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Recently, the U.K. Met Office announced a revision to the Hadley Center historical analysis of sea surface temperatures (SST), suggesting that the oceans have warmed about 0.1 degree Celsius more than previously thought. The need for revision arises from the long-recognized problem that in the past sea surface temperatures were measured using a variety of error-prone methods such as using open buckets, lamb's wool–wrapped thermometers, and canvas bags. It was not until the 1990s that oceanographers developed a network of consistent and reliable measurement buoys.
[...] But that's where the good news ends. Because the oceans cover three fifths of the globe, this correction implies that previous estimates of overall global warming have been too low. Moreover it was reported recently that in the one place where it was carefully measured, the underwater melting that is driving disintegration of ice sheets and glaciers is occurring far faster than predicted by theory—as much as two orders of magnitude faster—throwing current model projections of sea level rise further in doubt.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Wednesday August 21 2019, @12:30PM
No, it is not. What gets missed in efficiency arguments are two very important things. First, that there's a solid limit to how efficient you can get - while technology development can bypass the limit altogether. The most efficient hand shovel user will move far less dirt than a backhoe operator who takes two hour smoke breaks.
Second, many of these efficiency ideas waste more valuable things to preserve less valuable things. For example, recycling is a notorious example - wasting peoples' time to save a few scraps of low value paper, plastic, and glass. It's only a "few minutes" of your time individually, but that time is still more valuable than the materials being recycled and that waste adds up.
Thus, fixing ecological issues often makes us less efficient. The good fixes are mild, like putting scrubbers on coal power plant chimneys (or having chimneys in the first place!) - a mild cost with substantial benefits. The bad ones are massively inefficient like mandating that we reduce pollutants to lower levels than they appear in local nature (particularly happens with some toxins like arsenic or lead, and radiative pollutants).
Sure, there are ecological practices, particularly in agriculture and food storage, that can get both better environments and better efficiency, but it's a conceit that somehow we are so inefficient that we merely need to use everything better in order to get out from under. The problem, as I see it, is that we have well over 7 billion people on Earth with continued population growth - no matter how efficiently we get, without reducing that population and its growth, we can't escape from massive problems in the future. The way out as I see it is to push everything to developed world status - which has solved basic problems like overpopulation and most sorts of pollution. But that pushes everyone into the sort of societies you consider wasteful.