jordanlund Mod ,
@jordanlund@lemmy.world avatar

"The latest heatwave has seen temperatures in New Delhi match the capital’s previous record high: 49.2 deg C clocked in 2022."

120°F! Fuck me! That's like walking around in a latte!

SuddenDownpour ,

If there's a silver lining to this, is that the people of one of the most populous countries in Earth are going to become far more likely to support policies against climate change.

Naich ,
@Naich@lemmings.world avatar

I wouldn't bet on it. They have just re-elected Modi, whose record is pretty sketchy.

tfowinder ,
@tfowinder@lemmy.ml avatar

Most of their population is living hand to mouth.

I don't think they care slightest about climate change.

theacharnian ,

There is no consensus on the actual size of India’s middle class. Using the classification of those spending between US$2–10 per capita per day, over 600 million people — half of India’s population — were in the middle class in 2012, up from less than 300 million or 27 per cent of the population in 2000. Nearly 75 per cent of the middle class is comprised of the lower middle class — those spending US$2–4 per capita per day, a figure that’s only slightly above the global poverty line.

If using a higher income band — where a person is considered middle class if their daily income is approximately US$17–100 — 432 million Indians can be included in the middle class as of 2021, comprising 31 per cent of the population, up from 14 per cent in 2005.

Source

These are people who are able to care about more than subsistence. Not "middle class" in a western sense, but secure enough in their own community to be able to push their politicians to do something about them not dying of heatwaves.

Lost_My_Mind ,

Now, I do believe in climate change. I just believe that the earth will dictate its own tempatures more than anything we do. The earth used to be 150F in the area currently known as Alaska in the time of the dinosaurs. Then we had 2 ice ages. The area currently known as Florida was at one time -200F.

And a lot of that ice still stuck around. It's melting, as thats what ice does. We may have sped up the ice melting, and the ice may have been what was keeping the planet artificially cold, but I think earths natural tempature was ALWAYS hotter than anything humans experienced.

I think even without humans melting the ice caps, the ice caps would have still melted. It would have just taken longer.

But, if I'm wrong, than India, the most densely populated country on the planet by far, reaching record high tempatures would be pretty good proof that humans ARE behind climate change.

yeahiknow3 , (edited )

What is this, mumble rap for science deniers? Just riffing this bullshit on the fly. Florida was -200F. Exactly, the closer you get to the equator, the colder it gets.

Lost_My_Mind ,

-200F in the ice age WAS the warm spot. The polar caps were closer to -500F. The whole planet was an ice planet. It's not like Florida was -200F, but Ohio was 73F.

yeahiknow3 ,

So true. And before that don’t forget that Earth didn’t even exist, because it was just a clump of dust.

Lost_My_Mind ,

No......it was extremely hot before the ice age. Do you seriously think the dinosaurs were just hanging out in 70 degree weather?

Look at insects, as oxygen levels decreased they became smaller. Even alligators used to be like 150 feet.....now they're closer to 18-30 feet depending on type.

The living creatures of that era were all bigger. It was more humid. There was more oxygen in the air. And then astroids hit, and basically were world ending events. Happened twice, hundreds of millions of years apart.

And you think that YOU can kill a planet? No. This planet decides if it ALLOWS you to live. And humans are awful pests. Honestly surprised the 2 nukes in WWII didn't trigger a 3rd ice age.

But until the 3rd ice age, it's just always going to get hotter. Humans or not.

PahassaPaikassa ,

Honestly surprised the 2 nukes in WWII didn't trigger a 3rd ice age.

Why are you surprised? How do you think the nukes would have triggered a ice age?

Lost_My_Mind ,

Same way the astroids did. Big boom, big ripple effect around the globe, and the force pushes the earth slightly out of orbit.

Apperently nukes aren't powerful enought to do what astroids did. I thought they would.

PahassaPaikassa ,

Just checked from wikipedia, the yucatan impact was "The kinetic energy of the impact was estimated at 72 teratonnes of TNT (300 ZJ)." The Little Boy dropped on hiroshima was 15 kilotons of TNT. To say theres a vast difference is a understatement of the century.

You either have wrong understanding or no understanding of physics.

cyberpunk007 ,

What is this imperial temperature crap? 🤣

yeahiknow3 , (edited )

That’s how they do science in the real world, not your fancy-schmancy ivory tower. /s

SuddenDownpour , (edited )

Science in the real world is done with Kelvin.

Edit: Oh shit, you aren't @LostMyMind. Sorry about that.

Ravenson ,

-500F is about 40 degrees F colder than absolute zero. It has never been that cold anywhere in the universe. -200F is certainly more "actually possible in our current understanding of physics", but it's over 100 degrees colder than the current Martian temperature and thus also not a temperature it's ever been on Earth, even at the heart of the coldest Ice Age directly on the poles. While Earth's average temperature has certainly fluctuated, the temperatures you're talking about are so cold that all life on Earth would have gone extinct.

borari ,
@borari@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

https://xkcd.com/1732/

Stfu with your nonsense.

Jax ,

Yeaaah...

I'm gonna go ahead and say you should keep your thoughts to yourself.

SlopppyEngineer ,

It would have just taken longer.

You could say that. The earth in general changes temperature one degrees in a few millennium if it's in a hurry. Humanity is causing changes of a degree in a decade. It's unnaturally fast.

Lost_My_Mind ,

I think that math is way off. We didn't have all these polluting machines in the 1800s, yet the 1800s were warmer than the 1700s. We didn't start using cars until the early 1900s. Same with planes, and it wouldn't be until the 1930s that we got jet engines that pollute in the way you think of today.

SlopppyEngineer ,

And temperature changes in 1700 and 1800 were much slower. Coincidence? I think not.

Number of cars versus temperature

Redredme ,

Just watch that xkcd graphic my dude. Somebody else already linked it. It makes the issue very clear and is quite scientifically based.

Yes, everything you said is factually true.
That doesn't mean your interpreting it all correctly. We not just accelerated it, we where strolling along the path of planetary heating and then decided to step aboard the Starship Enterprise and screamed: "MR SULU WARP FACTOR NINE, STAT!"

We're fucking with systems (planetary weather patterns) we can't comprehend. And to solve it we again fuck with that system but now not by adding energy (heat) but by removing energy from it (wind, radiation)

I think both will have issues. But for now removing lots and lots of energy from the system will greatly benefit us.

In the end it will always come down to population control or going interplanetary as a species.

More people on this planet, in this system will always mean more heat. Remove the excess from the system and it will find its equilibrium again.

But.. Removing the excess sounds nice but isn't. Especially when you are deemed to be the excessive one.

You want to know where global warming can lead to? Look no further then Venus.

Lost_My_Mind ,

The comic was over 22,000 years, and the tempature got cooler over time. Which right off the bat isn't true.

But also, I'm talking about over billions if not trillions of years.

BestBouclettes ,

Earth warms up and cools down naturally that's a known fact. But over thousands of years, not 200. What we're witnessing right now is not natural and we have the data to support it.

SuddenDownpour ,

Furthermore: we shouldn't care too much about the speed at which Earth heats or cools down on its own. If we know we're a significant factor alongside its natural processes, we should still contribute to the NET temperature being one that's appropriate for human life. If the Earth was heating up this fast naturally, we should still try to cool it down by artificial means, if possible.

Ranvier , (edited )

Millions even, we haven't been this warm in millions of years! And same for our co2 concentrations. All done in the blink of an eye geologically speaking. We've reversed a natural Co2 trend in only 0.004% of the time!

The commenter above you and anyone in doubt desperately needs to see these graphs:

https://earth.org/data_visualization/a-brief-history-of-co2/

If we follow projections and do nothing to change our behavior we'll get to levels and temperatures not seen in hundreds of millions of years, all bascially instantly when compared to the the ability of life to evolve and adapt. Earth will survive, it's been through worse. Gonna be rough on the humans though. We were 10c temperature above where we were then, but it would be even worse now of we got back to those co2 levels, becaue of differences in orbit and solar activity.

cyd , (edited )

Yes, the world was a lot hotter in the distant past, but that's because the carbon in the biosphere was gradually sequestered by natural geologic processes, leading to a gradual cooling over hundreds of millions of years. We're now partially undoing that, by pumping and digging the stuff back up and burning it.

If fossil fuels hadn't come along, it's possible that the long-term cooling of the Earth would have been a problem, eventually. Nobody wants another Ice Age. But we've gone waaaay past in the opposite direction now. We really, really don't want to see an "age of the dinosaurs" climate, with its pole-to-pole super-hurricanes, continent sized mega droughts, and other forms of extreme weather that human civilization has zero experience coping with.

WhatAmLemmy ,

Username checks out

apocalypticat ,
@apocalypticat@lemmy.world avatar

This user has 600 comments in their one month since joining. That's 20 comments per day. Maybe they should try to spend less time commenting falsehoods, and more time reading?

Lost_My_Mind ,

"Lemmy needs to grow!"

"Hey everybody, check out this loser who actually is active, and posts more activity in a day, than I do in a month.......he should go away, so lemmy can remain small and unheard of!"

Seriously? THATS your attack??? If anything 20 messages per day sounds really low. These messages take like 20 seconds to write, and boost activity and engagement on an almost completely dead platform.

But then I see posts elsewhere on Lemmy "what have you done to boost niche communities?"

Uhhhhh.......have you guys tried POSTING AND COMMENTING???

I know its a crazy idea, but it just might work! I look forward to seeing your reply......in like 4 days after I've long forgotten about any of this.

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