Is Climate Change Impacting Your Long Term Planning?

[Kalbear]

And all that being said, any climate scientist worth their salt starts with the statement 'no specific weather event can be attributed directly to climate change'. 

But statistically, we should see more variations in weather with larger dangerous weather patterns. As you add more energy to the system, you get more chaos and more movement in the overall system. You will have parts that are colder than they had been, parts that are warmer, and the average overall temperature will be greater. 

[Altherion]

1 hour ago, Rippounet said:

Seven hells. It's called "climate change" rather than "global warming" for a reason: although we know for a fact that temperatures are rising *globally* we also know that localized changes or events are near impossible to predict. So it's not surprising that there are contradicting predictions as soon as we start going into details. This certainly does not invalidate the theory as a whole, unless you read the wrong stuff or have zero critical distance.

It's called climate change rather than global warming mainly because it's easier to frighten people with the former. Global warming is the thing that's actually been extensively studied; the rest is almost entirely sensationalism.

1 hour ago, Rippounet said:

Then there's confusion between prediction of future events and interpretation of current events. Some extreme climactic events that we are witnessing are no doubt due to climate change, but it's difficult to know which ones or to what extent global changes are playing a role in them.
A single drought, heat wave, flood, polar vortex, or forest fire may not be a consequence of climate change but if such events are truly exceptional and/or start happening on a regular basis, it's a pretty safe bet that they are indeed part of the whole. Sometimes the media gets a bit sensational and may get a few things wrong, Nonetheless, *some* of these extreme events must be linked to climate change anyway so a few mistakes here and there are only to be expected, and again that certainly doesn't say anything about the theory as a whole

In the quote immediately above, you say "localized changes or events are near impossible to predict" so what makes you think that anything we're witnessing is due to climate change? There have been droughts, floods, forest fires, etc. throughout recorded history with varying frequencies and varying magnitudes. Where is the proof that any one of them is associated with climate change at all or even that they're occurring more frequently or are more intense? Of course, the argument for more frequent and more extreme fluctuations is plausible (Kalbear summarizes it above), but to actually prove that this is happening with respect to any given type of event is not simple and I haven't heard of it being done.

[Kalbear]

8 minutes ago, Altherion said:

It's called climate change rather than global warming mainly because it's easier to frighten people with the former. Global warming is the thing that's actually been extensively studied; the rest is almost entirely sensationalism.

It's called climate change because conservatives started calling it that, because global warming sounded more dire. This was in 2002. Scientists were cool with it because climate change is more accurate, but global warming was the more popular term until then. 

So you're right that it had to do with sensationalism. You're wrong that climate change is the more sensationalist term (it is the more correct term AND the one that sounds less bad), and you're basically wrong about everything else there. 

8 minutes ago, Altherion said:

In the quote immediately above, you say "localized changes or events are near impossible to predict" so what makes you think that anything we're witnessing is due to climate change?

Any one specific event is likely not attributable directly to manmade climate change, but trends in more of them with more strength are attributable. The models predict more heavy weather events than previously. If we had fewer, that'd be a blow against the model - but so far that's not been the case, and if anything it's been more severe. 

8 minutes ago, Altherion said:

There have been droughts, floods, forest fires, etc. throughout recorded history with varying frequencies and varying magnitudes. Where is the proof that any one of them is associated with climate change at all or even that they're occurring more frequently or are more intense? Of course, the argument for more frequent and more extreme fluctuations is plausible (Kalbear summarizes it above), but to actually prove that this is happening with respect to any given type of event is not simple and I haven't heard of it being done.

We're going to get to the point where we'll have a storm event that is worse than anything that anyone has recorded before - a hurricane that drops more rainfall than an area typically experiences in a year, or tornadoes that appear in winter along with snow (Oh wait, that just happened). We may get something like the red spot on Jupiter, where there's enough energy in the atmosphere to keep a continuous storm event going on for months at a time. We may get to the point where clouds are just...gone. That should be pretty obvious to most observers.

But the most realistic thing that we'll get to see is massive flooding caused by sea level rises and a whole lot more water in the atmosphere. 

[TrueMetis]

3 minutes ago, Altherion said:

It's called climate change rather than global warming mainly because it's easier to frighten people with the former. Global warming is the thing that's actually been extensively studied; the rest is almost entirely sensationalism.

Except Climate Change was the term that was coined first, as "climatic change", back in the past when we weren't sure if greenhouse gases or aerosols would be the dominant force. Climatic change has it's origins to at least the 50's, and obviously it was a common term since the IPCC used it in it's name when founded in 1988. While global warming traces it's origins to 1975 when it started to become clear that greenhouse gases would dominate over aerosols.

https://www.skepticalscience.com/climate-change-global-warming-basic.html

"Global warming: the increase in Earth’s average surface temperature due to rising levels of greenhouse gases.

Climate change: a long-term change in the Earth’s climate, or of a region on Earth. "

If you've got a problem with that, maybe go tell all those scientists who use these definitions in their papers.

So yeah, different terms with different meanings, which of course means that the news media abuses the hell out of them. And so do Republicans for that matter, since it was actually a republican consultant who pushed climate change over global warming because it sounds less scary but go ahead and keep spreading your propaganda.

 

[Altherion]

29 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

We're going to get to the point where we'll have a storm event that is worse than anything that anyone has recorded before - a hurricane that drops more rainfall than an area typically experiences in a year, or tornadoes that appear in winter along with snow (Oh wait, that just happened). We may get something like the red spot on Jupiter, where there's enough energy in the atmosphere to keep a continuous storm event going on for months at a time. We may get to the point where clouds are just...gone. That should be pretty obvious to most observers.

Massive hurricanes have happened before as have tornadoes in winter (yes, even with snow). The clouds disappearing would definitely be proof, but you'll notice that this is not projected until at least a century from now. I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but chaotic systems are treacherous: if all you have is a plausible argument why they should react to a change in a certain way, there's a pretty good chance that they'll find a way to do something unexpected.

[Kalbear]

1 minute ago, Altherion said:

Massive hurricanes have happened before as have tornadoes in winter (yes, even with snow).

I like that your primary example is something that happened only 10 years ago. And prior to that, it was considered an absurdly freak experience, one that we've seen now four times (at least) in the last 10 years.

1 minute ago, Altherion said:

The clouds disappearing would definitely be proof, but you'll notice that this is not projected until at least a century from now. I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, but chaotic systems are treacherous: if all you have is a plausible argument why they should react to a change in a certain way, there's a pretty good chance that they'll find a way to do something unexpected.

Again, the prediction is simple: there should be more 'once in a century' type of events occurring with greater frequency and intensity. The specific nature of them is harder to predict, but if you simply look at the kinds of things that are absurdly strong, you should see more of them and with bigger intensities overall year over year and decade over decade. 

Now, in addition to all that there are some really weird things that might happen, like the jet stream disappearing utterly or not having cloud cover or permanent hurricanes, but you don't need to predict any one of those things absolutely occurring. 

[SerHaHa]

One of the fastest jetstreams ever recorded just happened last month - one airliner caught a 200+knt speed bonus from it in fact.  Central/Western Canada just experienced the coldest Jan/Feb winter since 1936 - in an area you can fit 6 United Kingdoms inside, and nearly all of Europe - or more - it averaged -26C, and there wasn't a single second of thawing in February.  I know, it's "local weather". 

The NEEM Greenland ice core samples taken a few years ago, and the analysis done by actual climatologists, one of whom founded Greenpeace, have ×used actual scientific measurements that were observable and repeatable, and proven that at 2000, 5000, and 10000 years ago respectively, it got FAR warmer than even the most nightmare predictions we're hearing right now. 

 

[Rippounet]

7 hours ago, Altherion said:

In the quote immediately above, you say "localized changes or events are near impossible to predict" so what makes you think that anything we're witnessing is due to climate change? There have been droughts, floods, forest fires, etc. throughout recorded history with varying frequencies and varying magnitudes. Where is the proof that any one of them is associated with climate change at all or even that they're occurring more frequently or are more intense? Of course, the argument for more frequent and more extreme fluctuations is plausible (Kalbear summarizes it above), but to actually prove that this is happening with respect to any given type of event is not simple and I haven't heard of it being done.

Oh, it's been done all right, at least for all the events that can be linked to warm weather: droughts, heat waves, and forest fires. I'm not sure how honest you're being because it's been widely reported that we're seeing the worst droughts, heat waves, and forest fires ever recorded in human history in a number of places. It's pretty damn easy to find the information, a simple google search even gives me websites entirely dedicated to tracking them. You've got lists, studies, maps... etc. I have no idea how anyone could pretend that it's "not being done." Like, I don't even have TV and I've "heard" of about half-a-dozen extreme *recurring* climactic events that can certainly be attributed to climate change.
I *could* of course start providing data, but I don't see why the burden of proof would be on me. Quite honestly it seems to me you've kept yourself in the dark *deliberately* because climate change doesn't fit your own personal worldview. Or maybe those Delingpole articles on Breitbart got to your head, eh?

[Conflicting Thought]

I thought climate change would not be that controversial on this board.

[Week]

7 hours ago, SerHaHa said:

The NEEM Greenland ice core samples taken a few years ago, and the analysis done by actual climatologists, one of whom founded Greenpeace, have ×used actual scientific measurements that were observable and repeatable, and proven that at 2000, 5000, and 10000 years ago respectively, it got FAR warmer than even the most nightmare predictions we're hearing right now. 

So? What relevance does that have to the current human impact on the climate? How many humans lived on the planet during those times?

https://phys.org/news/2013-01-deep-ice-cores-greenland-period.html

Quote

"Unfortunately, we have reached a point where there is so much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere it's going to be difficult for us to further limit our impact on the planet," White said. "Our kids and grandkids are definitely going to look back and shake their heads at the inaction of this country's generation. We are burning the lion's share of oil and natural gas to benefit our lifestyle, and punting the responsibility for it."

In the past, Earth's journey into and out of glacial periods is thought to be due in large part to variations in its orbit, tilt and rotation that change the amount of solar energy delivered to the planet, he said. But the anthropogenic warming on Earth today could override such episodic changes, perhaps even staving off an ice age, White said.

 

[Kalbear]

I like that it's just totally cool that we are going to have 65 feet of sea level rise and @SerHaHais completely fine with it

[Week]

3 minutes ago, Kalbear said:

I like that it's just totally cool that we are going to have 65 feet of sea level rise and @SerHaHais completely fine with it

But but FASTER PLANES!!*

*As long as you are flying with the jetstream ... 

[Durckad]

3 hours ago, Conflicting Thought said:

I thought climate change would not be that controversial on this board.

Well the Elites have paid off Altherion to keep our attention focused on much more important issues, like non-white identity politics and racists being called racists.

[lokisnow]

On 3/2/2019 at 12:27 PM, S John said:

There has been some very promising research into carbon capture and sequestration.  It’s a bit of a punt on the issue, but it might be enough to save our bacon in the short/ medium term assuming we can do it on a large enough scale.  It works though.  The primary negative being that, if effective, it’ll be used as an argument to keep on truckin’ using fossil fuels and disincentivize market change.  But if i prevents Armageddon, I’m down. 

Trees are really good at CCS, better than any novel technology yet invented, and likely to still be better than any technological tree substitute for many decades. But Trees need centuries to do it. And right now we are clear cutting trees to burn in old coal-powered power plants, because some wellmeaning wonks persuaded environmentalists that this was better. but clear cutting forests and burning the trees is only marginally better than burning coal and long term might be worse, because it takes centuries for the offset to balance, and while you're waiting for the ledgers to balance like the wonks said they would, all those forests you clear cut are not sequestering carbon, which they would have been doing if you hadn't clear cut them.

On 3/3/2019 at 4:53 AM, DireWolfSpirit said:

Regarding measures beyond total electrification-

What ideas are being proposed to accomplish lowering vehicle miles traveled per person?

I can think of mass transit (bus, rail), carpooling, and at home occupations fairly quickly. But those are already current societal options, what beyond those measures are planners proposing?

It's not really something that's come into focus, and a lot of it is technology dependent and zoning dependent. Denser urban cores is one solution. Mass transit is another solution. But I'd hypothesize that we're more likely to see self-driving tech result in reduced scale vehicle sharing, not buses, more like like vans, or if you want to go sci fi, modular-ganged-pods

Buses are historically effective because they can carry sixty people seated, 120 people packed to the gills, but only pay one laborer (the bus driver) while being versatile enough to deploy anywhere without capital investment other than the buses themselves.

Vans are not very effective historically because they can only carry 6-10 people, there's not a packed to the gills option, generally, the labor costs per rider are ten times higher and to serve the same amount of users, you'd need 10 times the amount of vans. 

But a lot of people really dislike using buses, so they are used mostly on need, they're not an opt-in transit modality. That creates a negative feedback loop with various high need populations and socio-cultural sorting and expectations. puts a lot of unfair onus on the bus.

But in a world where labor costs have been eliminated, self driving vans could create an opt-in reinforcing cycle. Given vast enough deployment (say five minute headways, but more like zone to zone (suburb to city center), rather than strict routes served, and also given the new distributed methods of first/last mile option to bridge the gap (uber lyft, scooters, ebikes etc), you could see big reductions in VMT--this could be incentivized too (congestion tax rides not shared, exempt shared rides from the tax).

Suffering from congestion is a big incentive to utilize alternatives, but alternatives generally are enormously inflexible which makes them inconvenient, which lowers their utility to their potential consumers. the inconvenience is largely a problem of limited capital vehicle stock and labor cost constraints. If technology kills off labor, and the zaibatsus distribute suffiienct stock, the inconvenience barrier could largely be eliminated by the increased flexibility.

This could all be true of self-driving buses too, but I think people will opt-in to options that are less efficient, more at the van scale. 

 

[Altherion]

20 hours ago, Kalbear said:

I like that your primary example is something that happened only 10 years ago. And prior to that, it was considered an absurdly freak experience, one that we've seen now four times (at least) in the last 10 years.

The same article has an example from 1975.

20 hours ago, Kalbear said:

Again, the prediction is simple: there should be more 'once in a century' type of events occurring with greater frequency and intensity. The specific nature of them is harder to predict, but if you simply look at the kinds of things that are absurdly strong, you should see more of them and with bigger intensities overall year over year and decade over decade.

This is better than nothing, but it's difficult to do right. Given a dataset where each point has sufficiently many properties it's usually possible to slice it up such that a certain subset (e.g. recent events) look exceptional.

14 hours ago, Rippounet said:

Oh, it's been done all right, at least for all the events that can be linked to warm weather: droughts, heat waves, and forest fires. I'm not sure how honest you're being because it's been widely reported that we're seeing the worst droughts, heat waves, and forest fires ever recorded in human history in a number of places. It's pretty damn easy to find the information, a simple google search even gives me websites entirely dedicated to tracking them. You've got lists, studies, maps... etc. I have no idea how anyone could pretend that it's "not being done." Like, I don't even have TV and I've "heard" of about half-a-dozen extreme *recurring* climactic events that can certainly be attributed to climate change.

I've seen it, but I don't find these reports terribly interesting. The planet is large and recorded history is short -- in any given year and any given location, there's quite likely to be something record-setting or other. That said, there are some studies which get around this problem and one of the most problematic aspects of scientific research in this area is that by the time one has rigorous results rather than just plausible ones, it's usually much too late to do anything about it.

[Rippounet]

9 hours ago, Altherion said:

I've seen it, but I don't find these reports terribly interesting.

I'm not sure what "interesting" is supposed to mean here.

9 hours ago, Altherion said:

The planet is large and recorded history is short -- in any given year and any given location, there's quite likely to be something record-setting or other.

Not really no, and the odds that most of these records are linked to rising temperatures are so small they barely deserve thinking about.

9 hours ago, Altherion said:

Given a dataset where each point has sufficiently many properties it's usually possible to slice it up such that a certain subset (e.g. recent events) look exceptional. 

This isn't wrong in itself, it's just misleading again, for anyone who might not know what we're talking about. Because a single look at this:
https://i12.servimg.com/u/f12/11/35/07/06/18072611.jpg

And your entire line of argumentation crumbles.

I seriously can't tell whether you're trolling us at this point. But I'll go on a limb here and say that it seems you don't have a clue what you're talking about, because you never really bothered to check data that might call into question your own personal version of pseudo-scientific denial.

[Altherion]

16 hours ago, Rippounet said:

This isn't wrong in itself, it's just misleading again, for anyone who might not know what we're talking about. Because a single look at this:
https://i12.servimg.com/u/f12/11/35/07/06/18072611.jpg

And your entire line of argumentation crumbles.

I seriously can't tell whether you're trolling us at this point. But I'll go on a limb here and say that it seems you don't have a clue what you're talking about, because you never really bothered to check data that might call into question your own personal version of pseudo-scientific denial.

Did you actually read anything I said? Here, I'll quote it for you:

On 3/4/2019 at 8:45 PM, Altherion said:

The valid result is anthropogenic global warming -- at this point, we are confident that the average temperature of the world is rising and also what we've done to bring that about.

The map in your link is precisely about the average global temperature being higher. I not only didn't deny that, I linked an article which points out that the average being slightly higher is still bad because of how creatures that live in the water react to more extreme upwards fluctuations. My complaint was not about global warming, it was about people who associate every disaster (including ones far more likely to be caused by mismanagement of specific landscapes) with climate change.

[Rippounet]

7 hours ago, Altherion said:

My complaint was not about global warming, it was about people who associate every disaster (including ones far more likely to be caused by mismanagement of specific landscapes) with climate change.

Yeah, I got that. You don't want to openly deny climate change, but at the same time you wish the media didn't talk about its consequences so much.

Just as you won't deny climate change, but still think humans are bad at predicting things 25 years into the future... Or that there's absolutely no way to say what will happen to individuals. anyway..

There's a pattern in your interventions, you see? You may think you're being subtle, but you're not.

[Rorshach]

https://andthentheresphysics.wordpress.com/2016/09/10/the-attribution-question/

Relevant, as it seems the question now has turned to attribution. For those who wonder who ATTP is, it's this guy.

ETA: when reading ATTP, it never pays not to read the comment section.

[karaddin]

I still think the strongest illustration of the difference between the natural climate variation and the current warming trend is the xkcd timeline. This change is happening too fast for most organisms to evolve in response, so we're getting mass extinctions that are only going to get worse.

For those that have never seen it, its this one

https://xkcd.com/1732/