Hacker News

> lets us anticipate droughts distribution and crop failures months ahead of time.

If by “us” you mean big corporations, which will then buy the stuff and sell it at a premium later, then I agree.

Nobody in planet modelling has ever suggested that the 3 phase El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) exists because of fossil fuel usage.

An extreme swing, here and there, has always been part of its nature.

The observed change is more and more extreme swings, greater amplitude, higher frequency.

Hurricane season in Hawaii is June through November. August and September have always been peak months. It's completely normal to have hurricanes at this time of year.

https://www.weather.gov/hfo/faq

https://energy.ecoflow.com/us/blog/when-is-it-hurricane-seas...

https://manoa.hawaii.edu/dps/hurricane/

It is dry heat, if you look at it from certain point of view. I once experienced smth like 27-28°C with fog, 100% humidity. Was almost as bad as 40°C with low humidity.

And if it would be 42°C/107°F with fog and 100% humidity, lots of people would be dead already. But it’s more like saying “at least this building is not on fire right now”. Or 1km wide meteor is not crashing down. It is not, and anything near 40°C is really unpleasant, regardless of burning homes and falling meteors.

Car temperature sensors tend to be inaccurate because they're often in the Sun or some other place affected by baking a car not in a garage.

Check a thermometer in the shade. The weather data stations reported an average of 101 ℉ / 38 ℃ for Waco. It's hot, and especially feels worse with Southern subtropical humidity. OTOH, 101 in California with 0-15% humidity, it would just be a bit annoying. Higher humidity makes heat qualitatively exponentially worse until it's a sauna.

It's just wet heat.. humid here. Just back-breaking humidity. London has been terrible, 40c (104f).

You step out of the shower and within minutes you're stepping back in for another.

A little south from you. Car said 102. Some of that depends on where you are. Parking lot, vs say, at the lake or rural areas.

> People dying from extreme heatwaves, weather, and famines due to climate change has been predicted for decades at this point; and this is exactly the sort of climatic setup that will enable this to happen.

Yeah, people have been "predicting" it, but the fact is that this is currently mostly hyperbole, driven by bad reporting and activist exaggeration.

What is happening, right now, is that winters are mostly getting warmer. Summers are getting hotter in certain places, but not at nearly the rate that cold days are decreasing -- and the evidence is weaker on a global scale. From the IPCC 6AR report, figure 11-9 shows it clearly:

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/figures/chapter-11/figure...

Figure 11-2 shows it another way:

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/figures/chapter-11/figure...

Even the IPCC report only gets to the "virtually certain" evidence level by combining the two claims:

> The frequency and intensity of hot extremes (including heatwaves) have increased, and those of cold extremes have decreased on the global scale since 1950 (virtually certain).

That's because, when you actually look at the data, it is abundantly clear that the increase in hot extremes are far less common than the decrease in cold extremes. Of course, when you take the ratio of the two, this looks worse, because the denominator is getting smaller.

Chapter 11 is worth reading. You will be shocked how many of the widely reported memes about extreme weather and climate are just not supported by good data:

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/chapter/chapter-11/

I recommend in particular going through the figures, and looking at how many of them are model predictions (nearly all), versus plots of historical data. Setting aside the debates about model quality, etc., surely we can all agree that predictions are not evidence?

> People dying from extreme heatwaves, weather, and famines due to climate change has been predicted for decades at this point; and this is exactly the sort of climatic setup that will enable this to happen.

The rhetoric is all well and good, but if you look at the numbers according to the WMO[0], deaths from climate-related hazards have been dropping steadily in the 50-year period from 1970 to 2019, even as atmospheric CO2 went from ~326ppm to ~410ppm and the world population more than doubled. That's not a per capita decrease; it's an absolute decrease, from over 50k deaths worldwide the 70s to fewer than 20k in the 2010s.

All of this is due to the increased ability of humans to deal with what the climate might throw at them, mostly due to cheap energy unlocked by fossil fuels during that time. Remember, there are no countries that are both rich and have a low per capita energy usage. Surplus energy allows humans to build the infrastructure that makes them more resilient to disasters.

If I had to wager, more people will suffer and die in the coming decades from efforts to combat climate change (i.e. hamstring energy production and usage) than from climate change itself. You can already see this in the anti-air conditioning sentiment in parts of Europe.

[0]: https://library.wmo.int/idurl/4/57564

You don’t get to be unattached to the lives of others; only your own. What ugly thinking to cloth in Buddhism!

What is your point? What system are you taking about? Also I don't want to judge but I hope you don't use your past trauma as an excuse for indifference. You can be indifferent but just say so. The fact that you have trauma doesn't give you a leg to stand on. There are plenty of people with trauma and have come out of it. It just sounds rather angsty.

It would've helped a ton but it's not like electricity generation is the only source of emissions. You can't run a car or a plane on nuclear power. You can technically run a cargo ship on nuclear power but that's also not gonna happen. Yet transport is the second largest source of emissions.

Batteries have only recently-ish gotten energy dense and cheap enough for electric cars to be competitive, completely different solutions are needed for long distance shipping by sea or air.

It's the same situation across many other sectors like agriculture, construction and waste management. Lots of things causing emissions that's not electricity generation.

China is the only country that is seriously doing anything about anything. They've single handedly built more renewable energy capacity than every other country combined, they've pulled millions of diesel and gasoline cars off roads, reforested one of the world's biggest deserts, this year they've finally reduced coal usage, and next year the long awaited Tokamak is set to fire for the first time.

The US is busy sending warships across the planet to blow up oil refineries which will be rebuilt. It's not bad enough we are busy grinding sand, but we are actively making things worse.

https://apnews.com/article/wind-solar-energy-china-climate-c...

Republicans are the bad guys right now.

Per capita CO2 emissions in the US are down about 36% from their 1973 peak (https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions).

There is currently a multi-billion, if not trillion, dollar industry (advertising and marketing) that is convincing everyone to behave the opposite way, i.e. maximize consumption with no regard to negative externalities. If we simply curb them, or better yet, use those same mechanisms to propagate a more rational message, yes, that that's all we need to do.

It really was very achievable, the main reason we didn't was we had a bunch of people spreading lies about it for 100 years or so.

Exactly, kinda like what we did with CFCs!

Granted fossil fuels are much more ubiquitous than CFCs and comparatively more difficult to replace, but we have prior art for changing industrial practices in the interest of improving climate conditions.

Most people agree on basic values. It's really not that big a stretch to appeal to such common values, seeing as rapid global warming would cause mass relocation, suffering, adaptation costs for those who can stay put, etc.

individual people don't matter, they're peanuts. otoh the single biggest consumer of fossil fuels is the US DOD. and why is that, really?

Yeah and the west is so extremely dry.

> Has seemed pretty normal here in central Florida as far as rain goes.

We're defiantly in the rainy side of the scale. https://climatecenter.fsu.edu/products-services/data/statewi...

As for this seasons storms in WCFL, every week I see storms that barely move - often just sitting in place for an hour or more. It's a change from the historical lines that marched across the state.