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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: 4, Insightful) by qzm on Wednesday August 21 2019, @02:25AM (17 children)
Actually, most of the people in power are busy working their hardest to use a combination of AGW, Terrorism, and Identity Politics (and soon 'Recession Economics') to try and create Totalitarian states that have themselves at the top.
If they succeed, then I suspect that global temperatures will be the least of the issues for the foreseeable future.
If you actually want to do something about AGW its relatively simple. Support nuclear power (by which I mean new design reactors built without massive over-regulation and NIMBY politics to push the costs through the roof), and fight against centrally planned states (which have long histories of creating massive ecological disasters and huge inefficiency).
The #1 ecological issue facing us right now is massive inefficiency and waste. the US leads, however others are racing to catch up. Get rid of that, and carbon emissions would crash.
However, the financial markets see daily oil use as a positive measure of 'growth', so, good luck with that..
So yes, we are boned, but not for the reasons most people think. We are boned BECAUSE of the people at the top yelling about global warming, not despite them - because they have agendas, and helping you aint one of them.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 21 2019, @08:20AM (2 children)
Uh. No?
If we ramped energy efficiency and food production to 100% perfection given solar input, it would buy us less than a century at current consumption/capita and growth.
In softwarespeak: inefficiency and waste are low order terms and scaling constants, in the big-O versions ecological formulas. They matter, in the sense of "pay twice for bread" matters, but not in the sense of "inflation has made bread prices exponentially increase in cash-dollar prices" and I hope you can guess which of these perspectives matters to ecological matters.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 21 2019, @10:56AM (1 child)
If instead you want humanity to huddle on planet Earth, reducing itself to squalor over dwindling resources in wait for the next asteroid to put it out of its misery - then going out quicker with a bang is the better option. Reduces total suffering.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday August 22 2019, @12:05AM
The point you miss is that both terraforming and the comparatively simpler Earthship/Generation Ship models we'd need require precisely the same skills, actions, and attitudes that keeping THIS planet livable does. If we were somehow able to escape and colonize, with our current state of mind, we'd just shit up wherever else it is we went.
No, we need a fundamental change of heart before we'll be capable, let alone morally fit, to colonize space.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by PiMuNu on Wednesday August 21 2019, @08:48AM (4 children)
> and fight against centrally planned states (which have long histories of creating massive ecological disasters and huge inefficiency).
1. The only states that do anything are centrally planned. There has never been an anarchy successful enough to make anything.
2. There are many examples of centrally planned states that have not created ecological disasters. Far more than those that have.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 21 2019, @10:59AM (2 children)
I dare you.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Thursday August 22 2019, @08:22AM
> how say pre-WW2 USA was centrally planned
Well, there were a bunch of people called the senate, and another bunch of people called the house of representatives, and a guy called a president, and they got together to make a bunch of laws. The laws enabled the people in those houses and their flunkies to collect taxes, which were used to build roads, railways, electrical power distribution networks and other infrastructure along planned routes to certain regions.
Etc, etc.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday August 27 2019, @05:49PM
How pre-WWII America was centrally planned:
1. Starting in the early 1800's, the various state and federal governments, along with private businesses, planned out and created a network of canal and river transportation routes to aid in commerce. Major examples of this were the Erie Canal (connecting New York and the east coast to the Great Lakes) and the Ohio & Erie Canal (connecting the Great Lakes to the Ohio River and from there the Mississippi). Some of these are still in operation today, e.g. the Intracoastal Waterway along the Atlantic coast.
2. Throughout the mid- to late-1800's, the government was working alongside railroad companies to plan both rail routes and what sort of development would occur along those routes. Those rail routes are in many cases still here, and if they're not here as rail routes they are often here as major roads. For instance, Amtrak still runs trains over a section of the original transcontinental railroad route, and a bunch of the rest of it is now Interstate 80.
3. There was a massive central planning effort between 1861 and 1865 which was needed to fight the Civil War on both sides (the Confederates were far more centrally planned than the Union, because they got much more desperate).
4. As you get into the Gilded Age, the central planning stops being run by the government, and is instead being run by JP Morgan and the many many businesses he controlled, with substantial influence of other major industrialists like Andrew Carnegie, John Rockafeller, and Henry Ford. Morgan was instrumental in managing several financial crises, to the point where the US Secretary of the Treasury was often answering to Morgan rather than the other way around. Throughout this period, the US military is regularly deployed in Latin America and the Pacific to take over countries on behalf of US industrialists - they even invent the country of Panama specifically because Nicaragua was refusing to allow a canal to be built.
5. Woodrow Wilson adds a great deal of government central planning to first support the Entente powers (Britain, France, et al) and later send US troops to fight World War I. This process greatly increases the US Army's standing forces and hardware.
6. Franklin Roosevelt spends all of the 1930's engaged in central planning efforts to try to mitigate the worst effects of the Great Depression.
But I'm sure you'll be quite happy to go on pretending that the concept of central planning was invented by Communists or something.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday August 21 2019, @01:04PM
Like start wars that kill millions or tens of millions of people? Drain the Aral Sea? Commit the genocides of history? "Do anything" isn't necessarily better than "do nothing", and a vicious state is not better than anarchy.
Perhaps we should go through this list of centrally planned states to see what needs to be thrown out? Either on the grounds that it has actually created ecological disasters contrary to assertion, or on the grounds that it isn't actually a centrally planned state. Central planning is more than just regulation or having some central government that decides a few things. It's allocation of most resources over the entire state based on what an ignorant committee or person decides is appropriate.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Wednesday August 21 2019, @10:40AM (6 children)
According to my observation, those who try to make their states more totalitarian are mostly climate change deniers. They do use terrorism and identity politics (and fear of refugees) for their purpose, though.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 21 2019, @11:41AM
It is called the Welfare-Warfare state for a reason. Good god, what is so difficult to understand about this?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday August 21 2019, @01:24PM
I guess you need to look a little harder. Note that the fixes for climate change all require changing developed world peoples' behavior. None of the people most concerned about climate change consider adaptation (except to discount it by claiming it's ridiculously expensive) even though it's much less impact on people and their freedom. Nor do they consider a similar forcing of peoples' behavior in the developing world, like China, even thought that would in theory have more impact since there's both more people and more growth in greenhouse gases emissions.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday August 21 2019, @03:05PM (3 children)
Outlawing automobiles, air conditioners, beef, plastic straws, plastic bags, taxing sugared drinks, limiting the size of drink you can buy, promised gun confiscations, none of those things are a sign of totalitarianism, are they? These are the things O'crazio and her Squat club promise us.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 21 2019, @03:24PM (1 child)
Damn you're like an infinite font of stupid.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday August 21 2019, @03:34PM
If so, I rely on your aquifer of stupid to feed me. WTF do you think "totalitarianism" means, anyway?
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by digitalaudiorock on Thursday August 22 2019, @12:01AM
...and possibly even the confiscation of straw men.
(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.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Wednesday August 21 2019, @05:04PM
Yeah, I'm sure fear of central planning is why the party that believes that AGW either doesn't exist or isn't a problem in the face of overwhelming evidence has, in recent years:
- Made it illegal to protest centrally planned oil pipelines.
- Made it illegal to produce your own electricity by putting up a windmill on your property, so that you'll be more likely to rely on the centrally planned electric grid.
- Made it more expensive to produce your own electricity by putting solar panels on your roof or property, so you'll be more likely to rely on the centrally planned electric grid.
- Made it legal to frack for natural gas even under your land even if the company doesn't own the mineral rights, thus allowing companies to centrally plan their extraction efforts more easily.
- Overthrown or attempted to overthrow multiple foreign governments, some of them democracies, in order to get at the oil. This is the ultimate in centralization, because now you're not even allowing foreigners to choose their own government like we do.
- Given massive government subsidies to oil and natural gas companies, artificially lowering the price of gasoline, heating oil, natural gas, and other fossil fuels, as part of a central plan to aid those companies.
I'm going to hazard a guess that all this has jack squat to do with principles of decentralization, and everything to do with a handful of very large corporations who own drilling rights for oil and gas worth $trillions wanting to maximize their return on investment, who are bribing politicians to pass laws favorable to that effort and running a very large public propaganda campaign to convince people like you to put up with it. All of which was centrally planned, I might add.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.