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Climate: Il fait VRAIMENT CHAUD (fka un petit)


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Heat waves kill more people in regions where people are not used to high temperatures. But eventually even people e.g. in tropical regions won't be able to survive there any more, as sweating can't cool you down if humidity is high. Vast regions in South Asia might become uninhabitable. And there are a lot of people living there....

How Much Heat Can Your Body Take Before Killing You? - YouTube

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On 6/30/2021 at 6:18 PM, L'oiseau français said:

I had to look that up as well. On a normal weekend there are 130 deaths reported, so 233 over 4 days means a lot of extra deaths, but the causes have not been determined yet.

You have to be specific with these data: did they die from the heatwave or with the heatwave?

(sarcasm, sorry, quite a bad taste, but it's a very apt way of showing how utterly stupid the original is - whatever, this is terribly bad, I hope all of you in that vast area can stay safe, and I hope temps will go down to more classical levels as soon as possible)

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4 hours ago, Week said:

I thought this was footage from a movie. I still do because it just doesn't make sense.

 

In Grosse Pointe Blank John Cusack's character mentions seeing the Persian Gulf on fire and wonders if maybe there is some higher power in the world.

Edited by larrytheimp
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Pemex. So, basically, Mexico. I'm not sure they're going to get hit in any serious way. Then they also claim to have stopped this mess after a few hours, so luckily overall pollution and damages are far lower than the infamous Deepwater ones. I suppose they're going to find a way to avoid consequences.

I wonder how it looked like from Ciudad del Carmen.

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On 7/1/2021 at 5:31 PM, L'oiseau français said:

I saw the premier’s press conference and various interviews with people about the fires, and what stood out to me was the comment that two fires are involved here, the wildfire and a fire in the town itself. They had no information about how the fire in the town got started, they only said there was a lot of “speculation and rumour” going around.

Please, please don’t tell me there was a Catholic Church in the town and some idiot decided to burn it down in the middle of the worst heat wave in Canadian history.

Quoting myself to say authorities have announced the fire in town was indeed started from a human source, but more investigation has to be done to determine the source. Some people reported seeing sparks from a train going through town.

I hope that means that no one set a church on fire.

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2 hours ago, L'oiseau français said:

Quoting myself to say authorities have announced the fire in town was indeed started from a human source, but more investigation has to be done to determine the source. Some people reported seeing sparks from a train going through town.

I hope that means that no one set a church on fire.

Of course, you'll have to wait for investigations to be completed but our experience in the most recent Australian bushfires was that any spark can potentially set off a fire when temperatures are so intense. A massive fire in our local national park, which threatened my city, was sparked by an Army helicopter landing and taking off.

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  • 1 month later...
8 hours ago, IFR said:

Anyway, in the US politics thread I linked to the latest IPCC report, which was received with thundering indifference (something of a microcosm of its worldwide political reception, haha).

Discussions on climate change have had their separate threads for a while now. And to be fair, there is surprisingly little to discuss when everyone is well-informed.

Anyway, at a glance, this is a very elaborate piece of work that tries to be as specific as possible. The summary is an easy read (very clear).
In all honesty though, I'm more curious avout the next report (that of Working group II).

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Thank you, Rippounet! This is certainly a more appropriate place for discussions of the IPCC report. 

I've been reading through the full report. There's a lot, but it is worthwhile.

Hopefully the largest impact of this report is the more forceful language. Previous reports have been highly conservative in their language. This report finally announces that humans are "unequivocally" the primary driver of global warming. The best estimate of human contributions to global warming is 1.07 degrees Celsius of the 1.1 degrees global average increase over preindustrial temperatures, leaving radiative forcings due to natural phenomena (volcanoes, solar flares, etc.) as negligible contributors.

According to the assessment, we've already caused certain irreversible changes. Ocean acidification and deoxygenation are locked in for potentially millenia. Sea levels will continue to rise even if we achieve the 1.5 degrees Celsius established in the Paris Agreement. Large scale precipitation changes will be ongoing (bad news for Asia). Ocean warming will also continue, which is concerning since the latest heat dome is estimated to have killed over a billion mollusks (that last part is my own annotation).

That's just a brief look. Some of the future projections are truly staggering (for example, the projected worst case scenario of mean global temperature increase is 5.7 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, which would be apocalyptic - at 5.7 degrees sea levels are projected to rise 22 meters, for instance).

I hope the effect this report will have is a drawing of the line in the sand. There may have been some wiggle room before, but purely based on the language of the report any dispute of anthropogenic global warming is a naked political maneuver. There's absolutely no doubt at this point. Scientifically, there's not so much as a fig leaf for objections. And there is little room to downplay the consequences either.

Now the question is how this will be addressed. World leaders meeting in Glasgow over climate change is something worth watching. Australia (contributes 1.2% to the world's annual greenhouse gas emissions) has played its hand, rejecting the findings of the IPCC. We'll see how other countries respond.

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37 minutes ago, IFR said:

I hope the effect this report will have is a drawing of the line in the sand. There may have been some wiggle room before, but purely based on the language of the report any dispute of anthropogenic global warming is a naked political maneuver. There's absolutely no doubt at this point. Scientifically, there's not so much as a fig leaf for objections. And there is little room to downplay the consequences either.

Now the question is how this will be addressed. World leaders meeting in Glasgow over climate change is something worth watching. Australia (contributes 1.2% to the world's annual greenhouse gas emissions) has played its hand, rejecting the findings of the IPCC. We'll see how other countries respond.

How other countries respond:

 

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5 hours ago, IFR said:

Now the question is how this will be addressed. World leaders meeting in Glasgow over climate change is something worth watching. Australia (contributes 1.2% to the world's annual greenhouse gas emissions) has played its hand, rejecting the findings of the IPCC. We'll see how other countries respond.

Much like my attempts to reject my government, unfortunately the governments rejection of the facts does nothing to change the facts

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I don't think the Australian government has any idea what the Australian government's position on climate change is at the moment. Trying to simutaneously tiptoe towards net zero by 2050 to placate international allies, while no we're definitely not doing that more coal power please, to placate the right wing of the near-minority government.

Edited by Impmk2
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9 hours ago, IFR said:

Hopefully the largest impact of this report is the more forceful language. Previous reports have been highly conservative in their language.

The language seems much clearer to me. I've tried to have a working knowledge of the IPCC reports, but I'd still missed some very basic information.

9 hours ago, IFR said:

According to the assessment, we've already caused certain irreversible changes. Ocean acidification and deoxygenation are locked in for potentially millenia. Sea levels will continue to rise even if we achieve the 1.5 degrees Celsius established in the Paris Agreement. Large scale precipitation changes will be ongoing (bad news for Asia). Ocean warming will also continue, which is concerning since the latest heat dome is estimated to have killed over a billion mollusks (that last part is my own annotation).

It's truly sobbering to see that oceans are projected to rise for the next 2000 years.

9 hours ago, IFR said:

I hope the effect this report will have is a drawing of the line in the sand. There may have been some wiggle room before, but purely based on the language of the report any dispute of anthropogenic global warming is a naked political maneuver. There's absolutely no doubt at this point. Scientifically, there's not so much as a fig leaf for objections. And there is little room to downplay the consequences either.

Now the question is how this will be addressed. World leaders meeting in Glasgow over climate change is something worth watching. Australia (contributes 1.2% to the world's annual greenhouse gas emissions) has played its hand, rejecting the findings of the IPCC. We'll see how other countries respond.

I don't think this report changed much. It doesn't exactly tell us anything new, and "policymakers" already knew all that.
What is needed is for populations to apply increased pressure, but also to be willing to make "sacrifices" for the transition. And I'm writing sacrifices between quotation marks, because I don't think giving up your SUV or eating less beef is much of a sacrifice.
But I'm starting to think the political pressure will only be sufficient when people start being directly affected by devtastating extreme climate occurrences. As long as climate change remains an abstract notion it does not translate into policy. But when the forest fires and the floods happen to you or right next to you, there will be urgency to act...

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12 minutes ago, Rippounet said:

But I'm starting to think the political pressure will only be sufficient when people start being directly affected by devtastating extreme climate occurrences. As long as climate change remains an abstract notion it does not translate into policy. But when the forest fires and the floods happen to you or right next to you, there will be urgency to act...

They're already happening and it hasn't changed anything. At least in Aus, which is definitely one of the places its already here, I don't think its possible to get the scope of the 2019/2020 fires, but they were absolutely it. And immediately followed by flooding impacting some of the same communities.

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39 minutes ago, karaddin said:

They're already happening and it hasn't changed anything. At least in Aus, which is definitely one of the places its already here, I don't think its possible to get the scope of the 2019/2020 fires, but they were absolutely it. And immediately followed by flooding impacting some of the same communities.

I would assume/hope that this means climate change will be an important issue in your next major elections (sorry, have no idea when that'll be) and that should the Conservatives stubbornly refuse to embrace the need to transition, they will lose - thus forcing them to turn around for the next cycle.
I think that's the way it should happen, i.e. at some point, no political party will have the capacity to risk ignoring the issue, so populations will then get to choose who they think can be efficient at dealing with it.
Of course, alternatively, humans are just too dumb to react to the threat and our species disappears around the end of the century, but that's a bit dark, even for me. There will always be islands of dumbfuckery of course, but I would hope that they progressively dwindle and become negligible.

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We cant have someone like Donald Trump in office for another term; while it is my opinion that many of his actions can be undone if not immediately, then over a generation the impact of his deregulation when it comes to the environment will have a multi-generational impact. And not to mention inaction for 4 years contributed greatly to climate change as well.

As to the rest, yeah it makes for depressing reading. As IFR noted, some aspects can be reversed, but things like ocean acidification will take centuries. Still, as this article points out: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/13/ipcc-latest-climate-report-hope

Quote

What was remarkable in the IPCC report was put most succinctly in University of Leeds climate physicist Piers Forster’s pair of tweets on Monday, outlining the good and bad news from the report. The bad news was familiar: we are seeing “more intense and more frequent” weather extremes. We are close to 1.5C of warming and will reach it by mid-century. But the good news is that there is, Forster reported, “much more certainty that if we get to net zero CO2 its contributions to further warming [are] also likely to stop”. At net zero, “the temperature change should even start to slowly go into reverse.” That is, we can halt and even reverse some of the devastation.

Important to have a little bit of hope or people just stop trying.

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