Comment by Noaidi
1 day ago
People really don’t appreciate yet. How really bad this situation is and will be. They’re talking about 1.76°C higher temperatures next year because of this El Niño. Those are climate change temperatures that are not supposed to be around until 2035. So it’ll give us a sneak peek into our future.
But the biggest effect and this is noted by many insurance companies now is going to be in places like India.
But this is something the world has never seen and I mean that literally so I don’t expect it to be anything but really bad and you should be ready.
It was inevitable we'd get to the point where climate change began substantially disrupting ecology and human livelihoods. Looks like we're ahead of schedule.
People dying from extreme heatwaves, weather, and famines due to climate change has been predicted for decades at this point; and this is exactly the sort of climatic setup that will enable this to happen.
> People dying from extreme heatwaves, weather, and famines due to climate change has been predicted for decades at this point; and this is exactly the sort of climatic setup that will enable this to happen. Yeah, people have been "predicting" it, but the fact is that this is currently mostly hyperbole, driven by bad reporting and activist exaggeration.
What is happening, right now, is that winters are mostly getting warmer. Summers are getting hotter in certain places, but not at nearly the rate that cold days are decreasing -- and the evidence is weaker on a global scale. From the IPCC 6AR report, figure 11-9 shows it clearly:
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/figures/chapter-11/figure...
Figure 11-2 shows it another way:
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/figures/chapter-11/figure...
Even the IPCC report only gets to the "virtually certain" evidence level by combining the two claims:
> The frequency and intensity of hot extremes (including heatwaves) have increased, and those of cold extremes have decreased on the global scale since 1950 (virtually certain).
That's because, when you actually look at the data, it is abundantly clear that the increase in hot extremes are far less common than the decrease in cold extremes. Of course, when you take the ratio of the two, this looks worse, because the denominator is getting smaller.
Chapter 11 is worth reading. You will be shocked how many of the widely reported memes about extreme weather and climate are just not supported by good data:
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/chapter/chapter-11/
I recommend in particular going through the figures, and looking at how many of them are model predictions (nearly all), versus plots of historical data. Setting aside the debates about model quality, etc., surely we can all agree that predictions are not evidence?
Go back and compare some of the earlier IPCC reports and see which bits have been left out. The worst case scenarios keep getting removed, and the best case scenarios are based on projections of CO2 emissions which are highly unrealistic.
Official reports have been downplaying the impact for decades, while countries have been setting climate targets that they had no intention of achieving.
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In other words, average temperature is higher is mostly because cold days are shorter and warmer a lot more than hot days is hotter?
I went to both of those links. "Page not found".
>Setting aside the debates about model quality, etc., surely we can all agree that predictions are not evidence?
Predictions are warnings. When we have the evidence it will be too late. So let me ask you, what direction are we headed?
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Yeah, ask any european how less intense the heatwaves are during this summer compared to milder winters, you won't hear a polite response
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Your linked figure confirms that 2018 was cooler than things are today.
The chapter 11 temperature over view is concerning for the consequences:
...
It's the harder to precisely predict potential tipping point changes that should really concern and motivate global changes to emissions.
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Way more people die of being exposed to the cold than exposed to the heat. So you could make a good argument that weather events save more lives than they cost by increasing the temperature of marginal zones where people otherwise freeze.
> Way more people die of being exposed to the cold than exposed to the heat.
I was skeptical of this claim, so I looked it up. You’re right. Globally, about 9x as many people die due to cold-related causes than heat-related causes. It’s not freezing, though, but longer-term effects like kidney failure in elderly people. [1]
I’m still dubious about the argument that weather events could save lives, though, partially because climate change makes weather more extreme, not simply “more pleasant for people in colder climates.”
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/part-one-how-many-people-die-from...
> People dying from extreme heatwaves, weather, and famines due to climate change has been predicted for decades at this point; and this is exactly the sort of climatic setup that will enable this to happen.
The rhetoric is all well and good, but if you look at the numbers according to the WMO[0], deaths from climate-related hazards have been dropping steadily in the 50-year period from 1970 to 2019, even as atmospheric CO2 went from ~326ppm to ~410ppm and the world population more than doubled. That's not a per capita decrease; it's an absolute decrease, from over 50k deaths worldwide the 70s to fewer than 20k in the 2010s.
All of this is due to the increased ability of humans to deal with what the climate might throw at them, mostly due to cheap energy unlocked by fossil fuels during that time. Remember, there are no countries that are both rich and have a low per capita energy usage. Surplus energy allows humans to build the infrastructure that makes them more resilient to disasters.
If I had to wager, more people will suffer and die in the coming decades from efforts to combat climate change (i.e. hamstring energy production and usage) than from climate change itself. You can already see this in the anti-air conditioning sentiment in parts of Europe.
[0]: https://library.wmo.int/idurl/4/57564
Look, I think you made some good points, but at the same time, humans have become better at handling the climate because we’ve been able to predict it and have found solutions to certain known issues. What happens when it gets less predictable, like when certain regions get much less water for an extended period, is very much unknown.
Your last claim makes no sense. Is there actually a widespread political effort to ban air conditioning or make it hard to get in Europe? That certainly isn’t the case in the US. And yet hot summers are still killer in cities which aren’t accustomed to them: that’s climate change doing the killing.
Solar is just about the most abundant source of energy on the planet, and easily decentralized. Plugin solar is becoming increasingly popular and cheap, for example.
I think energy production would be much more abundant and directly in control of the people if governments stopped subsidizing energy sources that need massive amounts of resources just to keep running. Why not give solar an advantage when every watt installed can just… work by itself for the next three decades? Every watt of a gas plant needs you to figure out who to buy gas from forever.
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all airconditioning brands had massive uptick in sales in Europe; Spain and other southern countries over 100%. what anti air conditioning sentiment?
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The two are racing each other. So far, human adaptation is winning. But climate change is just getting started. The change that happened over the last 50 years is tiny compare to what will happen over the next 50. It may well start winning that race.
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Ministry for the Future ch. 1 scenario?
https://www.scribd.com/document/979965270/Robinson-Kim-Stanl...
> But this is something the world has never seen and I mean that literally
Lets not forget there have been bigger and hotter events than this in local past.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1877%E2%80%931878_El_Ni%C3%B1o...
You may tie this in to climate change in general to prove your point, but this is a discussion about El Nino weather event and it is important to remember the current situation is not unprecedented.
This El Nino is expected to be worse than that based on the El Nino 3.4 temperatures we are already seeing. This is why most weather people are talking about it so much.
We do not have the same data for the 1877 event that we do for the last strongest El Nino in 1997. And this one is much stronger than that by far:
https://xcancel.com/BenNollWeather/status/208864941472211787...
> expected to be worse
Lets not speculate, currently there have been worse ones in the past. If this eventually becomes more extreme then yes it will become a big talking point, but it is not there yet.
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It's hard to rationally discuss this with non-experts as you will immediately be labeled an AGW denying crank and downvoted to oblivion.
Yes, AGW is real. Yes, extreme weather and climate events have occurred before AGW. No, I am not saying that AGW is incapable of making these extreme events even worse.
For instance, California has experienced megadroughts lasting decades or hundreds of years in the relatively recent past.
The global average temperature was about 1.5C lower back then.
You miss the point, the warming of El Nino is relative.
El Nino warmed the earth more back then relative to average temperatures than it currently is now.
The future will be much worse. Some effects take years or decades to manifest and we wont see them during a relatively short event like El Niño.
Eg: the severe disruption of the jet stream or the collapse of the AMOC.
Plus all the long term feedbacks like methane etc.
Cheap cooling vests distributed at scale, kept cool or "recharged" by a portable and unpluggable solar panel, seems necessary. Individual air conditioning is too expensive and most affected people need to work outside during the daytime.
The solution to climate change is definitely not more gadgets and power use.
There's an inverse relationship between exposure to the effects of climate change and CO2 emitted per capita. The people who will need live preserving artificial cooling the most are exactly the people contributing the least to climate change.
In any case, the effects of extreme heat on the body are the easiest part of climate change to mitigate with current technology. The hard part is the famine.
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Our future is extinction regardless of what we do. It’s a matter of timescale. Plagues, wars, political unrest, asteroids, geological events on the continental scale, super volcano eruptions, poles flipping, the Earth coming closer to the Sun and then moving farther away, iron core rotation slowing down, the Sun swelling and dying. Unless we find a way to evolve into something capable of leaving this planet for good, we are going to go extinct. No carbon taxes and offsets are going to change anything. We are boiling as the proverbial frog, and everything we do is just ”feel good” measures.
Even if we leave the planet we're going to go extinct anyways, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't try to slow it down.
Said the frog in a pot. Sorry, but it’s true.
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You don’t get to be unattached to the lives of others; only your own. What ugly thinking to cloth in Buddhism!
Attachment being the cause of suffering really is core to Buddhism. It's not for everybody though.
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What is your point? What system are you taking about? Also I don't want to judge but I hope you don't use your past trauma as an excuse for indifference. You can be indifferent but just say so. The fact that you have trauma doesn't give you a leg to stand on. There are plenty of people with trauma and have come out of it. It just sounds rather angsty.