Wait a second? So if GOP members say stuff like this, what happens if some unruly ICC people decide to go after GOP and their family? These people sure know how to create a safe world…
They will do anything and everything to escalate tensions in that part of the world. They believe that if they can hasten Armageddon in the Middle East it will force Jesus to come back sooner. It's a bullshit lasagna plan (layer upon layer of utter shite). But it's what these lunatics believe.
This right here. Not enough people realize how bonkers these religious nut jobs really are, or that this is the real reason the US is so invested in Israel.
Seriously, can we push back rules separating state and church? You can't work for the government if you believe in Santa claus, sorry. Same goes for Allah, god, Jehova, shiva, or any other of the make belief friends.
Yeah I think the implication now that they will try and murder them. Thinly veiled threats
The US apparently already put a law in place that if a US soldier is ever tried by the ICC that they would invade the Netherlands and liberate him by force.
We want to be able to commit war crimes and behave like absolute monsters, and we want the same for our friends.
"I think we are headed for major societal disruption within the next five years," Gretta Pecl of the University of Tasmania told The Guardian. "[Authorities] will be overwhelmed by extreme event after extreme event, food production will be disrupted. I could not feel greater despair over the future."
But, reason to keep fighting:
Others found hope in the climate activism and awareness of younger generations, and in the finding that each extra tenth of a degree of warming avoided protects 140 million people from extreme temperatures.
I'm in no way a climate change denier and I too believe that the current path leads us there. However, isn't it normal for 80% of climate scientist actively researching this to think this way? Would they not spend their efforts somewhere else if they would think this isn't happening?
A survey among mathematicians showed that 80% consider that mathematics has the answer they're looking for.
We need to discuss hard data and proper research, not surveys.
Apparently those brainiacs with their fancy book learnin' and expertise are useless. We must all sift through hundreds of thousands of pages of raw data before reaching any conclusions. The entire concept of career specialization is wrong! Throw it out!
Yeah, I used to run into you in r/skeptic a lot, fighting the good fight lol. And we both know the mods of that sub let it be overrun with all types of deniers and insane conspiracy theorists... But at least those trolls put a little more effort into it than just scoffing at experts.
That's not what I said at all, is it? I'm simply pointing out that we're reacting to a poorly written article which plays on our emotional side instead of discussing the actual facts. Yes, scientists doing research in an area believe that their research is going to confirm their hypothesis. That's how research works. In this case, I'm surprised it's not 100% to be honest.
The whole premise of the article is stupid. Not global warming, not the fact that we're heading towards more than 2.5C global warming by 2100, not the people answering the questions. What's stupid is the idea of "conducting an opinion poll" in that specific group.
If someone could convincingly scientifically back up their belief that climate change isn't going to be a big deal, they'd be swimming in oil company money to promote their work. There's definitely an incentive to research it if you think the other way.
If they're not the ones to give us that data, who would? Polling experts in the field is different from asking fisherman if they think we should eat fish
What data though? This article doesn't contain data - that's my issue. You're right, it's not asking fishermen if they think we should eat fish. It's asking nutritionists if they like fish.
I can see some climate scientists just saying that 2.5C won't be as dire as others predict without being stupid or paid off. There are often contrarians and sometimes (not often, but sometimes) they can be right, so it's healthy to have them even when there is broad consensus. It's how we came to accept ideas like plate tectonics.
So sure, maybe some of them are paid off (I doubt any of them are stupid since they have scientific degrees), but maybe some of them just disagree about the predictions for whatever semi-legitimate or maybe even legitimate reason and that's fine. It's worth exploring why just in case they could be right. The thing is, they're scientists who are dissenting, not just some random guy on Facebook, which is why it's worth exploring them.
We keep doing it because we have to do it, so [the powerful] cannot say that they didn't know," Ruth Cerezo-Mota, who works on climate modeling at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, told The Guardian. "We know what we're talking about. They can say they don't care, but they can't say they didn't know.
It seems to me that we are at such a stage that no matter what we do, there is no turning back. We are doomed, lucky not likely in my lifetime.
Maybe im too optimistic, but i think its more current society as a whole is doomed, but humanity will probably survive and maybe even recover, hopefully smarter and less profit driven.
And even if we don't make it, at least the Earth will survive, and maybe the next civilization wont be so greedy.
The Global South? Those people aren't going to lay down and die. They're gonna climb North, as they should. And then we're gonna have to decide whether to shoot people approaching the borders or accept a huge population influx. Given our political reality, I think there's a good chance we try the first option at first.
Yup. Sadly the truth. And then probably cry about all these migrants bothering them "for no reason", and that it's hard to find a good reef to dive in on vacation.
Right wing parties are already massively strengthening Frontex. They're fully aware what will happen, but still not willing to kill our emissions.
"Some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I am willing to make."
Bit of a misdirect in the headline. This was not primarily a scientific projection. This was a political reckoning by scientists who had recently suffered the bureaucratic pain of serving on the IPCC, and voluntarily responded to a survey.
As one climate scientist put it:
"As many of the scientists pointed out, the uncertainty in future temperature change is not a physical science question: It is a question of the decisions people choose to make," Texas Tech University climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe wrote on social media. "We are not experts in that; And we have little reason to feel positive about those, since we have been warning of the risks for decades."
Change never comes from politicians first, but these are people who are zoomed in on whether politicians are changing their minds.
They're not going to change their minds slowly over time. It's gonna be nothing at all until the electorate is too loud to ignore, and then suddenly 100% of officials will claim they've "always condemned fossil fuels", "from day one", and "in the strongest terms possible".
We've seen time and again that policy changes tend to bubble just below the surface for long time and then suddenly emerge with multiple changes happening in quick succession.
I was of voting age when just saying the word "civil union" in the context of gay rights was political suicide, and I'm not that old. Things can change quickly. Keep your hope alive and keep agitating. We can do this.
Fun fact: a lot of mining companies have been incorporating climate change projections into their closure plans for years now, using RCP2.6, RCP4.5, and RCP8.5 scenarios. Hey, we are using a thermal cover to make sure this gargantuan pile of mine waste rock doesn't cause metal leaching/acid rock drainage issues later on: we'd better over-engineer it to take on higher-than expected warming, given that we'll be liable for it for the next 100+ years
There is no ceiling. It might go up 6 or 7C. The people who have the power to change things do not give a shit if the rest of us die. They don't care, and they won't change anything. That's the world we live in.
They (selfishly) believe that allowing the problem to flourish is what will get us to solve it.
They're not wrong. There's just way better, more humane approaches.
So you're mostly right. Because they know they have the wealth to weather the discomfort in comfort. But it is accurate that humans historically are fucking aces at reacting and kinda piss poor at proacting.
Finally some good news on the climate. Our ability to fuck the Earth will mostly go away when our civilization collapses. We might even get a second Genghis Khan cooling when everyone dies.
There isn't one definitive paper I can give. They're are of course also papers claiming the opposite.
I've seen multiple articles about this. Less yield from staple crops, productivity loss with heatwaves, storm damage. There are a bunch of papers too, usually about a specific region. But roughly above 2°C, the hurt really begins with the cost to the economy exceeding almost every country's growth. Exact numbers differ per article.
Too bad, I'll have to hunt around myself. Simulation is always a bit vulnerable to assumptions when human behavior is involved, but it's definitely worth trying to model things.
If that's true, the political landscape is going to become starkly different. We expect growth right now; it's used as the yardstick of economic success. Obviously past civilisations didn't, and we could go back, even peacefully for all I know, but it would be uncharted territory post-industrialisation.
I kind of suspect climate adaptation produces more CO2 than other forms of activity, because it would be construction heavy. I wonder if that's factored it. Actually, I wonder what the adaptation assumptions are in general.
There is a problem of lag. By the time temperatures are high enough to force the economy to stop, the amount of CO2 will be sufficient to continue pushing the temperature up considerably.
The problem is that feedback loops start to kick in above 2°C so it doesn't matter if the economy crashes.
In fact, in some cases that makes things even worse. One example is that without smokestacks and ships pumping out sulfur dioxide the albedo of the atmosphere will rapidly drop, which might cause immediate and rapid warming over a period of only a few years.
We could be pushed past 2.5°C or even 3°C without industrial forces contributing at all.
Yes and no. Renewables are now cheaper than other forms of energy but cost isn’t the only issue.
There are practical limits on how many renewables projects we can build and integrate at a time. We’re not even remotely close to building them fast enough to save anything. We can’t even build them fast enough to keep up with the ever increasing demand energy.
Nuclear is expensive as fuck but we need to be building more of it as well as renewables because we can’t build enough renewables fast enough to avert the catastrophe, and that’s about the only other tech we have that can generate energy in the massive quantities needed without significant greenhouse gas emissions.
I don't think that's quite true. Where I live it has expanded from nothing to a major power source in just a few years. We'll need grid storage of some kind to kick fossil fuels completely, but that seems surmountable. Worst case scenario we build pumped air and just eat some round trip losses.
Nuclear plants take many years to get off the ground, so I'm not sure that's actually an easier solution. Once they're up and running at scale they're actually really cheap per unit production, so I would have agreed with you a decade ago, but as it is solar and wind have just pulled ahead.
Don’t take my word for it. Look up the numbers for yourself and do the math.
Search for “National GHG inventory {your country}”.
You find a report listing (among a bunch of other things) the amount of electricity generated each year by each method, and the emissions from each. Look up the total TWh of electricity produced by fossil fuels.
Then look at the total TWh from renewables, and rate it has been growing Y-o-Y and extrapolate until it reaches the number needed to eliminate fossil fuels.
You’ll find it will take decades to build enough renewable capacity to replace fossil fuel based electricity generation.
And that’s before you realize that only about 25% of fossil fuel combustion goes to electricity generation. As we start switching cars, homes, industries to electric we’re going to need 2x-3x more electricity generation.
Yes it takes a long time to bring on a new nuclear plant, roughly 7-9 years. If it was remotely realistic that we could build enough renewable power generation in that time to replace all fossil fuel generation then I’d agree we don’t need nuclear. But we’re not anywhere close to that.
It’s also helpful to note too just how much power a nuclear reactor generates. I live in Canada, our second smallest nuclear power plant in Pickering, generates almost 5 times more electricity annually than all of Canada’s solar farms combined. It will take 1000s or solar and wind farms covering and area larger than all of our major cities combined to replace fossil fuels…
…or about 7 nuclear power stations the same size as Pickering.
Then look at the total TWh from renewables, and rate it has been growing Y-o-Y and extrapolate until it reaches the number needed to eliminate fossil fuels.
You’ll find it will take decades to build enough renewable capacity to replace fossil fuel based electricity generation.
I get ~2 decades when I extrapolate these numbers (from 2010-2023) to get to 2022 total primary energy usage for solar alone.
Energy usage will grow as well, and keeping that growth is ambitious, but it the future doesn't look that bleak too me if you look at it that way.
Did you use linear extrapolation, or something else? Because it's an actual paradigm shift happening now, I'd guess some kind of exponential or subexponential curve would be best. That would bring it even faster.
Extrapolation is tricky, and actually kind of weak, although I think it's appropriate here. This XKCD explains it really well, and I end up linking it all the damn time.
Exponential, it fits the curve very nicely. I can give you the python code if you want to. I got 2 decades for all energy usage, not only electricity, which is only one sixth of that.
I just took the numbers for the whole world, that's easier to find and in the end the only thing that matters.
The next few years are going to be interesting in my opinion. If we can make efuels cheaper than fossil fuels (look up Prometheus Fuels and Terraform Industries), we're going to jump even harder on solar and if production can keep up it will even grow faster.
E-fuels are a big deal, particularly for aviation. Non-electricity emissions are also something to watch. Hydrogen as a reducing agent seems like it can work very well as long as we do phase out fossil fuels like promised, so that solves steel production and similar. Calcination CO2 from concrete kilns is a very sticky wicket apparently, since they're extremely hot, heavy, and also need to rotate, which is challenging to combine with a good seal.
Cheap grid storage is a trillion-dollar question, but I suspect even if new technology doesn't materialise, pumped air with some losses can do the trick, again subject to proper phase-out of dirty power sources.
Alright, I can't seem to find useful numbers anywhere. We went from 50% coal to nil in just a few years, though, so big changes fast are possible. If you're in Ontario, you also have to consider your local renewables penetration was really high to start with, because of those waterfalls.
And yeah, like I said to the other person, exact growth pattern matters. It's probably exponential-ish right now, not linear, because it's just unambiguously cheaper to move to renewables, and so just getting ducks in order to do it is the bottleneck.
I respect you for doing your own research. People need to understand the scope of the problem if there’s going to be meaningful action.
The reason I’m passionate about nuclear in particular is that only about a quarter of all fossil fuel consumption is from electricity generation.
Most of the rest is burned in transportation, buildings, commercial and residential applications. We have the tech already to switch most of these things to electricity, and eliminate their direct emissions, but that’s not much of a win if we’re burning fossil fuels generate that electricity. Which is what happens today when electricity demand is increased, we can’t just turn up the output of a solar/wind farm in periods of high demand, but we can burn more natural gas.
Switching to electric everything (Car, trucks, ships, heat pumps, furnaces, etc) will increase electricity demand by 2-3x.
Even if renewables growth is held to the exponential-ish curve it’s been so far (doubtful) we still need 15+ years just to get to the point of replacing current global fossil fuel electricity production in the most optimistic case, never mind enough to handle 2-3x demand.
Massive quantities of new carbon free electricity generation is needed to “unlock” the electrification technologies we need to deploy if we going to avoid the worst of the disaster. If we wait until renewables alone get us there it’ll be too late.
The more carbon free energy we can build in the next 20-30 years, the more options we have. Even if we can reach a place of excess capacity, there are a lot of things like DAC and CCS, that we could use it for that today result in more emissions from electricity generation than they sequester.
I don't mean to diminish your point about the utility of nuclear, but (a) it's subject to the same ramping up/scaling issues as anything else*, and (b) you'd be surprised how quickly we could ramp up manufacturing of renewables if The Powers That Be actually wanted to.
(* Or worse: in particular, the absolute debacle that was Plant Vogtle 3 and 4 -- delivered years late and billions overbudget, while bankrupting Westinghouse in the process -- shows that we definitely did not maintain our nuclear expertise over the past several decades of building exactly fuck-all new plants.)
Same. England for me, but I think it’ll bother the people in power who abhor people migrating and also deny climate change or at the least taking adequate action to mitigate the effects / affects (which is it).
uh no florida has already made the next play, and it was to repeal all protections for outdoor workers against the elements
in other words the next move is literally "Fuck you, die", apparently, so, good to know we're past the bullshit and can get on with actually solving the problem properly.
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