I worked in climate policy for awhile. I got out of it because I lost hope. I believe our governments have lost hope also. Covid taught us that if they inflict the necessary pain to control carbon, our governments will be consumed by populist anger. Only the Chinese system appears to have any hope of controlling people’s behavior that much without riots. And what a terrifying system! Even their control began to slip after a few years of zero Covid.
We will just have to deal with the consequences while we try to innovative our way out of this mess. It’s made me a AI accelerationist. Of the two civilizational dooms, I’ll take my chances with the computers.
Some other fun “x is closer to y than z”:
* We are closer in time to the T rex than the T rex was to the Stegosaurus
* We are closer to the time of Cleopatra than Cleopatra was to the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza
I find it surprising that the 1896 answer of warming estimates closely match modern estimates.
Back then:
- They didn't have electronics, radio was barely being discovered
- They didn't have airplanes, they just discovered the upper atmosphere, with the very first weather balloons
- They knew about atoms, the periodic table was 30 years old, but nucleus wasn't discovered yet
Climate science is a notoriously difficult topic, with countless feedbacks, positive and negative. Nowadays, we run simulations on supercomputers based on satellite data, decades of precise historical data, geological data, etc... They didn't have that at the time.
Maybe he got the precise value by chance. Sometimes it happens. For example it is said that Eratosthenes (240 BC) calculated the Earth circumference with great accuracy (<1%) and no one managed to get a better estimate until modern times. In fact, many later estimates were off by more than 10%. The technology available at the time wasn't capable of such accuracy, but by chance, it turned out to be spot on (but they didn't know it was).
Meanwhile, half of CO2 emissions from human causes since the industrial revolution have happened in about the last 40 years or so. Every time we mash the snooze bar for another decade the problem just gets that much harder to solve.
As this brilliant cartoon points out, we've had 128 years of warnings about human-induced climate change, and over all those years, humanity did not change course.
That's because warnings and exhortations rarely accomplish anything.
Things tend to change only after there's no other choice, i.e., when there's a crisis.
There's an insightful quote from Milton Friedman on this:
"Only a crisis -- actual or perceived -- produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable."[a]
I disagree with Friedman on many things, but on this, I think he was right.
It is only now, when we find outselves in the early stages of crisis (unprecedented heat waves, perpetual giant fires, etc.), that the work of all those scientists and engineers who have been documenting, predicting, and warning about climate change for the past 128 years is finally being put to good practical use.
Hopefully it's not too late.
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[a] https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/110844-only-a-crisis---actu...
In response to all the nuclear power discussion in this thread, see thorium molten salt. We have had the technology since Oak Ridge in the 70s. We ignored it because the existing refinement infrastructure is conveniently "dual use" for nuclear weapons.
It must be emphasized that solar panels, wind turbines and batteries are products of carbon-burning industry. They have their place but we don't have the metals to repair and replace them in the long term, and we don't yet know if a fully electric industrial society is even possible. E.g. how do you reach the necessary temps in a blast furnace without melting your heating element?
Electrifying civilization as we know it is politically palatable, but the feasibility studies are few, and those that have been done are sobering. Any analysis which ends without a serious look in the mirror is likely serving some special interest. To expect that modernity can continue in the same mold, with hydrocarbons swapped out for something else, smacks of nostalgia or naivete. Alternative energy sources are needed, absolutely; but even more important is to transform the way we relate to each other, to other life forms, to natural resources, and to this generation ship we call a planet.
Today, living in a significantly changed climate while still producing vast amounts of greenhouse gasses:
"Yeah, but that can't be us. I need a scientist to prove it's not because of us!"
turning to workforce
"It's not us, keep going!"
We could switch to regenerative agriculture and yeet most of the carbon back out of the air[1] and back into the soil where it belongs, but that might hurt Monsanto's profit margin, so it's unlikely to happen.
[1] https://forceofnature.com/blogs/regenerate/carbon-sequestrat....
PSA: Your personal experience of climate change resulting in "We are all going to live horribly in the future" is quite dependent on the definition of "we"
The sad reality is that the humanity probably needs some type of big climate-related event that would act as a wake up call when it comes to the urgency of climate change. We need something that people can relate to with their senses or emotions. Data by itself can only get us so far.
In my opinion the only solution is a drastic drop in number of human beings. Thankfully we wont have to do much since nature will do it for us when the droughts begin and the crops start failing. Its fun to think of how we will science ourselves out of this as we go over 8 billion people who all desire an ever increasing standard of living. However the only science we will science ourselves with are going to be fully autonomous suicide drones patrolling our borders for any straggling climate refugees and also drones inside our ruined cities patrolling for dissent. That's my take on the thing at least
While we have a socio-economic that values market and profit over social benefits we will keep this going just because it's cheaper. (and also because there is some big people gaining lots of money with it)
As with most large scale changes...there are winners and losers. New species and extinctions. High CO2 is great for plants in my greenhouse...I suppose that's why it is called a greenhouse gas. Anyone longing for lower CO2 levels in our entire atmosphere is basically an anti-Canadian Agriculture bigot. Seriously though sometimes the cure is much worse than just handling the issues one at a time as we transition to a beautiful warm catastrophe/boon. Historically the planet has gone through all sorts of things before. Perhaps we should be looking more at how to successfully terraform our planet. Why are we still predicting weather when we should just be making it?
For anyone who's curious, here's an explanation of how the greenhouse effect works -- it's not just that some infrared radiation escapes from earth to space, while some other infrared radiation gets trapped. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqu5DjzOBF8
And people keep wondering why climate protesters are not asking things "nicely" anymore, and resort to blocking traffic and defacing paintings. They tried the nice way... they tried for many decades.
Who is going to pay for polluting the atmosphere? I don't think it will be the people who had the most to gain from polluting in the first place.
Guys World War 2 Is A Lie It Didn't Happen
1975: The first cancellation of a planned nuclear power plant occurred in Wyhl, Germany due to protests from "environmentalists".
When we have people who cannot house and feed themselves, why do we expect them to care abotu what will happen to the planet in another century? We have a hopelessnes crisis.
The propaganda of capitalism has also been widly successful. Many people believe in the myth of meritocracy or that somehow markets will solve all problems or that Jeff Bezos having $200 billion instead of $100 billion while Amazon warehouse employees work in dire conditions are all good things. At the same time, very few of those people can define capitalism but will defend it anyway.
There is no fixing the climate crisis without fixing wealth inequality and giving people dignity and hope for the future. And no, I don't mean some communist utopia where everyone has the same (b3cause that's the usual straw man argument people jump to). I simply mean it has to be way less extreme than it is today.
Capitalism created this problem. Capitalism perpetuates this problem. And it won't be solved until you deal with capitalism.
Ahh, but nowadays we know in much greater detail how it will screw up the planet.
For people on phones, https://m.xkcd.com/2889/
Yes, but during the last ice age we were under a kilometer of ice: https://xkcd.com/1225/
On the other hand, we've been "staving off the next ice age" too zealously: https://xkcd.com/1732/
Mere ~30 years after discovering the Greenhouse Effect we managed to split the atom, harnessing heretofore unimaginable amounts of energy.
Yet almost 100 years later, here we are - Oil and gas dependent, boasting an energy and climate crisis, all the while fooling regulators with worthless climate certificates, unaccountable off-shore factories and just plain rampant fraud when it comes to CO2 emissions.