Anthropogenic Climate Change

Yeah. Typically around 2 Atlantic storms get retired a year, sometimes more and sometimes less. The year Katrina happened was particular bad and saw 5 name retirements.

Here's the US NHC website I've been getting all this info from if you are interested.

@megarockman: You joke, but ideally we'd have legal structures for apportioning responsibility for externalities like smoke caused by wildfires caused by human activity (and those would include international treaties because smoke doesn't respect borders).

But before America could do that, we'd have to recognize that our system creates negative externalities, such as our failure to keep an eye on our guns leading them to walk south to Mexico.

Good luck finding a fair way to apportion blame for such complex climate interactions, anyway. Probably also need to consider positive externalities, if they exist.

(Although it's an interesting what-if concept. In one of my settings, a country has covered large swaths of the Sahara with wind and solar farms and suddenly there are lots of weather anomalies in other continents linked back to this project)

Edited by SeptimusHeap on Jan 19th 2024 at 11:06:44 AM

In which German weather forecasts say that tomorrow maximum temperatures will be 18 degrees Celsius. In February. With no commemt.

A boy is not inherently a bad thing but El Niño is really putting its foot down. Rather than progress in combating climate change, it feels like the train has no brakes.

But it's gonna be cold tomorrow so it's okay.

Don't buy roses for Valentine's Day says this French-language yt video.

This video maker explains that (in the North hemisphere at least) roses don't grow in February, and are imported from equatorial or South hemisphere countries with a terrible ecological impact. She suggests buying seasonal, local flowers instead.

I'd add fake/synthetic roses as an alternate option as well for if your valentine is adamant on having them.

CHOCOLATES!!!!!

Chocolate is even worse...

Also, El Nino will pass, eventually, and it will be a little colder for a few years then. Relatively speaking. Climate change does not mean cold snaps or extreme weather events will stop happening.

That's not how it worked in 2020-2022 though.

Oh? What was different?

With more energy in the atmosphere, the weather should become more extreme.

The Concordia-Dome C research station deep within East Antarctica experienced a 40⁰C (72⁰F) above seasonal average temperature back in March 2022, according to a report released earlier this year.

Random musing (not a peer reviewed scientific survey!) about the Gulf Stream/thermohaline circulation:

While its shutdown is often (incorrectly) framed as a "new ice age" thing, the main and principal danger iis that it would shut the northern hemisphere monsoons down. In a way, it's an example of the rich screwing the poor over, when you consider who relies on the monsoon and who produces greenhouse gases...

...but arguably, the rich can't fix this. A shutdown of the monsoons is a problem with most geoengineering schemes, and removing greenhouse gases might have the same effect. On the other hand, planting the Sahara with either vegetation or solar farms or wind farms might prop up the Gulf Stream, or at least the monsoons.

City has been orange for the last two days, damned dust from Sahara.

Wasted efforts of elite Marathon runners under a warming climate primarily due to atmospheric oxygen reduction note that it's due to pressure changes, not concentration changes which are irrelevant. On the other hand Warming climate is helping human beings run faster, jump higher and throw farther through less dense air

I'm afraid some corporations may use that second study as an excuse not to reduce their carbon emissions.

11 days ago, but India fires up coal use and emissions during election, heat wave

Kind of funny that this coincides with news of coal's share in India's installed electricity capacity dropping below 50 % in the first quarter of 2024, for the first time since the 1960s

https://scitechdaily.com/unprecedented-discovery-new-low-cost-catalyst-converts-carbon-dioxide-to-valuable-chemicals/

Apparently there's been some development in using atmospheric carbon to produce common industrial chemicals.

Obviously there's a huge difference between someone pulling it off in a lab and it happening at a meaningful scale, however I suspect that this type of carbon sequestration is probably a more viable path than mote direct forms of carbon sequestration that don't have a short/medium term economic benefit.

Mmm. I have my doubts about whether it's an economical method, but maybe it'll be an economical enough method.

Won't somebody think of the economy!

The simple reality is that the most effective way to fight climate change is to create ways for people to make or save money by doing so in a very direct fashion.

Otherwise you are always going to have friction between people who want to raise their standard of living (wether it's raising themselves out of poverty or going from stupid rich to REALLY stupid rich) and those trying to fight climate change.

Who may in fact be the same people. If I'm being honest with myself I do tend to prioritize my own being ahead of always making the most environmentally conscious choices. It's not a 100% thing, but it is a thing.

Edited by Falrinn on May 23rd 2024 at 7:04:48 AM

There are a number of factors to consider. Shaming people into acting ethically rarely works at scale, and it's useless anyway as long as things like recycling are promoted by big business as a way to greenwash their own pollution. When ExxonMobil can stand at the top of ESG charts, something is grossly wrong.

In the end, we need better, cheaper options. LED bulbs may be more expensive than incandescents, but they last much, much longer. Electric vehicles can't just be government mandates; they have to be better than gas vehicles for the consumer experience. Vat meat has to be convincingly similar to animal meat as well as cheaper, etc.

We're already making enormous headway on the energy side of things. Solar is cheaper than new fossil fuel power in many if not most areas, and wind is getting there. Battery storage is getting cheaper seemingly by the day.

Edited by Fighteer on May 23rd 2024 at 10:26:57 AM

I thought it was going to be hot and dry in the Netherlands, but the weather seems to be switching more to moderately warm and very wet lately. The local park here has been flooded since December due to the high water table.