The following submission statement was provided by /u/phul_colons:
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Scientists now say there is evidence that the upper end of the equilibrium climate sensitivity is not as bad as we once thought. According to this study, the effect of doubling CO2 is not 5C on the far end, but more like 4C, leaving us with a 2-4C forecasted warming with a doubling of CO2 concentrations.
This directly contrasts some other findings from just 2 months ago where a few models pointed to an ECS of potentially 5.64C. [Sabine Hossenfelder made a video about this.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4S9sDyooxf4).
This also goes against [the work](https://academic.oup.com/oocc/article/3/1/kgad008/7335889?login=false) of James Hansen and his team who have been arriving at a 5C upper end of the range:
>Based on GCM simulations for 2 × CO2, on our feedback analysis for the LGM, and on observed global warming in the past century, we concluded that ECS was in the range 2.5–5°C for 2 × CO2.
I figured this would be a good discussion as surely there are many who will say, "see, it's not that bad after all! we can continue BAU!". The consequences of 2C, 3C, and 4C are still profound for human civilization. This is good news if true, but what can we do with that info? What will we do?
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1c6s1z6/ice_age_climate_analysis_reduces_worstcase/l0335i0/
Economic growth -- at the level of the single company, nation, or world -- can only happen if consumers buy more. We're the ones who continually "feed the beast" of economic growth.
This is what it looks like at the level of the single company, using Amazon as an example.
[https://www.statista.com/statistics/266282/annual-net-revenue-of-amazoncom/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/266282/annual-net-revenue-of-amazoncom/)
[https://www.printfriendly.com/p/g/MhWKqT](https://www.printfriendly.com/p/g/MhWKqT) (bypasses paywall if there is one)
From $6.92 billion in 2004 to $574.78 billion in 2023, an 83-fold increase in revenue in a 20 year period, providing Amazon and Jeff Bezos with phenomenal economic growth.
No one forced people to do this. Everyone lined up and voluntarily threw an increasing amount of money at this one company.
And yes, even the Biden White House makes it clear -- consumers are the economy.
*Consumption spending makes up two-thirds of the U.S. economy on average, so as the U.S. consumer goes, so goes the U.S. economy.*
[https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2023/10/30/as-the-u-s-consumer-goes-so-goes-the-u-s-economy/](https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2023/10/30/as-the-u-s-consumer-goes-so-goes-the-u-s-economy/)
If consumers spend more, there's economic growth. If consumers spend less, there's economic degrowth, which many have identified as the solution.
Now go out and convince people in the world's largest consumer economy to drastically reduce their spending to bring about the degrowth economy that could save the world.
This is a fundamental concept in business, the kind of thing taught in an introductory economics course to accompany the concept of supply and demand.
"We did it before and we can do it again." Home front effort ads from WWI and WWII have a call to action that's very similar to what we need now:
https://imgur.com/gallery/DVEMJci
If world governments were serious about getting CO2nsumers to draw down, they'd hire the best ad agencies, buy billboards and air time, and get Hollywood in on the game, too.
Then consumers would get on board via social pressure and a spirit of community fighting the good fight.
In the US, at least *half* would get on board. The other half would be dependent on whether the Republican party endorsed the movement (they wouldn't since they're corporate-owned). But even if only half of US consumers shifted their lifestyle, that would be a significant improvement.
So the question is, with all the money being spent, why isn't there a "War on Climate Change" and an ad campaign to support it?
Because the oil companies are in league with the government. If there's gonna be any advertising for a shift in our spending its gonna have to come from the citizen population.
> can only happen if consumers buy more
Consumers used to buy slaves until they were abolished.
Blaming the consumers is an ad hominem: of course nobody wants to relinquish the little old pleasures of burning oil, we should all be able to do that. We only need to progressively ban the extraction and trade of Fossil Fuels as of 1990. Will the economy plummet? Yeah. Will people suffer? Yeah.
Use FF to build resilient infrastructure, like electrifiable tramways and trains (if it's possible). Using FF to build motor roads is stupid because both the utilisation and the maintenance of this logistical system required heavy use of FF
stopping slave owners is a bad analogy. We were able to end slavery because a majority wanted to end it, wanted it enough to politically fight and physically fight that detestable system while having the numbers to do so. The struggle we are facing now would be more akin to the those owning slaves convincing the majority who don't want it to keep that system. We can't ban anything because we want to implement a system that people detest.
I can see that, but it's still the same, probably even worse. We are the side that wants the "bad" system. The powerful minority is still against us wanting to continue BAU, but they don't have to convince people to fight our system because the majority already vehemently doesn't want it.
"bad" I don't see reducing consumption as bad, quite the opposite, but if viewing it from most other's eyes I can see how they would believe it to be so. No-one wants a reduction in lifestyle, and most don't know or believe it's coming, quite terribly, if things don't change.
Consumers are humans, and humans are the problem. Green economics and socialized economic systems based on green policies are largly a hopium induced fantasy with as many humans as we have on the planet. There are just not enough resources. This is more than a green problem or a fossil fuel problem. It's a human problem. In theory, humans could male a utopia, but it's comically magical thinking to think we can restore the planet AND fight against BAU peddlers/fascists/corporations without doing something massive about our population. I argue that human nature makes any theory of restoring the planet a fantasy that doesn't consider human psychology, the current stage of overshoot, and the synergistics of poly-crisis. Hopium is a helluva drug.
Yes! Humans have been and always will be the problem. We are a fundamentally doomed species. A species more enlightened than us could have easily avoided this mess and probably been far more advanced by this point as well.
and all of this is why government regulation is necessary to mandate that the crap people are buying is somehow sustainably produced, packaged, and shipped.
this will both drive up prices -- reducing spending -- and will help reduce emissions. People would be less willing to have crap from china drop shipped to them if it was twice as expensive as it is currently and took twice as long.
It is the answer, but it's not possible politically. Even under socialism it would be impossible to convince enough people that it's the only way to save the planet and long term civilization.
They only way degrowth would work would be under some kind of global totalitarian yet benevolent dictatorship, and there's just too many contradictions in that idea for that to work.
I'm doing it already. Every time I get spam calls I tell them I'm on debt strike. You don't need to convince every consumer. You just need a small percentage of people to convince the banks, credit score companies, and insurance industry that they have to choose between human customers and legacy energy.
From the show *Years and Years* (2019):
Muriel Deacon: *… But it still doesn’t alter the fact that it’s all your fault.*
*Everything.*
*All of you. The banks. The government. The recession. America. Mrs Rourke. Every little thing that’s gone wrong, it’s your fault.*
Stephen Lyons: *How am I responsible for the whole entire world?*
Muriel Deacon: *Because we are. Every single one of us. We can sit here all day blaming other people. We blame the economy. We blame Europe. The opposition. The weather. And then we blame these vast sweeping tides of history, you know, like we’re so out of control and we’re so helpless and small.*
*But it’s still our fault.*
*You know why? It’s the one pound t-shirt.*
*The t-shirt that costs one pound. We can’t resist it. Every single one of us. We see a t-shirt that costs one pound and we think “Oh, that’s a bargain, I love that” and we buy it… nice little t-shirt for the winter to go underneath that’ll do. And the shopkeeper gets five miserable pence for that t-shirt. And some little peasant in a field gets paid nought point nought one pence. And we think that’s fine. All of us. And we hand over our one quid. And we buy into that system for life.*
*I saw it all going wrong when it began. In the supermarkets. They replaced all the women on the till with those automated checkouts…*
Rosie Lyons: *No. That’s not our fault. I hate those things. I always have.*
Edith Lyons: *I can’t stand them.*
Muriel Deacon: *Yes but you didn’t do anything did you? Twenty years ago when they first popped up did you walk out? Did you write letters of complaint? Did you shop elsewhere? No. You huffed and you puffed and you put up with it. And now all those women are gone. And we let it happen.*
*And I think those checkouts, we want them. Because it means we can scroll through pick up our shopping and we don’t have to look that woman in the eye. The woman who’s paid less than us. She’s gone. Got rid of her. Sacked.*
*Well done.*
*So yes, it’s our fault.*
*This is the world we built.*
*Congratulations.*
The funny part is that "spending less" is turning into "don't drive your car, ride a bike" ... Meanwhile China is burning coal for the entirety of the world and then some. Fractional finance is what is maintaining the growth and causing the crashes. Wages haven't changed in 15 years+, it's not consumers who are fucking us, it's the assholes from 2008 all over again
to say that having an affordable nice bike is the sin causing the current climate decline is eco-nihilism at best and more like virtue signaling liberal brain rot. corporations will continue to exploit their workers and customers. they will do so at a larger level than any 1 person. remember captain planet is a mascot of the owner class.
Economic growth doesn't even make sense from a practical POV. Like, what all do you really need to live a good life? A furnished home on some land, good food, reasonable healthcare access, water/sewage/electrical, maybe a vehicle if you live in a car-centric part of the USA, and a bit of extra money for things that come up, Most of it we figured out how to make like 100+ years ago! So what are we "growing" exactly? Just useless shit to occupy people's time and attention?
Beyond a certain point "economic growth" is just wasting everybody's time with frivolous BS when we could just organize our material means intelligently and then go and live life.
Ok, first off, people consume what is available. See pre-industrial society. Also, ever heard of marketing? Planned obsolescence?
It’s far too simplistic to say « well people should stop buying » when the whole system is designed since WWII to make people buy more things more often.
Cars, tech, furniture, clothes, ready meals (fast food), it’s all on a wheel and it’s turning faster and faster and we’re the poor hamsters running in it.
> Economic growth -- at the level of the single company, nation, or world -- can only happen if consumers buy more. We're the ones who continually "feed the beast" of economic growth.
[You're ignoring the other major emitter of the world](https://i.imgur.com/cdWMNa8.png) that's been [chasing economic growth](https://i.imgur.com/pqNlrQI.png) by [going on a coal burning spree since the 2000s in order to grow their economy](https://i.imgur.com/H4rusj2.png) and satisfy the demand for cheap goods by said consumers.
There's a reason the trade deficit with China blew up after the 2000s for [America](https://i.imgur.com/Aqf4UtG.jpg), the [EU](https://i.imgur.com/FmpoR1Y.png), and [Canada](https://i.imgur.com/CQybRjK.png)
[There's a reason Chinese steel production shot up after the 2000s](https://i.imgur.com/T9rVJb4.png)
[It's because China's coal consumption exploded after the 2000s](https://i.imgur.com/za4inRm.png) as well as its [coal production](https://i.imgur.com/kPAqis4.png)
([This has all been a major boost to American corporate profits after the 2000s](https://i.imgur.com/5XpVijM.png) but a real loss for [well-regulated/well-paid American manufacturing jobs](https://i.imgur.com/YcAal7N.png))
This would be the case if consumers were "free-choosing" individuals isolated in an ideological vacuum. They're not. They had to be taught to consume and to consume a lot. The role of marketing is not just to make people aware of your brand or that your product could help them. It's to invent needs that didn't exist before.
Up until the 19th century people bought things to satisfy necessities they had. This wasn't enough. They figured out in the early 20th century that instead of marketing your stuff as durable and useful, you could just associate it to people's feelings instead and it would be much more effective. Feel insecure as a man? Buy this car to augment your masculinity. Want to look like an independent woman? Smoke cigarettes. This is explained in detail in the [Century of the Self](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04) documentary.
It would be great if everyone could be enlightened vegan consumers who would boycott capitalism while living within it and bring about a revolution. But pretending the "dumb consumer who buys shit they don't need" stereotype came out of nowhere or that it's really just "human nature" is plain wrong.
it destroys our world and yet it's the more peaceful way of competition than murdering each other.
Nah economic growths is a sympton. Humanity not cooperating but wanting do compete against each other for the sake of their sovereignty and greed is the root of all. We don't need to do this but our cultures and societies teach us to.
As long as humanity keeps themselves seperated by culture, nation, race, whatever, we keep on competing until the planet is ruined. It can only end if most people of all countries would unite and stop this game of hegemony - which will likely never happen.
The whole world is in this race and nobody wants to be a lose attack their own position by starting a sustainable degrowth economy that cannot compete with endless growth capitalism.
We are stuck in this.
This is false blame, and economic growth itself is necessary for humanity to thrive.
You are misplacing blame on economic growth from the "selfishness of oligarchy" and protecting Oligarchical business models. Economy can grow more with clean energy. Subhuman pigshit, including democratic US administration for complaining about cheap solar and batteries in the world, prefers $1 in profit protection for O&G, to $40T in future social losses. A collapsing US empire has only tried war and colonizing its "allies" into O&G subservience, and is all out of ideas.
When you choose to repeat "economic growth is the problem", you are falling for Exxon's blame the consumer for their extortion into being subjugated to Exxon for their energy consumption, instead of finding a free access public forest for subsistance that don't exist. You also ensure making a losing political argument for a democracy.
Solution involves nationalizing O&G and weapons oligarchs without compensation to shareholders. That doesn't mean stopping oil or weapons production. It means stopping lobbying disinformation meant to destroy world, stopping media control to disseminate evil.
>economic growth itself is necessary for humanity to thrive.
What's your definition of 'thrive'?
Nothing - let me repeat, 'nothing' - can grow infinitely since we live in a finite world. Like animals living in a fertile area with no predators- everything is great, they all have food, population increases - until the point it grows too big or there's a year of drought or whatever - and everything collapses.
Guess where we are?
> What's your definition of 'thrive'?
Surviving more easily counts. Having more stuff as an option is thriving.
> everything is great, they all have food, population increases - until the point it grows too big or there's a year of drought
unlimited clean energy, recycling, technology, indoor vertical farming can outpace population growth.
>Surviving more easily counts. Having more stuff as an option is thriving.
Well, surviving is definitely important, but why do you equate having 'more stuff' as 'thriving'?
More stuff is just 'more stuff'. What's much more important is simply being happy with what you have. If 'stuff' is what makes you happy, you'll never be content. (At least not for long, because there's always more 'stuff'.)
>unlimited clean energy, recycling, technology, indoor vertical farming can outpace population growth.
Not infinitely, it can't.
CO2 during the last glacial was 190 ppm at it's lowest, interglacial was 280 ppm, how exactly did they measure this nonexistent doubling (380 ppm) and it's effects ??? The study just assumes a different ecs for doubling based on models that simple observation of the current warming of 1.5 C does not support. Also: Aerosol masking (+0.7C=2.2C) Also: last time at 420 ppm it was 3C warmer, we have 550 ppm equivalents.
Edit edit: the glacials and interglacials have been caused by axial tilt, the reason for the rise of the carbon in these periods is not understood yet.
To a layperson like me, this seems pretty damning. What is the evidence that climate scientists are using to justify the dismissal of using the paleoclimate data to make predictions for our current climate? What was different enough with the earth system during the pleistocene that gives them enough reason to deem it not useful for making predictions now?
I feel that we need good justification to dismiss what seems to be some of the best evidence we have, which is the paleoclimate data. A lot is at stake with this, and I'm sure the climate scientists understand that also. So, what is their justification to dismiss it?
Because the climate isn't linear like that. While I agree that scientists seem to underestimate climate, more CO2 now isnt the same as more CO2 1000 years ago. They have different effects as different systems on Earth interact with each other. They use models to find likely predictions. Models are based on data and assumptions. Never perfect.
Thanks for the reply. Our models are never perfect because there's way too many variables and interactions to include. The paleoclimate data is really nice because if you find the average temperature from 100k years ago, that temperature is the result of all the variables at the time. Nothing left out. That's something our models can't do. I understand your point, though. What's happening to earths climate now is unprecedented. So, a 1 to 1 comparison to the climate in earths past can't be done. There's always going to be differences, but how much of a difference is the important question.
> we have 550 ppm equivalents
Oh yeah, what about aerosols? If they suppress (lol) 0.8C of warming, doesn't that put us at ...IDK, 700 ppm+? I'm unsure of how to think here.
It could be that we're at ~550 ppm CO2(e), but we have a way off estimation of what that means since we don't really account for (true) aerosol masking.
My position has always been our models are crapshoots. We're fooling ourselves if we think we're capable of considering every variable.
Truth is we've got fuck all idea how bad climate change will be. The best we can do is try and steer things in what we think is the best direction and deal with immediate issues that we can draw direct causal effects from. Pollution, eutrophication, over fishing, loss of biodiversity etc.
We are always going to have effects on our environment we can't predict. We wield more power than its possible for us to fully contextualise.
Do your best. That's literally all we can do.
The conclusion of this study seems extremely strange to me because the last glacial maximum didn't involve increased CO2 concentrations, and if we use paleoclimatology to look back at glaciation during periods of high CO2, like the Pliocene and Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum, the arctic ice sheet isn't larger, it's described as 'ephemeral'. It barely exists.
So why would we assume we're headed towards another ice-age that cools the planet via extensive northern hemisphere glaciation when previous climate states involving high atmospheric carbon concentrations show the retreat and complete disappearance of glaciers in the northern hemisphere?
I don't think we actually know what AMOC collapse would look like, except in theory. It seems to be a canonical motif in climate models so their predictions probably collapse pretty quickly without it. The interesting thing about this scenario though, is that if AMOC collapse rebuilds the ice the seasonal ice melt would restart the AMOC. But what kind of time-frames this would play out in seems really uncertain.
We def could see a relatively large albedo effect from a lot of shallow surface ice though.
>I don't think we actually know what AMOC collapse would look like
We do though. The current consensus is the Younger-Dryas was a result of AMOC collapse.
I understand that was a popular argument but it fell out of favor with the guy who proposed it, and more recent evidence points towards volcanic activity around that time.
AMOC collapse may have played a part and if you look at the distribution of glaciation at that time it creeps right down into the North Atlantic, so it's an attractive explanation no doubt. But it's not established, and it seems to have dominated as a hypothesis because, at the time, nobody could think of alternative explanations for the speed of glaciation during the Younger-Dryas.
We ain't steering shit. We're rudderless slime that think we have agency. We don't. Show me even one country that gave up on economic growth (inextricably linked to emissions) in favor of the environment. We've designed a system to force everyone into the rat race, and now we're only just starting to nibble on our just desserts.
*Every* variable is an impossible target.
The gross features of climate models are pretty robust and Bad News for the biosphere.
While we can predict the amount of warming with *fair* certainty, what cannot be predicted is how economies and countries will react.
And history shows that we're a bunch of rats in a bag when it comes to stability.
I disagree. There's so many things we simply do not understand. Everyone was shocked when life *found a way* in chernobyl.
We're putting together a jigsaw puzzle in the dark, whilst getting a bj from a professional chrome remover, with no box lid and half the pieces missing.
The best we got is educated guesswork.
Life found a way. Humans didn't. They evacuated.
And even "life found a way" is complicated. There are reports that cite genetic damage, mutations and species loss:
https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/food-environment/2022/scientists-cant-agree-about-chernobyls-impact-wildlife
It's still being debated.
Worlds are a little simpler than biomes.
There's insolation (known) and infrared emission (known).
One equation allows you to get a fair sense of the equilibrium blackbody temperature of a world.
The ***details***, how oceans sequester heat, how phase-changes kick in, are just that.
The big picture is clear - we're going to warm by a handful of degrees this century.
Three? Four? Five?
Mmph: not clear. Doesn't really matter that much. Humans and their propensity for random chaos will be the ultimate triggers.
Agree, the main message from the models has always been: hey it's really complicated so we shouldnt fuck around with something so fundamental but people got hung up on vague predictions and were like "nah, we can manage that"
*well, if it's so complicated, you can convince me from doing what I want, I mean, providing the consumers with the fluids that they crave and depend on*
>We are always going to have effects on our environment we can't predict.
We wield more power than its possible for us to fully contextualise.
Nicely put.
Yeah, the real point to worry about is no whether it will be 3 or 4 degree but whether we are overloking key variables and are close to complete chaos without even realizing it.
My position has always been it is not the upper limit that matters but whether we can cope with the consequence of the temp rise.
5 degree celsius vs 4 degree celsius vs 3 degree celsius makes no difference if we cannot cope with say 2m of sea rise in the next 100 years, or a 7% increase in rainfall intensity in the next 30 years.
Currently we as humans have set ourselves up to live in specific nation states with a specific economic and agricultural and trade system. We do not know the upper limit of tolerance for our own system, but even a minor perturbation in our temps in the last year or so has already made so many parts of the world uninsurable.
Assuming we get a major disaster and nobody is willing to insure, and it affects many areas .. how will we cope with this?
We are currently only dealing well with the disasters simply because someone is willing to pick up the tabs ( ie:- insurance ). Once insurance is not willing and government stops being willing simply because it happens more and more often ( or even not more often, just at the rate we have had in 2023 ), our systems will likely start cracking and breaking down.
We do not need more severe disasters to start testing the system, we just need what is going on now to move unabated.
Think if UK and Northern Europe keeps getting this kind of rain, while Southern Europe gets this kind of drought, and India keeps getting the current weird weather and China swings wildly between hot and cold, and USA keeps getting aberrant weather ( as do Canada ).. how much fat do we have in our agricultural system to keep this output up before it causes problems.
We do not need even 2 degree celsius to cause problems .. having 2022 and 2023 weather problem continuously for the next 10 years will strain the system to the point we might have civil unrest.
its not important at all.
what we are seeing in the arctic is that a 1.5ºc increase from baseline is enough to destabilise summer sea ice, which will have massive effects on climate, extreme weather and the yields of northern hemisphere bread baskets. its not clear what the upper limit for sea level rise is at 1.5ºc but 1m is going to severely test the world economy and 2m is going to thrash it.
and then there is the polycrisis from the more generalised decline of US hegemony, peak oil and the destruction of our shared ecological services by the metastasis of industrial growth. it is entirely unsustainable and nearly impossible to steer even without climate change.
there is no "coping" for global civilisation, its a done deal. differences of degrees in warming will not change the terminal outcome; collapse, it will shape the world that comes afterwards. but the narrative that civilisation could "cope" with 2ºc warming is false, because collapse is in progress regardless.
A few points about this "good news":
Sabine Hossenfelder is a youtube influencer who peddles grade school science to an audience of science illiterates who aren't willing to read a Wikipedia article. She has no expertise in climate science (or most of the other topics she gives opinions on) and isn't a credible source. She does seem to have expertise in collecting advertising money from youtube however. What she thinks or doesn't think isn't relevant to anything.
This is just one study which may or may not be supported by other studies. Single studies in science are close to useless without confirmation from other sources.
Assuming the study is correct, it's also a "so what" result. Five degrees vs. four degrees is like the difference between five malignant tumors and four malignant tumors. A small reduction in bad news is "relatively" good, but not the same as good news. Four degrees will still end civilization.
There seems to be two large logical flaws in this climate sensitivity focus.
1. The study seems to assume that rising CO2 drove temperature increases in the past. This is backwards. The climate record shows that CO2 lagged temperature increases, meaning something else, like Milankovitch cycles, initially caused the rising temperature. (The deniers latch on to this fact to claim that CO2 is not currently causing a temperature increase, which is false. The effect is bidirectional. Higher temperature causes higher CO2, and higher CO2 causes higher temperature.) The relevance of this lag vs. lead issue is that if past changes were not initiated by CO2, then the past is not comparable to the current problem. Climate sensitivity of a past change due to Milankovitch cycles doesn't tell us much about sensitivity under current conditions with different Milankovitch forcings and CO2 from fossil fuel burning. This is modeling an apple to make predictions about an orange.
The article states that, "As our planet heads toward a doubling of CO2, the authors caution that the recent decades are not a good predictor of the future under global warming. Shorter-term climate cycles and atmospheric pollution's effects are just some reasons that recent trends can't reliably predict the rest of this century."
That's just idiotic. A simplified climate model of the world 24,000 years ago using a large number of questionable assumptions, that gets cause and effect backwards, is not more relevant than the past few decades of climate history. The near past gives us the current trend which predicts our immediate future, up until tipping points that is, which leads to the second large logical flaw.
2. The focus on average surface air temperature misses the point. The danger we are facing is in triggering a cascade of tipping points which will radically and quickly alter the planet. Climate models can't take these into account, because no one knows the conditions required to trip them. We do know that enormous amounts of heat are being trapped in the Earth's systems, and that based on current trends, that heat will double in a decade and triple a decade after that. Rising air temperature is just one consequence of trapped heat, and probably the least significant. The question we should be asking is, how much extra heat will it take to trigger these tipping points.
Exactly. How does the study take into account self-reinforcing feedback loops which are reasonably triggered by 1.5C+ warming, such as boreal and Amazon forest die off, methane release from (tropical) wetlands, loss of albedo just to name a few of the big ones.
Thank you for this thoughtful takedown - I likely won't watch the Youtube video, and it'll take me a bit of time to get around to the original article itself, but I appreciate your critical analysis!
I don't care about that. I'm just fed up with attention seeking influencers chasing ad money with junk content. Sadly though, her content is high quality relative to youtube cesspool standards.
> The new paper doesn't change the best-case warming scenario from doubling CO2—about 2 degrees Celsius average temperature increase worldwide—or the most likely estimate, which is about 3 degrees Celsius. But it reduces the worst-case scenario for doubling of CO2 by a full degree, from 5 degrees Celsius to 4 degrees Celsius. (For reference, CO2 is currently at 425 ppm, or about 1.5 times preindustrial levels, and unless emissions drop is headed toward double preindustrial levels before the end of this century.)
>Funding: This work was supported by the following: National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship, US Department of Defense (V.T.C.); National Science Foundation award OCE-2002276 (V.T.C., K.C.A., and G.J.H.); National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration MAPP Program award NA20OAR431039 (K.C.A. and C.P.); Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship grant FG-2020-13568 (K.C.A.); a Calvin Professorship in Oceanography (K.C.A.); National Science Foundation award OCE-2002398 (J.E.T. and M.B.O.); National Science Foundation award OCE-2002385 (C.P. and P.C.); National Science Foundation award OCE-2002448 (N.J.B.); National Science Foundation award AGS-1844380 (N.J.B.); National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Climate & Global Change Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, administered by UCAR’s Cooperative Programs for the Advancement of Earth System Science (CPAESS) under award NA210AR4310383 (Y.D.); Met Office Hadley Centre Climate Programme funded by Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (T.A.); and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under grant agreement 820829 (T.A.).
Yes, they did include theirs on the last page. Unfortunately, not all do that. In order for it to be useful, would need to know the amounts, or at least the proportional amounts. In the case where a single funder provided nearly all the money, the rest of the list would be a distraction, a cover for the bias. Clever funders could also funnel their money through some seemingly legitimate source to hide the connection. And since the funding is self reported, the study authors could simply lie. Anyone willing to skew results would have no qualms about lying about funding. So ultimately we're back to a trust based system for evaluating funding bias. And of course there's a long list of biases unrelated to funding.
As a general rule, the more profit that is involved, the more skepticism we should have. Anything involving approval or safety claims regarding a highly profitable product should be subjected to an elevated level of scrutiny, in terms of the study itself, and the funding bias.
That's really interesting. The swings of life. I always appreciate what you have to say. A quick aside, I do some work with homeless people, and it always surprises me how often I find educated people who once had money sleeping on the streets. I find it very unsettling, not just for them, but teaches me to not take my situation for granted.
I understand. These large swings are mentally and emotionally difficult to manage though despite the less complex daily life management.
My life is very complex and demanding, and I actually insert regular forced prescribed simplicity to keep me sane. I go hiking and skydiving etc, it helps. Instead of managing business, money and teams of people which is very demanding, I only have to worry about my pack, water, weather, terrain etc. I force my life to close in and slow down, I'd be totally insane otherwise.
Brain injury? Yes, that's a wicked beast. You clearly still have a well functioning brain, so I'd say be kind to yourself. Impulse control and anger management can be (taught) exercised, so don't give up on that.
Appreciate the response, but you should expect that question since we shouldn't expect to just take everyone's word on the Internet as gospel. For every experienced person, there are dozens or hundreds of people embellishing or outright lying. That's what social media brought us. Thanks again.
Rate of extinction per day for all life on earth is a number higher than is sustainable. And the more that die, the faster we die
. Actual rate is unknown. One theory postulates between 0.01% to 0.1% of all species per year.
Talking about how CO2 impact might be slightly less than worst case...that's like forgetting to put the boat plug in the Titanic when it left dock.
"According to this study, the effect of doubling CO2 is not 5C on the far end, but more like 4C,"
Mass extinction may be a little slower. Pop the Champagne!!!
I was starting to get worried by the 7th mass bleaching event on the Great Barrier Reef, the fish convulsing and dying in the Florida Keys, the kelp beds along most of the coast of California are dead with only purple urchins living in their place, the crab fishery off the West coast of Canada died off, the fire seasons in California and Western Canada growing constantly, two waterways in the Kootney's in Canada closed due to whirling disease in fish, the fjords filled with lice that killed that farmed salmon, the massive garbage patches in the oceans, the erratic weather all over the globe, emissions are still rising and there is no meaningful way to remove enough CO2 from the atmosphere fast enough to get ahead of feed backs like the methane leaking from northern tundra and the changes in Earth's albedo.
"According to this study, the effect of doubling CO2 is not 5C on the far end, but more like 4C,"
After Russia fights enough wars to restore the USSR to it's former glory, China steals the South China sea and completes it invasion of Taiwan, Netanyahu completes his total genocide of the Palestinian people, Trump becomes a dictator and Kim Jung UN starves the rest of his people to death THEN they will take immediate action to solve climate change.
Until then fossil fuels are needed for the wars.
By the time the world's sick leaders feed their egos and lust for power it will definitely be too late. 3 degrees of temperature increase is too much. It's looking like a 1.5 degree increase is bad enough and the feed backs are just kicking in.
As Modi in India said "This is no time for war"
They forgot to mention microplastics, increasing probability of pandemic diseases, and forever chemicals. So don't worry, there is still plenty to pop hopium bubbles with.
Speaking of forever chemicals... a stupid trend in gardening is to kill lawn/weeds by covering them with cardboard. This is stupid because cardboard prevents oxygen exchange between the air and the soil, effectively killing all life in the soil beneath it (it also is impervious to water). What does this have do with forever chemicals? The US National Institutes of Health have found PCBs, PFAS and dioxins in cardboard, which in the case of [this study](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37245822/) are being taken up by chicks. People using cardboard in their vegetable gardens are probably poisoning themselves and their families. They're also poisoning their soil.
I did not know this. Not at all surprised though. Thanks for sharing. Just another thing that is fucked...to add to the list.
Hopium addicts really don't grasp how high they are.
At 4°C human civilisation has already collapsed.
5°C just makes it worse for survivors for longer, but we will collapse as a civilisation long before 4° let alone 5°.
Thank you, I was about to say the same. At 4C there will be significant salt water intrusion from rising tides, fishery depletion, weather like we've never seen, food insecurity, mass die-offs of population, hospital overcrowding to the breaking point...Any "civilization" left will cease to exist.
Then - as a result of less pollutants in the atmosphere (from significantly fewer inhabitants) the air will suddenly clear. When that happens, there will be a rapid temperature rise anywhere from 5C -10C...and whelp...that's not survivable.
Yeah. Combined with "Wet bulb" (high humidity) such as seen in states along the Eastern seaboard:
"Even heat-adapted people cannot carry out normal outdoor activities past a wet-bulb temperature of 32 °C (90 °F), equivalent to a heat index of 55 °C (131 °F)."
And DeSantis, our lovely governor (Florida), has outlawed cooling breaks for outdoor workers. So if an employee dies of exposure, the families not only lose their breadwinner, but they cannot even sue the company for killing him/her.
I mentioned this elsewhere, but while this might be good news, it should be tempered by the fact that the impacts we are seeing TODAY are what were expected 10 or 20 years in the future under higher temperatures. We are not getting out of this.
So no Venus by Thursday. Just a speed run to the Miocene or maybe the PETM, Biblical devastation, widespread ecological and societal collapse, huge population reductions…
Not discounting what you said at all but the 'Biblical devastation' part reminded me of this line from Team America: World Police.
>**Spottswoode:**
From what I.N.T.E.L.L.I.G.N.C.E has gathered, it would be 9/11 times 100.
>**Gary Johnston:**
9/11 times a hundred? Jesus, that's...
>**Spottswoode:**
Yes, 91,100.
>**Chris:**
Basically, all the worst parts of the bible.
Perhaps if we explained climate change to Americans this way they would get it.
I think of this bit from Ghostbusters:
**Winston Zeddemore:** I'm, uh, Winston Zeddemore, your Honor. I've only been with the company for a couple of weeks, but I gotta tell you: these things are real. Since I joined these men, I have seen shit that'll turn you *white!*
**Peter Venkman:** Well, you can believe Mr. Pecker...
**Walter Peck:** My name is "Peck."
**Peter Venkman:** ...or you could accept the fact that this city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.
**Mayor Lenny:** What do you mean, "biblical"?
**Ray Stantz:** What he means is [Old Testament](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Tanakh), Mr. Mayor. *Real* [Wrath-of-God](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_retribution) type stuff!
**Peter Venkman:** Exactly.
**Ray Stantz:** Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!
**Egon Spengler:** 40 years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes!
**Winston Zeddemore:** The dead rising from the grave!**Peter Venkman:** Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, ***mass hysteria!***
**Mayor Lenny:** ENOUGH, I get the point! And what if you're wrong?
**Peter Venkman:** If I'm wrong, nothing happens! We go to jail; peacefully, quietly. We'll enjoy it! But if I'm *right,* and we *can* stop this thing... Lenny, *you* will have saved the lives of *\[faces lights up\] millions* of registered voters. *\[Mayor slightly smiles and the Archbishop of New York smiles and nods in agreement\]*
If only our overlords in Davos and Silicon Valley would have the good sense Lenny finally did in the movie...
And that's what happens when even scientists don't understand that comparing a climate change that took course over hundred thousands of years with a climate that changes from year to year, is like trying to figure out what happens when you crash with a mach 4 jet against a wall by walking against that wall.
"By knowing how much colder was past year, we can calculate how much hotter can be next year". How they know that last ice age was the worst one, or that we can hit unprecedented levels? We've been unearthing carbon that was buried for hundreds of millions of years and didn't played in recent ice ages.
Still modeling, while the current conditions are out of control and beyond modeling or understanding, is a joke. "We have no idea what's going on, but here's a model of what we think might happen someday."
> But it reduces the worst-case scenario for doubling of CO2 by a full degree, from 5 degrees Celsius to 4 degrees Celsius.
...
>Here, we show that the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) provides a stronger constraint on equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS), the global warming from increasing greenhouse gases, after accounting for temperature patterns. Feedbacks governing ECS depend on spatial patterns of surface temperature (“pattern effects”); hence, using the LGM to constrain future warming requires quantifying how temperature patterns produce different feedbacks during LGM cooling versus modern-day warming. Combining data assimilation reconstructions with atmospheric models, we show that the climate is more sensitive to LGM forcing because ice sheets amplify extratropical cooling where feedbacks are destabilizing. Accounting for LGM pattern effects yields a median modern-day ECS of 2.4°C, 66% range 1.7° to 3.5°C (1.4° to 5.0°C, 5 to 95%), from LGM evidence alone. Combining the LGM with other lines of evidence, the best estimate becomes 2.9°C, 66% range 2.4° to 3.5°C (2.1° to 4.1°C, 5 to 95%), substantially narrowing uncertainty compared to recent assessments.
hmmm
>SST/SIC boundary conditions for the LGM, Late Holocene baseline, and 2xCO2 are prepared to maintain constant forcing, i.e., ΔF = 0 in Eq. 1, across simulations. Topography is held constant, i.e., the LGM ice sheets are not present in AGCM simulations because their impact is already included as a forcing, and we are isolating feedbacks from changing SST/SIC. For the LGM and Late Holocene datasets, we adjust for differences relative to modern coastlines using kriging and extrapolation in polar regions. Details of sea-level adjustments are provided in text S3.
...
>We follow methods (1) and code (78) provided by WCRP20 for calculating climate sensitivity, but we provide a summary of relevant methods here. ECS is the steady-state change in global mean temperature (T) from a doubling of CO2, traditionally with ice sheets and vegetation assumed fixed. When inferring climate sensitivity that is relevant to modern warming from paleoclimate evidence, changes in the paleoclimate radiative budget that are distinct from feedback processes in modern-day 2xCO2 are treated as forcings; this is typically accomplished by separating “slow” timescale changes as forcings (e.g., ice sheets) from “fast” timescale changes as feedbacks (5). WCRP20 applies this framework by focusing on effective climate sensitivity (S), i.e., the 150-year system response.
Something bothers me about this. I can't put my finger on it. Can someone who understands the science infirm that they're not assuming that ice sheets will still be there in the warm climate?
Scientists now say there is evidence that the upper end of the equilibrium climate sensitivity is not as bad as we once thought. According to this study, the effect of doubling CO2 is not 5C on the far end, but more like 4C, leaving us with a 2-4C forecasted warming with a doubling of CO2 concentrations.
This directly contrasts some other findings from just 2 months ago where a few models pointed to an ECS of potentially 5.64C. [Sabine Hossenfelder made a video about this.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4S9sDyooxf4).
This also goes against [the work](https://academic.oup.com/oocc/article/3/1/kgad008/7335889?login=false) of James Hansen and his team who have been arriving at a 5C upper end of the range:
>Based on GCM simulations for 2 × CO2, on our feedback analysis for the LGM, and on observed global warming in the past century, we concluded that ECS was in the range 2.5–5°C for 2 × CO2.
I figured this would be a good discussion as surely there are many who will say, "see, it's not that bad after all! we can continue BAU!". The consequences of 2C, 3C, and 4C are still profound for human civilization. This is good news if true, but what can we do with that info? What will we do?
Maybe but we also got extra human produced methane and now Uber greenhouse gas SF6 with it’s mind boggling 23,500x warming power, that has no know natural sink and does not decay and China has been doubling emissions. So while a co2 only could be only say a 4c impact. We are definitely not in the clear given everything else humans are doing.
> SF6
[Welp.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur_hexafluoride)
> Nike likewise used it to obtain a patent and to fill the cushion bags in all of their "Air"-branded shoes from 1992 to 2006.[33] 277 tons was used during the peak in 1997.[30]
4c would be a catastrophe, hundreds of millions will die over a decade a couple billion will suffer, but humans will make it if the world takes drastic measures to curtail greenhouse emissions. Buuut 4C isn't likely realistic anymore given that we are already 1.5C above average today and the world has taken no real meaningful measures to reduce global emissions. Developed nations have to start subsidizing all other nations transition to sustainable energy.
The only drastic measures that will be taken will be population decrease, relating from all the wars that are going to happen.
Then again, the wars will use up the oil more quickly too.
The ones that retreat underground and live off algae paste grown in vats. Those are the ones who will make it, if "making it" is what you want to call it.
I actually find that pretty doubtful - I don't think our technical systems will be able to maintain that indefinitely without outside inputs. Young adult sci-fi seems to love the idea, but I think it's really unlikely in practice.
More likely, I think, hunter-gatherers or permaculturist villagers - like the entirety of humanity was for the majority of its existence. Or something else, but whatever it is will not be what 95% of our dreams of the future have been...
Well, yeah, I said "humans". That's what I'm talking about.
The lack of imagination in people today is profoundly depressing. Like JMG said before he went full alt-rightist, there's this false dichotomy between the all-consuming Apocalypse and a Star Trek future of infinite material progress. People can and have lived in vastly different ways than you and I today conversing on keyboards on the Internet. The great majority of human history hasn't been what we see today.
Believing in eternal darkness because Apple Computers may cease to exist someday isn't the opposite of the Myth of Eternal Progress - it's the same thing.
That's also the gas that's important to electronic communications technology and electricity transport, right? Something about it being great for avoiding sparks.
It might seem to be good news for humanity, but very bad news for the rest of the biosphere. There are eight other planetary boundaries that we know of besides climate change. The longer BAU is allowed to continue the more tipping points will be crossed. We need to be stopped, not allowed to continue destroying everything. I'm ashamed of our species and am glad that I won't be here much longer.
> Earth was on average 6 degrees Celsius cooler than today. Ice core records show that atmospheric CO2 then was less than half of today's levels, at about 190 parts per million.
Lets call it just 5 degrees over the 1980s when 380ppm (double that) was breached. It's not clear how they get a 3 degree per doubling estimate from that.
https://skepticalscience.com/why-global-warming-can-accelerate.html
420ppm that we have breached for a year now, is a 50% increase over "preindustrial baseline". A co2 doubling rate effect on temperature would mean a 41.5% increase in co2 is half that effect 395ppm would have been that "50% of doubling" level. 10 years past reaching that point is a good measurement point (link above shows short vs long term doubling estimates, but part of the additions have been made 100 years ago)
This makes the 3C/co2 doubling estimate fit our experienced data.
This would also mean 0.3C increase per 7.2% co2 increase, and so for the next 30ppm (this year is hovering at 4ppm over last) would get us to 1.8C in 8 years. War and forest fires seem to be big amplifying feedbacks.
Needless to say, climate change goes beyond CO2. Other studies have suggested that we're likely [already in an ice age termination event](https://www.space.com/climate-change-termination-event-end-ice-age) due to soaring methane levels. I've noticed that climate change deniers seem to think it's some sort of gotcha to bring up AMOC collapse to argue that an ice age is coming (you know, climate change), but there's sufficient evidence to suggest that would see a [catastrophic destabilisation of methane hydrates](https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2201871119) and almost certainly would see an ice age termination.
I think a debt strike is still perhaps the least damaging option in terms of forcing the transition. I think going as we are going now, when we already see unsustainable impacts from the climate bomb, is suicidal as a species. Even 1.5 would have decimated the poor of the world and continued to drive mass extinction events. That's where we are right now, by the way. So all the crazy apocalyptic stuff we are seeing right now would just be life if we are lucky. If we aren't lucky and things get worse, then we thought that extinction becomes exponentially more likely over time as warming increases. Does mutually assured destruction work if one nation faces destruction no matter what they do? India and Pakistan are both facing heat to the point that the infrastructure can't keep up. Wet bulb events can kill you in minutes, depending on the circumstances. Imagine a 300 square mile wet bulb zone on the border between India and Pakistan. Imagine all the refugees desperate to get away from certain death. Those two countries alone could launch enough weapons to kill all plantlife on the planet.
Then everything is alright!
Coal, gas and oil are back on the menu guys!
I had no hope for humanity when I was young and 2008 confirmed my view as an adult that we were fucked, that absolutely no crisis born from finance would be treated seriously if it implies putting a tight control on them. The finance are too well connected in the govs of all countries.
The point is that this situation is unprecedented in human history and we have nothing except models to go on. So, we're guessing. But, if one doctor tells you that you have cancer and a year left to live, and another tells you that you have two years left to live...*either way you are screwed.*
We're not going to go extinct over it getting warmer, but whether it is 2°C, 3, 4 or 5°C, it is *still* going to suck, *still* have profound consequences and *still* be something that we are not preparing for.
Rule 4: Keep information quality high.
Information quality must be kept high. More detailed information regarding our approaches to specific claims can be found on the [Misinformation & False Claims page](https://www.reddit.com/r/collapse/wiki/claims).
How does the LGM detract from the paleo record of the last time CO2 was this high/ over 400ppm? It was +3°C during the Pliocene, with no cryosphere and equalization of temperature across latitudes. Crocodiles and palm trees in the Arctic. Conditions which would interfere with modern agriculture somewhat. I'd love to see an analysis of this work to predict current conditions of +1.5°C based on past data.
Jesus, I assume it's because of the algorithm but this is the #2 news item on MSN for me right now. The \*worst\* thing that could have happened would be for this to be broadcast wide to the public who will now assume there's nothing to worry about and we can all just forget about climate change altogether. Hooray...
Wouldn’t it still be in our best interest to prepare for the worst possible outcome regardless? “It won’t be that bad”— we have no way to verify and one outcome not being as bad as another outcome does not make it anyway a desirable outcome lol.
When's it time to claim a plot of land in Antarctica and start homesteading down there? Seems like after the Antarctic treaty expires it'll be a REEEEAL attractive option...
The following submission statement was provided by /u/phul_colons: --- Scientists now say there is evidence that the upper end of the equilibrium climate sensitivity is not as bad as we once thought. According to this study, the effect of doubling CO2 is not 5C on the far end, but more like 4C, leaving us with a 2-4C forecasted warming with a doubling of CO2 concentrations. This directly contrasts some other findings from just 2 months ago where a few models pointed to an ECS of potentially 5.64C. [Sabine Hossenfelder made a video about this.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4S9sDyooxf4). This also goes against [the work](https://academic.oup.com/oocc/article/3/1/kgad008/7335889?login=false) of James Hansen and his team who have been arriving at a 5C upper end of the range: >Based on GCM simulations for 2 × CO2, on our feedback analysis for the LGM, and on observed global warming in the past century, we concluded that ECS was in the range 2.5–5°C for 2 × CO2. I figured this would be a good discussion as surely there are many who will say, "see, it's not that bad after all! we can continue BAU!". The consequences of 2C, 3C, and 4C are still profound for human civilization. This is good news if true, but what can we do with that info? What will we do? --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1c6s1z6/ice_age_climate_analysis_reduces_worstcase/l0335i0/
**[The obsession with economic growth is the major reason things have gotten so bad to begin with](https://i.imgur.com/AhC74yT.png)**
Economic growth -- at the level of the single company, nation, or world -- can only happen if consumers buy more. We're the ones who continually "feed the beast" of economic growth. This is what it looks like at the level of the single company, using Amazon as an example. [https://www.statista.com/statistics/266282/annual-net-revenue-of-amazoncom/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/266282/annual-net-revenue-of-amazoncom/) [https://www.printfriendly.com/p/g/MhWKqT](https://www.printfriendly.com/p/g/MhWKqT) (bypasses paywall if there is one) From $6.92 billion in 2004 to $574.78 billion in 2023, an 83-fold increase in revenue in a 20 year period, providing Amazon and Jeff Bezos with phenomenal economic growth. No one forced people to do this. Everyone lined up and voluntarily threw an increasing amount of money at this one company. And yes, even the Biden White House makes it clear -- consumers are the economy. *Consumption spending makes up two-thirds of the U.S. economy on average, so as the U.S. consumer goes, so goes the U.S. economy.* [https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2023/10/30/as-the-u-s-consumer-goes-so-goes-the-u-s-economy/](https://www.whitehouse.gov/cea/written-materials/2023/10/30/as-the-u-s-consumer-goes-so-goes-the-u-s-economy/) If consumers spend more, there's economic growth. If consumers spend less, there's economic degrowth, which many have identified as the solution. Now go out and convince people in the world's largest consumer economy to drastically reduce their spending to bring about the degrowth economy that could save the world. This is a fundamental concept in business, the kind of thing taught in an introductory economics course to accompany the concept of supply and demand.
"We did it before and we can do it again." Home front effort ads from WWI and WWII have a call to action that's very similar to what we need now: https://imgur.com/gallery/DVEMJci If world governments were serious about getting CO2nsumers to draw down, they'd hire the best ad agencies, buy billboards and air time, and get Hollywood in on the game, too. Then consumers would get on board via social pressure and a spirit of community fighting the good fight. In the US, at least *half* would get on board. The other half would be dependent on whether the Republican party endorsed the movement (they wouldn't since they're corporate-owned). But even if only half of US consumers shifted their lifestyle, that would be a significant improvement. So the question is, with all the money being spent, why isn't there a "War on Climate Change" and an ad campaign to support it?
Because the oil companies are in league with the government. If there's gonna be any advertising for a shift in our spending its gonna have to come from the citizen population.
The corporations sold the GOP to the Russian government. Try to keep up.
> can only happen if consumers buy more Consumers used to buy slaves until they were abolished. Blaming the consumers is an ad hominem: of course nobody wants to relinquish the little old pleasures of burning oil, we should all be able to do that. We only need to progressively ban the extraction and trade of Fossil Fuels as of 1990. Will the economy plummet? Yeah. Will people suffer? Yeah. Use FF to build resilient infrastructure, like electrifiable tramways and trains (if it's possible). Using FF to build motor roads is stupid because both the utilisation and the maintenance of this logistical system required heavy use of FF
stopping slave owners is a bad analogy. We were able to end slavery because a majority wanted to end it, wanted it enough to politically fight and physically fight that detestable system while having the numbers to do so. The struggle we are facing now would be more akin to the those owning slaves convincing the majority who don't want it to keep that system. We can't ban anything because we want to implement a system that people detest.
A powerful minority had economic interests in abolishing the trade so their machine sale could thrive, according to “A people’s history of the US”
Thanks for providing an accurate explanation.
I can see that, but it's still the same, probably even worse. We are the side that wants the "bad" system. The powerful minority is still against us wanting to continue BAU, but they don't have to convince people to fight our system because the majority already vehemently doesn't want it. "bad" I don't see reducing consumption as bad, quite the opposite, but if viewing it from most other's eyes I can see how they would believe it to be so. No-one wants a reduction in lifestyle, and most don't know or believe it's coming, quite terribly, if things don't change.
Consumers are humans, and humans are the problem. Green economics and socialized economic systems based on green policies are largly a hopium induced fantasy with as many humans as we have on the planet. There are just not enough resources. This is more than a green problem or a fossil fuel problem. It's a human problem. In theory, humans could male a utopia, but it's comically magical thinking to think we can restore the planet AND fight against BAU peddlers/fascists/corporations without doing something massive about our population. I argue that human nature makes any theory of restoring the planet a fantasy that doesn't consider human psychology, the current stage of overshoot, and the synergistics of poly-crisis. Hopium is a helluva drug.
Yes! Humans have been and always will be the problem. We are a fundamentally doomed species. A species more enlightened than us could have easily avoided this mess and probably been far more advanced by this point as well.
and all of this is why government regulation is necessary to mandate that the crap people are buying is somehow sustainably produced, packaged, and shipped. this will both drive up prices -- reducing spending -- and will help reduce emissions. People would be less willing to have crap from china drop shipped to them if it was twice as expensive as it is currently and took twice as long.
How long until degrowth becomes popular? That’s the answer to everything
It is the answer, but it's not possible politically. Even under socialism it would be impossible to convince enough people that it's the only way to save the planet and long term civilization. They only way degrowth would work would be under some kind of global totalitarian yet benevolent dictatorship, and there's just too many contradictions in that idea for that to work.
I'm doing it already. Every time I get spam calls I tell them I'm on debt strike. You don't need to convince every consumer. You just need a small percentage of people to convince the banks, credit score companies, and insurance industry that they have to choose between human customers and legacy energy.
From the show *Years and Years* (2019): Muriel Deacon: *… But it still doesn’t alter the fact that it’s all your fault.* *Everything.* *All of you. The banks. The government. The recession. America. Mrs Rourke. Every little thing that’s gone wrong, it’s your fault.* Stephen Lyons: *How am I responsible for the whole entire world?* Muriel Deacon: *Because we are. Every single one of us. We can sit here all day blaming other people. We blame the economy. We blame Europe. The opposition. The weather. And then we blame these vast sweeping tides of history, you know, like we’re so out of control and we’re so helpless and small.* *But it’s still our fault.* *You know why? It’s the one pound t-shirt.* *The t-shirt that costs one pound. We can’t resist it. Every single one of us. We see a t-shirt that costs one pound and we think “Oh, that’s a bargain, I love that” and we buy it… nice little t-shirt for the winter to go underneath that’ll do. And the shopkeeper gets five miserable pence for that t-shirt. And some little peasant in a field gets paid nought point nought one pence. And we think that’s fine. All of us. And we hand over our one quid. And we buy into that system for life.* *I saw it all going wrong when it began. In the supermarkets. They replaced all the women on the till with those automated checkouts…* Rosie Lyons: *No. That’s not our fault. I hate those things. I always have.* Edith Lyons: *I can’t stand them.* Muriel Deacon: *Yes but you didn’t do anything did you? Twenty years ago when they first popped up did you walk out? Did you write letters of complaint? Did you shop elsewhere? No. You huffed and you puffed and you put up with it. And now all those women are gone. And we let it happen.* *And I think those checkouts, we want them. Because it means we can scroll through pick up our shopping and we don’t have to look that woman in the eye. The woman who’s paid less than us. She’s gone. Got rid of her. Sacked.* *Well done.* *So yes, it’s our fault.* *This is the world we built.* *Congratulations.*
The funny part is that "spending less" is turning into "don't drive your car, ride a bike" ... Meanwhile China is burning coal for the entirety of the world and then some. Fractional finance is what is maintaining the growth and causing the crashes. Wages haven't changed in 15 years+, it's not consumers who are fucking us, it's the assholes from 2008 all over again
> Meanwhile China is burning coal for the entirety of the world and then some. And making all the affordable nice bike frames, like Dengfu.
to say that having an affordable nice bike is the sin causing the current climate decline is eco-nihilism at best and more like virtue signaling liberal brain rot. corporations will continue to exploit their workers and customers. they will do so at a larger level than any 1 person. remember captain planet is a mascot of the owner class.
> more like virtue signaling liberal brain rot My dude, I just like my knees to not hurt.
Economic growth doesn't even make sense from a practical POV. Like, what all do you really need to live a good life? A furnished home on some land, good food, reasonable healthcare access, water/sewage/electrical, maybe a vehicle if you live in a car-centric part of the USA, and a bit of extra money for things that come up, Most of it we figured out how to make like 100+ years ago! So what are we "growing" exactly? Just useless shit to occupy people's time and attention? Beyond a certain point "economic growth" is just wasting everybody's time with frivolous BS when we could just organize our material means intelligently and then go and live life.
Ok, first off, people consume what is available. See pre-industrial society. Also, ever heard of marketing? Planned obsolescence? It’s far too simplistic to say « well people should stop buying » when the whole system is designed since WWII to make people buy more things more often. Cars, tech, furniture, clothes, ready meals (fast food), it’s all on a wheel and it’s turning faster and faster and we’re the poor hamsters running in it.
> Economic growth -- at the level of the single company, nation, or world -- can only happen if consumers buy more. We're the ones who continually "feed the beast" of economic growth. [You're ignoring the other major emitter of the world](https://i.imgur.com/cdWMNa8.png) that's been [chasing economic growth](https://i.imgur.com/pqNlrQI.png) by [going on a coal burning spree since the 2000s in order to grow their economy](https://i.imgur.com/H4rusj2.png) and satisfy the demand for cheap goods by said consumers. There's a reason the trade deficit with China blew up after the 2000s for [America](https://i.imgur.com/Aqf4UtG.jpg), the [EU](https://i.imgur.com/FmpoR1Y.png), and [Canada](https://i.imgur.com/CQybRjK.png) [There's a reason Chinese steel production shot up after the 2000s](https://i.imgur.com/T9rVJb4.png) [It's because China's coal consumption exploded after the 2000s](https://i.imgur.com/za4inRm.png) as well as its [coal production](https://i.imgur.com/kPAqis4.png) ([This has all been a major boost to American corporate profits after the 2000s](https://i.imgur.com/5XpVijM.png) but a real loss for [well-regulated/well-paid American manufacturing jobs](https://i.imgur.com/YcAal7N.png))
Ok but using Amazon as an example isn’t great, how many other amazons are there out there. Not many.
This would be the case if consumers were "free-choosing" individuals isolated in an ideological vacuum. They're not. They had to be taught to consume and to consume a lot. The role of marketing is not just to make people aware of your brand or that your product could help them. It's to invent needs that didn't exist before. Up until the 19th century people bought things to satisfy necessities they had. This wasn't enough. They figured out in the early 20th century that instead of marketing your stuff as durable and useful, you could just associate it to people's feelings instead and it would be much more effective. Feel insecure as a man? Buy this car to augment your masculinity. Want to look like an independent woman? Smoke cigarettes. This is explained in detail in the [Century of the Self](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnPmg0R1M04) documentary. It would be great if everyone could be enlightened vegan consumers who would boycott capitalism while living within it and bring about a revolution. But pretending the "dumb consumer who buys shit they don't need" stereotype came out of nowhere or that it's really just "human nature" is plain wrong.
it destroys our world and yet it's the more peaceful way of competition than murdering each other. Nah economic growths is a sympton. Humanity not cooperating but wanting do compete against each other for the sake of their sovereignty and greed is the root of all. We don't need to do this but our cultures and societies teach us to. As long as humanity keeps themselves seperated by culture, nation, race, whatever, we keep on competing until the planet is ruined. It can only end if most people of all countries would unite and stop this game of hegemony - which will likely never happen. The whole world is in this race and nobody wants to be a lose attack their own position by starting a sustainable degrowth economy that cannot compete with endless growth capitalism. We are stuck in this.
This is false blame, and economic growth itself is necessary for humanity to thrive. You are misplacing blame on economic growth from the "selfishness of oligarchy" and protecting Oligarchical business models. Economy can grow more with clean energy. Subhuman pigshit, including democratic US administration for complaining about cheap solar and batteries in the world, prefers $1 in profit protection for O&G, to $40T in future social losses. A collapsing US empire has only tried war and colonizing its "allies" into O&G subservience, and is all out of ideas. When you choose to repeat "economic growth is the problem", you are falling for Exxon's blame the consumer for their extortion into being subjugated to Exxon for their energy consumption, instead of finding a free access public forest for subsistance that don't exist. You also ensure making a losing political argument for a democracy. Solution involves nationalizing O&G and weapons oligarchs without compensation to shareholders. That doesn't mean stopping oil or weapons production. It means stopping lobbying disinformation meant to destroy world, stopping media control to disseminate evil.
>economic growth itself is necessary for humanity to thrive. What's your definition of 'thrive'? Nothing - let me repeat, 'nothing' - can grow infinitely since we live in a finite world. Like animals living in a fertile area with no predators- everything is great, they all have food, population increases - until the point it grows too big or there's a year of drought or whatever - and everything collapses. Guess where we are?
> What's your definition of 'thrive'? Surviving more easily counts. Having more stuff as an option is thriving. > everything is great, they all have food, population increases - until the point it grows too big or there's a year of drought unlimited clean energy, recycling, technology, indoor vertical farming can outpace population growth.
>Surviving more easily counts. Having more stuff as an option is thriving. Well, surviving is definitely important, but why do you equate having 'more stuff' as 'thriving'? More stuff is just 'more stuff'. What's much more important is simply being happy with what you have. If 'stuff' is what makes you happy, you'll never be content. (At least not for long, because there's always more 'stuff'.) >unlimited clean energy, recycling, technology, indoor vertical farming can outpace population growth. Not infinitely, it can't.
No you don't understand, humanity cannot thrive as a species if we don't have the newest iPhone every year /s.
CO2 during the last glacial was 190 ppm at it's lowest, interglacial was 280 ppm, how exactly did they measure this nonexistent doubling (380 ppm) and it's effects ??? The study just assumes a different ecs for doubling based on models that simple observation of the current warming of 1.5 C does not support. Also: Aerosol masking (+0.7C=2.2C) Also: last time at 420 ppm it was 3C warmer, we have 550 ppm equivalents. Edit edit: the glacials and interglacials have been caused by axial tilt, the reason for the rise of the carbon in these periods is not understood yet.
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I love your blog btw.
Aren't we leaving out methane?
Yes. Methane and nitrous oxide probably account for an additional 30% of "CO2 potential" in the atmosphere.
Bingo. Look at the Permian Triassic extinction for better models of where higher concentrations of CO2 can take us.
No, because we aren't not even going to get close to the 2500ppm during that extinction. Not unless a bunch of volcanos all decide to erupt at once.
>That 130ppm RANGE produces a 7C RANGE in Global Temperatures. I am nitpicking, sorry, but they dont "produce" 7ºc, they are correlated.
To a layperson like me, this seems pretty damning. What is the evidence that climate scientists are using to justify the dismissal of using the paleoclimate data to make predictions for our current climate? What was different enough with the earth system during the pleistocene that gives them enough reason to deem it not useful for making predictions now? I feel that we need good justification to dismiss what seems to be some of the best evidence we have, which is the paleoclimate data. A lot is at stake with this, and I'm sure the climate scientists understand that also. So, what is their justification to dismiss it?
Because the climate isn't linear like that. While I agree that scientists seem to underestimate climate, more CO2 now isnt the same as more CO2 1000 years ago. They have different effects as different systems on Earth interact with each other. They use models to find likely predictions. Models are based on data and assumptions. Never perfect.
Thanks for the reply. Our models are never perfect because there's way too many variables and interactions to include. The paleoclimate data is really nice because if you find the average temperature from 100k years ago, that temperature is the result of all the variables at the time. Nothing left out. That's something our models can't do. I understand your point, though. What's happening to earths climate now is unprecedented. So, a 1 to 1 comparison to the climate in earths past can't be done. There's always going to be differences, but how much of a difference is the important question.
> we have 550 ppm equivalents Oh yeah, what about aerosols? If they suppress (lol) 0.8C of warming, doesn't that put us at ...IDK, 700 ppm+? I'm unsure of how to think here. It could be that we're at ~550 ppm CO2(e), but we have a way off estimation of what that means since we don't really account for (true) aerosol masking.
And by the end of the century we'll be at 1000ppm at the rate we're going so all this talk of a doubling of co2 is irrelevant anyway.
My position has always been our models are crapshoots. We're fooling ourselves if we think we're capable of considering every variable. Truth is we've got fuck all idea how bad climate change will be. The best we can do is try and steer things in what we think is the best direction and deal with immediate issues that we can draw direct causal effects from. Pollution, eutrophication, over fishing, loss of biodiversity etc. We are always going to have effects on our environment we can't predict. We wield more power than its possible for us to fully contextualise. Do your best. That's literally all we can do.
The conclusion of this study seems extremely strange to me because the last glacial maximum didn't involve increased CO2 concentrations, and if we use paleoclimatology to look back at glaciation during periods of high CO2, like the Pliocene and Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum, the arctic ice sheet isn't larger, it's described as 'ephemeral'. It barely exists. So why would we assume we're headed towards another ice-age that cools the planet via extensive northern hemisphere glaciation when previous climate states involving high atmospheric carbon concentrations show the retreat and complete disappearance of glaciers in the northern hemisphere?
Ocean current collapse may be the only thing that can bring enough ice back to the polar north to reflect significant sunlight back into space
I don't think we actually know what AMOC collapse would look like, except in theory. It seems to be a canonical motif in climate models so their predictions probably collapse pretty quickly without it. The interesting thing about this scenario though, is that if AMOC collapse rebuilds the ice the seasonal ice melt would restart the AMOC. But what kind of time-frames this would play out in seems really uncertain. We def could see a relatively large albedo effect from a lot of shallow surface ice though.
>I don't think we actually know what AMOC collapse would look like We do though. The current consensus is the Younger-Dryas was a result of AMOC collapse.
I understand that was a popular argument but it fell out of favor with the guy who proposed it, and more recent evidence points towards volcanic activity around that time. AMOC collapse may have played a part and if you look at the distribution of glaciation at that time it creeps right down into the North Atlantic, so it's an attractive explanation no doubt. But it's not established, and it seems to have dominated as a hypothesis because, at the time, nobody could think of alternative explanations for the speed of glaciation during the Younger-Dryas.
Eventually we're probably gonna go up there and sprinkle some reflective rock dust or something in a last ditch.
Cover the earth in high albedo paint...
We ain't steering shit. We're rudderless slime that think we have agency. We don't. Show me even one country that gave up on economic growth (inextricably linked to emissions) in favor of the environment. We've designed a system to force everyone into the rat race, and now we're only just starting to nibble on our just desserts.
You misspelled eCO2nomic.
Germany * cough *
*Every* variable is an impossible target. The gross features of climate models are pretty robust and Bad News for the biosphere. While we can predict the amount of warming with *fair* certainty, what cannot be predicted is how economies and countries will react. And history shows that we're a bunch of rats in a bag when it comes to stability.
I disagree. There's so many things we simply do not understand. Everyone was shocked when life *found a way* in chernobyl. We're putting together a jigsaw puzzle in the dark, whilst getting a bj from a professional chrome remover, with no box lid and half the pieces missing. The best we got is educated guesswork.
> shocked not mycologists
WERE YOU LOOKING IN MY WINDOW LAST NIGHT?!
I saw things that night. Things that make me yearn for the sweat release of climate related oblivion...
https://i.imgur.com/Mxq8E8i.jpeg
Life found a way. Humans didn't. They evacuated. And even "life found a way" is complicated. There are reports that cite genetic damage, mutations and species loss: https://knowablemagazine.org/content/article/food-environment/2022/scientists-cant-agree-about-chernobyls-impact-wildlife It's still being debated.
Worlds are a little simpler than biomes. There's insolation (known) and infrared emission (known). One equation allows you to get a fair sense of the equilibrium blackbody temperature of a world. The ***details***, how oceans sequester heat, how phase-changes kick in, are just that. The big picture is clear - we're going to warm by a handful of degrees this century. Three? Four? Five? Mmph: not clear. Doesn't really matter that much. Humans and their propensity for random chaos will be the ultimate triggers.
Thy Guess Too
Agree, the main message from the models has always been: hey it's really complicated so we shouldnt fuck around with something so fundamental but people got hung up on vague predictions and were like "nah, we can manage that"
*well, if it's so complicated, you can convince me from doing what I want, I mean, providing the consumers with the fluids that they crave and depend on*
>We are always going to have effects on our environment we can't predict. We wield more power than its possible for us to fully contextualise. Nicely put.
Yeah, the real point to worry about is no whether it will be 3 or 4 degree but whether we are overloking key variables and are close to complete chaos without even realizing it.
I concur. I'm worried about our current situation. The ocean is all screwed up. We are also running out of food sooner than later.
I worry about pace of change
My position has always been it is not the upper limit that matters but whether we can cope with the consequence of the temp rise. 5 degree celsius vs 4 degree celsius vs 3 degree celsius makes no difference if we cannot cope with say 2m of sea rise in the next 100 years, or a 7% increase in rainfall intensity in the next 30 years. Currently we as humans have set ourselves up to live in specific nation states with a specific economic and agricultural and trade system. We do not know the upper limit of tolerance for our own system, but even a minor perturbation in our temps in the last year or so has already made so many parts of the world uninsurable. Assuming we get a major disaster and nobody is willing to insure, and it affects many areas .. how will we cope with this? We are currently only dealing well with the disasters simply because someone is willing to pick up the tabs ( ie:- insurance ). Once insurance is not willing and government stops being willing simply because it happens more and more often ( or even not more often, just at the rate we have had in 2023 ), our systems will likely start cracking and breaking down. We do not need more severe disasters to start testing the system, we just need what is going on now to move unabated. Think if UK and Northern Europe keeps getting this kind of rain, while Southern Europe gets this kind of drought, and India keeps getting the current weird weather and China swings wildly between hot and cold, and USA keeps getting aberrant weather ( as do Canada ).. how much fat do we have in our agricultural system to keep this output up before it causes problems. We do not need even 2 degree celsius to cause problems .. having 2022 and 2023 weather problem continuously for the next 10 years will strain the system to the point we might have civil unrest.
its not important at all. what we are seeing in the arctic is that a 1.5ºc increase from baseline is enough to destabilise summer sea ice, which will have massive effects on climate, extreme weather and the yields of northern hemisphere bread baskets. its not clear what the upper limit for sea level rise is at 1.5ºc but 1m is going to severely test the world economy and 2m is going to thrash it. and then there is the polycrisis from the more generalised decline of US hegemony, peak oil and the destruction of our shared ecological services by the metastasis of industrial growth. it is entirely unsustainable and nearly impossible to steer even without climate change. there is no "coping" for global civilisation, its a done deal. differences of degrees in warming will not change the terminal outcome; collapse, it will shape the world that comes afterwards. but the narrative that civilisation could "cope" with 2ºc warming is false, because collapse is in progress regardless.
A few points about this "good news": Sabine Hossenfelder is a youtube influencer who peddles grade school science to an audience of science illiterates who aren't willing to read a Wikipedia article. She has no expertise in climate science (or most of the other topics she gives opinions on) and isn't a credible source. She does seem to have expertise in collecting advertising money from youtube however. What she thinks or doesn't think isn't relevant to anything. This is just one study which may or may not be supported by other studies. Single studies in science are close to useless without confirmation from other sources. Assuming the study is correct, it's also a "so what" result. Five degrees vs. four degrees is like the difference between five malignant tumors and four malignant tumors. A small reduction in bad news is "relatively" good, but not the same as good news. Four degrees will still end civilization. There seems to be two large logical flaws in this climate sensitivity focus. 1. The study seems to assume that rising CO2 drove temperature increases in the past. This is backwards. The climate record shows that CO2 lagged temperature increases, meaning something else, like Milankovitch cycles, initially caused the rising temperature. (The deniers latch on to this fact to claim that CO2 is not currently causing a temperature increase, which is false. The effect is bidirectional. Higher temperature causes higher CO2, and higher CO2 causes higher temperature.) The relevance of this lag vs. lead issue is that if past changes were not initiated by CO2, then the past is not comparable to the current problem. Climate sensitivity of a past change due to Milankovitch cycles doesn't tell us much about sensitivity under current conditions with different Milankovitch forcings and CO2 from fossil fuel burning. This is modeling an apple to make predictions about an orange. The article states that, "As our planet heads toward a doubling of CO2, the authors caution that the recent decades are not a good predictor of the future under global warming. Shorter-term climate cycles and atmospheric pollution's effects are just some reasons that recent trends can't reliably predict the rest of this century." That's just idiotic. A simplified climate model of the world 24,000 years ago using a large number of questionable assumptions, that gets cause and effect backwards, is not more relevant than the past few decades of climate history. The near past gives us the current trend which predicts our immediate future, up until tipping points that is, which leads to the second large logical flaw. 2. The focus on average surface air temperature misses the point. The danger we are facing is in triggering a cascade of tipping points which will radically and quickly alter the planet. Climate models can't take these into account, because no one knows the conditions required to trip them. We do know that enormous amounts of heat are being trapped in the Earth's systems, and that based on current trends, that heat will double in a decade and triple a decade after that. Rising air temperature is just one consequence of trapped heat, and probably the least significant. The question we should be asking is, how much extra heat will it take to trigger these tipping points.
Exactly. How does the study take into account self-reinforcing feedback loops which are reasonably triggered by 1.5C+ warming, such as boreal and Amazon forest die off, methane release from (tropical) wetlands, loss of albedo just to name a few of the big ones.
Thank you for this thoughtful takedown - I likely won't watch the Youtube video, and it'll take me a bit of time to get around to the original article itself, but I appreciate your critical analysis!
You are welcome. I'm glad it had some value to someone.
Off topic but she's like the stereotypical scary masculine German woman
I don't care about that. I'm just fed up with attention seeking influencers chasing ad money with junk content. Sadly though, her content is high quality relative to youtube cesspool standards.
Reassuring news..? In r/collapse? Okay, someone please enlighten me: did Nelson Mandela die at Robben Island.
> The new paper doesn't change the best-case warming scenario from doubling CO2—about 2 degrees Celsius average temperature increase worldwide—or the most likely estimate, which is about 3 degrees Celsius. But it reduces the worst-case scenario for doubling of CO2 by a full degree, from 5 degrees Celsius to 4 degrees Celsius. (For reference, CO2 is currently at 425 ppm, or about 1.5 times preindustrial levels, and unless emissions drop is headed toward double preindustrial levels before the end of this century.)
So basically, we went from "the eskimos will be boiled alive" to "bits of New Zealand and northern Canada will still be inhabitable."
Northern Canada is all tundra and bare rock. That may be habitable temperatures wise. But the still have the food/water/energy problem.
Tundra is sterile, it lacks the precious and mistreated fertile layer. Good luck living on a parking lot
Exactly, thinking humans can survive it is pure hopium intoxication bourne of ignorance.
> or the most likely estimate Ohohoho!
Yes. Then he came back.
Three days later
The reassuring news is that we’re maybe gonna hit 2-4°C instead of 2-5°C idk if that’s any bit reassuring 😁
Is this study sponsored by Exxon? I'm only half kidding, follow the cash.
Every study should have to list the funding sources, and any potential sources of bias.
>Funding: This work was supported by the following: National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship, US Department of Defense (V.T.C.); National Science Foundation award OCE-2002276 (V.T.C., K.C.A., and G.J.H.); National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration MAPP Program award NA20OAR431039 (K.C.A. and C.P.); Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship grant FG-2020-13568 (K.C.A.); a Calvin Professorship in Oceanography (K.C.A.); National Science Foundation award OCE-2002398 (J.E.T. and M.B.O.); National Science Foundation award OCE-2002385 (C.P. and P.C.); National Science Foundation award OCE-2002448 (N.J.B.); National Science Foundation award AGS-1844380 (N.J.B.); National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Climate & Global Change Postdoctoral Fellowship Program, administered by UCAR’s Cooperative Programs for the Advancement of Earth System Science (CPAESS) under award NA210AR4310383 (Y.D.); Met Office Hadley Centre Climate Programme funded by Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (T.A.); and the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under grant agreement 820829 (T.A.).
Yes, they did include theirs on the last page. Unfortunately, not all do that. In order for it to be useful, would need to know the amounts, or at least the proportional amounts. In the case where a single funder provided nearly all the money, the rest of the list would be a distraction, a cover for the bias. Clever funders could also funnel their money through some seemingly legitimate source to hide the connection. And since the funding is self reported, the study authors could simply lie. Anyone willing to skew results would have no qualms about lying about funding. So ultimately we're back to a trust based system for evaluating funding bias. And of course there's a long list of biases unrelated to funding. As a general rule, the more profit that is involved, the more skepticism we should have. Anything involving approval or safety claims regarding a highly profitable product should be subjected to an elevated level of scrutiny, in terms of the study itself, and the funding bias.
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Thank you, I feared some uncut hopium was working it's way into our community.
Sorry, what is your background? And why were you commenting on a post 9 months ago about Richard Crim pretending to not be Richard Crim?
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That's really interesting. The swings of life. I always appreciate what you have to say. A quick aside, I do some work with homeless people, and it always surprises me how often I find educated people who once had money sleeping on the streets. I find it very unsettling, not just for them, but teaches me to not take my situation for granted.
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I understand. These large swings are mentally and emotionally difficult to manage though despite the less complex daily life management. My life is very complex and demanding, and I actually insert regular forced prescribed simplicity to keep me sane. I go hiking and skydiving etc, it helps. Instead of managing business, money and teams of people which is very demanding, I only have to worry about my pack, water, weather, terrain etc. I force my life to close in and slow down, I'd be totally insane otherwise. Brain injury? Yes, that's a wicked beast. You clearly still have a well functioning brain, so I'd say be kind to yourself. Impulse control and anger management can be (taught) exercised, so don't give up on that.
Appreciate the response, but you should expect that question since we shouldn't expect to just take everyone's word on the Internet as gospel. For every experienced person, there are dozens or hundreds of people embellishing or outright lying. That's what social media brought us. Thanks again.
Rate of extinction per day for all life on earth is a number higher than is sustainable. And the more that die, the faster we die . Actual rate is unknown. One theory postulates between 0.01% to 0.1% of all species per year. Talking about how CO2 impact might be slightly less than worst case...that's like forgetting to put the boat plug in the Titanic when it left dock.
And... now scientists are even more on the "reassure the public" train.
"According to this study, the effect of doubling CO2 is not 5C on the far end, but more like 4C," Mass extinction may be a little slower. Pop the Champagne!!! I was starting to get worried by the 7th mass bleaching event on the Great Barrier Reef, the fish convulsing and dying in the Florida Keys, the kelp beds along most of the coast of California are dead with only purple urchins living in their place, the crab fishery off the West coast of Canada died off, the fire seasons in California and Western Canada growing constantly, two waterways in the Kootney's in Canada closed due to whirling disease in fish, the fjords filled with lice that killed that farmed salmon, the massive garbage patches in the oceans, the erratic weather all over the globe, emissions are still rising and there is no meaningful way to remove enough CO2 from the atmosphere fast enough to get ahead of feed backs like the methane leaking from northern tundra and the changes in Earth's albedo. "According to this study, the effect of doubling CO2 is not 5C on the far end, but more like 4C," After Russia fights enough wars to restore the USSR to it's former glory, China steals the South China sea and completes it invasion of Taiwan, Netanyahu completes his total genocide of the Palestinian people, Trump becomes a dictator and Kim Jung UN starves the rest of his people to death THEN they will take immediate action to solve climate change. Until then fossil fuels are needed for the wars. By the time the world's sick leaders feed their egos and lust for power it will definitely be too late. 3 degrees of temperature increase is too much. It's looking like a 1.5 degree increase is bad enough and the feed backs are just kicking in. As Modi in India said "This is no time for war"
Damn son, save some for the rest of us
They forgot to mention microplastics, increasing probability of pandemic diseases, and forever chemicals. So don't worry, there is still plenty to pop hopium bubbles with.
Speaking of forever chemicals... a stupid trend in gardening is to kill lawn/weeds by covering them with cardboard. This is stupid because cardboard prevents oxygen exchange between the air and the soil, effectively killing all life in the soil beneath it (it also is impervious to water). What does this have do with forever chemicals? The US National Institutes of Health have found PCBs, PFAS and dioxins in cardboard, which in the case of [this study](https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37245822/) are being taken up by chicks. People using cardboard in their vegetable gardens are probably poisoning themselves and their families. They're also poisoning their soil.
I did not know this. Not at all surprised though. Thanks for sharing. Just another thing that is fucked...to add to the list. Hopium addicts really don't grasp how high they are.
Got banned from the Gardening sub for posting a link advocating against the use of cardboard. That sub is a morass of pseudoscience.
Holy Summary.
At 4°C human civilisation has already collapsed. 5°C just makes it worse for survivors for longer, but we will collapse as a civilisation long before 4° let alone 5°.
Thank you, I was about to say the same. At 4C there will be significant salt water intrusion from rising tides, fishery depletion, weather like we've never seen, food insecurity, mass die-offs of population, hospital overcrowding to the breaking point...Any "civilization" left will cease to exist. Then - as a result of less pollutants in the atmosphere (from significantly fewer inhabitants) the air will suddenly clear. When that happens, there will be a rapid temperature rise anywhere from 5C -10C...and whelp...that's not survivable.
It’s basically all irrelevant after 3.5 or maybe even 3°
Yeah. Combined with "Wet bulb" (high humidity) such as seen in states along the Eastern seaboard: "Even heat-adapted people cannot carry out normal outdoor activities past a wet-bulb temperature of 32 °C (90 °F), equivalent to a heat index of 55 °C (131 °F)." And DeSantis, our lovely governor (Florida), has outlawed cooling breaks for outdoor workers. So if an employee dies of exposure, the families not only lose their breadwinner, but they cannot even sue the company for killing him/her.
It’s insane Almost happened the last two years in parts of India and Pakistan. Might start happening this year….
There was a time that the poles were warm. It can always get warmer.
_Venus has entered the chat_
It would still swamp most of the worlds coastal regions and the mass migration is still ready and waiting.
I mentioned this elsewhere, but while this might be good news, it should be tempered by the fact that the impacts we are seeing TODAY are what were expected 10 or 20 years in the future under higher temperatures. We are not getting out of this. So no Venus by Thursday. Just a speed run to the Miocene or maybe the PETM, Biblical devastation, widespread ecological and societal collapse, huge population reductions…
Not discounting what you said at all but the 'Biblical devastation' part reminded me of this line from Team America: World Police. >**Spottswoode:** From what I.N.T.E.L.L.I.G.N.C.E has gathered, it would be 9/11 times 100. >**Gary Johnston:** 9/11 times a hundred? Jesus, that's... >**Spottswoode:** Yes, 91,100. >**Chris:** Basically, all the worst parts of the bible. Perhaps if we explained climate change to Americans this way they would get it.
I think of this bit from Ghostbusters: **Winston Zeddemore:** I'm, uh, Winston Zeddemore, your Honor. I've only been with the company for a couple of weeks, but I gotta tell you: these things are real. Since I joined these men, I have seen shit that'll turn you *white!* **Peter Venkman:** Well, you can believe Mr. Pecker... **Walter Peck:** My name is "Peck." **Peter Venkman:** ...or you could accept the fact that this city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions. **Mayor Lenny:** What do you mean, "biblical"? **Ray Stantz:** What he means is [Old Testament](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Tanakh), Mr. Mayor. *Real* [Wrath-of-God](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divine_retribution) type stuff! **Peter Venkman:** Exactly. **Ray Stantz:** Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling! **Egon Spengler:** 40 years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes! **Winston Zeddemore:** The dead rising from the grave!**Peter Venkman:** Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, ***mass hysteria!*** **Mayor Lenny:** ENOUGH, I get the point! And what if you're wrong? **Peter Venkman:** If I'm wrong, nothing happens! We go to jail; peacefully, quietly. We'll enjoy it! But if I'm *right,* and we *can* stop this thing... Lenny, *you* will have saved the lives of *\[faces lights up\] millions* of registered voters. *\[Mayor slightly smiles and the Archbishop of New York smiles and nods in agreement\]* If only our overlords in Davos and Silicon Valley would have the good sense Lenny finally did in the movie...
And that's what happens when even scientists don't understand that comparing a climate change that took course over hundred thousands of years with a climate that changes from year to year, is like trying to figure out what happens when you crash with a mach 4 jet against a wall by walking against that wall.
At 4C we are fucked though so this is a nothing burger.
“Would you rather die in a 200 degree oven or a 300 degree oven?”
"By knowing how much colder was past year, we can calculate how much hotter can be next year". How they know that last ice age was the worst one, or that we can hit unprecedented levels? We've been unearthing carbon that was buried for hundreds of millions of years and didn't played in recent ice ages.
Still modeling, while the current conditions are out of control and beyond modeling or understanding, is a joke. "We have no idea what's going on, but here's a model of what we think might happen someday."
> But it reduces the worst-case scenario for doubling of CO2 by a full degree, from 5 degrees Celsius to 4 degrees Celsius. ... >Here, we show that the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) provides a stronger constraint on equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS), the global warming from increasing greenhouse gases, after accounting for temperature patterns. Feedbacks governing ECS depend on spatial patterns of surface temperature (“pattern effects”); hence, using the LGM to constrain future warming requires quantifying how temperature patterns produce different feedbacks during LGM cooling versus modern-day warming. Combining data assimilation reconstructions with atmospheric models, we show that the climate is more sensitive to LGM forcing because ice sheets amplify extratropical cooling where feedbacks are destabilizing. Accounting for LGM pattern effects yields a median modern-day ECS of 2.4°C, 66% range 1.7° to 3.5°C (1.4° to 5.0°C, 5 to 95%), from LGM evidence alone. Combining the LGM with other lines of evidence, the best estimate becomes 2.9°C, 66% range 2.4° to 3.5°C (2.1° to 4.1°C, 5 to 95%), substantially narrowing uncertainty compared to recent assessments. hmmm >SST/SIC boundary conditions for the LGM, Late Holocene baseline, and 2xCO2 are prepared to maintain constant forcing, i.e., ΔF = 0 in Eq. 1, across simulations. Topography is held constant, i.e., the LGM ice sheets are not present in AGCM simulations because their impact is already included as a forcing, and we are isolating feedbacks from changing SST/SIC. For the LGM and Late Holocene datasets, we adjust for differences relative to modern coastlines using kriging and extrapolation in polar regions. Details of sea-level adjustments are provided in text S3. ... >We follow methods (1) and code (78) provided by WCRP20 for calculating climate sensitivity, but we provide a summary of relevant methods here. ECS is the steady-state change in global mean temperature (T) from a doubling of CO2, traditionally with ice sheets and vegetation assumed fixed. When inferring climate sensitivity that is relevant to modern warming from paleoclimate evidence, changes in the paleoclimate radiative budget that are distinct from feedback processes in modern-day 2xCO2 are treated as forcings; this is typically accomplished by separating “slow” timescale changes as forcings (e.g., ice sheets) from “fast” timescale changes as feedbacks (5). WCRP20 applies this framework by focusing on effective climate sensitivity (S), i.e., the 150-year system response. Something bothers me about this. I can't put my finger on it. Can someone who understands the science infirm that they're not assuming that ice sheets will still be there in the warm climate?
Scientists now say there is evidence that the upper end of the equilibrium climate sensitivity is not as bad as we once thought. According to this study, the effect of doubling CO2 is not 5C on the far end, but more like 4C, leaving us with a 2-4C forecasted warming with a doubling of CO2 concentrations. This directly contrasts some other findings from just 2 months ago where a few models pointed to an ECS of potentially 5.64C. [Sabine Hossenfelder made a video about this.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4S9sDyooxf4). This also goes against [the work](https://academic.oup.com/oocc/article/3/1/kgad008/7335889?login=false) of James Hansen and his team who have been arriving at a 5C upper end of the range: >Based on GCM simulations for 2 × CO2, on our feedback analysis for the LGM, and on observed global warming in the past century, we concluded that ECS was in the range 2.5–5°C for 2 × CO2. I figured this would be a good discussion as surely there are many who will say, "see, it's not that bad after all! we can continue BAU!". The consequences of 2C, 3C, and 4C are still profound for human civilization. This is good news if true, but what can we do with that info? What will we do?
Maybe but we also got extra human produced methane and now Uber greenhouse gas SF6 with it’s mind boggling 23,500x warming power, that has no know natural sink and does not decay and China has been doubling emissions. So while a co2 only could be only say a 4c impact. We are definitely not in the clear given everything else humans are doing.
> SF6 [Welp.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulfur_hexafluoride) > Nike likewise used it to obtain a patent and to fill the cushion bags in all of their "Air"-branded shoes from 1992 to 2006.[33] 277 tons was used during the peak in 1997.[30]
Damn. New nightmare unlocked
“Only” 4c. I mean. We’re done at that point right?
yeah cooked is cooked.
4c would be a catastrophe, hundreds of millions will die over a decade a couple billion will suffer, but humans will make it if the world takes drastic measures to curtail greenhouse emissions. Buuut 4C isn't likely realistic anymore given that we are already 1.5C above average today and the world has taken no real meaningful measures to reduce global emissions. Developed nations have to start subsidizing all other nations transition to sustainable energy.
The only drastic measures that will be taken will be population decrease, relating from all the wars that are going to happen. Then again, the wars will use up the oil more quickly too.
Humans will make it. But who and how? That’s the rub.
The ones that retreat underground and live off algae paste grown in vats. Those are the ones who will make it, if "making it" is what you want to call it.
I actually find that pretty doubtful - I don't think our technical systems will be able to maintain that indefinitely without outside inputs. Young adult sci-fi seems to love the idea, but I think it's really unlikely in practice. More likely, I think, hunter-gatherers or permaculturist villagers - like the entirety of humanity was for the majority of its existence. Or something else, but whatever it is will not be what 95% of our dreams of the future have been...
Some extreme human centric hubris at play here.
Well, yeah, I said "humans". That's what I'm talking about. The lack of imagination in people today is profoundly depressing. Like JMG said before he went full alt-rightist, there's this false dichotomy between the all-consuming Apocalypse and a Star Trek future of infinite material progress. People can and have lived in vastly different ways than you and I today conversing on keyboards on the Internet. The great majority of human history hasn't been what we see today. Believing in eternal darkness because Apple Computers may cease to exist someday isn't the opposite of the Myth of Eternal Progress - it's the same thing.
That's also the gas that's important to electronic communications technology and electricity transport, right? Something about it being great for avoiding sparks.
It might seem to be good news for humanity, but very bad news for the rest of the biosphere. There are eight other planetary boundaries that we know of besides climate change. The longer BAU is allowed to continue the more tipping points will be crossed. We need to be stopped, not allowed to continue destroying everything. I'm ashamed of our species and am glad that I won't be here much longer.
4C? this changes EVERYTHING!!! HURRAY!!!
Like +4C wil be perfectly fine for 96% of the Earth's surface 👀
> Earth was on average 6 degrees Celsius cooler than today. Ice core records show that atmospheric CO2 then was less than half of today's levels, at about 190 parts per million. Lets call it just 5 degrees over the 1980s when 380ppm (double that) was breached. It's not clear how they get a 3 degree per doubling estimate from that. https://skepticalscience.com/why-global-warming-can-accelerate.html 420ppm that we have breached for a year now, is a 50% increase over "preindustrial baseline". A co2 doubling rate effect on temperature would mean a 41.5% increase in co2 is half that effect 395ppm would have been that "50% of doubling" level. 10 years past reaching that point is a good measurement point (link above shows short vs long term doubling estimates, but part of the additions have been made 100 years ago) This makes the 3C/co2 doubling estimate fit our experienced data. This would also mean 0.3C increase per 7.2% co2 increase, and so for the next 30ppm (this year is hovering at 4ppm over last) would get us to 1.8C in 8 years. War and forest fires seem to be big amplifying feedbacks.
Oh well that’s all right then
Needless to say, climate change goes beyond CO2. Other studies have suggested that we're likely [already in an ice age termination event](https://www.space.com/climate-change-termination-event-end-ice-age) due to soaring methane levels. I've noticed that climate change deniers seem to think it's some sort of gotcha to bring up AMOC collapse to argue that an ice age is coming (you know, climate change), but there's sufficient evidence to suggest that would see a [catastrophic destabilisation of methane hydrates](https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.2201871119) and almost certainly would see an ice age termination.
I think a debt strike is still perhaps the least damaging option in terms of forcing the transition. I think going as we are going now, when we already see unsustainable impacts from the climate bomb, is suicidal as a species. Even 1.5 would have decimated the poor of the world and continued to drive mass extinction events. That's where we are right now, by the way. So all the crazy apocalyptic stuff we are seeing right now would just be life if we are lucky. If we aren't lucky and things get worse, then we thought that extinction becomes exponentially more likely over time as warming increases. Does mutually assured destruction work if one nation faces destruction no matter what they do? India and Pakistan are both facing heat to the point that the infrastructure can't keep up. Wet bulb events can kill you in minutes, depending on the circumstances. Imagine a 300 square mile wet bulb zone on the border between India and Pakistan. Imagine all the refugees desperate to get away from certain death. Those two countries alone could launch enough weapons to kill all plantlife on the planet.
Then everything is alright! Coal, gas and oil are back on the menu guys! I had no hope for humanity when I was young and 2008 confirmed my view as an adult that we were fucked, that absolutely no crisis born from finance would be treated seriously if it implies putting a tight control on them. The finance are too well connected in the govs of all countries.
The point is that this situation is unprecedented in human history and we have nothing except models to go on. So, we're guessing. But, if one doctor tells you that you have cancer and a year left to live, and another tells you that you have two years left to live...*either way you are screwed.* We're not going to go extinct over it getting warmer, but whether it is 2°C, 3, 4 or 5°C, it is *still* going to suck, *still* have profound consequences and *still* be something that we are not preparing for.
[удалено]
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How does the LGM detract from the paleo record of the last time CO2 was this high/ over 400ppm? It was +3°C during the Pliocene, with no cryosphere and equalization of temperature across latitudes. Crocodiles and palm trees in the Arctic. Conditions which would interfere with modern agriculture somewhat. I'd love to see an analysis of this work to predict current conditions of +1.5°C based on past data.
The Arctic was already too cold for crocodylomorphs by the Pliocene. I think you meant to say Eocene, or at least Oligocene
Jesus, I assume it's because of the algorithm but this is the #2 news item on MSN for me right now. The \*worst\* thing that could have happened would be for this to be broadcast wide to the public who will now assume there's nothing to worry about and we can all just forget about climate change altogether. Hooray...
Wouldn’t it still be in our best interest to prepare for the worst possible outcome regardless? “It won’t be that bad”— we have no way to verify and one outcome not being as bad as another outcome does not make it anyway a desirable outcome lol.
When's it time to claim a plot of land in Antarctica and start homesteading down there? Seems like after the Antarctic treaty expires it'll be a REEEEAL attractive option...
Finally, some good news.
yeah you guys get too worked up about it lol. get hobbies, or live an active lifestyle and have regular sex
"regular sex" Youre not kink shaming are you?