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Is it too late?

newme said:
Like many things I think this could be solved, we just need a worldwide effort, we did it with the ozone layer. Tho if that came up now I bet we would have significant resistance to any sort of agreement on even that. With so few companies being responsible for something like 70% of the problem and everything being loaded onto the consumer its just nonsense. Those companies need reining in but no one wants to be the one to do it. Politically its suicide, those companies have a huge amount of power and resources, especially in the US. News outlets are like everything else now mostly controlled by large companies, tech, electric, internet, gas, oil, food even. Water issues in the US, insane damage, flooding in new areas, massive heat waves and fires. A system was built that required resource exploitation and efficiency over environmental damage. Fine are mioniula and the cost of doing business. Monopolies have taken over and there is very little anyone can do about it on a personal level.

We could do this but I am becoming less able to convince myself we will actually do so. Bidens green plan is a great step forward but we need everyone to do it, the UK won't invest in anything large scale and whenever they try its bad and a huge mess.
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Yes, and this is why I'm a doomer. We have the technical ability to solve climate change, but not the will and don't seem to be on our way to finding it before things get really bad. We won't have the resources available that we have now if we wait too long.
 
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To nobody's great surprise, it looks as if a Trump administration would be determined and ready to slow and disrupt any progress that has been made towards clean energy transition and electric vehicle use by the Biden admin. According to Trump 'advisers and allies' he's keen to row back on the huge funding the current government has provided towards this. Apparently it's seen as something of a vote winner given the shite he's coming out with at campaign rallies:

In recent rallies, Trump, the likely Republican nominee, has called renewable energy “a scam business” and vowed to “drill, baby, drill”. On his first day in office, Trump has said he would repeal “crooked Joe Biden’s insane electric vehicle mandate” and approve a glut of new gas export terminals currently paused by Biden.
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www.theguardian.com

‘In a word, horrific’: Trump’s extreme anti-environment blueprint

Allies and advisers have hinted at a more methodical second term: driving forward fossil fuel production, sidelining scientists and overturning rules
www.theguardian.com www.theguardian.com
 
Has the planet warmed more than we thought? Ocean sponges might be telling us something
AP. February 5, 2024
Other scientists were skeptical of the study’s claim that the world has warmed that much more than thought. But if the sponge calculations are right, there are big repercussions, the study authors said.
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“The big picture is that the global warming clock for emissions reductions to minimize the risk of dangerous climate changes is being brought forward by at least a decade,” study lead author Malcolm McCulloch, a marine geochemist at the University of Western Australia. “Basically, time’s running out.”
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“We have a decade less than we thought,” McCulloch told The Associated Press. “It’s really a diary of — what’s the word? — impending disaster.”
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In the past several years, scientists have noted more extreme and harmful weather — floods, storms, droughts and heat waves — than they had expected for the current level of warming. One explanation for that would be if there was more warming than scientists had initially calculated, said study co-author Amos Winter, a paleo oceanographer at Indiana State University. He said this study also supports the theory that climate change is accelerating, proposed last year by former NASA top scientist James Hansen.
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There is regional climate variations, so I'm unsure on how much can be drawn from the study in the Caribbean?
 
Pickman's model said:
The curtain may come down with great rapidity Atlantic Ocean circulation nearing ‘devastating’ tipping point, study finds and billionaires running off to nz may not find that the refuge they'd hoped
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Also covered here at RealClimate.

The new study by van Westen et al. is a major advance in AMOC stability science, coming from what I consider the world’s leading research hub for AMOC stability studies
[...]
They do not present a particular time period estimate for reaching the tipping point, as more observations of the ocean circulation at this latitude will be needed for that
[...]
Given the impacts, the risk of an AMOC collapse is something to be avoided at all cost. As I’ve said before: the issue is not whether we’re sure this is going to happen. The issue is that we need to rule this out at 99.9 % probability. Once we have a definite warning signal it will be too late to do anything about it, given the inertia in the system.
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yield said:
There is regional climate variations, so I'm unsure on how much can be drawn from the study in the Caribbean?
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Yes, that's what I thought but their idea is that it's deep enough in the ocean to be shielded from the variations. It will be interesting to see whether that holds up.

I didn't agree with this though: "He said this study also supports the theory that climate change is accelerating, proposed last year by former NASA top scientist James Hansen." If they're right, they're just adjusting the baseline rather than showing anything about recent acceleration.

But this analysis does support Hansen's claims of recent acceleration:

Temperature increase after 2010, it suggests, will be at 0.027°C/yr, 50% faster than the lazy 0.018°C/yr it had been rising for decades before that.
[...]
There are other controversial ideas in the paper, including that climate sensitivity is on the high side at 4.8°C/doubling of CO2 rather than the 3°C/doubling considered the “mainstream” scientific estimate. There is no shortage of critics of many of these ideas, but I can only comment on the surface temperature warming rate. My analysis, based on the adjusted data representing the true global warming trend, confirms their claim about recent acceleration.
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All the indicators are fucking insane at the moment. We've been at 1.7 degrees - yes 1.7, not 1.5 - above pre-industrial temperatures for the past six months. Sea surface temperatures continue to break new records practically every week, off the scale levels of increase. And nobody outside the climate scientists and environmentalists I follow on Twitter appears to take any of it seriously.

Everything feels pointless at the moment. Eg - what's the point of pushing against the carbon impact of demolishing buildings (like the M&S on Oxford St or that modernist building under threat in Birmingham) when Israel can merrily demolish a whole fucking city? who cares about the impact of air pollution on children or their futures - at least they're not being shredded by high explosives.
 
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The FT is warning that parts of the US (and presumably UK) are becoming uninsurable due to the rising likelihood of extreme weather events. Knuckleheads will spin it as insurance firm profiteering but even taking that into account the numbers are pretty clear, and it's hard to see profiteering in cases of "we just won't insure you at all".
 
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Rob Ray said:
The FT is warning that parts of the US (and presumably UK)…
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Clearly I have been remiss in my monitoring of the news cycle, but howdy doody, I welcome our incorporation into the good ‘ol US of A and am looking forward to the freedom, cheap gasoline and gun ownership that comes with the package. :cool:
 
The last security job I had, was for a tech company part of the scandinavian green tech solution. They made software that could analyze ships systems and use data to recommend ways to sail to save money.
Our biggest investor was a company that own a lot of the worlds food production. They even own oil companies so they can have do without those middle men in order to power the ships that transport the grain that feeds the animals that we eat.
That’s when I threw in the towel. It took 20 years but I’ve seen enough to know I no longer have enough cognitive dissonance to participate.
The current system is one giant Manhattan project of illusions. Stop oil? Then stop eating meat you don’t farm or catch yourself. Stop ordering crap from china. Shop local. Stop giving your money to millionaires.
 
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