I'll be honest, this heatwave has been an eye opener for me. I've never been a climate skeptic, but I suppose I have been somewhat skeptical towards the more panicked claims regarding its impact.
As someone who lives in the south of England you become used to seeing green grass all year round. But this summer seeing all the greenery turn yellow and die over the span of a few weeks has been a much needed realisation that climate really matters. I guess I knew it before intellectually, but the idea that crops would fail from climate change just wasn't something that I had an understanding of instinctively. Now I do. It's terrifying how dead everything looks just from a few weeks of hot weather, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-62432844
This is precisely why climate change policy is so difficult to enact. Folks don’t understand the urgency until they experience it themselves, and by that point it’s gotten really bad.
There’s an analogy with tech debt or old software here somewhere.
I think it's with everything that doesn't have an immediate, graspable impact. Nobody would smoke if cigarettes killed you after a few months with a 50% chance. If they increase the likelihood of a stroke or other complications decades down the line, it's much easier to brush it off, tell yourself you're more of a Helmut Schmidt kind of person. Or just think it's a worthy tradeoff for the benefits you get from smoking today.
Same thing with child labor regarding smartphones, clothes, you name it. It's far away. If you had to buy it right at the factory at a counter where you could see the working conditions, it would have a vastly different impact on you.
And I'm not claiming to be smarter or superior to the average Joe here. This pattern strikes all the time, for everyone.
Smoking is probably a good analogy. In all ways. Because it took decades before we reduced the impact once we knew the dangers. And centuries before we even realized the dangers.
And smoking a cigarette won't kill you. Smoking one cigarette a day won't kill you. And most people who smoke don't actually get lung cancer.
But it all catches up with you. Smoking a cigarette a day for a decade is going to cause you to die earlier than if you hadn't. Smoking more, even earlier. Most is not all. Because most people who have lung cancer are smokers. And lung cancer isn't even the only thing. There's emphysema, heart disease, etc that's all related to smoking. And way more likely. But that's all aggregate.
Climate is a lot like that. It's nothing in isolation, it's everything in aggregate.
And even now that the dangers are widely and indisputably known we still have a hard time passing regulations to curtail the behavior because of addiction and entrenched profit motives.
So totally not a climate skeptic, but part of the reason for this is because models are often wrong, and the more complex the system, the more likely it is to be off I think.
So to be fair to humans, skepticism is often rational, in the sense that science of complex systems can be off.
The part I have not totally understood is that there are good reasons to be more energy efficient and ecologically sensitive even in the absence of climate change per se.
I think the thousands of scientists who have been studying this phenomenon for the last 40 years have a much better picture than just about every skeptic that has muddied the waters with their hasty rhetoric.
If anything scientists have been abundantly cautious with their messaging. Many predictions made in early IPCCC reports were in many cases too lenient. Feedback systems, impacts, and rate of warming have been happening on track or faster than reported. I suspect many knew but they didn’t want to be labelled as alarmists.
It is all about tangibility. That is why we install car reverse parking sensors. If people had glasses that see air pollution, they would revolt. If people had access to a very accurate live and high-res computer simulation of climate-change, or anything, they would take it more seriously. People are spoiled with regard to the level of accuracy and tangibility they require to be convinced.
What if every weather app showed, next to actual temperature, what the temperature is modelled to be if climate change had been avoided (kept CO2 ppm to 1950s levels, say)?
In a german podcast a guy once said: "You won't get them with melting Icebergs and Polarbears. They're too far away".
It's true, nobody* cares about icebergs and other things they've never seen before.
Just wait when the drought kicks in and more and more Problems arise. I hope then people start acting themselves instead of shouting into the social platform nirvana.
I feel like we need movies/media that helps things feel more real, personal, negative, close to home.
Not movies that _focus_ and sensationalize climate disasters like The Day After Tomorrow. But movies that exist in the near future where really visceral elements of how climate change played out 10-20 years exist as a backdrop to whatever story is being told (but feel grounded in reality).
e.g. water rationing, abandoned towns/cities, authoritarian responses to increased immigration/migration, food shortages, etc...
I'd say 'Don't Look Up', but on second thought, the venn diagram of climate change denialists and people who don't realize the movie's a satire about climate change is almost a circle.
Children of Men doesn't specify the cause for the infertility, I think? Only some handwavy "there were some chemicals", IIRC? At least I'm pretty certain it doesn't attribute anything to climate change.
Ya the original is a good example but that's probably still too apocalyptic, one can watch that and scoff saying "it'd never get that bad".
Stuff that's more focused on the immediate, painful changes but still in line of sight from our current reality. Children of Men did a pretty good job pulling some subtle "here's how society has changed for the worse" world building in (obviously all based on it's underlying premise that no more children are being born)
Of these, voting has the only real impact, because no action an individual can take (safe for suicide) can make their life carbon neutral. That needs policy.
I say "folks" as a 1:1 synonym for "people" and only recently became aware that some folks/people find this in some way derogatory. I think it's a regional thing.
I’ve pretty much been using “folks” as a gender neutral “guys” because I find “people” potentially problematic (some constructions like “you folks” or “you all” are pretty much always casual while “you people” can sound charged, etc). I think this is common? Haven’t heard of people taking offense to “folks” before.
Polar bears don't work on me, because the provided polar bear population numbers are higher than previous years!
The question for me, is why do people believe that there is a problem? Is it that you just have to state polar bears are in trouble? Does anyone check the claims of the climate alarmists?
You should take a look at Al Gore's film again, and see how well that has aged.
Climate alarmists need to answer the claim that they are just boys who cry wolf, imo.
I also apportion a fair amount of blame to the media.
There is a major 'boy who cried wolf' effect--because literally everything is maximally exaggerated and sensationalized to optimize engagement and revenue, people are numbed to the constant alarmism and there is no way to get through to them and convince them that this time the crisis is a real one that they can't afford to ignore.
Agree, and a big part of the problem is that Politicians will not be proactive and spend money for no apparent visible return. If they're wasting money they're unlikely to get re-elected. It's the same as asking IT accountants to invest in mirroring systems that appear never to fail - until they do...
Exactly. For a simple example, look at the criticism about Lithuania’s LNG terminal[1] a few years ago, built to reduce their dependency on Russian gas.
I think they are pretty happy about that terminal now.
I actually wonder if humans lack a crucial adaptive advantage if they do not intuitively understand how systems work. But then it occurs to me that some ancient philosophies and religions emphasised the need to be in tune with the surrounding world.
I think the more defective part of humans is our near complete inability for long-term thinking and planning, especially collective long-term thinking and planning. Just look at our daily lives and jobs. When are long-term plans every truly engaged and acted upon? Almost none. There is much too much self-induced noise in society and the economy, and there's a hyper-focus on short-term results and concerns.
I am thinking more of an automatic ability to see how things are related. Chinese language(s) ↔ Taoism, in the context of a holistic approach to worldview [0]. I know I am exaggerating, but maybe some meditative training could help in this regard?
How would understanding systems have been significantly adaptive for humans before a few thousand years ago? I agree with you that humans generally lack this capability. We also lack the ability to understand exponential growth, which I think is partially a cause of our lack of ability to comprehend systems.
My personal theory on this is that it comes from the fact that our sensory systems operate on a logarithmic response curve [0]. Note, for instance, how the decibel scale for measuring sound intensity is a logarithmic scale. Because our sensory systems respond logarithmically, that means an exponential increase in stimulus feels linear, at least until the point where the stimulus is damaging or so intense as to be uncomfortable. The end result is that we think "it's not so bad" until it's really bad.
I find your perspective interesting, but have the feeling that you are not thinking in systems (!). The sensory systems are perceptual systems, but they are subsystems of a larger "cognitive" system, and we cannot be sure that it exhibits the same logarithmic response behavior.
I live in the country, and a lot of farmers and even workers who have to commute would probably be hit quite hard by any spikes in fuel prices. We had already felt it when the prices were going up recently. It doesn't help that a lot of jobs that can be remote still aernt or still don't even give the option to be. We also aernt feasibly able to switch to electric at this point, as I can't tell you any nearby gas stations that allow for electric car charging.
Tax fossil fuels? When I fill my car with benzine at 2 euro/liter would you like to guess how much of that is taxes? Same for the gas heating in my apartment. And the electricity that powers my PC. The cost of the actual fuel or energy is only a fraction of the price I pay, the rest is taxes (plain old taxes, or taxes masquerading as operating / distribution costs).
I think this is the case for many of the catastrophic scenarios that a human/humans can face. Think about people smoking, or eating really really poorly, or driving drunk. And the worst thing is that in many cases people will revert to the old behavior provided they survive.
I sometimes wonder if we released civilisation game where climate change is a harsh unforgiving price for using coal and oil, would it change anything? Is it too late for such a product?
It's been a big feature in the later games. But it's been there since the start. Civ 1 had a simple mechanism where highly industrialized cities would create polluted tiles. You could clean up the polluted tiles with settlers. But if your settlers didn't clean it up quickly enough, there would be consequences. Plains tiles would turn into desert. Coastal tiles would turn into swamps.
And what storage mechanism are you imaging? People fail to realize that only ~300 GWh of batteries are produced each year, as compared to 60TWh daily electricity use (and about twice that much in terms of total energy use). Even attempt to install just one hour of storage capacity would require several times more storage than is produced globally.
Any serious attempt at producing grid storage would lead to shortages and increases in prices. This is why plans for a renewable grid assume that some heretofore unused storage mechanism - like hydrogen storage, compressed air, or giant flywheels - will make energy storage nearly free. Because existing storage mechanisms can't be produced at scale.
He's not. Zero emissions today, while impossible, would not remove gases from the atmosphere in a meaningful way, also something we cannot presently accomplish.
Past emissions will stay for centuries and increase heating globally for centuries to come.
All the reports stop at 2050 to 2100, but none of them have any sort of peak temperature in sight.
The extremes of today are only the very beginning.
A common trope is "this replacement (nuclear/wind/solar) isn't perfect so lets keep building fossil fuels"
Every 1kwh produced by a windmill is 1kwh less of oil being burnt. We don't exactly have an abundance of energy at the moment, there's no excuse not to be diverting vast amounts of planetary resources into renewable production.
I am certain that is the case for batteries. Recycling is always easier than digging up and processing the rocks which contain a few percent by weight of each relevant element, and they're already a net win (with regards to CO2) even if you do that.
We can do plenty to stop it getting worse (and in fact are).
There are also plenty of ways to take CO2 out of the air (several of which literally grow on trees, or are trees), the question for both organic and technological CO2 sequestration is economics.
For a sense of scale, human emissions are about 40 Gt CO2, global primary production is 104.9 Pg, so making the world about 10% more fertile would have the same effect as decarbonising the economy, or equivalently remove 1 year of existing excess carbon if we also decarbonised the economy: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%2840%20Gt%20%2F%20mass...
(10% is a lot, but not so much it would be crazy to consider).
> There are also plenty of ways to take CO2 out of the air (several of which literally grow on trees, or are trees), the question for both organic and technological CO2 sequestration is economics.
As you mentioned none of them are currently economical. You can't drive such a thing if it does not make sense financially.
And I will never respect your policy for you lack the self-awareness required to acknowledge its risks, and they are enormous, like stalin era population displacement high.
For me what was eye-opening was the amount of digging in and denial of it.
I thought with it literally right there in your face that the denialists would come to some sense. No instead we got, "you can tell you weren't around in 1976, it was worse then", which it wasn't and a basic check would clearly show that's a lie. "Oh the climate is always changing", not at this rate.
The usual 'snowflake' ad hominem attack thrown in too. I don't even understand what even is the point of this head in sand strategy.
> I don't even understand what even is the point of this head in sand strategy.
It varies.
A lot of the time when you see it happen, the other side isn't exactly being polite either. Its a battle of "snowflake" vs "moron". In those cases, theres much more at stake admitting your wrong, with much more permenance. You're essentially admitting that not only were your theories on climate change wrong, but that the oppositions view on you is correct, you are a moron. Neither side means this, of course, but thats how it ends up being.
In more polite arguments, denial could down to fear of change, fear of being wrong (essentially the same as the less polite argument, but with the loser thinking that of themselves), or perhaps even just simply not being convinced for whatever reason
I'd hardly call "if you're rude to people, they won't want to accept your arguments" a psychological analysis. I'm not even sure why it accomplishes nothing.
We will not survive if we wait to convince the unconvincable. We must take actions that will anger some. When it comes to climate change, the use of force is vitally necessary and wholly justified.
I was there in '76. In the UK. I was in school. I remember the water rationing, the half-days at school to conserve water, the longest and hottest summer in my memory. The past 20 years in Southern California have not dulled how blisteringly hot that summer of '76 was. And yet this year, I'm seeing numbers that would make my memories of '76 seem like a mild summer day.
I think it's because climate change is used as a formal issue disguising the actual desire of acquiring power. It's being used to legitimize power acquisition and force and is often full of things that won't actually make a difference.
Right, but the formal issue of solving climate change is wrapped in passion and other meaningless notions (boarding on religious) from the point of view of real actions that we can take that are practical and achievable under the actual conditions of society and the world.
Those are never put in front because that’s not the point. The entire point is to use an issue to acquire power and there’s no reason to believe that power will be used the way you think it will. Especially since it is never described precisely how the problem will be solved. Just “green energy”.
The real issue isn’t how we solve climate change. It’s who gets to control energy policy - tax credits and subsidies and those nice things. And who can mix in their pet issues whine they’re at it. Suddenly solving climate change becomes climate justice because it’s maybe a better formal issue to obtain power with. It’s still bullshit.
Look at the latest bill and it’s climate change parts. It essentially gives rich car owners a bigger refund on buying rich people cars. Go figure - the powerful have managed to serve their own interests and the plebs who put them there cheer them on.
I have yet to hear anybody actually describe what they propose to do to cool down the planet and (supposedly) make it sustainable. I have heard a lot of people insist that we need to raise taxes and redistribute wealth to social justice causes in the name of combatting climate change, though.
You haven't heard people say we should burn less fossil fuel, and use more solar, wind and nuclear energy? That people should have better insulated homes? That we should fly less and eat less meat? That we should plant more trees? That large corporations exploiting externalities should be better regulated?
If that's the case, you might want to read "sustainable energy without the hot air" [1] which is available free online. It's slightly dated with regards to the cost of solar panels, but a good introduction to the area IMHO.
> I have yet to hear anybody actually describe what they propose to do to cool down the planet and (supposedly) make it sustainable.
Plenty of people did just that. You can start with the IPCC reports. A lot of think tanks also published reports focused on specific countries. Not knowing is not an excuse, particularly when so much noise has been made on the subject and so much information is available.
> I have heard a lot of people insist that we need to raise taxes and redistribute wealth to social justice causes in the name of combatting climate change, though.
We (the rest of the world) by and large do not care about your culture wars. The fact that saving the goddamn climate we rely on is somehow controversial is maddening. You collectively sound like children arguing about who started and who’s the meanest.
> We (the rest of the world) by and large do not care about your culture wars. The fact that saving the goddamn climate we rely on is somehow controversial is maddening. You collectively sound like children arguing about who started and who’s the meanest.
Trust me, it gets annoying to a lot of us over here too.
I believe that you believe that we're in imminent danger of extinction. I'm still a bit skeptical, in part because of the number of people in actual power who say they believe same thing, but then propose to "fix it" by raising taxes and then not doing anything climate related with all that new tax revenue.
> I believe that you believe that we're in imminent danger of extinction.
I do not believe that. I believe that other species are at risk of extinction, or indeed extinct already, but I think we have enough of a technological and intellectual advantage to avoid extinction. Probably not casualties in the hundred of millions, though.
> I'm still a bit skeptical, in part because of the number of people in actual power who say they believe same thing, but then propose to "fix it" by raising taxes and then not doing anything climate related with all that new tax revenue.
“I am doubtful because politicians do not take it seriously” is not really sound. What your experience shows (rightly, in my opinion) is that a lot of politicians are opportunists with flexible principles, not that the situation is not serious.
We're in imminent danger not of extinction, but of our planet becoming a much less nice place to live, also with the upheaval (social unrest, migration, wars) that is likely to come with that.
> I'm still a bit skeptical, in part because of the number of people in actual power who say they believe same thing
And if Roosevelt sat around waiting for all the unconvinceable to be convinced, and didn't enact lendlease, maybe UK and USSR would have fallen and US would face the Axis alone.
Many Americans felt the same way about Hitler and Japan while the Holocaust was happening. It wasn't untill Perl harbour that the penny dropped.
Poor people are more affected by and less able to adapt to climate change.
Poor people increasing their wealth, are doing so by starting to burn fossil fuels. If you don't give an alternative, they're going to scale up their fossil fuel burning as fast as they can
Like so many large-scale processes, things change "slowly, then all at once" with the climate.
During the slow change, things aren't immediately obvious, but can be reversed easily.
Once the rate of change starts speeding up, it becomes pretty clear what's happening, but it's far more difficult to prevent the change to whatever future stable state the system winds up in.
Here in Germany we were used to pretty much "English" weather, especially in the middle regions where I grew up. A drought is something which happened once or twice in my youth. There was a bad one in 2003 and since 2015 we had a lot of too dry years, the ground never recovering from them, especially the years 2018 and 2019. As a consequence, many forests were damaged and fell to some bugs, so a lot of regions are deforested already.
This year I was in shock when in the quarter I am living in, about half of the trees already lost their leaves, looking like late October.
The bad thing is is that it’s too late. From this point forward it’s about adapting where we can.
This is the downside of climate change deniers and the inability of humans to recognize existential threats. Climate change and global warming was never about it just getting hot and that’s it. It is about extreme weather popping up more and more frequently.
In my location, we had a weird winter. The snowfall was above average but it only snowed on like three or four separate days. This summer has seen a heat wave and serious drought. When it rains, again only one like three days all summer, it’s for like 10 minutes. We actually just had a major storm, and it rained violently for about 5-10 minutes. That does little to get the ground soaked again. Even the ferns are dying, which are typically robust.
Too late for what exactly? Majority of climate scientists agree the situation is dire, but there are many actions that can be taken to reduce the short-term and long-term impact, via both adaptation and reducing carbon emissions.
When climate change was far away enough that we could have solved it with incremental changes, skeptics in the media mocked and denied it.
Now things have got bad enough that we would need more radical changes to keep to 1.5-2 degrees. But radical changes are just the kind of thing that swing voters don’t like, so we probably won’t do them.
I doubt we will come together and implement radical economic changes or geo-engineering solutions. More likely in my opinion is every country for itself, the rise of new, authoritarian governments and 3+ degrees of heating. I would take some kind of corporate tech bro dystopia.
>Majority of climate scientists agree the situation is dire, but there are many actions that can be taken to reduce the short-term and long-term impact, via both adaptation and reducing carbon emissions.
Am I the only one thinking that it reminds me of a bunch of priests in ancient time who claim to speak to the gods and tell us what we shall do?
I'm no climate denier but I hate how everything is framed to induce panic and fear.
Well, there were books and papers warning about the societal, emotional, economic, and environmental impacts of a technocratic society as far back as 50-100 years ago. Don't you think that a little fear and panic, at this point, are justified?
And aren't there enough religious people inducing fear and panic into society still today?
I once heard that you will not meet a more dejected and depressed person than a climate scientist. Imagine warning about things for literally decades or your entire life, being ignored the entire time, and only to be asked in the present "why didn't you warn us?!" or "what's going on?!".
Fear is justified because we honestly don't know about some of these things. Dynamic systems with bifurcations, chaotic behavior, and tipping points are difficult to understand even when they're laid out in front of you, much less when you're trying to figure out what the dynamic system is (in the case of the climate and environment, although we do know a lot). Does it even make sense to continually push the boundaries to see what we can get away with? Do humans realize that this Earth was not made for them and that there were times that humans could not be supported by the Earth's environment? In our daily lives, we stress certain behavior of planning and restraint, but we are incapable of doing so collectively.
Literally the simplest thing in the world to do is to restore lawns and grass areas with native plants (wildflowers, bushes, trees, etc.), and yet no one is doing it. In fact, we're still destroying habitat. And then people write articles like "where are the bees and butterflies?".
I believe earth will survive anyway, and if we die in the process so be it.
Either we find a way to be in harmony with Earth (not consuming more than what it can generate), or we die. Currently we are in a path where the majority of us are going to die, that is self regulation from Earth.
Restoring lawns with native plants is just like sacrificing your elder child to appease Gods, you thing it will help where in fact we just need to go back to the a sustainable equilibrium (which noone knows precisely).
Just to clarify, I don't believe it's too late to make changes, and I am trying to do my part. But it's too late for these changes to prevent what we're currently and about to go through. The climate and environment are massive, dynamic systems.
It's just dangerous. For example, native plants are absolutely imperative. There is very little movement for this. All of my neighbors are cutting down trees, replacing it with lawns that do nothing but sit there (and for this summer die or take on disproportionate amounts of water) and also plant non-native plants that also require a lot of water.
I planted native plants, but the new plantings are struggling due to the severe drought we are going through (with not much end in sight). It's clear that the native plants that are doing well are helping, because the pollinator activity is insane around them, but it's not enough. One household out of a thousand isn't going to help. This is the systematic nature of things that show this can't be solved by flipping a switch. We need drastic measures, and I just do not see us enacting solutions until things become very serious.
I think many underestimate just how short-term humans are. It's never too late until it is.
This is why I don't have faith in humans making serious change until after driving head-on into a wall. There have been countless documentaries, youtube videos, books, seminars, activist movements, government campaigns, grassroots campaigns, etc etc etc to educate people on how serious climate change is and why it's a big deal. But the average person, even the educated person, has an extremely difficult time taking things seriously unless (1) they personally take interest, or (2) shit hits the fan and they realize the risks were serious. If I weren't personally interested in the environment, I'd probably be just as ignorant. I don't think there are any _viable_ politically correct solutions to the issue, so we'll just have to wait and see how bad we let things get
This is a real problem; whereever there's an unowned resource, such as the atmosphere, there's a profit to be made by looting it or dumping externalities into it, and as long as people are profiting from this it's difficult to get them to care.
This includes pensioners, by the way, not just a narrow billionaire class. Almost everyone with a private pension ("401k" in US speak) is probably a beneficiary of this unless they've taken steps to avoid that.
This never made sense to me as an argument. Climate change is driven by transportation, electricity, and energy primarily. We burned fossil fuels because until recently there was no better alternatives. Sure, had we known in the 50s and 60s about the potential harms of ICEs we might have build out cities pretty differently and transportation would be a smaller slice but we'd still need electricity, heating, and industrial goods. Maybe we could have built more Nuclear and electrified more things, but Nuclear was in decline before the science on climate change shaped up.
Moreover, trying to drive quarterly earnings is what is now causing wind to displace coal.
They key term is 'externalization' and in this case a more interesting form called 'temporal externalization'. The idea is that in order to achieve short term financial gain the downsides are spread either in space (to the rest of current society or some faraway place) or in time (by moving the bill to the next generation).
Climate change is the posterchild for both of these. Other examples are pollution, resource depletion etc.
Of course, the heat records and the drought are worse in 2022 than either of those.
And grass turning yellow doesn't necessarily mean that it's dead. It can regrow from the roots when conditions improve. Assuming that the drought is not too long.
The 2003 heat wave claimed over 90,000 lives in Europe. It was nearly if not just as bad as this one. We didn’t then have quite the sensationalized global news apparatus that we do today, though
Germany is extremely likely to have the driest summer on record (the summer goes to end of August, but unless we have some pretty extreme rain in the next three weeks we are never going to catch up). The amount of rainfall is about half of 2003 and significantly lower compared to the second lowest which was 2019. So there really is not much presedence. Let's not even talk about the fact that all the extreme events have been in the last 20 years (and most in the last 10). We are past the point where we can say we can't blame single events on climate change. We are pretty much in the territory where all events now are.
2003 was nowhere near 2022. A lot of things were improved after 2003 to reduce the number of heat-related deaths so yeah, the toll could have been higher this year. But looking at aquifer levels and the effects on vegetation, it is much worse than it was 19 years ago, which was already quite bad. Also, 2022 is not over yet, and Southern Europe will still be very dry until September at least.
> We didn’t then have quite the sensationalized global news apparatus that we do today, though
That is not helpful. It was very widely reported in 2003. From Europe, I would not say that the coverage is more sentationalised than it was. I grant you that it was not as global as today, because Americans don’t care about what happens in non-America and it wasn’t a hot issue back then in American politics. But it was definitely seen as a catastrophe and it spurred a whole bunch of laws and regulations to help mitigate the consequences of such an event (not the likelihood of an event, because we’re lemmings with 5-minutes attention spans).
It may well be counterproductive to normalize drawing conclusions from singular events.
We don't know whether this particular drought is due to the human induced climate change. It's great if it will finally convince those who are in denial about climate change, but in some sense they are being convinced by what is likely to be a random event.
In other words: the fundamental issue is that there's a very large mass of people who are resistant to rational argument.
So the climate change proponents get "lucky" this time as they get a single but painful event in their life and they can go to deniers and say "do you see now how bad climate change is?" but this is a single event. For all we know, there may have been many similar ones 500 (or 1000) years ago before detailed meteorological records were kept.
What if this drought is followed by 5 subsequent years of completely normal weather? Would we want the deniers to start claiming everything is fine based on a handful of events?
> It may well be counterproductive to normalize drawing conclusions from singular events.
We are not doing that. But we have a lot of statistical data and measurements, which demonstrate a noticeable increases of both frequency and magnitude of these events.
> We don't know whether this particular drought is due to the human induced climate change.
This is the kind of arguments some people use when they want to muddy the waters. Because, sure, someone is going to say that it is caused by global warming and then someone else will say “gotcha, climate is statistics and an event cannot be attributed to a single cause”. So let’s not go that way again.
This event is unprecedented in recorded history in Western Europe. Whilst indeed no single event can be attributed to a single cause, again, we do have data showing that the trend follows exactly what was predicted by the models 30 to 20 years ago. This behaviour is completely inconsistent with the situation of our planet, which should otherwise be in a mild cooling cycle.
> So the climate change proponents get "lucky" this time as they get a single but painful event in their life and they can go to deniers and say "do you see now how bad climate change is?"
Nobody is lucky, certainly not the dead or those whose house went up in flames, or those boiling at home. This attitude is juvenile and unmoored from what actually happens in the real world.
> For all we know, there may have been many similar ones 500 (or 1000) years ago before detailed meteorological records were kept.
I don’t know why you lament people being generally irrational and then come back to this sort of arguments. Let me repeat: single freak events are not caused by a single cause, but we do have data, including concerning the last million of years. The things we see now, with rapid sea level rise, collapse of ecosystems, mass extinction, and regional cataclysms, are things we can see in the fossil record.
> What if this drought is followed by 5 subsequent years of completely normal weather? Would we want the deniers to start claiming everything is fine based on a handful of events?
Except that it is not the case. We keep accumulating heat records, and what used to be centennial droughts are not every 2 years. People already said that in 2003, and yet it keeps getting worse.
Overall, I am not sure why I spent so much time replying. You do not sound half as smart as you seem to think you are. I would encourage you to understand the subject a tiny bit before LARPing the intelligent adult in the room.
> You do not sound half as smart as you seem to think you are. I would encourage you to understand the subject a tiny bit before LARPing the intelligent adult in the room.
Thanks for the ad-hominem attacks. That always makes discussions more productive and people amenable to consider your arguments. I may not be half as smart as I think I am, you on the other hand are coming across as an angry, immature and rude person who can't respond in a civilized manner or assume a shred of good intent from their counterparty.
> We are not doing that. But we have a lot of statistical data and measurements, which demonstrate a noticeable increases of both frequency and magnitude of these events.
And yet this thread is full of people saying that finally with this draught, this specific event, climate change is undeniably here. Again, I'm not arguing against climate change. I know it's happening. I'm trying to say that approaching from this angle is an argument on tricky grounds and may backfire when confronting opponents.
> This event is unprecedented in recorded history in Western Europe. Whilst indeed no single event can be attributed to a single cause, again, we do have data showing that the trend follows exactly what was predicted by the models 30 to 20 years ago. This behaviour is completely inconsistent with the situation of our planet, which should otherwise be in a mild cooling cycle.
Nobody disagreed with this.
> Nobody is lucky, certainly not the dead or those whose house went up in flames, or those boiling at home. This attitude is juvenile and unmoored from what actually happens in the real world.
You know perfectly well I didn't mean it that way. Again assuming malice and producing a strawman.
> Except that it is not the case. We keep accumulating heat records, and what used to be centennial droughts are not every 2 years. People already said that in 2003, and yet it keeps getting worse.
You may be correct about everything you've said here, but I expect the tone is counterproductive.
If you're intent is to blow off some steam for your own sake, feel free to disregard. If you're intent is to make a difference, it seems likely that this kind of discourse moves the needle in the opposite direction you would presumably like for it to go.
> I would encourage you to understand the subject a tiny bit before LARPing the intelligent adult in the room.
I would encourage you to consider the impact of words like this before posting them. What was gained here? And what was lost?
Edit: It's like in a game of billiards. The people who win games are the ones that are precise. Each turn results in many of the balls being in a more beneficial position. Less skilled players slam the balls in the general direction of a pocket, and something might go in occasionally, but the overall table state is a mess turn to turn.
I was surprised by the downvotes I got for this, so I wanted to clarify my point.
If you have a cause that you are interested in, making a public statement about it will either help or hurt that cause, depending on how that statement is received by your audience.
Some people don't realize this, but being correct (or passionately believing you are correct) has little bearing on how your argument is perceived. You can be right, but if your delivery is abrasive, the world (assuming your cause is just) would have been better off if you just kept your mouth shut.
Statements like the one I originally replied to are (imo) examples of people being harmful to their own cause. Insulting, shaming, browbeating, etc, will rarely gain you any ground, and will likely actually galvanize people against you and your cause.
> You may be correct about everything you've said here, but I expect the tone is counterproductive.
I think you’re right. I realised after 5 minutes that it was the same tired tropes and mistakes again and the OP really sounded like bad faith by the end, and that no discussion is going to be productive anyway. Let’s be fair: all these points are very well documented for anyone interested in understanding them.
> I would encourage you to consider the impact of words like this before posting them. What was gained here? And what was lost?
You’re right again, but this bit was cathartic. It is difficult to stand the people who act like they are the reasonable ones when they use dodgy logic and faulty premises.
I'm not saying I agree with this but I think the point might be that what's happening now isn't completely out of the ordinary but we're being made to believe that it is.
What part of the south do you live? I'm in the south-east and I'd estimate most of the summers I've experienced the grass in our parks has turned yellow. It doesn't seem unusual at all to me. And by the way, just because the grass is yellow, does not mean it's dead. It usually recovers quickly as soon as we get rain.
It was pretty much like this in 1976 (yes, I'm that old). We've had localised droughts too. 2003 sticks in my mind - Faversham held the record for just under 100F, and the London Jubilee line had everyone clustered round the windows, and no-one holding the rails as they were too hot (the trains stand outside at the depot near West Ham). My part of the world had lots of crispy grass, burning fields, and dried up streams and ponds, pretty much like now.
I suppose this is probably the second significant drought I've experienced in SE England. It's something like 3 months of sunshine and no rain. Given our summers are usually wet and mild, careful what you wish for...
According to Wikipedia, the peak temperature I'm England in 1976 was 35.9C. In 2022 it was 40.3C. Maybe it was as dry in 1976, but 2022 has been hotter.
Living in Seattle with a similar always green weather. It was quite scary when we had our big heatwave last year and a lot of the plants around my house died even if I watered them.
The scary part was reading about the damage done to the croplands East of the Cascades. At some point the global trade system will fail due to insufficient supply. It's going to get rather ugly.
But this summer seeing all the greenery turn yellow and die
I know it's probably just a matter of speaking since you use 'all' while you're likely well aware it's not really 'all', but with respect to the dying: a lot of these plants aren't dead yet.
In case of grasses the root system is still ok, similar for roots and part of the stem for herbs/trees. It works like a first aid in coping with drought: get rid of the stuff which evaporates the little water which is still there, so that by the time water is available again it might not too late to recover.
Actually depending on the plant there are even earlier stages of such mechanisms; for example the leafs of some plants have a pale, almost white, underside and when drought kicks in the'll turn there leaves upside down to reflect more light and absorb less heat.
As someone who moved to the area (Ireland, admittedly, not UK, but similar climate) it drives me fucking crazy to see people who have spent an entire lifetime not considering that the sun isn't always your friend.
"Historic heatwave incoming :-D 8-) break out the ice cream!"
It's weird. The hosepipe ban has literally only just happened, and for a while they used to be almost yearly. I've definitely seen the park grass go this colour before - it certainly isn't the first time.
I'm not disagreeing it's hot, and it's much more consistently hot than I remember from previous summers. However the GP suggests impact is noticeably different to usual, and i'm not sure that resonates so well.
I wonder if we're better at conserving the water we have (more reservoirs, less leaks, etc.), which avoided those frequent hosepipe bans. Until now that is.
Doesn't the UK have sprinklers in front of major places like Parliament Square, Royal Naval College or even in Golf Courses. Here in the US, we are building new golf courses in the desert (Utah, Nevada) and use either ground water or the Colorado river even though their level has been falling.
The UK gets enough rain that grass generally grows on its own - so you only need a sprinkler system during periods of drought. And periods of drought generally come with hosepipe bans, which means you can't run the sprinkler anyway.
Most venues choose to show 'leadership' and 'solidarity' by following any hosepipe bans, rather than trying to get an exception.
Sprinklers are used occasionally though - for example, establishing newly seeded grass. Golf courses might use them on the putting greens, but rarely on the fairways.
The third picture of the set shows the greens but not fairways.
> A view of the greens and fairways on a golf course near New Romney in Kent on 5 August, as parched parts of England face a hosepipe ban ahead of another predicted heatwave. Months of little rainfall, combined with record-breaking temperatures in July, have left rivers at exceptionally low levels, depleted reservoirs and dried out soil
What is terrifying to me is that I have been sharing this planet with people who are not willing to change anything to their mode of life and won't even vote for parties that actually care and want to do something about the issue. Because those are also the parties that are for a better redistribution and allocation of resources. And I know the rich would rather rant all day long in their newspaper mouthpieces about communist dictatorship rather than being taxed/renouncing to take the plane for all their trips. The idea that I am going to die by starvation because someone liked to play golf and prefers driving around in an air conditioned metal boxes in concerete and tar hell is killing me.
I have know about climate change since I was a teenager some twenty years ago. How some people may not have had the memo about impending doom is beyond me.
> their mode of life and won't even vote for parties that actually care and want to do something about the issue.
The other issue is that boomer-style green parties in the EU are completely counterproductive as far as limiting CO2 emissions. Both EELV in France and the greens in Germany are responsible for raising our electrical carbon emissions from closing nuclear plants, when we have no practical solutions for using solar/wind with storage today (it’s fairly obvious to me now that I live in California, where the sun shines almost all the time). I really hope some of them are secretly paid by the oil industry because that’s basically what they have caused us to do, burn more oil and gas.
While you can indeed make an argument about shutting down nuclear power plants while there are coal power plants in operations, the green party was part of the government which targetted the mid-20ies for an end of nuclear energy in Germany - many power plants would have had to be shut down of age anyway. But they also set energy politics onto a trajectory which would have meant to mostly run on renewables by now. It was the Merkel government which first prolonged nuclear power plant run times and then cut it down quicker than the initial plans after Fukushima. All of that could be rationally argued, but not that they mostly killed the deployment of renewables. If they had pushed that properly, we still would be fine. Still, Germany managed to get to 50% renewables in the electricity mix. But indeed, we now have to push hard to take up speed of deployment and fortunately we have now the greens in power to push for that.
> they also set energy politics onto a trajectory which would have meant to mostly run on renewables by now
The idea that we can run not just our current demand on “renewables”, but peak demand after electrifying everything from cars to stovetops, was and remains an absolute fantasy.
No, absolutely not, it is entirely doable. By the way: stovetops are already almost exclusively electric in Germany, and electrifying all cars would mean about 10% more electricity consumption. Doing so would add about 2 TWh of storage capacity in the cars alone, which would be very helpful for the grid.
No, it’s clearly not, and we’ve wasted decades chasing the utopian impossibility of energy with zero-downside — all while continuing to dump pollution into the atmosphere.
> electrifying all cars would mean about 10% more electricity consumption
Not at peak load.
> Doing so would add about 2 TWh of storage capacity in the cars alone, which would be very helpful for the grid.
Come again?
You want people to donate the limited lifecycle of their very expensive car batteries to provide inefficient backup power to the grid?
This is why the OP said greens hold significant responsibility for the mess we’re in. This kind of magical thinking has been a gift to the fossil fuel industry.
I don't know what you mean by "peak load", but it is 10% more electricity consumed. Electric cars rather help than load the grid, as their charging can be easily controlled to help balance the grid.
And yes, a small part of the battery capacity won't be "donated" but rather rented to the grid in exchange for much lower prices. VW is about to roll out a corresponding project, owners can expect much cheaper charging up to even free charging.
And no it isn't the Greens who are feeding the fossil fuel industry but those who hold back renewables and the electrification of transportation.
> Still, Germany managed to get to 50% renewables in the electricity mix. But indeed, we now have to push hard to take up speed of deployment and fortunately we have now the greens in power to push for that.
I live in California, we have 59% renewables. The last 31% is exponentially harder as you actually need electricity sources that are reliable. Nuclear is reliable / suitable for base loads, wind/solar aren't. There are zero grid that use solar/wind as base load today.
I am pretty sure both EELV or the FI, if they were in power would actually not target Nuclear (even though they say they would) but would probably just stop investing in it (which may be a problem). No head of state is going to shoot itself in the foot by removing such a profitable energy whose costs have already been paid for. I think it's just signalling on their part. The alternative are the rich people parties (I count the far right in, even though they pretend they work for the people when they are effectively in power they attack workers rights among other nasty things) that absolutely won't shake any preestablished interests status quo.
> No head of state is going to shoot itself in the foot by removing such a profitable energy whose costs have already been paid for.
Both the French and German governments did just that in the last 10 years. The Belgian one as well, though they seem to have second thoughts now, it’s just a shame that it is not a decision you can reverse.
> I think it's just signalling on their part.
I don’t think so. Besides, it is a very dangerous idea to rely on. There are several examples in the world in the last 5 years or so of governments implementing absolutely stupid policies for ideological reasons. That’s how one end up with Trump or Brexit, and later whine that one did not know that they were going to do what they told they’d do.
Often, it turns out that the face-eating leopards actually do eat faces.
Part of the problem, likely a major part, is the first world has to go and stop the emerging world from emerging like they did. Europeans who clear-cut europe to industrialize into a first world society are having to go tell Brazilians "You must stop cutting down the Amazon!", preventing them from industrializing.
Basically: Rich people telling poor people that they cannot do the things that make people rich.
Part of the Kyoto Treaty did exactly this. Seems to have been a bit of a mess for various reasons, China and USA opted out, the money from EU got diverted by a recession.
I think overall, carbon fees and getting tech to cost parity via local subsidies, then ensuring corporations/kleptocrats don't conspire in developing nations may work better.
Correct. Because to do so threatens humanity and many other species. The solution then is to share the existing wealth and build better rather than go hands off, right?
We can simultaneously support development without killing all future generations.
I agree with you so much. Britain was basically stripped clear of wood and concerted recovery only began after WW2 because at some point there was a serious risk that there won't be any timber supply.
Those parties you mention are often just as unserious as our current crop of "leaders", which can be seen from the lack of support for nuclear and the lack of acknowledgement that to complete the green transition we need MORE fossil fuels in the short term, not less. What do they think is going to power the factories/infrastructure that make all the solar/wind/battery/nuclear stuff at the scales required? Where do they think plastic comes from?
We also need a lot more mining. We need more lithium, more cobalt, more copper, more aluminum, among others. It's not a matter of "just pay for it", the material inputs for a GLOBAL green transition do not presently exist at any price without more mining. But mines are environmentally damaging and require fossil fuels to get started, so those same parties often ignore the need. Hell the good people of Maine recently voted down a measure to import clean hydroelectric power from Quebec because they didn't want to destroy a small stretch of forest to build the transmission lines. That bullshit FernGully flavor of environmentalism has to go extinct
If we're going to be serious about de-carbonizing the economy, then we need to purge the various environmental factions of their nature-worshiping ideologies and focus on the dry, economic, technological, sometimes nuclear, localized-nature-destroying methods that will actually do it.
Not that i have any faith in political parties, but i disagree with your analysis entirely. Green capitalism is not gonna get us out of this dire situation. For the reasons you point out, techno-utopist solutionism is actually making the situation a lot worse (extraction/refinement of more minerals, more overall industrial activity to achieve the transition, extra hardware we don't know how to recycle).
The more we try to make it look like industrial society can be green, the more everyone is going to consume and that's not sustainable in the long run. We need actual degrowth now, if not yesterday. And i'm not saying we global northerners should moralize countries like Brazil or India about their industrial practices: no, we need to develop our own self-sustenance for food, housing, and medicine in the here and now... and stop pillaging/exploiting the 3rd world as our industrial backyard where all chemical atrocious pollution is permitted.
Nuclear is part of the tech pipe dream that the oligarchy is promising us, of an ever abundance of free/clean energy. But the reality on the ground, from mining sites to storage facilities, looks very different. And who cares where your electricity comes from if even the most mundane devices come with electronics and batteries? Can't i buy a fucking car without having at least a 100 micro-controllers inside?!
If you want to save the environment, make it a criminal offense to sell a product without having at least minimum 50y warranty/service. That's how you change things: the planet doesn't care if your energy has more or less carbon if you keep on producing disposable phones that's gonna be broken/obsolete two years from now. We have to stop this madness. The same goes with the housing industry and many other industries, believe it or not: the Romans and the Aztecs built low-tech structures that will outlive us all, and multi-billion dollars corporations can't even build stuff that stays in decent shape for more than 10 years (or rather, they won't for financial reasons).
So fine, be angry all you want at people like me who promote actual environmentalism. Maybe we're too much "nature-worshipping" to be heard by the psychopaths in power who already ruined everything. I personally have zero faith in the system and structures that have taken us so far, and have made sure that every attempt to diverge from the worst possible timeline has been sabotaged. I come from France, where the Rainbow Warrior was sunk by secret services, and the COP21 mass demonstrations were all canceled using the indecent pretext of so-called "terrorist" attacks and State of Emergency... The people in power will never help us save the planet: we have to make them.
> Nuclear is part of the tech pipe dream that the oligarchy is promising us, of an ever abundance of free/clean energy. But the reality on the ground, from mining sites to storage facilities, looks very different.
This could not be further from the truth. Nuclear power has the lowest rate of deaths per unit of energy. Uranium mining does have environmental impact, but it's so energy dense that very little of it has to be mined.
If "actual environmentalism" means rejecting industrialized society then we're doomed. The Romans built a stable society, sure. But it was a society with a huge portion of enslaved people, and little opportunity outside of the elite. If I have to choose between climate change and reverting to an agrarian preindustrial society I'll pick climate change without hesitation.
Degrowth? Luddite movements have a pretty abysmal history, mostly because they tend to produce comparatively awful living conditions for those who follow them. Those low-tech structures you prize consumed a lot of forests to heat, all with low energy density, high carbon-emission, high cost of labor wood. Never mind all the other downsides of pre-industrial society.
I agree we should refocus the economy on more durable goods and housing, that's part of the solution. I'm not sure where your criticism of Nuclear is coming from though. It has the smallest mining footprint, all the nuclear waste dumps in the world could fit in an incredibly small area compared to waste products from other power sources. Small modular reactor designs basically solve the waste issue by being self-contained for their entire lifetimes.
Nuclear is also incredibly safe statistically speaking, and produces no pollution in its power generation.
Your last paragraph is telling as well. For those who think like you there's a social-revolution element to combating climate change. You see things as "already ruined", and have declared the "psychopaths in power" the absolute enemy standing in the way of "saving the planet". So you have all the resentful psychological license you need to burn the house down, with the rest of us in it, just to stick it to the psychopaths, and that's your primary objective.
I'd rather save the house, with everyone. I'd like the psychopaths gone as much as anyone, but if you think de-industrializing will get rid of them, you haven't read much history.
> the idea that crops would fail from climate change
There was a massive drought in England about 10 years back, where farmers had to change the types of crops back then to accommodate for the drought, which was then proceeded by a large flooding. Why would say this time is different from 2012? Especially given that there had been talks (and sometimes actual) hosepipe ban every single year since.
Great, I am not talking about France though, I am talking about England. Unless England now is part of France, which last time I checked, is definitely not the case!
The hosepipe ban aspect comes from catastrophic failure to build more resivoirs for the last 40 years. A couple coming online "soon" - same with energy. We wanted to build more nuclear but the NIMBYs killed it
As someone who lives in the south of England you become used to seeing green grass all year round. But this summer seeing all the greenery turn yellow and die over the span of a few weeks has been a much needed realisation that climate really matters. I guess I knew it before intellectually, but the idea that crops would fail from climate change just wasn't something that I had an understanding of instinctively. Now I do. It's terrifying how dead everything looks just from a few weeks of hot weather, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-62432844