Changing Attitudes: Climate Change

[cheeky_monkey]

This is my position on Climate Change..

is the world warming? yes..

are man made emissions responsible for said warming? yes.

is the world economy going to collapse due to a warming world? no 

are we in imminent danger of global catastrophe now or in 100 years ? i would say no.

is moving away from fossil fuels a good idea? yes

are renewables a long term solution ? no

will the UK/EU/USA reaching net zero by 2030 solve the issue? no

is giving China/India etc a free pass negating resolving climate change in the short and long term ? yes

is carbon capture/ nuclear power and the development of water/hydrogen energy the answer? yes

Does anyone know what the planet will be like in 100 years from now..even the top boffins from round the world? no

Do i think there are bigger threats to my children's future than climate change ? yes 

 

[raz.org.rain]

 Metwatch I've noticed a lot of this, I always found it incredibly ironic how people will vehemently deny that climate change is a thing... by arguing that an ice age or regional cooling is about to happen. Which is an odd argument for multiple reasons, one being that it is - by definition- climate change. My impression is that most people can't accept the scary unknowns that come with a rapidly warming climate, and I completely understand why. It's communicated as an impending doomsday scenario that we have very little control over. The people at the top continue to be the net contributors by a long shot while people at the bottom are told that their log burners are the problem.
 

As I like to say, lock 100 people in an airtight garage with a running car and tell them that artificially introduced gases aren't a problem to them.

[WYorksWeather]

 cheeky_monkey I think the key point really is about how you define some of those terms.

In terms of the biggest threats, without getting too political about it, I would personally rank climate change up there with e.g. existential AI threats and nuclear war as one of the top issues.

In terms of whether we're facing a catastrophe, well then that really depends on how we respond, so is ultimately unknowable. But I have every confidence that e.g. a business as usual scenario leading to 3-4C of warming would be catastrophic. Not world-ending, but that level of warming within this century would in my view be close to civilisation-ending. The reason is the rapid changes that would result from tipping points above and beyond just the warming itself.

Some of the other issues like renewables vs. hydrogen and carbon capture are a bit of a false dichotomy. You'd want to get to is to use all of these methods. Nuclear is good for the baseload. You then use solar and wind since they're becoming very cheap. If you have periods where there is an excess, you use some sort of storage, whether it be direct storage e.g. batteries (probably infeasible at the moment), or more realistically storing massive amounts of hydrogen, or storing energy in the form of gravity e.g. pumped hydroelectric storage. And of course, some human activities will still produce CO2, so you need carbon capture or other methods to deal with the remainder.

In terms of predictions for 100 years from now, it really depends on what assumptions you make. The predictions in broad terms have proven to be fairly accurate (ignoring pop science / media and focusing on the actual science). Long term is tough though because it depends on what we do over the next century. But for the short to medium term, climate projections are pretty well constrained. If you just cast our current emissions forwards, then we pass the 1.5C warming mark long-term around the late 2020s or early 2030s, and likely 2.0C before 2050.

As for the whole geopolitical side of this - it's just a classic example of the tragedy of the commons and/or prisoner's dilemma. Nobody wants to cut emissions if it will harm their economy, but if every country thinks that way we all lose. I don't hold out much hope that rapid progress will be made because it's literally a problem that defies human nature.

[cheeky_monkey]

6 minutes ago, WYorksWeather said:

As for the whole geopolitical side of this - it's just a classic example of the tragedy of the commons and/or prisoner's dilemma. Nobody wants to cut emissions if it will harm their economy, but if every country thinks that way we all lose. I don't hold out much hope that rapid progress will be made because it's literally a problem that defies human nature.

the UK has cut emissions by nearly 70% per capita since 1991..yet China has increased by 500% per capita in the same period and is now more than double that of the UK per capita and predicted to keep rising until at least 2030..for me this is a huge elephant in the room that nobody wishes to address...just stop oil and extinction rebellion can continue to throw tantrums on our streets ..however the UK is doing a great job ..others are not and that is why 1.5c 2.0c or 3.0c cant be stopped.

[WYorksWeather]

 cheeky_monkey In terms of those figures, the chart I found here shows more like a 40% drop for the UK, and a 300% rise for China since 1991 (you may have been thinking of total, rather than per capita emissions, maybe?). But I take the point.

 

Per capita CO₂ emissions

OURWORLDINDATA.ORG

---

Carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions from fossil fuels and industry. Land-use change is not included.

Here's China's current climate action tracker:

And here is the UK's:

Here's a global perspective, with most of the world's major economies listed.

By this metric, every country needs to do more, but China is near the top of the list.

In terms of JSO and Extinction Rebellion, I think the main reason they protest in western countries is obvious once you think about it. It has the best win to loss ratio.

In the West, you're guaranteed at least some press coverage for your protest so you might influence some people, which indirectly might lead to change. On the loss side, if you keep to the right side of the law you won't be arrested at all, and if you do cross the line, the worst you'll likely get is a few months banged up for typical civil disobedience tactics.

Compare and contrast doing the same in a country like China, Russia etc. The state media will suppress any details of the protest so you won't get much coverage, and if you're caught then even non-violent protesting might get you banged up for years in some godforsaken prison camp.

In terms of how we address emissions from countries that can't / won't do more, there are really only three ways I can think of. Option 1 is some sort of aggressive trade barriers or cross-border carbon prices or something like that. The second option is climate finance, or to be less euphemistic, bribery. The third option is to lead by example in the West in showing that we can cut emissions whilst not doing too much harm to our economies.

In short you probably need a combination of stick, carrot, and leading by example. Again though, not a simple one, and raises all sorts of political issues.

I'm not going to pretend any of this is easy, it isn't. It's a complex problem with the interplay of what the climate science tells us, what is possibly economically and in terms of engineering, and what politicians can actually negotiate and agree upon. I am very much not an optimist, for that reason.

[Arctic Hare]

My own attitudes have changed, but not in the same way. I've never been a denier and it's a long, long time since I was a real sceptic about human-induced CC. What's changed, unfortunately, is that I've become gloomier about our (meaning humanity as a whole) ability/willingness to stop things getting not just quite bad but very bad by concerted action quickly enough. I don't think that humanity will go extinct entirely. We're too resourceful as a species for that; we've survived ice ages after all. But that's a small glimmer in a dark thought, since "some humans will survive" is a very different thing from "21st-century civilisation for eight billion people will survive", and I can't convince myself that the latter is true. Micawberism (ie "something will turn up") is a dangerous game to play, and if you lose that bet the penalties can be very severe.

I'm not saying I think this disastrous future is certain. But not so many years ago if someone had put it to me I'd have responded "Don't be silly, that's way over the top." I'm no longer sure I could say that with confidence.

[Wold Topper]

Interesting discussion at the local farmers discussion group tonight, farmers are being (financially) insentivised, (encouraged) currently to grow grass for environmental reasons rather than crops. So we then have to import grain/wheat via diesel powered ships, hmmm... more box ticking

Carbon tokens and cattle is even crazier if anybody can be bothered to read up on it? 

[blizzard81]

 Wold Topper Indeed. Very sinister goings on right now in the world. More people are waking up to it thankfully. 

 cheeky_monkey Absolutely spot on

[Wold Topper]

 blizzard81 i just look at it from a production point of view, why import (via diesel powered ships ) what we can grow, even the farmers tonight are scratching their heads, turning productive Wold land over to grass when we yield fantastic wheat, barley, potatoes etc... all just to box tick bs environmental policies that on a global scale matter diddly squat whilst China, India etc continue to pollute our atmosphere at will....

Edited February 26 by Wold Topper

[raz.org.rain]

 Arctic Hare I would agree, I can't see humans going entirely extinct as long as there are survivable conditions. Even under the most extreme conditions, there'd likely be conditions favourable to humans to some extent. If our species were to go completely extinct, it'd have to be some extreme event that completely wipes out the food chain or destroys our breathable atmosphere.

There's a lot of concern regarding what type of climate we enter into and how fast. Everything suggests were rapidly heading for a "hothouse" type climate comparable to previous thermal maximums. It'd take some time to reach thermal maximum levels of extreme, but the transition out of the current ice age cycle could take less than 200 years. Such transition ordinarily take a millennia and allow for nature to adapt, but our climate is currently changing too quickly for adaption. Our biosphere and modern society have adapted to interglacial conditions so a rapid transition into a hotter geological epoch could be catastrophic for life on earth.

[cheeky_monkey]

 Wold Topper Food Dependency..once the govt decide what can be grown and how and what you consume  they further gain control of your everyday life..its easy to push climate change as an  existential threat for other more sinister agendas.

[Wold Topper]

 cheeky_monkey i normally push back on this, BUT as time and age go on, i ponder more and question more , 

[TonyH]

 Markus03 Hmm 5 month long winters in the 70s? A run of very mild largely snow free winters in that decade.

[TonyH]

 Bypass Could argue that the whole of human history has been unstable.

[Metwatch]

37 minutes ago, TonyH said:

Hmm 5 month long winters in the 70s? A run of very mild largely snow free winters in that decade.

A few yes, especially when compared to the older and colder 1961-90 average, but they weren't as common or as consecutive back then as they are now.

Comparing to the newer and warmer 1991-2020 average:

Link to the graphs:

http://starlingsroost.ddns.net/weather/ukobs/ukgraphs.php?type=monthlyregional&field=year&param=Tmean&region=England_and_Wales&month=13&anom=9120

 

[Markus03]

 TonyH It could have even been earlier than that. I apologize if my grandmother lied but I'm sure she didn't do it on purpose. Maybe the wrong decade was in mind.

[Nath]

Whether one believes man made climate change is real or not, in the West it is being used to try to bring in basically totalitarian or even fascist policies.

 

If we do not row back on the insane "Net zero" soon, the UK will experience frequent power outages, food shortages even famines, and extreme poverty within the next 5-10 years. 

 

 

[Methuselah]

 Nath

But Trump's a Denier, and so are Truss and Farage. 

[Methuselah]

But, anyhow, this graph is pretty definitive. It's no wonder that when Deniers refer to this or that 'warm period' they invariably neglect to post any supporting data: 

 

That said, the winters of 1971-'76 were indeed rather snowless. 

Edited February 27 by Methuselah

[raz.org.rain]

 Methuselah kind of related but I was reading about the Little Ice Age recently, there's some disagreement over whether or not it was a true period of cooling due to the inconsistencies. Winters got considerably colder but summers didn't really change, so it created the impression of widespread cooling when in reality it was the winters causing that anomaly. There's also a general correlation between the coldest annual averages and high concentrations of volcanic sediments. Another interesting fact about the LIA is that it wasn't actually unremittingly cold, some of our warmest CET averages come from that period. There were some record hot summers such as 1666. Even some of the winters were abnormally warm.

Not totally related but it's an example of how naturally occurring climate change isn't a clear cut case, compared to anthropogenic warming that's shown a consistent upward trend for several decades.

Edited February 27 by raz.org.rain

[Methuselah]

 raz.org.rain  raz.org.rain  And I think it's the recent acceleration in warming that's played havoc with the modern use of analogues, dating back to the 19th century. . . Whatever any single analogue (or teleconnection) might have led to, in 1876, it surely has much less significance now than it did then. 

IMO, it's not the analogues/teleconnections that have gone astray -- it's the weather! 

 

[TonyH]

 Metwatch Well it seemed really mild 73 to 76 with few hard frosts or snow similar to recent years.

[blizzard81]

 Methuselah 1920's and 30's also abysmal for cold winters in the UK. 

 cheeky_monkey Never a truer word said. Wake up people. 

[blizzard81]

 Wold Topper The most important thing of all is to question EVERYTHING and don't just swallow everything as gospel. 

[MP-R]

 Wold Topper Quite right. As the saying goes, the loudest opinion is typically the weakest.