Climate Change | UN Report: Code Red for humanity

Gehrman said:
I dont think trying to shrink countries economies both developed or developing is going to be an actual serious idea in almost any place in the world, so its not a viable alternative because its not going to happen therefore its not viable.
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It isn't about being viable or not, the way we are headed, we will revert to nomadic, prehistoric lifestyle as only means of human survival. Check the climate atlases for any country in the world, in 40 years it will become almost uninhabitable. The life that we have built and promoted is unsustainable.

Technology and green growth bullshit are just continuation of selfish anthropocentric idea in which humans won't give away anyhting. It is impossible to sustain life like this.

I'm going to simplify things extremely, but why does anyone need to travel thousands of miles for vacation each year? And I'm not really sure if it's even a major problem, but it's a good example of extremely unnecessary behavior.
 
Jericholyte2 said:
And yet many major reports immediately write-off CCUS as not being viable.

There no example of any CCUS system working to anything like the scale that we’d need, the energy required to work these is ridiculous, and the dangers posed (especially to marine life) should leaks, ruptures or other issues occur is catastrophic.

All that is is an expensive plaster over a bullet wound.
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Carbon capture is like trying to empty the north Atlantic with a tea cup. All single measures are going to be inadequate on their own so I'm not yet totally sure it is pointless but it certainly isn't going to be a huge part of the answer.
 
calodo2003 said:
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That’s the issue, we simply don’t have the infrastructure to get anywhere near the scale we need.

We need huge, high capacity cabling going across countries to move this energy to places where it’s needed, and herein we have the next problem of public opposition to building of pylons or underground cabling etc.
 
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It'll take a global natural disaster for the World to take action and it'll be too late at that point. As a species we're all far too selfish and live in the moment rather than thinking of the future of the species.

Unfortunately scientists who should be the Worlds leaders just don't have the political power.
 
RedSky said:
It'll take a global natural disaster for the World to take action and it'll be too late at that point. As a species we're all far too selfish and live in the moment rather than thinking of the future of the species.

Unfortunately scientists who should be the Worlds leaders just don't have the political power.
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Boiler frogs.
 
RedSky said:
It'll take a global natural disaster for the World to take action and it'll be too late at that point. As a species we're all far too selfish and live in the moment rather than thinking of the future of the species.

Unfortunately scientists who should be the Worlds leaders just don't have the political power.
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Kind of like Plato's *********** king, but kind of replace that with the UN's climate scientists?
 
Gehrman said:
I dont know if you might find this interesting or might not. Doesnt touch on all the points you mentioned though.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/climat...ange-cop26-glasgow-global-warming-11635973538
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I mean it is interesting and demonstrates the increasing resilience of human societies during the 20th century but I'm not entirely sure why you think it supports a position asserting that more people die of cold than heat. If you look historically the majority of people dying directly from extreme weather events have died from drought.

At any rate I don't think anyone is arguing that the lot of humanity hasn't improved dramatically over the past century or that scientific prediction, medical discovery and engineering invention isn't responsible for increased longevity and reduced death. That we're more insulated from the environment than those living in a Victorian hovel isn't surprising. The point isn't to deny the progress we've made it's to make the point that climate change threatens that progress going forward.

The truth of the matter is that climate informs such things as what plants can grow; how readily available water is. There's a reason Scotland is not a wine producer and why it's harder to have a shower in rural Chad than Market Weighton. Everything that lives does so within certain tolerances. The entire point of the IPCC target of keeping warming under 2C is precisely because temperatures rising above that for a significant period represents a tolerance breach that should have severe real life consequences. A sort of tipping point. Even at the 1.5C target that's now in danger of being breached we're forecast to see some pretty dramatic changes. It's the upper tolerance level for many corals for instance. I guess the next few years will demonstrate the accuracy of predictions.
 
Gehrman said:
I dont know if you might find this interesting or might not. Doesnt touch on all the points you mentioned though.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/climat...ange-cop26-glasgow-global-warming-11635973538
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That's only direct impacts and conveniently glosses over the fact that the more expensive infrastructure that is mentioned also protects people better.

More generally though, the most important of climate change isn't going to be the direct damage of changing weather, but the indirect damage from changing climate a sit makes currently heavily populated areas unliveable (major coastal population centres, for example) and significantly disrupts current food production methods and chains (growing crops in the Great Plains/Prairies of North America, for example).

The latter is what @Ekkie Thump was talking about, and the article isn't about that at all. Bit of an understatement on your end in that regard.
 
Cheimoon said:
That's only direct impacts and conveniently glosses over the fact that the more expensive infrastructure that is mentioned also protects people better.

More generally though, the most important of climate change isn't going to be the direct damage of changing weather, but the indirect damage from changing climate a sit makes currently heavily populated areas unliveable (major coastal population centres, for example) and significantly disrupts current food production methods and chains (growing crops in the Great Plains/Prairies of North America, for example).

The latter is what @Ekkie Thump was talking about, and the article isn't about that at all. Bit of an understatement on your end in that regard.
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It wasnt so much "climate change no biggy". But at least on my end more about how can we adapt to it considering we in general have never been more advanced. With rising sea levels why cant countries in the risk zone adopt the Netherlands approach for instance? Im honestly talking about plan C. Im not saying everything is rosey. Most posters seem to agree that Net Zero by 2050 isnt going to happen. Conscious degrowth worldwide isnt going to happen. So its more about what can we do if the most negative projections turn out to be true?

Also regarding Ekkie this article wasnt about the ratio of people dying from heat or cold. That was information from a podcast i listened to months ago.
 
nimic said:
If you're not aware, WSJ editorials are absolute garbage. The news part of WSJ does some amount of actual, decent journalism, but it's completely separate from the editorial board. It's not news and it's not journalism, it's ideological ranting.
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What's factually wrong in that article?
 
To add to what I said, the author is a known climate skeptic. He's also someone who put a lot of stock in the "global warming hiatus". Many of us will remember all the climate skeptic graphs showing global warming was slowing down or even stopping (judging from a high in 1998). Basically this (with reality added on at the end):

320px-Global_warming_hiatus.gif


Gehrman said:
What's factually wrong in that article?
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I'm not reading a WSJ Opinion article from a known climate skeptic. It is of no value to me.
 
nimic said:
To add to what I said, the author is a known climate skeptic. He's also someone who put a lot of stock in the "global warming hiatus". Many of us will remember all the climate skeptic graphs showing global warming was slowing down or even stopping (judging from a high in 1998). Basically this (with reality added on at the end):

320px-Global_warming_hiatus.gif




I'm not reading a WSJ Opinion article from a known climate skeptic. It is of no value to me.
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Okay im a fan of attacking the post and not the poster. In this regard i mean the article. If you cant debunk the article then well you havnt debunked its relevance. Im well familiar with Bjorn since im a Dane. He also changed his tune over the years.
 
Gehrman said:
It wasnt so much "climate change no biggy". But at least on my end more about how can we adapt to it considering we in general have never been more advanced. With rising sea levels why cant countries in the risk zone adopt the Netherlands approach for instance? Im honestly talking about plan C. Im not saying everything is rosey. Most posters seem to agree that Net Zero by 2050 isnt going to happen. Conscious degrowth worldwide isnt going to happen. So its more about what can we do if the most negative projections turn out to be true?

Also regarding Ekkie this article wasnt about the ratio of people dying from heat or cold. That was information from a podcast i listened to months ago.
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Yeah, it's hugely problematic. And the Dutch approach won't work cause even in the Netherlands it's going to be an issue; you can only raise dikes and dunes so much, and then there's various other complexities to that sort of water management. It's not a long-term solution to letting climate change go on.

So, the best solution is rather still to hugely ramp up efforts to slow down climate change. I mean, climate mitigation measures, if fully implemented, would be enormous and require huge government initiative and population buy-in. If that's doable, then why not focus full-on on measures that would curb climate change?

Also: this idea that climate change is now unavoidable and that we should hence stop focusing on stopping that and instead focus on mitigation isn't a sort of factual truth. It's the new line of defence from climate change denialists, fuelled (haha) by the industries that would suffer most from measures to limit climate change. This line of fought should be thought as hard as outright denialism has been fought.
 
Gehrman said:
Okay im a fan of attacking the post and not the poster. In this regard i mean the article. If you cant debunk the article then well you havnt debunked its relevance. Im well familiar with Bjorn since im a Dane. He also changed his tune over the years.
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It's not my job to go through and debunk all the articles you can post. I was just assuming you didn't know that WSJ Editorials are garbage, and was informing you of it.
 
nimic said:
It's not my job to go through and debunk all the articles you can post. I was just assuming you didn't know that WSJ Editorials are garbage, and was informing you of it.
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Alright a garbage article you wont read. I cant see any merit in continuing this discussion.
 
nimic said:
Correct. If you next post a link to an InfoWars video or Alex Jones appearing on some podcast, that doesn't mean you have a point if nobody can be arsed to spend time watching or listening to it.
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Im not familiar with any of them, apart from hearing Alex Jones name a few times on here.
 
Gehrman said:
Im not familiar with any of them, apart from hearing Alex Jones name a few times on here.
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I wasn't implying you're the type to watch Alex Jones, because you'd have to be extremely far down the rabbit hole for that. But yeah, he's... something else. InfoWars is his site/show. If you can think of a crazy conspiracy, he's peddled it.
 
nimic said:
To add to what I said, the author is a known climate skeptic. He's also someone who put a lot of stock in the "global warming hiatus". Many of us will remember all the climate skeptic graphs showing global warming was slowing down or even stopping (judging from a high in 1998). Basically this (with reality added on at the end):

320px-Global_warming_hiatus.gif




I'm not reading a WSJ Opinion article from a known climate skeptic. It is of no value to me.
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you should read it it’s hilariously bad science if nothing else

I’d put money on the Heartland Institute being involved with this guy in some regard
 
Tarrou said:
you should read it it’s hilariously bad science if nothing else

I’d put money on the Heartland Institute being involved with this guy in some regard
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What's the bad science? Could you single out the bad science in completely official statistics? What factual errors are involved?
 
Jericholyte2 said:
Already getting amber warnings for temperatures above 30’ here, along with thunderstorms and we’re only just in June.

No doubt we’ll break the highest UK temperature again and I reckon we’ll be >40’ quite regularly come July/August.

Yeah we’re fecked.
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Yes it looked bad in May/June. 5 weeks without rain as well in the Manchester area.

July is looking to be very mild so far at least here in Manchester, ~20 degrees every day up to the 15th of July. Last year we hit 36 degrees on July the 19th with days either side well in the 30s and over 30 in the early mornings. We'll see how late July/Aug goes but it's not looking like last year.
 
Gehrman said:
What's the bad science? Could you single out the bad science in completely official statistics?
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well his general theory is that they aren’t more weather disasters, we’re just getting better at detecting them right?

and if you look at the cost of those natural disasters against gdp, it’s actually cheaper today

but this obviously ignores the fact that global gdp if multiples higher than decades ago

or the fact we have better technology today for preventing damage, such as detection systems or more advanced structural engineering

I only read a few paragraphs so I’m sure there is a lot more nonsense to be found if you could be bothered, which I’m not
 
Tarrou said:
well his general theory is that they aren’t more weather disasters, we’re just getting better at detecting them right?

and if you look at the cost of those natural disasters against gdp, it’s actually cheaper today

but this obviously ignores the fact that global gdp if multiples higher than decades ago

or the fact we have better technology today for preventing damage, such as detection systems or more advanced structural engineering

I only read a few paragraphs so I’m sure there is a lot more nonsense to be found if you could be bothered, which I’m not
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But that is literally what he's saying in a article that takes max 5 minutes to read.
 
Gehrman said:
What's factually wrong in that article?
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it accounts for a tiny part of the problem with climate change (directly weather-related deaths), and within them, implicitly assumes that disasters now will be of the same magnitude as disasters when the temperature deviation crosses 2, 3, 4C etc

so it has nothing to say about the difficulty of growing crops, rising vulnerability to microbes as they adapt to warmer climate, of reduction/loss of water for the majority of humanity, or even of events like this, which don't show up in death statistics but do show up as lack of food or work. there are also secondary effects of events like mass extinctions and destruction of marine like in its current form, and what that could mean.

nice article!
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But, living in Denmark, hating refugees, and hating China in particular, you should not worry. As Putin pointed out 20 years ago, and your ideologues agree:
warmer temperatures would mean Russians “spend less on fur coats” while “agricultural specialists say our grain production will increase, and thank God for that”.
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Gehrman said:
Okay im a fan of attacking the post and not the poster. In this regard i mean the article. If you cant debunk the article then well you havnt debunked its relevance. Im well familiar with Bjorn since im a Dane. He also changed his tune over the years.
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So I looked into Lomborg, and it seems this 'changing his tune' is exactly in line with the changed approach of climate denialists I mentioned just before. Also, his contributions to the debate so far have been hallmarked by poor, disingenuous, and/or outright wrong arguments. For example:

https://www.theguardian.com/environ...ccuse-bjrn-lomborg-of-misinterpreting-results
https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/resources/the-low-down-on-lomborg/

Again, his WSJ op-ed is entirely irrelevant to the point @Ekkie Thump raised. It could be true in relation to the points it makes, but I'd have to dig through the sources to find out. Given Lomborg has proven to be a poor (euphemism) contributor to this debate in the past, I'm not going to bother with that and will assume this article isn't true until better sources corroborate it. If that seems harsh, reviewers that know the subject trashed the book the op-ed is based on:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/books/review/bjorn-lomborg-false-alarm-joseph-stiglitz.html
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2...calypse-never-by-michael-shellenberger-review

This one provides a lot of detail as well: https://www.lse.ac.uk/granthaminsti...ntastical-numbers-in-bjorn-lomborgs-new-book/

So anything Lomborg says would have to be studied in detail to find out if it's relia le this time, or nonsense yet again. Did you do that for the WSJ article?

If you are genuinely interested in climate change and its impacts, I'd suggest staying away from this obvious propagandist.
 
Gehrman said:
No he adresses the points your making.
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my point is he’s twisting the data to fit his agenda

He’s going on about death rates and completely ignores that we’ve gotten a lot better at not being killed by weather (or earthquakes)
 
Cheimoon said:
So I looked into Lomborg, and it seems this 'changing his tune' is exactly in line with the changed approach of climate denialists I mentioned just before. Also, his contributions to the debate so far have been hallmarked by poor, disingenuous, and/or outright wrong arguments. For example:

https://www.theguardian.com/environ...ccuse-bjrn-lomborg-of-misinterpreting-results
https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/resources/the-low-down-on-lomborg/

Again, his WSJ op-ed is entirely irrelevant to the point @Ekkie Thump raised. It could be true in relation to the points it makes, but I'd have to dig through the sources to find out. Given Lomborg has proven to be a poor (euphemism) contributor to this debate in the past, I'm not going to bother with that and will assume this article isn't true until better sources corroborate it. If that seems harsh, reviewers that know the subject trashed the book the op-ed is based on:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/16/books/review/bjorn-lomborg-false-alarm-joseph-stiglitz.html
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2...calypse-never-by-michael-shellenberger-review

This one provides a lot of detail as well: https://www.lse.ac.uk/granthaminsti...ntastical-numbers-in-bjorn-lomborgs-new-book/

If you are genuinely interested in climate change and its impacts, I'd suggest staying away from this obvious propagandist.
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Not sure i can be arsed reading all that. It would certainly take more than 5 minutes of my time.
 
Tarrou said:
my point is he’s twisting the data to fit his agenda

He’s going on about death rates and completely ignores that we’ve gotten a lot better and not being killed by weather
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That's the point. Its the headline.
 
Gehrman said:
That's the point. Its the headline.
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Uhuh

As the world has gotten richer and its population has grown, the number and quality of structures in the path of floods, fires, and hurricanes have risen. If you remove this variable by looking at damage as a percent of gross domestic product, it actually paints an optimistic picture. The trend of weather-related damages from 1990 to 2020 declined from 0.26% of global GDP to 0.18%.
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he’s not talking about the quality of these structures preventing deaths. He just makes the point that they are more expensive and therefore there’s more damage to be done today. It’s laughable
 
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