There's no amount of evidence that'll help. We have had a sufficient amount of that for a long while. It's entrenched economic interests fostering a lack of political will that's keeping us from taking this seriously.

China emits 34% of the world’s total carbon emissions, the USA produces 12%.

Since 2000, China has increased emissions by 262%. The USA has decreased emissions by 21%.

If that’s how China is charging ahead, we don’t need it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

You're still hearing politicians talk about climate change? This could be an American bubble but I haven't heard talk of climate change from US politicians, or the other global leaders that filter through our news cycle, since 2023.

2050 is not meaningless. Its close enough to feel like its achievable but far enough away that you can put off immediate action and still feel there is time to get it done. Reminds of the lyrics of the spirit of the west song:

It's a ways outside of town

But the distance has its uses

Close enough to make the effort

Far enough to make excuses.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZXgl5KxUQY

Even if we stop all emissions right now, we'll exceed the 1.5C target, so...

A couple years back I saw articles about how we're basically less than a year from the tipping point.

Then nothing.

My guess is we passed the tipping point. It's inevitable by now.

That goal is no longer possible.

I don't think it's that easy to interrupt politicians, especially these days as more and more protections are justifiably given to them.

Do you have an example where you personally interrupted a politician effectively?

> We need to avoid reaching tipping points that will cause non-recoverable damage to the earth system.

Then I'd be far more worried about nuclear war than minor temperature excursions. Aside from that "non recoverable" damage happens every day. What do you think mining is?

> Actual global average temperatures is what should be measured.

On average it was 10 degrees Fahrenheit cooler last year than it was the previous where I live in northern CA.

I’m amused that the argument is that we are in a Mr Burns position where different kinds of pollution we were emitting was balancing out and somehow fighting pollution is the reason global warming is worse? While I’m sure it has some effect, the amount of co2 we pump out every year as a species is insane. The effect of ship pollution mitigating that is marginal at best

https://archive.ph/jXcuJ

Drive less.

CO2 output per person in the US (all sources including industry, etc): ~13-14,000kg

Average distance driven per year per capita in the US: ~20,000km

Average CO2 output of current private vehicle fleet: ~250g/km

Therefore, over one third of total CO2 output per person is personal vehicle use. Considering only CO2 output due to personal choices driving has to be well over half.

Most people don't - or refuse - to consider the obvious choice to take personal responsibility. Drive less.

The real practical solutions are trivial, the politics are not. It's a collective action problem, where the US is one of the actors.

The real solution is pricing the true cost of the externalities fairly and globally.

Everything which isn't sustainable must he taxed to the degree to offset the damage. We know well that economic incentives work best and that markets are efficient to achieve optimal solutions.

The core issue is just game theory to coordinate globally all players to prevent free riding.

There are a lot of money scams out there to be sure.

It's unlikely that something like carbon capture will ever significantly reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere. It's just too energy intensive.

But there are a lot of practical solutions to significantly curb emissions that mostly just require regulations and taxes.

Things like building out rail transport. Heavily taxing air travel. Taxing all forms of carbon emission (fuel taxes would be pretty effective). Subsidizing non-co2 emissions, pushing for electrification when possible and power generation which uses non-CO2 emission. Stop wasteful pipedreams like "clean coal". Force data centers to be better citizens. For example, make them buy the battery/solar systems to offset their consumption. Make them participate in district heating schemes.

There's also some hope that even without intervention some of this will happen somewhat naturally. Solar and battery is already very cheap. Both are causing changes in the shipping and transit equations.

What about poor people that live in areas in the world that will become completely uninhabitable?

> is the ozone layer repair.

Which was, stop using CFCs, and stop venting them into the atmosphere to "dispose" of them. We also stopped lighting rivers on fire for mostly the same reasons, stop dumping industrial waste in them.

> I guess we should just accept it and adapt?

Ocean shipping produces more pollution than most countries. There are only like 5 countries that produce more carbon than the worldwide shipping fleet. If they cared then "cheap crap from China" wouldn't exist.

It's a scam. They want to monopolize the economy and they're using your environmental consciousness as the wedge to push you against your own best interests.

Don’t live like a rich person in a developed country - they’re the only ones whose co2 footprints are too high.

Yes, we got to adapt, we won't cool it down and "repair" what is broken.

However we can slow down the effects and try to stop the effects. So it's "only" 1.5° or whatever, not 3°, 5° or 10°. And if we raise average by 10° at least not by the years 2100, but 2200 to give time to adapt.

"Adapting" means resettling people, restructuring agriculture and food production, etc.

(All numbers are quite arbitrary picks, just as any goal one tried to set before)

I heard about this[1] recently, essentially spurring a massive plankton bloom to capture carbon where it ends up on the sea floor and becomes future oil deposits in a few millenia.

The nice thing about it is that it doesn't require global cooperation.

[1]https://www.onepercentbrighter.com/p/the-no-bullshit-way-to-...

Edit: I should probably link where I heard about it to give credit to someone who deserves it

https://uncomfortableconversations.substack.com/p/the-climat...

Look at the degrowth movement. There are solutions but nobody, especially the leadership, are going to like them.

As with most difficult problems, this is a messy political problem, not a technical one. There is zero chance we avoid 1.5C gain. The best you can do is make life decisions for yourself to make your lifetime as comfortable for you as you can, assuming it will happen. I started doing that 5 years ago.

Technologically practical? Certainly. Kick renewables and electrification into high gear. Treat it like the emergency that it is.

Politically practical? Not a chance. It was already a major struggle a decade ago when the political climate was much more favorable to addressing the problem. Now, even the countries that want to do something about it are going to be more concerned about more immediate threats like being invaded.

Our best hope is that green technology quickly gets to the point where it so heavily outcompetes CO2-emitting technology that the latter disappears on its own. But this will take longer than it should.

I'm not sure what we should do, it's very hard to determine what minimizes harm and maximizes benefits at a global scale. It's certainly not as simple as extremists would like to believe. Certainly it would be much (MUCH) less risky to slow warming as much as possible and maintain constant or slowly reducing CO2 levels.

I think from the standpoint of predicting what will happen, my best guess is that people will use fossil fuels until it is economically not viable to do so. If you want hasten it at an individual level, buy solar panels and have your house disconnected from the grid until fees you pay no longer subsidize fossil fuels. Frown at people and refuse to give them positive social cues when they buy a car that isn't electric. Instead of "oh nice car" just say "it would be so cool if they had a plugin version!". Support electrification of things like heat and water heating so long as it can be powered by non-fossil sources.

In the long run I think solar power, effective battery technology, and the peaking of the global population combine to cause fossil fuel usage to reduce over the next 100 years or so until CO2 levels stabilize. Lots of large CO2 emitters are already leveling off - the output is too high to sustain but at least it's no longer increasing year over year - such as from cement production.

Honestly it's not much but that's what you can do, larger social movements and political action do not work when someone's decision is whether to spend $800 a month or $100 a month to heat their house. Anyone who says it does should buy a thermometer, but instead they will get a plane ticket to the next big city to run around in the street yelling at police (literally the only people paid to not care about your slogans) while nobody really notices.

The population is achieving results. Most of these results are occurring in China, which has begun an unimaginably huge deployment of renewables and nuclear. Europe is also making progress. The rest of Asia will go next, and then (as it develops industrially) so will Africa. Even parts of North America will quickly electrify: for example, Canada just agreed to reduce tariffs on Chinese EVs to 6% from 100%.

Agreed.

Our ecological goals are to make biosphere damage scarce, but our economic practices aim to make scarce things plentiful. We need something to balance out the effects of scarcity-based economics.

Banning CFCs. But that didn't require giving anything up really so it was an easier sell.

Uh, no, it’s the 3rd hottest year since 1880. You can click “Download Data” and look the table yourself.

https://science.nasa.gov/earth/explore/earth-indicators/glob...

the article is particularly dodgy. “On record” is a crime. They hint at it being satellite recordings since the 1970s.

The Economist used to be a good publication until McElthwaite left for Bloomberg about 10-12 years ago.

Uhm obviously. It would be difficult to have a year from the future on record wouldn't it?

Here's a raw table in .txt format from NASA

https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/graph_data/Global_...

There are tons of raw data available freely and publicly. In my estimation, there is no comparable scientific discipline with a better curated data environment.

What exact raw data would you want? I am sure ChatGPT can throw together some python that will download the relevant data.

https://cds.climate.copernicus.eu/datasets

You are capable of operating Google, right?

And what will you do with the raw data? Are you trained in processing and interpreting it? How good is your math?