Lexicus
Deity
It's nontrivial but has also largely been answered, with only small refinements necessary. Human activity is causing the overwhelming majority of currently-observed warming.
False
Also false
Global warming strikes again...
- Thread starter CavLancer
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It's nontrivial but has also largely been answered, with only small refinements necessary. Human activity is causing the overwhelming majority of currently-observed warming.
False
Also false
Ziggy Stardust
Absolutely Sane
onejayhawk
Afflicted with reason
Which, as pointed out, is very small. Your other two comments are erroneous. We have seem only incremental change.
I am not sure the relevance. No one is arguing that carbon dioxide is not rising.
J
Lexicus
Deity
It's not actually very small, you only think it's very small because you are almost totally ignorant of climatology and general Earth history.
Yes. As mentioned, we still have room in the buffer. The concern is that (a) the incremental change has compounding effects and (b) the further we get along, the less capable we are of weaning in time.
I regularly post that we can still burn fossil fuels, and that they're of net benefit (currently). But in a profitable enterprise, you devote a portion of the earning towards surviving the pivot. People working at the buggy whip factories did fine if they saved a portion of their earnings in order to take advantage of new opportunities as their industry died. Fossil fuels currently produce net profits, on both first order analysis and on second order analysis. But there's literally the visible counterfactual looming. We need to pivot, we can tell by looking at the incremental change.
onejayhawk
Afflicted with reason
Compounding can be a loaded word. Be more specific.
Still not seeing a pivot coming. Will weaning be effective, even in the best case scenario? Will it be better than adjusting to changes as they come?
J
Still not seeing a pivot coming. Will weaning be effective, even in the best case scenario? Will it be better than adjusting to changes as they come?
J
Ziggy Stardust
Absolutely Sane
You wondered "The question of how much to attribute to natural variation and how much to human influence is nontrivial.", and even though the picture and numbers themselves are a little dated, it gives an indication.
Varsham Sharma
Chieftain
- Joined
- Mar 12, 2018
- Messages
- 2
Only a very small portion of organizations in the industry is taking initiatives towards preventing global warming. It will stop when everyone understand the disaster that could possibly take place if we don't take immediate action.
The answer is 'no' then 'yes'. For a period of time, we're still better off using the fossil carbon to improve the quality of our lives and improve our progress as a species. The benefits of consumption are not zero-sum, though, obviously. But as we produce more greenhouse gas, the risk of a tipping point increases along with the sum of the individual damages. They're kinda two different things. Shoreline creep is cheap (until it isn't), but an aquifer getting salted by the rising ocean is expensive. Importantly, those who profited from causing the rising shorelines are going to refuse to compensate those victimized by it. Just like in any risk scenario, you buy insurance if you cannot afford the consequences. And if you cannot afford the insurance, you don't engage in the risky behaviour.
Each tick of the economic cycle concomitantly creates new options for weaning at a rate that we partially control with our underlying investment, but also creates new infrastructure purchases that become non-profitable if we wean from fossil carbon. This creates political friction against weaning, "please care about the bondholders who just bought a brand-new coal-fired powerplant!". Okay, it won't be that, it will be "please care about their employees who took out loans to buy stuff!". There will always be someone who took out a loan betting that prices wouldn't rise. Some are victims of bad planning. Some control the politicians.
There's a remaining portion in our decided buffer, but the Western nations have consumed their portion of this buffer and are now eating into the buffer of nations who haven't yet used theirs. There's no doubt that a huge portion of human misery can be alleviated with continued usage of reserves. But unless your economy is properly investing in the pivot and weaning, wasteful or hedonistic consumption is doing very little to assist those who actually need continued development.
There's every likelihood that I will be richer in 2100 than I was in 2050, no matter what we do. But we've yet to see a report that I will be richer with the Business As Usual scenario than I would be in any reasonable pivot. Keep in mind, I can blame the past for how expensive the pivot is getting. We've known since 1992, but the leaders before us continued to run up the credit card to subsidize current consumption.
onejayhawk
Afflicted with reason
You still are not addressing the central question. Even if done perfectly, will weaning fix the situation? Nothing I have seen indicates it would be sufficient, or even particularly helpful in the sort of situation you envision.
J
J
What do you mean by 'sufficiently'? Quickly putting out a greasefire in my kitchen won't erase the damage caused by the fire. But it's still the right choice.
With regards to 'nothing I have seen', what reports are you working off of?
With regards to 'nothing I have seen', what reports are you working off of?
Broken_Erika
Play with me.
The ones on Fox News? Or the ones that most conservatives use that were more or less written by the oil/gas/coal lobbying groups?(also featured on fox news)
salty mud
Deity
Citation needed.
I'm legit curious. He might have an analysis source that I don't attend. His statement implies he follows the conversation at an academic level
Lexicus
Deity
Are you being serious? You have been reading the, you know, previous two dozen pages or so where J has made it clear he doesn't know Thing One about this topic right?
https://www.ucsusa.org/publications...ting-fossil-fuel-companies-climate-deception#!
That's only one example...
onejayhawk
Afflicted with reason
This is more, will it put out the grease fire? Since you raise the metaphor, can fossil carbon cause a grease fire?
You toss out the phrase "tipping point" as if it were the state change energy of an electron or the activation energy of a chemical reaction. That usage is inconsistent with the concept of weaning. This is why I asked about your term "compounding", which is a term of art in multiple fields. It implies an exponential growth equation. All eco-disaster scenarios have one, but experience has not born them out.
As to sources, it's more the lack of them. I am not following at an academic level, but there are no popular discussions of this side of the subject. What you see is the same thing Al Gore used in his movie, ie thirty years and it's all over hysteria. An Inconvenient Truth was disproven by experience. Why expect different results when you have the same prediction?
J
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onedreamer
Dragon
you have quite a human-centric view of our world. You can't adjust to the fact that one grade difference in average temperatures can completely destroy an ecosystem. There is no adjusting that. The planet is not a machine that you can modify, change, adjust modularly; it is a complex system where everything is connected, and planning, adjusting, reacting or whatever you dream you can do after watching a Hollywood disaster movie with happy ending is extremely unlikely. Actually, it would be extremely unlikely if humanity acted in concert as usually happens at the end of those movies, after Paris or one of the other 3 cities around the world that the americans are aware of is destroyed, but as of now this is far from happening. What do we have here? Nations that claim they have the right to screw up the planet because the grand grand fathers of peoples of other nations started screwing it up 150 years ago because of their ignorance and carelessness, and now it's their turn to do it, even though they are not ignorant of the consequences. They have the right to endanger the life of their and our children, so we can tell them they've been screwed equally by (almost) the whole world: by some grand grand fathers ignorance and by other fathers complete idiocy. I have yet to see this scenario depicted in any hollywood movie, yet it's the one we live in. But yeah... I already envision you adjusting to changes as they come. It's obvious by how you refuse to even acknowledge that there is any need to change since it's all Mother Nature's fault and not our deed, that you will be a major promoter of "adjustments".
Lexicus
Deity
This really just says quite a bit about the value of your contributions to the thread.
Keep in mind, climate change is not going to affect all humans equally.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politi...bal-warming-affects-the-rich-and-poor-w509956
As we have already seen in New Orleans with Katrina and are now seeing in Houston and Puerto Rico this year, climate change is actually being exploited by the capitalists as part of the "shock doctrine". Development in the wake of these disasters is designed to funnel more and more money upwards, the classic example being the New Orleans school system which was converted entirely to charter schools.
salty mud
Deity
Loosen off the tin foil hat, dude. It's cutting off circulation to your brain.
onejayhawk
Afflicted with reason
That's hard to read.
Of course drastic changes can have drastic effect. However, gradual changes need not have drastic effect. Climate change is almost the poster child of gradual change. Alarmists that blame Katrina, Irene and Maria on climate change are not helping.
J
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