Climate: Il fait VRAIMENT CHAUD (fka un petit)

[Ring3r]

7 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

I thought a war was mostly being fought in Aghanistan before the Li battery - EV craze took off, and if I'm not mistaken the people who were in control of Afghanistan before the war are... back in control of Afghanistan, so...

Actually, we sold the mining and exploration rights to.....china, long before we left.

[Ring3r]

5 hours ago, Larry of the Lake said:

The fucking oil companies have recognized anthropogenic global warming since at least the 70's.  

Thinking that the US acting ahead of time to secure the next valuable non-renewable resource as the world churns through petroleum is some kind of argument against global warming is myopic.  

The companies extracting lithium are in bed with the oil companies, and sometimes are the oil companies themselves.  

Hear me out, don't TLDR....that happens far too often on this topic with people talking past each other and never actually hearing what the other has to say.

Obviously climate change is happening, and obviously at least some of it is human caused - it's impossible to live in an environment and not influence it.  Focusing on humans and CO2 as the primary driver isn't particularly useful though - there's significant evidence against that and ignoring it means we're putting blinders on.

Global historical climate and CO2 levels can be precisely calculated by taking ice cores, and this has been done in multiple locations around the world.  Changes in temperature 10 times greater than what we're currently panicking about, with no burning of fossil fuels.  ~400 foot shifts in sea level. Massive jumps in CO2 concentration (and OTHER gases too) with almost no humans around to cause it.  All these things occurred within the last 20,000 years.  Careful examination of the graphs of temperature vs CO2 level also show that in some cases, the temperature went up PRIOR to the CO2 level going up, indicating the linkage might be correlative rather than causative, with a 3rd, unaccounted for variable.  Almost nobody is looking into that possibility because nobody will fund such research due to the political climate.

All of that has been shown in the last 10 years and it never gets ANY media coverage, even though the implications are huge.  The only time it gets talked about is when it's brought up to scare people over sea level change....but the fact that the earth has been in a warming trend since the end of the last ice age, and at some times that warming occurred significantly faster than it is right now....gets left out.  Anything that doesn't support the fear-mongering.....gets left out.

The scientific community has been en-masse wrong about MANY topics in the past, particularly when they decide something is granted.  I think this is one of those topics.  Major evidence is being cast aside in favor of the narrative.  People's careers depend on it.

A sane reaction to this would be to continue working on alternative energy sources, particular nuclear, and begin preparing for inevitable sea level change.  It's definitely a net positive to get away from fossil fuels.  But whole-sale destruction of world economies by trying to do it too quickly is pointless, since we pretty obviously do not have the power to stop what's happening.  It's still a laudable goal to influence things as little as possible.

Another interesting point....nuclear is clearly the best current solution that can actually produce the volume of power that we actually need right now - but the safest place to put nuclear power plants is inland and away from any major tectonic activity.  In the US....that means massive economic activity in the central "fly-over" states, and the people in power don't want to do that because it would inevitably cause a population and wealth shift away from the places they live.  If they ACTUALLY cared, there would be a huge push for this....but there isn't.  They don't actually care.

Final interesting fact: Life on earth, without exception, has always benefited during warming periods.  Populations explode, new species arise at higher rates, there's always massive growth in life. Certainly I'm not suggesting it's GOOD if we change the climate.....but the news is not all bad, as we're being told.  Warmth tends to have positive effects too.  The last time there was a large warming trend while humans were alive, we benefited...growing seasons were longer, health improved, the average height of a human increased dramatically due to less malnutrition.  Politicians getting up in front of people and claiming the world is going to end in 10 years if we don't vote for their policies is deeply, deeply disingenuous.

 

[IFR]

@Ring3r

You are ignoring the impact of the rate of change. A change over millions of years is quite different from a change over tens or hundreds of years. You are also ignoring that mass extinctions can and have occurred due to climate change.

[polishgenius]

34 minutes ago, Ring3r said:

Global historical climate and CO2 levels can be precisely calculated by taking ice cores, and this has been done in multiple locations around the world.  Changes in temperature 10 times greater than what we're currently panicking about, with no burning of fossil fuels.  ~400 foot shifts in sea level. Massive jumps in CO2 concentration (and OTHER gases too) with almost no humans around to cause it.  All these things occurred within the last 20,000 years.  Careful examination of the graphs of temperature vs CO2 level also show that in some cases, the temperature went up PRIOR to the CO2 level going up, indicating the linkage might be correlative rather than causative, with a 3rd, unaccounted for variable. 

 

'400 foot shifts in sea level' is a blurry way of describing the melting of the glaciers at the end of the last ice age, that no-one is disputing or not accounting for when discussing current climate change.

I think you're gonna need to link us to evidence for the rest. Unless it's all just references to the same post-ice-age climactic shift, which, again, no climate scientist is unaware of or discounting.

[The Anti-Targ]

CO2 levels as correlation not causation of climate change? What hot garbage is that?

The physics of how CO2 is a GHG was worked out and established as solid scientific fact over a century ago and no science between then and before climate change was even a thing in the public consciousness has come to a different conclusion. Even if in the past there have been causes of global warming that are not CO2, given we all know CO2 isn't the only GHG, doesn't mean the increased CO2 that follows had no effect on global temperatures, and it doesn't mean rising CO2 now isn't the primary cause of this climate change. Every occurrence of climate change can have different causes. IIRC I read an article some time ago that suggested one past cause of global warming was a massive release of methane into the atmosphere (which is a stronger GHG than CO2). In this scenario a rise in CO2 would lag the warming, and the natural conversion over time of methane to CO2 and H2O in the atmosphere would in fact have a net cooling effect, albeit the climate would be warmer than prior to the methane escape. But while we have seen an increase in methane compared to pre-industrial methane, the increase is no where near enough to be the primary cause of today's warming.

History informs the present, it does not dictate it.

If you want to claim something other than burning fossil fuels is the primary cause of the current warming then you have to provide the robust science that identifies the main cause to a greater level of certainty than the current fossil fuel CO2 evidence. That's how science works, a theory becomes established because it explains observations  and makes predictions better than anything else, until another theory comes along that explains observations even better.

Claiming "they" are preventing any science from being done does not absolve you of the need to provide scientific evidence to support a counter-factual to fossil fuel CO2 being the major culprit. And if you don't want to be dismissed as a conspiracy nut you've got to provide the evidence that "they" are preventing science from being done.

There are surely climate change deniers with $million who would gladly fund any credible scientist to do the counter-factual research. Ex-President Trump claims to be a billionaire, and he said climate change is a hoax and several of his buddies are also supposedly very rich. So there must be money floating around that can fund the research, if people really believe there are hidden truths that need to be revealed. I would think PragerU might be keen to be the hub of any such research.

[JGP]

2 hours ago, Ring3r said:

Hear me out, don't TLDR..... [snip]

Feels like a messaging problem to me.

Not saying I'm right here, but I suspect that the conflation has some of its roots in the idea that human caused climate change is wrecking the planet. It's everywhere, from media headlines, articles, and passing conversation.

The earth has been through some awful cycles in the 4.5 billion years its been around. I mean, take this with a grain of salt now, but I heard there wasn't even life at all on this lonely little planet at one point. 

Unless something catastrophic happens to its atmosphere, the earth will be fine. We, and many of the other current lifeforms currently on this planet might not be there to enjoy it, but something will. Eventually.

 

[The Anti-Targ]

1 hour ago, JGP said:

Feels like a messaging problem to me.

Not saying I'm right here, but I suspect that the conflation has some of its roots in the idea that human caused climate change is wrecking the planet. It's everywhere, from media headlines, articles, and passing conversation.

The earth has been through some awful cycles in the 4.5 billion years its been around. I mean, take this with a grain of salt now, but I heard there wasn't even life at all on this lonely little planet at one point. 

Unless something catastrophic happens to its atmosphere, the earth will be fine. We, and many of the other current lifeforms currently on this planet might not be there to enjoy it, but something will. Eventually.

 

That pre-supposes acceptance that the Earth has existed for 4.5bn years. The only number I see in that post is 20,000 years. So we shouldn't assume, yet, a common frame of reference.

[JGP]

Just now, The Anti-Targ said:

That pre-supposes acceptance that the Earth has existed for 4.5bn years. 

Amongst other things, yeah lol

[Ring3r]

4 hours ago, IFR said:

@Ring3r

You are ignoring the impact of the rate of change. A change over millions of years is quite different from a change over tens or hundreds of years. You are also ignoring that mass extinctions can and have occurred due to climate change.

No, I'm not.  You TLDR'd what I said.  We have records of massive temperature changes recorded in ice cores just from the last 20,000 years alone.  26-29 degrees over the course of less than 100 years in one instance....WHILE humans were around but primitive.  This is known stuff, but nobody gives it any air time because of the implications.  The climate graphs everyone publishes have the scale set so these events don't show up....the data cut off is usually a couple thousand years.  But if we look back just a LITTLE further than that, there are catastrophic, extremely fast climate changes occurring regularly...MUCH greater fluctuations than are being predicted for our future.

This is all from extremely reputable sources and it NEVER gets talked about.  I bet almost everyone here has never even seen it.  You should be asking yourself why.  If climate change is such a disaster....why are we actively ignoring the most glaring and recent cases of it and incorporating those things into our studies, plans, etc?

 

http://www.ces.fau.edu/nasa/images/module_3/GreenlandGraph.gif

https://cdn.britannica.com/18/112518-004-AADA8FF8.jpghttps://humanoriginproject.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11

/younger-dryas-climate-change-1.jpg

[karaddin]

Even if I completely ignore everything about the science and just focus on the economic cost angle that argument doesn't convince me. My country is something of an early adopter of a climate change adjusted...climate and we're on our 7th? Maybe 8th? extreme flooding event of 2022. Just taking one of those in isolation was already the third most costly natural disaster in our history at the time (in June) and for all I know one of the two separate current flooding events may surpass it. I can assure you the rest haven't been insignificant either.

Almost 3 years ago we had catastrophic bushfires destroying such an enormous area, and killing billions of native animals, I've never seen non Australians (and probably Kiwis) actually grasp the scale. It destroyed somewhere between 24 million and 34 million hectares, compared to the US forest fires of 2020 which were very heavily reported and destroyed 4 million hectares. Oh and it resulted in half of our population spending weeks breathing air that rated as severely hazardous due to the smoke blanketing our eastern seaboard. It was also fucking revolting so that's significant on a "personal experience" front.

The economic impact of the natural disasters that are going to hammer Australia will far exceed the what the economic costs of early investment in renewables would have been. 

[Ring3r]

7 minutes ago, karaddin said:

Even if I completely ignore everything about the science and just focus on the economic cost angle that argument doesn't convince me. My country is something of an early adopter of a climate change adjusted...climate and we're on our 7th? Maybe 8th? extreme flooding event of 2022. Just taking one of those in isolation was already the third most costly natural disaster in our history at the time (in June) and for all I know one of the two separate current flooding events may surpass it. I can assure you the rest haven't been insignificant either.

Almost 3 years ago we had catastrophic bushfires destroying such an enormous area, and killing billions of native animals, I've never seen non Australians (and probably Kiwis) actually grasp the scale. It destroyed somewhere between 24 million and 34 million hectares, compared to the US forest fires of 2020 which were very heavily reported and destroyed 4 million hectares. Oh and it resulted in half of our population spending weeks breathing air that rated as severely hazardous due to the smoke blanketing our eastern seaboard. It was also fucking revolting so that's significant on a "personal experience" front.

The economic impact of the natural disasters that are going to hammer Australia will far exceed the what the economic costs of early investment in renewables would have been. 

I'm familiar with the awful bush fires that you guys had, yeah.  California keeps having similar issues.

Have you looked into other potential causes for that?  Like how your government (and California's) all but outlawed controlled burns in the years leading up to the catastrophic fires?  In the name of reducing climate change?  Land needs occasional burns to remove old, dead undergrowth.  That was actively prevented from happening for years and it resulted in catastrophic fires....which they then had to get under control by using.....you guessed it, controlled burns. 

Literally, the people blaming it on climate change are the ones who put the policies in place that caused it to happen....

[The Anti-Targ]

I've seen climate graphs and articles that go back several hundred thousand years and even millions in their analysis. I have no idea where the idea that climate history dating back just 20,000 years is being actively suppressed.

Perhaps its a recency thing. Climate change on a geological timescale has been debated, analysed and put in its proper context and found to not negate or invalidate any conclusions about what's happening now. And this discussion happened a few decades ago. People who are only just discovering this stuff now come up with weird conspiracy thinking that it's being actively suppressed. It's not, it's just in the rear view of people actively researching in this field and there's nothing more to discuss about it in credible forums.

[karaddin]

Yes that was the bullshit talking point in this country as well, but it's utter bullshit because we've done no such thing. Of course our rural firefighting service coming out and saying that there has not been a change like that does nothing to deter people looking for any excuse still claiming it anyway.

The eucalypt trees that California unwisely imported are native here and make up huge swathes of the country and fires are part of the regular cycle. We know that, our authorities act on that knowledge and conduct back burning every year during the winter to the best of their ability in areas that most need it and it can be done safely. When conditions are severe they can't do it because funnily enough that would just be starting the bush fire themselves. 

The flooding certainly can't be blamed on supposed failure to conduct back burning either. There's a nice example of the huge flooding areas in this video of a fucking idiot almost getting themselves killed trying to drive through floodwater

https://www.reddit.com/r/Whatcouldgowrong/comments/yg8y7q/wcgw_driving_through_a_flooded_road_in_australia/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

[Ring3r]

3 hours ago, The Anti-Targ said:

CO2 levels as correlation not causation of climate change? What hot garbage is that?

The physics of how CO2 is a GHG was worked out and established as solid scientific fact over a century ago and no science between then and before climate change was even a thing in the public consciousness has come to a different conclusion. Even if in the past there have been causes of global warming that are not CO2, given we all know CO2 isn't the only GHG, doesn't mean the increased CO2 that follows had no effect on global temperatures, and it doesn't mean rising CO2 now isn't the primary cause of this climate change. Every occurrence of climate change can have different causes. IIRC I read an article some time ago that suggested one past cause of global warming was a massive release of methane into the atmosphere (which is a stronger GHG than CO2). In this scenario a rise in CO2 would lag the warming, and the natural conversion over time of methane to CO2 and H2O in the atmosphere would in fact have a net cooling effect, albeit the climate would be warmer than prior to the methane escape. But while we have seen an increase in methane compared to pre-industrial methane, the increase is no where near enough to be the primary cause of today's warming.

History informs the present, it does not dictate it.

If you want to claim something other than burning fossil fuels is the primary cause of the current warming then you have to provide the robust science that identifies the main cause to a greater level of certainty than the current fossil fuel CO2 evidence. That's how science works, a theory becomes established because it explains observations  and makes predictions better than anything else, until another theory comes along that explains observations even better.

Claiming "they" are preventing any science from being done does not absolve you of the need to provide scientific evidence to support a counter-factual to fossil fuel CO2 being the major culprit. And if you don't want to be dismissed as a conspiracy nut you've got to provide the evidence that "they" are preventing science from being done.

There are surely climate change deniers with $million who would gladly fund any credible scientist to do the counter-factual research. Ex-President Trump claims to be a billionaire, and he said climate change is a hoax and several of his buddies are also supposedly very rich. So there must be money floating around that can fund the research, if people really believe there are hidden truths that need to be revealed. I would think PragerU might be keen to be the hub of any such research.

Talk to some researchers.  Funding simply isn't given to anyone who wants to explore other possibilities.  They're black-listed and driven out of their field.  This is COMMON in academia on a number of topics.

And yes, methane is far more potent than CO2 in terms of greenhouse gasses.  I have actually read a ton of stuff on this topic because I do consider it important.  It's entirely possible that methane or some other greenhouse gas (or increased solar activity, or the normal over-time gradual change in the tilt of the earth, etc), is responsible for the CO2 levels sometimes lagging behind the actual temperature changes.  That's exactly my point.  We don't know.  Nobody's looking at it.  It seems like we should know that.  If there are other causal actors that we could actually do something about, we could be taking other steps.

The term "climate change denier" in and of itself is a manipulation....iit's a label associates people with other horrible "denial" things like the Holocaust and such.  The term is a manipulation of language and dishonest. It's designed to shut down conversation.  If you actually sit down and talk to somebody who's put it the work and research, it's nearly always the case that they're not denying it's happening, but only that we are not the sole cause and the research is skewed.

[Rippounet]

In the final analysis, what we are facing is first and foremost a humanitarian crisis on an unprecedented scale. Beyond fears about the climate or the planet (which are easily overblown), we are also reacting to a world in which the survival of billions will soon be in jeopardy. If we're not careful, the reaction of human societies to this new reality can easily be an even greater threat than the environmental crisis itself.

[IFR]

5 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

I've seen climate graphs and articles that go back several hundred thousand years and even millions in their analysis. I have no idea where the idea that climate history dating back just 20,000 years is being actively suppressed.

If you inspect the graphs, you'll note that it is in Greenland. These changes are local, not global.

[Zorral]

We're already in it.  This isn't hypothetical for some handwavium future.  It is here.  Now.

[Ring3r]

12 minutes ago, karaddin said:

Yes that was the bullshit talking point in this country as well, but it's utter bullshit because we've done no such thing. Of course our rural firefighting service coming out and saying that there has not been a change like that does nothing to deter people looking for any excuse still claiming it anyway.

The eucalypt trees that California unwisely imported are native here and make up huge swathes of the country and fires are part of the regular cycle. We know that, our authorities act on that knowledge and conduct back burning every year during the winter to the best of their ability in areas that most need it and it can be done safely. When conditions are severe they can't do it because funnily enough that would just be starting the bush fire themselves. 

The flooding certainly can't be blamed on supposed failure to conduct back burning either. There's a nice example of the huge flooding areas in this video of a fucking idiot almost getting themselves killed trying to drive through floodwater

https://www.reddit.com/r/Whatcouldgowrong/comments/yg8y7q/wcgw_driving_through_a_flooded_road_in_australia/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

Yeah, you guys did have a period aof time where you were doing far less controlled burning.  One side blames it on the climate already being too dry, the other side says it was intentional.  When push comes to shove and a massive fire starts...magically now it's no longer too dangerous to use controlled burning again.  I don't buy it.  Reads much more like "oops...don't blame us."

In Cali, it's 100% the case that they had anti-controlled burn rules.  They also cut funding to traditional power companies and forced them to invest in green tech at the expense of maintaining their pre-existing stuff.  At least one of the giant fires in california was traced directly back to old, failed equipment that was sparking as a result of a lack of maintenance.  They've also nearly completely drained their own water table (and the water table of the surrounding states) trying to farm land that is much more naturally arid.  A depleted water table is disastrous for fires because the land literally dries out.  That was caused by people irresponsibly using water over the course of 100 years in that area.

[Ring3r]

4 minutes ago, IFR said:

If you inspect the graphs, you'll note that it is in Greenland. These changes are local, not global.

There's similar ice core samples from other parts of the world during the same time period.  Greenland was the highest because there was clearly some event that happened there but it did not remain a "local event."  There was a huge global shift.  See below:

https://www.realclimate.org/images/colose_yd2.png

[The Anti-Targ]

6 minutes ago, Ring3r said:

 

And yes, methane is far more potent than CO2 in terms of greenhouse gasses.  I have actually read a ton of stuff on this topic because I do consider it important.  It's entirely possible that methane or some other greenhouse gas (or increased solar activity, or the normal over-time gradual change in the tilt of the earth, etc), is responsible for the CO2 levels sometimes lagging behind the actual temperature changes. 

Why do you think any of this is not being looked at? People are looking at the processional effects on climate. People are looking at the sun's behaviour and how that affects climate.

Why do you think climate change research and action isn't also being taken on other GHGs like methane and nitrous oxide (which are also increasing because of human activity)? Because it most certainly is.

It appears you either have not read enough, or you are reading the wrong sources.