Do YOU believe in climate change and global warming?

Even if I don't think there is gonna be a global warming where it is around 50°C everywhere (Altho there is certainly a reason Venus is how it is now), I do think something else would erase us, or at least a good amount of life on earth.

In some regions of the world there is something called permafrost. Permafrost is ice that been here for a very long time, and in that ice there is a lot of ugly things we really don't wanna meet.
Imagine if a virus get out of there and makes world fall. Like really. Who think the first pandemical crisis was not enough? Don't worry you're not prepared. It is pretty simple. A deer or something get in contact with the virus, then it mutates to get to us. It will be too late before we even know it.

The scariest thing about that is a little like how we can recycle metal in the game. The more heated it gets, the more it frees gas that accelerate the warming itself. So there is going to be a point where the earth don't need us anymore to warm even more and more, and by that time we wouldn't be here to talk about it from a long time, but it's going to be tough. I wouldn't want to travel to 2500 and see how it is, it's going to be ugly.

I have not yet studied the yearly amount of earth disasters that happens, but I heard that some crops of where I live (France) got destroyed by a cold wave, so I'm not expecting very nice 2020-2030 seasons.

quote: Do YOU believe in climate change and global warming?

No.

Believe? NO!

I UNDERSTAND THE MECHANISM!!!


Now I do happen to have the advantage of having studied physics in general and climate physics in particular, but the required knowledge to understand the greenhouseeffect is highschool level and most of my (14-19 year olf) students are capable of understanding it as well.

There are a lot of things about Global Warming that can/need to be debated and researched better, from the particular effects on certain regions of the world, to the exact nature/danger of tipping points such as the Permafrost or the Ice shields of Greenland and the Westantarctic and of course the required response (i.e. CO2-Tax vs. a cap and trade-system vs. investment in new tech etc.). 10 Years ago I myself was part of a research group studying a particular effect, that contributed to cooling!!! the climate, today the results of that study are part of every up-to-date climate modell.

What is not up for debate, is that

a) The greenhouse effect is real, and that a doubling of the CO2-Concentration leads to a warming effect of around 2°C.
While Climatemodels are constantly being refined and updated those updates are about effects that impact the climate on one or two orders of magnitude less then what CO2(and to some extent CH4) contribute. It is still important to incorporate them, after all the climate is a "complex system" and small changes might have big consequences, but nothing ever added will negate this primary driver of our changing climate.
This is NEITHER NEW KNOWLEDGE NOR DEBATLABLE and anyone I have ever encountered to say otherwise was either clearly not educated on the subject or had a political agenda.
In this view I am not alone, any physicist knowledgable on the subject would agree so much so that the high arbiters of scientific achievements, i.e. the Nobel Commitee for the science prizes(=/= peace prize) this year chose to give the Physics Prize to Syukuro Manabe and Klaus Hasselman, who in the 1960s and 70s!!! developed methods show the double CO2 = 2°C as well as methods to clearly show how to distinguish between the natural variability of the climate and the impact of human behaviour.

b) While the climate has always changed it has never done so this quickly. This is important, because while nature can reasonably adapt to changes over the course of thousand or tens of thousads of years, it can not do so withing decades, meaning at our current course we are heading for a mass extinction event.

Now what makes me sad and sometimes angry is that image of green voter/ ecofriendly people as naive. While quite a few of them are, that percentage is about the same as in any other group of humans. But the real naivitee is to think that our economy can go on as it is. The constant more more more of our current type of capitalism ( not advocating for communism here, there are other types of market based system around then what we currently have) is simply not sustainable for more then (maybe) the next few decades.


Ps. Gotta love thejuicemedia

pps. for those fluent in german, this is an Interview with this years Nobellaureate Klaus Hasselmann, listen to the 30-60s starting at 1:20 and remember that the guy knew most of what he found out by 1980!!!

https://www.tagesschau.de/multimedia/video/video-927783.html

I do not believe the earth will stop warming until enough ice melts so that there is enough water to absorb the greenhouse gases and stabilize the climate. Meanwhile, the earth will lose huge amounts of dry land, people will die, animals will die, and the world-wide standard-of-living will plummet, except for the top 5% or so wealthiest people that will manage to live at an even higher standard.

Life is not fair, has never been fair, and never will be fair. Either life is meaningless or we are not alone.

Ocean acidification always feels left out :(

Climate change is unarguable at this point. The only argument is over what we are going to do about it.

To me the solution is relatively simple: most of the pollution stems from creating electricity and getting from A to B.

Solar power is becoming very cheap and it's not hard to DIY an installation.

The bottleneck is batteries.

We don't have a battery that is cheap, can store a good amount of E and last a long time. Even lead acid, the most proven battery, gets expensive when you want to run an entire house off of it. If battery storage costs half of what it does now people will naturally gravitate to solar installations for all their energy needs.

Have you heard about nuclear fusion? It's a clean source of energy, but requires a highly advanced unstable confining magnetic field. There are multiple test-reactors. If we really invest in it we can have a working net-positive prototype in, say, 10-20 years. Then we can scale it up.

What I said above has been true for the past 40 years. For 40 years the net-positive prototype was 10-20 years away. But they never pulled through, really invested in it. Same goes for tackling climate change, reducing CO2. We could have acted earlier, but we didn't. We're moving goal posts constantly.

The only positive thing is that we are simulteanously developing new techniques and preparing infrastructure. But factually, we are fucked, because we acted too late.

It's not the +1 / +2 degrees that is the problem; it's how you can expect more extreme weather. Potentially we could run into a cascading effect, something something tundras. But we know for sure that devestation will reach developing countries and mass migration will happen.

Yes.

The overwhelming scientific consensus says human activities contribute to climate change and global warming (on average).

- interesting XKCD with the 20k year relative temperature curve
https://xkcd.com/1732/

- miscellaneous info on the NASA website
https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/


Despite the short term warming trend, I don't think there's consensus about where it'll end up in hundreds of thousands of years, though, or how it'll get there. There's historical precedents where it got significantly warmer and still cooled down. On the PETM 55 million years ago, CO2 rose to about 2000 ppm and temperatures got up to about +8ºC relative to current ones for about 200K years, but then over about 100K years it cooled back down:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene%E2%80%93Eocene_Thermal_Maximum
http://www.xylenepower.com/PETM.htm

also note that we're apparently releasing CO2 into the atmosphere at 10x the rate of the PETM event:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110605132433.htm


and that the sea level at the time was over 50m higher than today:
http://pages.geo.wvu.edu/~kammer/g231/PETM.pdf (page 4)

https://www.ipp.mpg.de/17019/meilensteine (just click english at the top right of the page)

Wendelstein 7-X should be powering up to do 30 min cycles next year. #teamstellarator