Comment by lukeify
1 day ago
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.
Arguing that the IPCC report is "downplaying the impact" because of corruption -- which is what you seem to be doing, without evidence -- is an implausible assertion.
The far more likely conclusion is that you're wrong.
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?
Oops. Links got truncated. Here:
Figure 11-9:
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/figures/chapter-11/figure...
Figure 11-2:
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/figures/chapter-11/figure...
Chapter 11:
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/chapter/chapter-11/
3 replies →
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.
> Your linked figure confirms that 2018 was cooler than things are today.
So? what does that have to do with the question at hand? An 8 year change is irrelevant in the world of climate science. It's statistical noise in a system where cycles run for decades. Weather, not climate.
> The chapter 11 temperature over view is concerning for the consequences:
...and then you quote the part that says exactly what I explained to you, as some kind of counter-argument?
You will note that the part you quoted is, again, combining the types of extremes. They're not talking about just hot days.
I honestly do not understand this need to fatalize data. You don't have a counterargument (because what I said was factually true) so your only rebuttal is to wave your hands and say that it's all scary.
We can be honest -- the world is getting warmer -- and admit when the people predicting imminent death and destruction are exaggerating. This is good!
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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.
Regarding air conditioning in Europe, I suspect that there are other interests at play given that there has been zero pushback against air conditioning in cars.
Air conditioning in buildings is likely viewed as a threat to gas providers as most modern cooling devices also have a heating mode that competes directly with gas heating.
8 replies →
> I think energy production would be much more abundant and directly in control of the people if governments stopped...
Lots of people pat themselves on the back for (correctly) believing that climate change is real. Why is it so hard for people to also believe that regulatory capture and oligarchy are real, and directly responsible for the lack of action against climate change?
Think of all the for-profit power utility companies in the US. Why are they for-profit? For that matter, why are ISPs for-profit and not run as non-profits with heavy government assistance? Answer, basically: Because the existing people that make lots of money off them have been lobbying heavily to make it so. Similarly, it is no coincidence the current leadership in the US is actively against renewable energy.
A lot of the existing wealth, especially in North America and Europe was built on top of fossil fuels directly or indirectly (cars, power plants, industries, maintaining diplomatic relations with oil-rich nations). That dependence is hard to unwind and is going to take 50 years or more unless the US electorate can start electing people that believe in climate change. And for this reason, actually addressing climate change is going to come from unintuitive social actions, like making smaller housing more fashionable, moving to urban areas, possibly cracking down heavily on crime in those areas, and financially rewarding the use of public transport and bikes.
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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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