SOMETHING, FOR CHRIST'S SAKE!"
And your answer to the difference in intensity is to discard the prediction? Fuck off.
The important part is the need to act. And both the models and the climate are fully aligned.
The evaporation rises exponentially with temp (Score:2)
This according to Grok and common sense science, all base science point to a linear or gently exponential relationship of cloud cover to ocean temps. The anomaly is that this is not happening. The hope is that somewhere whatever that is will go away, and we will all be living in Seattle until we get the CO2 under control.
And yet... (Score:2)
...the US congress is openly exacerbating the situation as we speak because they fear retribution if they utter the slightest reservation.
Methane Clathrate gun hypothesis (Score:2)
If only half of it is true [wikipedia.org], we are soooo screwed.
Re: Yet another /. climate cultists article (Score:2)
Re: Fake data (Score:4, Informative)
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Meanwhile, the solution instead is to do research that comes up with better alternatives like generating cleaner energy or using it more efficiently.
That's being done. It doesn't preclude work on the climate.
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Meanwhile, the solution instead is to do research that comes up with better alternatives like generating cleaner energy or using it more efficiently.
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Way to bury my response behind one mis-placed char, /.
The *actual* solution is to take our foot off the population pedal... .50yrs ago. The fact that it is now to late and would ellicit epic levels of SCREEEEE from the farkwit population does not make it wrong.