87 degrees in December

12/14/2017 1:21:53 PM

We visited an Alaskan village being killed by climate change.

In just four days there, we saw the loss of 10 feet of land.

https://www.facebook.com/vicenews/videos/942548552571762/

12/30/2017 8:17:53 AM

I feel like this is tangentially related to this issue.

Quote :

"By July 2019, the bitcoin network will require more electricity than the entire United States currently uses. By February 2020, it will use as much electricity as the entire world does today."

http://grist.org/article/bitcoin-could-cost-us-our-clean-energy-future/

[Edited on January 14, 2018 at 12:43 PM. Reason : ]

1/14/2018 12:42:37 PM

^ that claim has already been discredited
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/bitcoins-insane-energy-consumption-explained/

1/20/2018 9:24:22 PM

Quote :

"From February 2016 to February 2018 (the latest month available) global average temperatures dropped 0.56°C. You have to go back to 1982-84 for the next biggest two-year drop, 0.47°C"

https://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2018/04/24/did_you_know_the_greatest_two-year_global_cooling_event_just_took_place_103243.html

5/17/2018 9:23:39 AM

Well, if that doesn't disprove global warming, i don't know what will!!!11

5/17/2018 9:31:09 AM

HCH probably didn't even read it

5/17/2018 9:35:18 AM

Where did I say anything about "proving or disproving" global warming. I just thought it was interesting that we've just gone through the longest period of cooling temperatures in 30 years. Maybe this means our efforts to reduce global warming is working.

You guys are so entrenched in your "global warming at all costs" narrative, that you can't accept any data that doesn't reinforce your preconceived beliefs. Open your mind and trust the science.

5/17/2018 9:56:47 AM

lol, he read it and was like "whoops"

5/17/2018 10:04:44 AM

This probably says more about how absurdly warm it was in 2016 than any high-five-worthy cooling event.

5/17/2018 11:34:55 AM

lol, the hack is pretending like he isn't trying to push a narrative. "Trust the Science", he says.

5/17/2018 12:14:07 PM

^^exactly, it’s a re-hash of the “global warming pause” argument from 1998-2012ish. If you start your trend from an El Niño year (1998, 2015), you’re gonna have some cooler years right after those maximums:

5/17/2018 12:36:03 PM

Clearly, yall dont understand the scientific method.

5/17/2018 1:05:20 PM

Is that the process where throwing a snowball on the floor in Congress invalidates climate change?

5/17/2018 1:22:56 PM

To be sure, global warming is one of the more important items we should be discussing, but I can't stop thinking about plastics and all the harm they're doing. Global warming is a hard concept for a lot of the folks out there ignorant of the science behind it. And the results of positive change aren't even perceptible. But plastics - that's something tangible that everybody can wrap their heads around. I'd like to see more of a push to get rid of non-essential plastic products.

5/18/2018 1:56:21 AM

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0071-9.epdf

Study suggests that if we were to limit temperature rise to 1.5C, rather than 2C, by the end of the century, we could expect a global $20trillion cost savings.

5/25/2018 4:38:11 PM

that's 5 years of the US federal budget

5/25/2018 10:08:50 PM

Yea, from a global perspective and on an 80 year time scale, that’s really not that much money.

But I think you need to keep in mind 2 things:

-they are talking about cost savings from a 0.5c difference, and at the lower end of potential warming (2c instead of 4c) which is way lower on the catastrophic scale.

-the increase in global investment to get from 2c (if we were actually on a path to 2c) down to 1.5c is more on the order of $0.5-2 trillion, meaning our ROI could be 10:1 or better.

5/26/2018 6:52:48 AM

Hurricane Maria and its aftermath killed around 4,500 people, cf official count of 64 excess deaths

Study estimates a prolonged increase in death rate in Puerto Rico in months following Hurricane Maria
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/death-rate-increase-puerto-rico-hurricane-maria

Quote :

"By comparing this post-hurricane mortality rate with the same time period in 2016, the researchers estimated that there were 4,645 [95% CI, 793 to 8498] additional deaths in the three-month period following Hurricane Maria."

5/29/2018 11:03:09 PM

That's a hell of a confidence interval.

5/31/2018 11:50:08 AM

Quote :

"Hurricane Maria and its aftermath killed around 4,500 people, cf official count of 64 excess deaths"

PREPA killed around 4,500 people, and not a single fuck was given inside that company.

5/31/2018 4:50:22 PM

Good one

5/31/2018 4:56:48 PM

We are fucked.

I read the report when it was released a couple of weeks ago, but this video is nice:

https://www.facebook.com/YearsOfLiving/videos/471915476588997

(Antarctic ice melting way faster than thought, and if it keeps accelerating at the same rate, most coastal areas will be uninhabitable in 50 years.)

6/24/2018 10:45:57 PM

Try not to have a knee jerk reaction about this one. Shuffle through all the spin and BS and maybe you'll realize that things aren't so dire. I know it's tempting to freak out over 0.011% of Antarctica's ice melting over the last 25 years. What if the headline had said "99.989% of Antarctica's ice sheets are intact from the last 25 years of global warming"?

Quote :

"Zwally will again challenge the prevailing narrative of how global warming is affecting the South Pole. Zwally said his new study will show, once again, the eastern Antarctic ice sheet is gaining enough ice to offset losses in the west. Much like in 2015, Zwally’s upcoming study will run up against the so-called “consensus,” including a paper published by a team of 80 scientists in the journal Nature on Wednesday. The paper estimates that Antarctic is losing, on net, more than 200 gigatons of ice a year, adding 0.02 inches to annual sea level rise."

Couldn't find link to new study; here's link to previous one: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-mass-gains-of-antarctic-ice-sheet-greater-than-losses

[Edited on June 27, 2018 at 10:08 AM. Reason : ]

6/27/2018 10:04:33 AM

^ but that's from 2015

new calculations show that the rate of loss has tripled compared to 2012:

this is the study:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0179-y

popular reports:

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/antarctica-is-losing-ice-twice-as-fast-as-anyone-thought
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/06/after-decades-of-ice-loss-antarctica-is-now-hemorrhaging-mass/562748
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/antarctica-ice-sheet-melting-study-sea-level-rise_us_5b2228ede4b0adfb82711586

but i guess as usual when it comes to climate change, the consensus is that there is no consensus... :shrug:

6/27/2018 10:54:56 AM

https://www.wral.com/scientists-confirm-july-set-new-global-heat-record/18571082/

8/15/2019 2:26:58 PM

I've never been one to deny climate change, nor our role in it. But this post is about something else.

I was reading an article presented to my feed on FB about how a planet 10x the density of Earth collided with Jupiter billions of years ago. The evidence presented, in layman's terms of course, was that Jupiter's core was less dense than it should be. They concluded that a dense planet collided with Jupiter and disturbed its core, and from which that core is still settling down.

What was surprising and sad to me were the number of comments on that article straight up denying the science or pointing to religion. Hardly any of the comments were like "wow that was interesting, etc."

Science deniers.

8/22/2019 10:56:31 AM

well, what do you expect when Dear Leader is also a science denier?

8/22/2019 1:51:23 PM

the denial of science by right wingers pre-dates him by decades

one would think it would cause some on that side to question why they’re on the side chock full of denialists

8/22/2019 1:55:50 PM

Quote :

" how a planet 10x the density of Earth collided with Jupiter billions of years ago. "

There is a great series on Hulu (I think it is a NatGeo series), called "How the Universe Works". One of the episodes is about Jupiter and its role as basically a large nightclub bouncer, keeping all the space debris from slamming into earth. Recommend x3000

[Edited on August 23, 2019 at 10:09 AM. Reason : wrong title]

8/23/2019 10:06:03 AM

That series used to air on The Science Channel. I loved watching it. Not sure if its still on there or not.

8/28/2019 1:02:38 PM

It's really a great series. I just finished the episode about the first second of creation, and everything that happened during that second. The people who figure this stuff out are so amazingly brilliant.

Speaking of brilliant scientists, there is a new show on Hulu called "Genius" (but I think it originally aired on another channel). I was only able to catch the first half of the first episode last night, but I definitely recommend. Its about Einstein's life, and certainly more dramatic than the series mentioned above. But they do a pretty good job of explaining how Einstein started to think about relativity and time and matter.

8/29/2019 11:20:20 AM

That was actually originally on NatGeo, but I never watched it.

8/30/2019 8:47:20 AM

Antonio Banderas played Picasso on one series. I intended to watch it but never did.

8/30/2019 9:28:45 AM

Has the brazilian president blamed liberals for lighting the fires to make him look bad?

That's what Trump would do.

8/30/2019 11:09:22 AM

Yes, he did that soon after they started. He said NGOs lit them. When asked for any proof, he stated "That's not how it's done".

He's very Trump-esque.

8/30/2019 12:02:45 PM

https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2019/10/14/climate-change-naomi-klein-on-fire

Quote :

"The Inconvenient Truth: Fixing Climate Requires Major Economic Change, Naomi Klein Says Climate change denial is not driven by rogue scientists who disagree with their peers — author Naomi Klein says — but rather free-market capitalists who want to protect the economic status quo. Klein has an inconvenient truth for climate deniers who oppose the economic changes that scientists and activists say are necessary to reduce the risk of environmental catastrophe: A government takeover of business is necessary to combat climate change. In her new book "On Fire: The Burning Case for a Green New Deal,” Klein writes that allegiance to capitalism is at the heart of climate denial. Free market think tanks like the Heartland Institute and the Heritage Foundation are weakening the fight against climate change by championing corporate deregulation and low taxes for the wealthy, she says. “That requires massive investments in the public sphere, exactly what these free-market think tanks have been railing against for some 50 years,” she says. “It requires that we regulate corporations. It requires that we actually increase taxes on the wealthy.” While attending a conference for the Heartland Institute in 2011, Klein heard one attendee declare climate change is “a Trojan horse designed to abolish capitalism and replace it with some kind of eco-socialism,” she writes. In February, eight years later, chief executive officer of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Thomas Donohue called the Green New Deal “a Trojan horse for socialism.” On the darker side of climate change denial — the Christchurch killer, who murdered 50 at a mosque in New Zealand, called himself an “eco-fascist.” And Anders Behring Breivik, who slaughtered 70 in Norway in 2011, called action against climate change “enviro-communism.” Despite the prevalence of this fear of going against capitalism, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its landmark 2018 report calls for “fundamental societal and systems transitions and transformations” to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. This necessary transformation includes rethinking energy, transportation and agriculture systems, Klein says. “This is why they have been denying it all along,” she says. Enacting climate solutions could create millions of unionized, well-paying jobs and help rectify the economic inequality caused by the deregulated capitalism argued for by climate-denying think tanks, she says. In her book, Klein argues for a Green New Deal to support this transformation. She says the Great Depression was the worst crisis capitalism had ever created at the time, but it’s now been beat out by climate change. Former President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s was not a single policy, but rather a series of initiatives that gave Americans financial support and employment opportunities, she says. The government programs helped struggling Americans, and employed 10 million people, too. “When we talk about a Green New Deal, we're not talking about abolishing a free market,” she says. “We're talking about remembering a time when there were major investments in the public sphere in the face of a collective crisis.” The original New Deal had its problems: Many African-Americans and domestic workers were excluded, and the plan was too centralized, she says. The Green New Deal, however, would aim to include everyone, she says. And climate strategies like wind and solar energy lend themselves to decentralized ownership. But since the New Deal, people’s willingness to trust the government has changed, she says. Thanks to the era of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, many people still believe in what Reagan once said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help.” “We have been told that every time we try to do anything together, things go horribly wrong, that there is no such thing as society,” she says. “We have forgotten that we actually can do big things together.”"

10/21/2019 4:23:10 PM

Quote :

"Klein has an inconvenient truth for climate deniers who oppose the economic changes that scientists and activists say are necessary to reduce the risk of environmental catastrophe: A government takeover of business is necessary to combat climate change."

nice of them to admit their goals i guess

10/29/2019 5:13:14 PM

If you've been paying attention, those intentions have been clear for years. Decades in the case of some of the fanatics.

11/12/2019 8:13:18 AM

why are you a climate denier?

11/12/2019 12:23:55 PM

apparently galaxy brain here thinks it's a plot to nationalize industries

11/12/2019 12:30:58 PM

Porsche and Audi pushing EVs at the super bowl, GM teasing an all electric hummer, Boris Johnson talking about setting a date where no new vehicle sold is fossil fuel, we’re at a turning point now for gas vehicles going away. Personal vehicles are 65% of oil usage, 75% if you count commercial transportation (excluding planes).

2/2/2020 11:17:02 PM

You have to consider a lot more before you praise car companies for trying to sell more cars. First, it may take 3-8 years of driving at 10k miles per year to offset the initial production emissions of the battery which means you also have to consider the type of people buying these vehicles and their driving behavior with them. Second, at $75-103k those luxury vehicles you mentioned aren't exactly going to be replacing someone's daily driver for a long commute. They likely won't even be the owner's sole vehicle and how long will they drive it before buying another one? Also, its not these people who are most often getting stuck with long, carbon intensive commutes. Third, transportation is only responsible for 29% of GHG emissions in the US, so even if we scraped that, we still have a long way to go and this mindset enables the people responsible for the other 71% to champion themselves as "green".

This is not about helping, its about maintaining profits in a world of changing social ethics. Rich people are under social pressure against buying unnecessary vehicles in the midst of climate change so this "solution" is just to make said unnecessary vehicles electric. Now they get to pat themselves on the back for buying an unnecessary product (extra emissions) while the cheerleaders neglect to consider indirect emissions.

Don't get me wrong, EVs and batteries are PART of the solution but the cars you mentioned are definitely not part of the solution. They are laughable, at best, and once you consider how many places are charging the batteries with coal power, as well as the billions of tax credits being poured towards them, they may even be harmful. I'm not trying to be an asshole, I just want to point out that the companies responsible for the problem will do everything in their power to generate even more profits off of the good intentions to solve it. We need to be producing LESS cars, not more so I'd rather spend the $17.5+ BEELION on green projects that have a more direct benefit for more people such as public transit and things like high speed rail instead of private luxury vehicles for the rich.

2/3/2020 12:48:22 AM

I normally like reading your posts, but can you shorten that a little? Tl;dr. Just seems like a lot of words.

2/3/2020 12:52:34 AM

Shouldn't take longer than 1 minute to read each paragraph. I have to tag every base because there are 4 or 5 people on this board who will flame everything out of context and yell "TROLL" if I don't elaborate points into context. When that happens, the discussion usually ends up being ruined and drowned out by people who have no intention in taking part in nuanced discussion anyway.

2/3/2020 11:01:20 AM

Quote :

"Porsche and Audi pushing EVs at the super bowl, GM teasing an all electric hummer, Boris Johnson talking about setting a date where no new vehicle sold is fossil fuel, we’re at a turning point now for gas vehicles going away. Personal vehicles are 65% of oil usage, 75% if you count commercial transportation (excluding planes)."

Porsche and Audi (among others) are basically being forced into it by the EU. Not that, long term, it's a bad thing - but the technology isn't ready. They're not building these cars to "save the environment". There's nothing sustainable about a 5500 lb quasi-SUV that just happens to be electric. Ditto Porsche's Taycan (and SUVs to follow shortly). I suppose you can say it's dipping their toes into the pool, and setting the state for later, but sadly most people aren't interested in actual vehicles built for sustainability (BMW i3 was a huge flop - though you can argue the styling of it was a big obstacle).

2/4/2020 9:07:27 AM

bump

8/9/2021 11:13:49 AM

The solutions seem so big though.

And it doesn't help when you have billionaire vanity projects that look like a slap in the face to helping the environment. Yea, Bezos' rocket didn't use fossil fuels, but how many people know that?

8/9/2021 4:23:39 PM

I agree that it’s on the federal government to take it on in a way that they haven’t yet and that they need to tax the billionaires as opposed to relying on the kindness of the billionaires

8/9/2021 5:30:19 PM

How would you propose the government tackle it?

8/9/2021 8:15:35 PM