Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

xpost but it's up to people to force their governments to act.

what i'm dreading even more than the world that we'll have to live in for the rest of our lives - where the new normal is weeks on end of 100+ degrees, droughts, Katrinas, oceanic foodchains ruined by acidification, climate refugees struggling to move to the remaining pockets of the world where agriculture isn't wrecked - is the geoengineering "solutions" that will inevitably arise. it's so obvious that that's where we're headed. and no doubt, geoengineering efforts will probably be pushed by exxon-mobil and the like.

what is the true percentage of people in the US that believe god is protecting us though? I feel that there are many who just don't want to admit the truth because it is terrifying, or are just susceptible to listening to whichever account of events is least traumatizing. I figure it's quite a minority who really believe that God Himself will prevent any ecological disaster, even if a majority of Americans identify as religious.

xxpost

like most Americans are religious, but not thaaaaat religious, right? I mean most people just like to say they believe in god and attend church once in a while. right guys??

now I think I'm fooling myself maybe

i need a drink after reading this

I get the impression that it works on a lower/earlier level, like as long as there's FUD about climate change, people can react to it as "one story is this, and one story is that, but God would not put us in the situation where Story 1 happens so it must be Story 2"

I am curious what the thinking inside China is - I oddly expect more of them than the US, partly because I don't associate them with "Oh God won't let that happen".

also because their leadership would actually have the ability to unilaterally "force" action on the issue. don't know if they'd actually do it, but at least it's possible.

there was a nyer stat about 26% (iirc) of americans defining themselves as evangelicals, recently (xxxp)

hey Z S, sorry to use you as a lazy wikipedia substitute, BUT, is it correct that the limited action that was taken by governments after the discovery of the hole in the o-zone layer was actually effective? that stat always seemed slightly reassuring to me, because i couldn't believe that anyone did a lot, but the idea that some modest action was effective seemed promising.

these are some of the people in power in the united states. just so we are clear:

In 2009, for the first time, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce surpassed both the Republican and Democratic National Committees on political spending; the following year, more than 90 percent of the Chamber's cash went to GOP candidates, many of whom deny the existence of global warming. Not long ago, the Chamber even filed a brief with the EPA urging the agency not to regulate carbon – should the world's scientists turn out to be right and the planet heats up, the Chamber advised, "populations can acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of behavioral, physiological and technological adaptations." As radical goes, demanding that we change our physiology seems right up there.

U.S. Chamber of Commerce is horrible for many reasons, not least of which is that they fool people into thinking they're an actual gov't agency!

Not long ago, the Chamber even filed a brief with the EPA urging the agency not to regulate carbon – should the world's scientists turn out to be right and the planet heats up, the Chamber advised, "populations can acclimatize to warmer climates via a range of behavioral, physiological and technological adaptations." As radical goes, demanding that we change our physiology seems right up there.

as cynical as i am about the intelligence of our conservative political leaders, i think that many of them really do understand the implications of climate change. as time goes on and denying climate change becomes more and more absurd - think about the first warnings about cigarettes and cancer in the late 50s, the loooooooong conservative battle against those scientists who were trying to save lives, and then the gradual, quiet acceptance of the facts in the following decades - the rhetoric will quickly shift to geoengineering "solutions", since by then it will be too late to actually effectively mitigate climate change by reducing CO2 emissions. hell, it's probably already too late NOW, when you take into account tipping points/feedback loops. anyway, they'll be happy to move straight to geoengineering, because that's a pro-business attitude that doesn't involve changing your own lifestyle.

http://adsoftheworld.com/files/sony.start_.new_.tunnel20.jpg

wait did ned just say that he made his peace with the destruction of the planet via an australian college rock band from the 80's?

sounds about right

You gotta start somewhere.

hey Z S, sorry to use you as a lazy wikipedia substitute, BUT, is it correct that the limited action that was taken by governments after the discovery of the hole in the o-zone layer was actually effective? that stat always seemed slightly reassuring to me, because i couldn't believe that anyone did a lot, but the idea that some modest action was effective seemed promising.

yes, the actions taken were relatively effective! but the experience is - cue negative nancy alert - unfortunately not very applicable to the problem of climate change. ozone depletion is primarily caused by the use of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). Banning the use of CFCs in things like spray cans and refrigerators was relatively easy to accomplish, since there are chemical substitutes that could be used at a similar cost. and it was regulation that could be implemented quickly, from the top down, on industry.

climate change, on the other hand, is driven by the emission of greenhouse gases, primarily from burning coal and using oil. but the key is that the infrastructure required to deliver energy and car-centered transportation to the people is enormous. you can't change it overnight, and you can't do it in a way that consumers barely notice (like phasing out CFCs in spray cans). there are cleaner substitutes for coal and oil, of course, but the substitutes tend to be more expensive and will take a long time to replace to replace the existing infrastructure.

and also, there's just the sheer usefulness of fossil fuels. think about what a gallon of gasoline provides for you - it enables a weak, feeble human being to move a one ton automobile for 30 miles or so! imagine pushing that car! all from a gallon of fossilized ancient dead organisms! it's seriously amazing. and so incredibly cheap. $3 for access to superhuman powers. it's like playing videogames on god mode. people in underdeveloped countries understandably want access to oil and coal. again, all of this in contrast to CFCs, which could be eliminated without negatively impacting the prospects of a better life for anyone else.

xpost -- Said album was more of a vehicle and a lens, in that it builds up to a pretty harrowing ending. I don't know whether it matched my mood or enabled it, but I find it pretty inextricable in reflecting back, and anytime I encounter stories or concerns like this it's part of the soundtrack in my head.

If global warming is real, then why is it cold in winter? Huh? Fuck you, science.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4MCRrsmzYU

The first six months of 2012 were the hottest on record. Deke Arndt, chief of the climate monitoring branch of NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, takes a look at record warm temperatures across the county and the world and their connections to global warming.

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/bl/2012/jul/11/weather/

The 'Dark Knight' shootings are terrifying and ppl will rightly be appalled by them but somehow climate change lacks the immediacy that would rightly make it that much more terrifying.

it's because what's predicted to happen has never happened before in human memory and so people just ignore it.

if you can scarcely conceptualize a threat then it's hard to motivate yourself to give up deeply ingrained habits and privileges to stop it.

i do wonder what sort of world the rest of my life will be spent in. will my neighbors and myself experience widespread privation? or will life in america just become marginally more difficult, with our wealth and technology insulating ourselves from the worst of it? will my diet change thanks to rolling food shortages? will we all simply die of malnutrition in 40 years?

3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe.

he sorta blows his math cred in the second sentence. that number is almost zero.

odds are expressed as a fraction of 1 iirc

agree. the odds are small, not large. an editor should have picked that up.

Dodgy formatting imo, should it be 3.7 x 10^99:1? Or 3.7 x 10:99? Or what?

more proof that this is all a hoax

Sorry, I've got my stupid head on and didn't read the sentence properly. Yes, it makes no sense as he has written it.

it makes sense it's just inaccurate. he shd've used odds against if he wanted to draw the stars comparison.

i mean, i knew what he meant, so it makes sense, and i squinted at the -99 index when i read it

so the warming deniers all think that its the sun's fault. the culprit is the sun. because the sun is in a warming cycle. who knows? maybe it is. kind of bad timing what with us also destroying the planet with carbon emissions.

it isn't.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/solar-activity-sunspots-global-warming-intermediate.htm

and in fact, over the last 30 years, forcing from the sun has actually shown a slight cooling trend, while global temperatures have steadily risen. global temperature used to be pretty correlated with the sun (for obvious reasons), until the latter part of the 20th century when the greenhouse effect really started to take hold. in other words, if there was no greenhouse effect, global temperatures would most likely have cooled slightly over the last 30 years.

http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/Solar_vs_Temp_basic.gif

btw scott, and others who are interested, that website (skepticalscience.com) is a GREAT resource. it lists common arguments that people use (it's the sun, you can't rely on computer models, global warming will be good for people, etc) and then summarizes the science on the topic, organized by basic, intermediate and advanced levels of knowledge about the climate.

th eearth has a fever baby, and the cure is no mor ehumans!

ugh, why do i read through the comment section? why do i do this to myself? i tell myself that it's an opportunity to get a better sense of what people who don't really follow the issue closely actually think (at least if you can filter out the wingnuts), but even that is so frustrating. the very first one i see is:

well where I live its been a very mild summer, so dunno. The 3000 ish records broken sounds good, but out of how many reporting temerature change? How many reported record lows? to little info, to many ways the stats can be fudged.

i want to shake this person and say It doesn't matter what the temperature is where you live! it's global warming, not your town warming, and it's climate change, not weather change. and the record highs are piling up at a rate far exceeding the record lows:

http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2009/images/temps_2med.jpg

or

http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/record-high-chart.jpg

or

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Wtz1uv3h7Ic/T2OLxtVncpI/AAAAAAAACrI/0H_mhLuIcaw/s1600/temp.records.031512.jpg

this whole thing seems like a tragedy in the strict sense, in that our collective failure to respond with sufficient speed to global warming is founded on some very basic cognitive biases that are very difficult to overcome.

speaking of which, training in interpreting statistics should be central to junior-high and high-school curricula.

or hell, elementary school curricula. as you learn math, you should also learn how it is applied, how it is represented in discourse, and how it can be manipulated/misused.

xpost
yeah, it's pretty much classic game theory here. on an individual level, everyone has an incentive to pollute and/or to not care, since the effect of one person living a zero-impact lifestyle really makes no difference on a global level, and it's less stressful to just continue living the way you want to, without any concern for the future. and on a industrial level, presently, it's cheaper and more profitable to use fossil fuels rather than clean energy alternatives (although that's quickly changing with some technologies). everyone has the incentive to create the worst possible outcome on a global level.

and of course, the traditional answer to that game theory dilemma is that policy/government must step in and shift the incentives. but politicians are playing their own terrible game, with the same terrible incentives.

no one gets votes for helping to prevent an amorphous future catastrophe.

i've been saying we need to tax CO2 emmissions for years, but yeah it's probably not going to happen

as a somewhat patriotic American it does upset me to see all this technology coming out of places like Germany and Denmark when I know that we have the intelligence and will and power to create a new economic and industrial revolution by dumping billions of bucks into renewable energy

Power definitely, intelligence possibly, will are you fucking kidding me?

or at least, we had the will; in the past when America's really wanted to get things done, it happens quickly, we need that wartime mentality back

there were some minor environmental things that were pushed through (minor enough that I can't remember what they are) under GWB's regime, if that's what you mean.

well where I live its been a very mild summer, so dunno. The 3000 ish records broken sounds good, but out of how many reporting temerature change? How many reported record lows? to little info, to many ways the stats can be fudged.

How does one even begin to reason with this sort of person? Even if you get them outside of "where they live" you still have to explain exponential change and other basic concepts to which they'll reply "to many ways the stats can be fudged".

yeah, it's a fool's errand. i used to respond to stuff like that all over the internet, and i don't think i ever succeeded in changing anyone's mind.

we have all the technology we need, frogbs. it's not about technology anymore, it's about manipulating the market to stave off disaster.

dipping back into the comments.

For everyone out there preaching denial and skepticism, it's because of you the planetary systems that have supported our civilization are crumbling, and you deserve any suffering that pursues. Unfortunately the millions of innocent bystanders - all the other living species that you share this world with will also suffer for your imbecility. May you rot in Hell eternally for your ignorance.

well, that's one way NOT to respond, i guess,

I just hope The Singularity occurs first and we merge painlessly into the computronium continuum.

We got up to 150 mm (6 inches) of rain on Sunday afernoon here in Montreal. Lots of basements flooded, the sewer system here just isn't built for that kind of rain, which used to be a once a generation type of thing but has now happened twice in less than a year.

It was definitely raining heavily in my part of Brooklyn but it didn't go on for that long??? I saw the flood warnings and hilarious video of the 23rd St train station (not hilarious, actually really dangerous) but it's hard for me to understand that getting 1 inch of rain caused so much chaos. The Montreal situation sounds insane.

https://www.wired.com/story/the-first-planned-migration-of-an-entire-country-is-underway/

(https://archive.ph/4Jh25)

Yup posted on another climate change thread...horrible.

ah sorry I see that now. but yeah a devastating development. I suppose it's good to see they're not being left to fend for themselves, but Tuvalu is one of the lowest-population nations

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/27/greece-enlists-help-from-european-allies-to-tackle-raging-wildfires

16k+ additional deaths in Europe this summer due to global heating

https://www.euronews.com/green/2025/09/17/silent-killer-climate-change-led-to-16500-more-heat-deaths-in-europe-this-summer-study-say

Mosquitos appear in Iceland for the first time
https://www.npr.org/2025/10/22/nx-s1-5582748/iceland-mosquitoes-first-time

rude

Mount Rainier Has Shrunk, and Its Summit Location Has Changed

The results were troubling, to put it mildly. In 1956, Mt. Rainier measured 4,392.2m (14,410′) at its highest point, Columbia Crest. As of 2007, however, Columbia Crest is no longer the summit of Rainier. That honor now goes to a 4,389m (14,399.6′) rocky outcrop about a football field away. Columbia Crest, meanwhile, continues to melt, measuring only 4,385.8m (14,390′) at the time of the study.

Struck by the role of climate (among other factors) in reducing population.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v47/n20/pablo-scheffer/among-the-rabble

Demography is a particularly murky corner of early medieval history, but we know that between 500 and 1000 there was a trend of population decline and deurbanisation, the result of a degrading climate (the cold, arid period between the volcanic winter of 536 and 660 is sometimes called the Late Antique Little Ice Age), continuous warfare and a series of plague epidemics. New research suggests a connection between the harsher conditions and outbreaks of disease, as plague swept through communities already buckling under the pressure of food shortages and social crisis.

Read this postmortem on the IRA too.

https://newrepublic.com/article/202755/inflation-reduction-act-biden-biggest-policy-death

People care much less about what generates their electricity than how much that electricity costs; decarbonization is not a winning message.

i was surprised to read this in tnr

isn’t the reason that IRA didn’t survive just that it was passed under reconciliation so republicans could kill it with 50 votes? is there anything more to it than that?

A rare instance of an *indoor* sporting event getting postponed due to climate change:

https://chicago.suntimes.com/bulls/2026/01/08/bulls-heat-postponed-due-to-condensation-on-the-court

People care much less about what generates their electricity than how much that electricity costs; decarbonization is not a winning message.

i was surprised to read this in tnr

The first half of that sentence, before the semi-colon, is objectively correct if you understand "people" as a generality meaning "most people today". And because winning elections is a matter of attracting the most people to your position, the second half of the sentence is defensible when you put it into that framework.

The problem with that thinking is obvious. Decarbonization becomes a winning message as soon as you connect it to ideas that are attractive and disconnect it from ideas that are unattractive. It isn't rocket science. Cap electricity costs for consumers as part of the deal and you immediately neutralize the reason why 'decarbonization is not a winning message'. Just take the cost to individuals off the table.

You sound decarbonized.

commandeering venezuela's oil reserves will fix things ;)

Well it sure seems Chomsky was right about one thing. The GOP is pure evil and a legitimate serious threat to civilization at this point.

I don’t take much US legacy media “liberal” or otherwise seriously so this nonsense coming from TNR isn’t a big surprise. The whole decarbonization issue is just a red herring as long as we aren’t willing to address how the ultra rich are by far the worst culprits here and the simple solution to much of the issue is obviously just to tax them into oblivion. Return some of the dough to working people as a “green dividend” if you need to frame it in a populist way.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/10/world-richest-used-fair-share-emissions-2026-oxfam

the thing you have to keep in mind is that the wealthiest 1% and esp the wealthiest 0.1%, are 100% better and esp in some cases 1000+% better than us, and deserve it

i know this is out of character for this thread, but wanna read something really depressing!!??!?!

read the reviews:

http://greatnonprofits.org/org/heartland-institute

― Karl Malone, Friday, December 9, 2016 1:55 PM (nine years ago) bookmarkflaglink

(for those unfamiliar with heartland institute:

https://www.desmogblog.com/heartland-institute
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/feb/15/leak-exposes-heartland-institute-climate
https://www.listoftheworldfuckingpeopleintheentireworld.net/no1heartlandinstitute)

― Karl Malone, Friday, December 9, 2016 1:58 PM (nine years ago) bookmarkflaglink

9 years pass...

Climate change is a hoax perpetrated by “leftist politicians.” Fossil fuels are the greenest energy sources. More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will be harmless.

These were some of the false claims made at a conference on Wednesday held by groups that reject the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change. What might have seemed like a fringe event in years past this time boasted a prominent keynote speaker: Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and one of President Trump’s possible choices for the next attorney general.

“We aren’t just following blind obedience to whatever the dire, doom-and-gloom prediction of the day is,” Mr. Zeldin said at the conference, which drew around 220 attendees to the basement ballroom of a hotel in downtown Washington.

“We won’t sign up for the script that the world is imminently about to end,” Mr. Zeldin added, drawing applause from the crowd, which had given him a standing ovation before his speech.

...The conference on Wednesday brought together people with varying levels of skepticism of the scientific consensus. Some attendees flatly denied that the planet was warming, while others recognized the trend but argued that it was not an emergency and that the potential solutions were too costly.

The event was organized by the Heartland Institute, a research organization that says it promotes free-market solutions and that has attacked mainstream climate science for decades. Other sponsors included the CO2 Coalition, a nonprofit group that claims falsely that planet-warming carbon dioxide is beneficial to humans.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/09/climate/climate-change-deniers-trump.html
https://archive.ph/B0Q1w

which drew around 220 attendees to the basement ballroom of a hotel in downtown Washington.

have to say, though, i think 220 attendees is low for this gathering of some of the most selfish liars on the planet, i guess that's a positive sign.

um yikes?

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/apr/15/critical-atlantic-current-significantly-more-likely-to-collapse-than-thought

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/apr/15/cherry-blossom-1200-years-japan-climate-scientist-yasuyuki-aono

xp. It's too late already. There is a lot of impact mitigation but it's like the reports of food and petrol gradually disappearing due to Iran war where it will take months to see life as we know it changing. But it will change.

um yikes

Ice age comin', Ice age comin

Iduoteques lyrics more on point by the hour

Waterworld needed more icebergs to be truly realistic

Things are gonna get crazy if Europe can't grow its own food. and this could quite easily happen in my kids' lifetimes.

UK especially vulnerable I hear.

Meantime I don't hear a plan from this government though any upcoming shortages this year may focus minds. Who knows.

oof bad reporting by the guardian here, but good news in that NOAA's projections find the U.S. has a good chance - specifically, 55% - of a below-average hurricane season this year. however, the guardian chose to report it like this:

The US will see a below-normal hurricane season in 2026, federal government scientists said on Thursday, predicting eight to 14 named storms with winds at 39mph (63km/h) or more.

The announcement came days before the start of hurricane season, which begins on 1 June and runs through 30 November.

The season has a “55% chance of being below normal, 35% chance of near normal and a 10% chance of above normal,” said Neil Jacobs, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) administrator, at a press conference.