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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
The Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii recorded an increase of 2.4 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide (CO₂) to a total of 471.1 ppm in May 2020.
[...] In 2015, fires ravaged 2.6 million hectares due to slash-and-burn methods to clear areas that were dominated by peatlands. A dry season influenced by El Nino climate variability also contributed to the increasing spread of hotspots.
That year, NASA satellites detected more than 130,000 hotspots.
These fires in peat area released 802 million tons (Mt) of CO₂e (carbon dioxide equivalent) in 2015, making it one of the worst emission events in the country.
[...] The average annual emission from peat fires from 2000 to 2016 was 248Mt of CO₂e.
Approaching peak dry season in August, peatland will still be vulnerable to fires.
[...] The country has been struggling to control these fires, which are becoming an annual event.
[...] However, the coronavirus pandemic is challenging climate change commitments. Nations will be focusing on bouncing back economically.
With predicted cuts to economic growth resulting from this virus, concerns are growing that Indonesia will clear more forests and depend on cheap fossil fuel to buffer the financial impacts.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 21 2020, @03:29AM (13 children)
Again, CO2 levels are NOT at 471.1 ppm. They were at 417.1 ppm. I get it, the phys.org article has an error. Perhaps SN would have accurate information if the text of stories weren't merely copied and pasted. Maybe summaries should be shorter and people should be submitted to actually write brief summaries of a paragraph or two, instead of just copying other people's work. There's still a lot of mobility, despite a pause of a few weeks where people were traveling a lot less. However, people might be more inclined to drive their own vehicles instead of using mass transit, because the latter does carry greater risk of being infected. One theory as to why New York was hit so hard is the prevalence of mass transit there versus other places around the country.
The same problems that plague our coronavirus response also impede us from addressing climate change. There's a segment of the population that believes the lies they're being told, lies that are being spread for political benefit, that neither issue is real.
The QAnon cult initially claimed that the coronavirus was a ploy to drive people out of Washington, DC in order to make mass arrests of Democrats who are supposedly pedophiles and involved with sex trafficking. Obviously that was complete bullshit. Initially the far right claimed that the coronavirus is very dangerous. They've done a 180, now saying it's no worse than a normal seasonal flu. This is likely an effort to cover up for Trump's complete botching of the response. Perhaps they're also just being contrarian, now that Democrat governors are taking the virus quite seriously. But people who believe those lies may be more inclined to engage in dangerous behaviors that put themselves and others close to them at serious risk.
The problem is that coronavirus denial is making it difficult to enact policies that are necessary to contain it. For example, Nebraska's governor is telling counties that if they require people to wear masks in any county buildings, they can't receive federal funds from the CARES Act. And Trump claims that people are wearing masks as a political statement to show their disapproval of him. Politicizing the wearing of masks is dangerous and beyond stupid. Many of the QAnon messages, for example, are laced with references to Christianity. If their God is real and has any sense of justice, there's going to be a special place in Hell for people who spread lies for political gain at the expense of other people's lives.
But if you look at the climate issue, you'll see similar bullshit from climate deniers. There's a tremendous amount of right wing propaganda directed at discrediting climatologists, not unlike the efforts to discredit people like Anthony Fauci. There are ridiculous claims that solar activity is responsible for the recent warming, despite the fact that solar activity has been on a slight decreasing trend over the past few decades. But enough people believe this bullshit, much of which is backed by corporate money from wealthy people whose business models won't work any longer if we shift away from fossil fuels.
It's past time for coronavirus denial and climate denial to stop. We can disagree in good faith on how to respond to these issues, but continued denial of what is plainly obvious is asinine and should be condemned in the harshest way.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 21 2020, @03:53AM
Nice summary -- here's the official page on CO2 levels,
https://research.noaa.gov/article/ArtMID/587/ArticleID/2636/Rise-of-carbon-dioxide-unabated [noaa.gov]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 21 2020, @06:35AM (5 children)
Blah blah blah ... totally ignore massive yelling (expelling air forcefully from lungs through mouth) protest crowds ... blah blah blah ... "now that Democrat governors are taking the virus quite seriously" (unless it means going to a massive protest in which they won't even contact trace because reasons) ... blah blah blah ... Democrats are smart, Republicans are retards ... blah blah blah ... your religion is stupid and my SJW religion is backed up by Ph.D dissertations in Critical Whinging Theory ... blah blah blah.
It is interesting that in all that wall of text, you never once mention protesting as COVID risk and rioting -- and the pollution caused by burning so much plastic, rubber, building materials, as environmentally harmful. If you ever want to be taken seriously, quit being partisan, otherwise, you are just Ranon or whatever letter you want to pick. And the world doesn't need any more assholes.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 21 2020, @07:05AM (4 children)
Thank you for your post. It's good to see my post has already triggered one right wing snowflake.
If the protests were actually responsible for the increase in coronavirus cases, why aren't we seeing them everywhere that such protests occurred? Why aren't cases in New York City and Minneapolis surging? For that matter, why didn't we see a surge in coronavirus cases in cities where people protested the stay at home orders by gathering in close proximity without masks? The simple fact is that the virus is readily dispersed in the air outdoors, rapidly reducing concentrations of the virus below the levels where it can cause new infections. It's not the say the effect of any of the protests was exactly zero, but the science and the data suggest it's low. It doesn't matter if it's the right protesting stay at home orders or Black Lives Matter protesting the murder of George Floyd. It's outdoors, so the virus is readily dispersed. Naturally, you didn't mention Trump's indoor rally in Tulsa. Indoor environments do not allow for the virus to be diluted nearly as fast, making it a much greater opportunity for superspreading to occur.
As for anything that burned during the protests, while it's not great that anything burned, it's a drop in the bucket compared to other emission sources. There's still a lot of air travel because of freight being shipped. The risk of the coronavirus spreading when people are gathered in close proximity like in mass transit systems may lead to more people driving their own cars. There are also places like the Darvaza Gas Crater, which has been continuously burning for nearly five decades, though burning the CH4 to produce CO2 may be the lesser of two evils. All of those emissions are certainly orders of magnitude larger than anything that burned during the protests.
The point of my post was to criticize people who deny facts or concoct misinformation, especially when it's politically expedient. I actually hope your post gets modded insightful because it's actually a worthy addition to my post. It's a great example of exactly the type of right wing misinformation I was discussion in my post. Thank you for providing corroborating evidence to support my criticisms of misinformation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 21 2020, @07:01PM (1 child)
Well, when NYC won't even ask those positive whether they went to a protest, it's quite easy to know the data is crap.
You lot spinning science to support ideological agendas is the greatest threat to science. It was easy to dismiss religious nutters but when you let your own brand of religious nuttery infect data collection, that makes you an actual danger to objectivity, knowledge, and progress. Get off your high horse and put on some clothes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 21 2020, @08:10PM
Yet if the protests contributed in any significant way to coronavirus cases, we should see an increase in the number of cases anywhere significant protests occurred. That just hasn't happened. While some states are seeing surges in coronavirus cases, many others where there were large scale protests aren't seeing such increases. If the protests had a significant effect, we should see an increase in the number of new cases regardless of whether contact tracers are explicitly asking about attendance at protests. That's just not occurring.
I agree that NYC's contact tracers aren't inquiring about protest attendance, and here's an article discussing it: https://www.thecity.nyc/coronavirus/2020/6/14/21290963/nyc-covid-19-trackers-skipping-floyd-protest-questions-even-amid-fears-of-new-wave [thecity.nyc]. However, that article also says that only 2-3% of tests are coming back positive.
The 2-3% of positive tests is pretty low and it suggests that limits on the availability of tests aren't causing large numbers of cases to be missed. That means we can have reasonable confidence that there isn't an undetected surge in cases. If you believe that testing simply cannot be trusted, the rate of people being hospitalized is another way to measure trends in the infection rate. Here's NYC's data, which includes hospitalization rates: https://www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid/covid-19-data.page [nyc.gov]. There hasn't been an increase in the rate of hospitalizations.
There were very real concerns both that the protests and NYC's method of holding arrested protesters could spread infection: https://newyork.cbslocal.com/2020/06/03/protests-coronavirus-new-york/ [cbslocal.com]. But the data suggest that hasn't materialized at all.
Your theory is that the protests would result in rapid spreading of infections. The data do not support your hypothesis. There are multiple sources of data, coming from different parts of the country, with different state and local authorities involved in collecting and aggregating the data. After all, there were large scale protests throughout the country. There is no evidence that the protests had a significant role in spreading the coronavirus. At this point, your hypothesis should be rejected. But you're unwilling to do so, instead arguing that somehow the method of collecting data is preventing new cases associated with the protests from being detected. This would require widespread coordination because there are many agencies throughout the country responsible for collecting data. When the data don't support your theory, instead of behaving like a scientist and discarding the theory, you're concocting a conspiracy theory.
You've provided a great example of how conspiracy theories can be started. Thank you again for clearly demonstrating what I've described in my comments. You've been most helpful!
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday June 21 2020, @08:18PM (1 child)
Burning CH4 to produce CO2 and 2H2O is mich better than allowing the CH4 to be released into the atmosphere, because CH4 is vastly more of a greenhouse gas than CO2.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 21 2020, @08:25PM
Yes, as I noted, it's probably the lesser of two evils to burn the CH4 and immediately convert it to CO2. Otherwise, CH4 is far more potent than CO2, but will eventually be converted to CO2 in the atmosphere anyway. The contributions from the Darvaza Gas Crater are almost certainly quite small on a global scale. However, the contribution is almost certainly much larger than the climate impact of a few burned buildings during the George Floyd protests, an utterly absurd "pants on fire" level bit of misinformation from the AC I replied to.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 21 2020, @09:55AM (1 child)
In a few years, it will be at 471... I'm quite certain majority of us will live to see that day provided Trump or someone like him doesn't blow up the world first (in which case, there will still be 500+ppm CO2 from the destruction but no one around to measure it).
Just a year or two ago, there was a big hoopla over 400ppm world.
https://www.climatecentral.org/news/world-passes-400-ppm-threshold-permanently-20738 [climatecentral.org]
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 21 2020, @08:49PM
I agree that most of us will see CO2 levels at 500 ppm and many of us will see 600 ppm. I'm alarmed at how efforts to reduce carbon emissions and combat climate change are impeded by bad faith conspiracy theories and attacks on the integrity of scientists.
One of the reasons we may not have seen much of a decrease in greenhouse gas emissions during the pandemic is because of aircraft. Yes, I know that there were fewer passenger flights. But there was also an increase in online purchases, and the use of freight aircraft reached record levels [forbes.com] during the pandemic. Retail stores tend to receive inventory shipped by trucks and trains, which produce lower emissions than aircraft. And as I speculated in my original post, people may have been less willing to risk using mass transit, instead opting to drive their cars more frequently.
We would do well to go back to two or three day shipping for most things and make extensive use of freight trains to transport goods over long distances. Even better would be to use electric trains and power them with renewable energy, which might be feasible in the US with enough support [eesi.org]. It wasn't that long ago that Amazon Prime promised two day shipping and anything faster cost quite a bit more. If electric railroads can be made more efficient as the article discusses, maybe most goods could still be shipped to customers in two days, but by rail instead of by air.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 21 2020, @04:41PM (2 children)
Anyone can submit a story. If you think you can do better, please contribute.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 21 2020, @08:20PM (1 child)
Your response is not helpful. The fact that I'm criticizing this story does not imply that I have not contributed to this site. Indeed I have submitted stories. When I do so, I write my own summary instead of copying text directly from articles. I try to write good summaries that require minimal editing by the staff. That was pretty much expected when submitting stories to Slashdot, so I've just done the same thing when submitting to SN. My experience is that SN tends to post such stories very quickly because they require less work from the staff. If people would write their own summaries instead of just submitting URLs or having bots copy the entire text of stories, it would reduce the workload for SN's staff and we would probably get more articles to discuss.
I'm also pointing out an error in the summary, something that could be corrected by the editors. While I would have preferred this error to never make it into the story, it's still helpful for editors to make corrections. I clearly recall when CO2 concentrations passed 400 ppm a few years ago. I suspect I'm not the only person who remembers this. It would have been a staggering rise to increase from ~400 ppm to ~471 ppm in a few years, implying a far faster increase than what is actually occurring. Because of the large number of climate deniers who will seize upon any mistake to try to discredit AGW altogether, it's particularly important to avoid such errors.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2020, @06:33AM
In case you or anyone else doesn't already know Arthur T Knackerbracket and upstart are bots.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Monday June 22 2020, @09:06PM
Too lazy to verify it, but a graph circulated about covid 19 in italy, and the bell curve sees no signs of interference from the policies enacted at a national and regional level. That is, apparently the measures had been scarcely relevant.
Account abandoned.