Comment by gonzalohm
1 day ago
What's interesting to me is that almost all models underestimated the ocean temperature.
We are entering uncharted waters and I fear that at some point we will get an extreme extreme weather event and the worse thing is that we won't see it coming.
That should be the scary part. We know how El Niño affects world's weather, but it is also a symptom of how much heat the ocean is absorbing.
That core problem won't end this year or the next one, and it will keep disrupting global climate. And with it, agriculture, settlements, economy and civilization as we know it.
And the scariest part is what we do about it. Keep doing activities that rise global temperature and power up positive feedback loops, weakening or abolishing climate policies, and when things start to feel urgent will try things by the fast way with unclear outcomes.
- There is no "we", but it would take "we" to fix this.
- There is a global scale issue, but no consensus on this being a problem. Not at the global, continental, local or individual level. FFS, there are idiots proudly rolling coal.
- Leadership - in the rare places on earth where it is somewhat accountable - reflects this lack of consensus.
- Acknowledging the problem does not equal acting even on an individual level.
- There's lots of cognitive dissonance. Why am I even flying to the other side of the world next week?
We are cooked. Not so much us old farts, but the children.
It’s all so scary! I regret having a child.
For your child's sake, make sure they never find out your regrets.
For me, this was one of the reasons to not have kids
I don’t. But I will at least consider the thinking about my kids (8, 4) should look into alternative paths.
>It’s all so scary! I regret having a child.
I dont get this. I would regret having a kid maybe if he turns out to not be resilient and up to the challenges posed by the changing climate and the shitty political situation. But those are things I can work with him on. Opsec can be taught. Political dissent can be taught. This thing can be turned around when the political class has been disposed of.
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Due to the widespread idea that climate prediction has been predicting doom and gloom all the time, and has always been wrong about it, I have been entertaining myself by revisiting old climate predictions from 20 years ago. I can highly recommend it.
I mean, predicting the climate must be one of the hardest numerical simulations you can run. Climate models are famously incomplete. But the results turned out to be way more accurate than I would have thought. That's some impressive modeling, and I would assume that models have only improved since then.
The most chilling thing (and not in a good way) about it is that popular science type repotrs for the general public usually indicate an interval between a good case and a bad case, with a nice line in between. In retrospect we have been pretty much perfectly tracking the bad case line ever since.
I don’t recall the more serious predictions predicting anything worse than what we’ve actually experiencing. There were plenty of predictions about nasty consequences if we experienced X degrees of warming by, say, 2050, and it’s not 2050 yet…
Interesting. Do you mind sharing some of the predictions you have been revisiting?
This sounds neat...I'd love to do it as well. Any past predictions vs current conditions tools or datasets that you're using?
There have been a lot of published retrospective cohort climate model studies, ex https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2019GL08...
>Due to the widespread idea that climate prediction has been predicting doom and gloom all the time, and has always been wrong about it, I have been entertaining myself by revisiting old climate predictions from 20 years ago. I can highly recommend it.
N=1 Mind, but I remember reading a spread in Australian Scientist that predicted Australia would become something of a rainless desert, storms bringing only lightning, by 2020 or so. Leaving only Melbourne, Adelaide and Tasmania somewhat habitable. Article went on to discuss how to calmly migrate the population south over the 13 or so years remaining, and what the government might do to dissuade climate refugees from pacific islands.
Since then I have a read a lot of people walking back the absolute death and destruction stuff, but "Extremier Extremes" seems to be the closest to a consensus position, one that the strongest El Nino ever supports completely.
Well, we can see it coming, but we are doing very little about
We are doing a lot. Almost 90% of electricity capacity added last year was renewables. Nearly 1 in 3 cars sold are now EVs. The world is spending over $2 trillion every year on low‑carbon energy investment. Solar and wind have already avoided more than 2 gigatons of C02 being added to the atmosphere. In the US, the IRA will drop emissions 40% to below 2005 levels.
What do you mean we are doing very little?
It should be at the level od the economy of war but worldwide. The majority reacted too late to have the possibility to act slowly.
> We are doing a lot. Almost 90% of electricity capacity added last year was renewables
New capacity being electric is fine but we need to be actively removing fossil fuels from existing capacity, which isn't actually happening. We're just building new capacity on top of old existing fossil fuels. So sure, it's nice that a majority of new capacity is green, but we're still burning more fossil fuels year over year
I’ve had the same discussion with many people, and when I tell them how much work is done on cleaning up carbon emissions, the reply is always “well… it’s not enough”. And of course, they don’t have a sense of what is “enough”.
They don’t really understand it in a factual, measurable way, but just are interesting in what the overall story is, and what it says about humanity failing.
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We've been seeing our own certain destruction from climate change coming since the 70s. The 1870s. We had two entire lifetimes to do something about it, we didn't.
Except those guys throwing soup at the fossil fuel HQs. They did a little.
We're building more data centers for a technology that's ramping global warming even faster. Water consumption, heat generation and tons and tons of CO2 emitting concrete to house these things.
So we're doing something, but those things are counterproductive to our planet's general well being. Apparently billionaires don't need an inhabitable Earth to live on.
Yeah, data-centers are definitely the worst thing happening to the planet. You got your priorities straight.
AI data centers are what, half a percent of the world electricity consumption, if that, and an even smaller fraction of the total energy?
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DC water consumption is a red herring. That water is returned back to its source but warmer.
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Once I listened to a podcast about the holodomor, a famine caused by Stalin and affected Ukrainians mostly. In the end they were forced to eat their children as they were so desperate for food. The suffering was untold, but real, it happened, and that kind of thing can and will happen again if we're not extra extra careful.
We're pushing ourselves into absolutely untold suffering the longer do nothing. I truly fear a famine like that and the more we go down this road, the closer we're getting.
Obviously its too late to avoid the worst, the only hope we have is to collectively cooperate to help each other get through it. Not sure that will happen but I believe that's the only way through.