Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

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.

i hope our new robot overlords properly configure their 0's and 1's to use a source of energy that won't become economically unfeasible to use in 20 years and won't cause the foundation of civilization to fall apart.

by the way, this is what happens when you actually try to engage:

hikerstud:

So is global warming responsible for the increase in mega earthquackes too?

kevin:

No... Earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanoes are geological events, not climatic ones...

hikerstud:

Exactly so geolical events are more frequent and violent than ever before along with climate events so it points to many systems including the economic or manmade systems all being shaken at once. But this is old news for anyone at all educated about the most influential person to ever walk the earth....Jesus Christ...also known as Emanual God with us. Whoever falls on the Son for mercy will be broken of pride and blindness but whoever the Son falls on will be crushed to powder. He was a carpenter but he is now the King of Kings and will return to restore all systems thankfully soon but until then it will be a very rocky boat ride and many like myself will be killed in the persecution by the rest of mankind who do not want to hear about a supreme being.

hikerstud is stoked that someone took the bait on that one

i can see his studly hands clapping together in ecstasy as he sees that "kevin" has responded

global warming is the machines way of killing us off so they can have the planet

I was dj'ing a friend's wedding in Virginia a few years back, his dad very wealthy with a younger wife. I'll never forget the conversation; she was nobody's fool, and she fully accepted climate change. She just thought that it was foolhardy to believe that mankind's behavior had any influence or impact on it. I tried to take on the conversation, but by the end of the conversation I had a lot of sympathy; what's going on is easily understood from a scientific viewpoint, but almost incomprehensible otherwise.

Also will never forget these tweets:

Copenhgen=arrogance of man2think we can change nature's ways.MUST b good stewards of God's earth,but arrogant&naive2say man overpwers nature [Palin Tweet, 12/19/09]

Earth saw clmate chnge4 ions;will cont 2 c chnges.R duty2responsbly devlop resorces4humankind/not pollute&destroy;but cant alter naturl chng [Palin Tweet, 12/19/09]

what do you guys think about the line of thought that people should just give up trying to change their minds and just press on the "MUST b good stewards of God's earth" option?

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

right, and i'm not really sure what the next step is

Hey lefties, Greens, Libtards, DemocRATS, and other haters of the human race..

Unite, YOU HAVE THE KEY… Please do us all a favor, Save the planet with ONE SIMPLE idea.. DON'T REPRODUCE! It's that easy! Let me guess, why should YOU curtail your lifestyle right? I bet more than half of these responses were written in air conditioned comfort, including the article itself! So please, DON'T REPRODUCE… and thanks for saving the world.. you'll go straight to heaven.. oh yeah,, you don't believe in that nonsense… sorry..

how do you respond to that?

donate to planned parenthood in hikerdude's name + address?

what do you guys think about the line of thought that people should just give up trying to change their minds and just press on the "MUST b good stewards of God's earth" option?

might be work for a few people, but not effective overall. the bible can be interpreted so many ways, it's pointless. i mean, the Quoting Relevant Scripture approach doesn't even work with really obvious stuff, like fundamentalists who are afraid of anyone who's not a WASP, and then you're like "what about those things jesus said about loving everyone and washing the feet of prostitutes", and the response is, in effect, "but.....i hate gay people"

governments could make solar energy...more profitable? tax oil and give so many breaks for solar and other alternatives that it makes more sense to get out of the oil business? i have no idea.

i don't mean using arguments from scripture, i mean just re-selling pro-environmental policy to fit their worldview.

Religion is one of the worst social viruses in modern history and it's usefulness is now outweighed by its detrimental 'retarding force'.

i mean just re-selling pro-environmental policy to fit their worldview.

There are, tbf, plenty of progressive Xtians in the world, they just don't shout as loud and double-down on every dumb thing they can.

it seems like children are rebellious if you hate liberals you shoudl say REPRODUCE beucase their kids will rebel and be conservaties

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.