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Virtually every forecast assumed that humans would at least try to stop it instead of deliberately accelerating it in competition to squeeze every penny out of the planet first.
I don't think the forecasts necessarily built in "trying to stop it" but they certainly didn't include "accelerating it" with dumbassery like AI.
No, they did include "trying to stop it". For example the ICC projections assume that, towards the end of the century, we start becoming carbon-negative by figuring out effective carbon capture.
How to blow up a data center
The first thing the peasants did when news of the french revolution reached them, was burn their local clerks' records offices.
Use AI to destroy the AI
If we had real AGI and not just shitty chatbots, we could tell them to melt their GPUs for the good of the planet.
An AGI would probably have some kind of drive for self-preservation. Plus, an AGI with time on its hands could come up with a more long-term, viable and more environmentally friendly solution to the climate crisis than commuting seppuku and melting a bunch of valuable hardware. Shit, you don't need to be an AGI or even a climate scientist to realize that solar and battery tech could help reduce GHG emissions.
Of course, this is all assuming a future AGI shares our goals in any way.
As an aside, keep in mind that shitty chatbots may be a stepping stone to AGI.
It not really a question of “how?” Anymore. We know how to get most of the way there. We already developed technology to get at least halfway. We just need to roll it out, the “easy” part.
Of course we don’t yet have 100% of the answer, but it’s criminal how much of the answer is already in our hands and we refuse to use it, or keep dragging our feet
Don't forget crypto before that, and still around now. SMDH
I live in the Rockies. The mountains around me have been completely bare of snow for almost the entire winter. Like the peaks are just bare gray stone where the snow used to be year round.
I keep hearing people saying how sad it was they couldn’t ski this year because there was never snow… we basically haven’t had any winter/cold-weather at all, and they’re upset about skiing… I’m pretty sure there are more serious things to worry about.
The Colorado river system is completely fucked, every state reliant on that water is... basically in a mega-drought, and going to fairly rapidly desertify / dustbowlify.
In a worst case scenario... there isn't enough water to power dams, such as the Hoover Dam.
... if something like that happens, well, now you've lost water and power.
Broadly speaking, the Colorado River Compact is based around being able to allocate 15 MAF (million acre feet) of water each year.
Between 2000 and 2019, the average actual water consumption was ~19.3 MAF, and the average actual amount of allocatable water was ~12.7 MAF.
Thats a 'water debt' of 132 MAF, 20 years of an average 'water deficit' of 6.6 MAF.
So, that is about 25% overconsumption of water, for two decades, compared to what was supposed to be going on, as well as the actual existing water being about 20% less than what it 'should' have been.
So, if you assume the ... conditions don't get worse (which is probably a stupid assumption) for the river... and it evens out for the next 20 years at 13.5 MAF... well you have to pay off that water debt too, if you want to return to sustainability.
So that means you're looking at about 7 MAF for the next 20 years, for the whole system.
Thats roughly a 50% cut in water usage.
For AZ, CA, CO, NV, NM, UT, WY.
... Trying to implement that is almost certainly politically impossible as it would basically destroy the economies of every involved area.
So uh yeah, yeah.
Water wars are here, this particular one is I guess more like a intra-country water civil war? I dunno.
Also, the most populated part of Utah runs on water that ends up in the Great Salt Lake which has been slowly drying up the last few decades and is close to pushing out all the toxic heavy metals it’s stored up over the centuries into the air for everyone in the valley to breathe in. All of which could’ve been avoided if they limited their agriculture industry and their suburban sprawl.
Yeah, thats a whole fun thing that is going on as well.
Last I heard it was airborne arsenic that was the primary problem.
So....thats just not a phrase you should ever want to read.
I also have no idea what you could even do to meaningfully mitigate or solve the problem.
... Hazmat suits for being outside, and scrub down room entrances for every building?
excellent points. just want to help people contextualize here. roughly 3/4 of all that water you're talking about is for industrial scale agriculture. we could almost halve the water usage with restrictions on which crops can or can't be grown.
Irrigated agriculture is responsible for 74% of direct human uses and 52% of overall water consumption. Water consumed for agriculture amounts to three times all other direct uses combined. Cattle feed crops including alfalfa and other grass hays account for 46% of all direct water consumption.
in other words, there's a fuckton of water available for human use... but not enough for humans AND cows. not enough to satiate the endless global demand for cheeseburgers and steaks. our mis management of the water supply is steering the entire southwestern US into a man made disaster with catastrophic knock on effects for global meat consumption. some folks say "cattle ranching made The West. seems fitting that cattle will be it's unmaking.
Maybe that’s what it will take to fix these ridiculous legacy water rights and the whole “use it or lose it” system we have in place that actively discourages water conservation for these farms. It doesn’t help that these are also the biggest MAGA folks in these states, and thereby climate change deniers.
How about we also slap on a big export tax on any food products being grown in this region that are being sold internationally? Add on a complete ban on foreign ownership of water rights.
How about we also slap on a big export tax on any food products being grown in this region that are being sold internationally? Add on a complete ban on foreign ownership of water rights.
See, your problem here is that those ideas ... well...
They make sense.
Because they'd force people to change the way they are doing things, to be doing better things, that make more sense.
MAGA folks are very much not into making sense, nor being told what to do.
You'd have to trick them or scam them.
... maybe we could try to convince them that water is gay, and ... only Satan grows soybeans and alfalfa.
You don't want to grow homosexual devil beans and grass, do you?
?????
I'd imagine they baulked at the idea that the lack of snow was due to Global Warming too?
I live in Western Wyoming. It is the middle of January and most of my yard is grass. My lawn is supposed to be under three or four feet of snow. Instead, grass. This is all fucked.
I live in the mountains and they aren't even snowcapped this year. Still feels like September and I can easily go outside in a t-shirt most days. Even when it does snow, which has only happened three times so far this season, it melts by the late afternoon.
I nearly died in the PNW Heatdome a few years back.
In roughly a week, I lost 10 pounds, purely from sweating.
In that week, I don't think it ever got under 85 degrees in my apartment. For several days it was never under 95. And thats 24/7, including nights.
That's with mylar/space blankets reflecting heat out of the windows, and with the portable AC unit I could afford.
Its not that common for apartments to have any AC solution in the PNW, because normally, for the past 100 years, yeah summer is hot, but not that hot, and most importantly, if it is exceptionally hot, its just for one day, then its either less hot the next day, or is even overcast and rains/drizzles a bit.
Oh and that Heatdome also featured all of the smoke from regional wildfires just... pooling, basically, in certain areas, so I also had to ramshackle an air furnace filter and a box fan together.
You needed a gas mask to safely be outside for more than 15-30 minutes.
... I don't live there any more, but apparently what's going on now is... basically every river in the state is flooding at historical levels, at the same time.
Yeah. Climate is broken. Its only gonna get worse.
Don't worry florida got some snow.
Honestly the amount of snow the deep south gets now is alarming. During my childhood (0-18) it snowed 3 times and only 2 of those stuck. Then it began happening 2 or 3 times a decade. Now it's every year.
My mom remembered it snowing twice from her childhood to when I was born. My grandfather remembered maybe 4 or 5 snows his whole life.
This is not good
There is currently, right now, an absurd weather formation... uh, forming, that looks like it is going to dump a serious amount of snow and freezing rain from TX/KS/OK all the way to the East Coast.
Its gonna hit this Friday.
Where I am?
Another couple of days at -30F.
Seen it a few times in the few years I've been here, but the locals say that that level of cold is pretty rare.
Parts of northern Minnesota, around Duluth... could possibly get as cold as -60F.
Would entirely not surprise me if Texas' power grid collapses again, Ted Cruz takes another vacation, etc.
We got a huge downpour of rain back a week or two, flooding and everything. Today the high is like 10f. It’s crazy. And the swings are just crap to live through too. Today it’s 52, tomorrow it’s -52.
I’m not upset about not getting it as snow cuz I hate shoveling, but it’s very upsetting to have it come down as rain in January (should have been a blizzard).
even better indicator antartica have actual vegatation encroaching further south, at least in the subantartic islands. the 2 native flower plants(antartic hair grass and Antarctic pearlwort have spread southward due to warming temp, plus also invasive species.
old people talking about forest lands should be privatized or the ol "we go through waves", "it's a la niña year", "I'm enjoying the weather", "I heard such and such got snow"
the most batshit insane thought processes calm these people's minds, and it's.. well it makes sense where we are when you can see the gymnastics many people are doing. propaganda and attempts to suppress truths on reality have served well
rest easy knowing the kids will be served sunnyside up :)
maybe a few of these pricks shift gears after all the common ski spots are unusable and their lil pastime gets nullified
Yup, California here. We're usually at around 30-50 inches of snow by now. It's snowed just under two inches so far this entire season.
I’m feeling pretty smug about opting to not have kids between this and the fascism— though I admit I didn’t see the fascism coming when I got my vasectomy.
I wouldn't be so sure that climate change and fascism are completely unrelated.
That's not a surprise. Experts always gave the most conservative assessment. They do that because they didn't want to look like they are alarmists and lose credibility. So everybody was conservative all the time, always calculating with the optimistic numbers and ignoring all possible feedback loops.
The predictions were always the most conservative estimates. They were trying to avoid panic. The most likely scenario was that this would all start and hit hard within our lifetimes.
Exactly right. The feedback loops aren't even accounted for in the results we are given. Namely the methane and co2 from the permafrost. There is enough just in that feedback in just the siberian permafrost to cause runaway warming, 2x the carbon as currently in the atmosphere, freed by bacteria working in above freezing temperatures. The methane is massive idk the estimates on that, but to date methane is estimated to be about 30% of warming. Swamps basically, huge methane sinks that have been stoppered up for thousands of years brewing those hyrdocarbons underground.
And the arctic is warming at like 6x the rest of the world last I heard.
There was never any question, the powerful have shouted down any more honest forecasts. Even the most pessimistic ones don't take into account the biggest feedbacks, like methane and co2 from the permafrost getting released.
To be clear, there is no predicting it, there are interconnected variables that we don't have numbers for, so it's impossible to accurately predict anything no matter how much computing power they devote to it.
What has been undeniably true in reality where we ignore the ivy league experts lying to us to protect their obscene wealth, is it will happen quicker than the models we are shown predict.
But worry not, we won't have to worry about it too much because the instability will give the worst people the ability to take over our societies and throw us into a dark ages first.
Mostly correct. One note: the experts have been saying it's worse than the IPCC (or any government) says it is since the 90s. The experts, in universities and legit research institutions all around the world, have long known this is going to be a shit show, and they have already accepted that we did not do what was needed to avoid impacts on the world that have a good chance to end human civilisation and kill billions of people. It's not a slam dunk, btw, there are still ways to get away with, say, only hundreds of millions dead from starvation, war, disease, heatstroke, etc.
But no expert who has been paying attention thinks we're getting out of this without at least that. I know a few of them, they've actually done their grieving already because they know we didn't stop it when we could, and they know what's coming.
The "best" part is that none of these end up taking into account the fact we'll cook ourselves/the planet from excess heat waste long before climate change can finish the job
And this was before ai started to speed up the job
When I was getting my bio degree in the late 90's, early 00's we learned a lot of worst case scenario models for climate change, many of which seem to be coming to pass. Those scenarios were for ~2080 - 2100.
Half of my country is on fire rn
This is partly because the models have NEVER matched the data.
yt's "Just Have A Think" seems a good channel, for accurate information on global warming.. ( FAR better than MSM )
but there's a simple, blunt principle which has always been true, in ClimatePunctuations:
The SPEED of change goes from 0 up to maximum-speed-of-change, then back down to 0, at the new ClimateEquilibrium.
So, you get a BELL-curve, for the speed of change.
That's predictable.
Where are we on that curve??
In the still-accelerating part.
ALL the forecasts seem to ignore that, & intentionally-leave-out huge pieces..
Interior Antarctica is heating at 2x the speed predicted by the models, I read in 2025 or 2024.
They didn't include the freshwater from Greenland's melting until 2023 or something??
The "Cold Blob" visible from space had no explanation until then??
( what was icemelt supposed to do, except be
I've read that it isn't that the models are wrong, rather, it is that the data isn't agreeing with them.
Pseudoscientific bunk ( one of that yt-channel's videos mentioned a guy with ICC authority maintained the models are trustworthy in spite of the evidence contradicting them.. )
No, this is systemic intentional-ignorance, in ALL dimensions: government, "science"-institution, politics, economy, EVERYthing.
No matter: we're on-track for something like +9C, & that means that the US is going to have to rampage Canada, in order to have any place to live, right?
& same with India's population needing a new home, same with Saudi Arabia's, same with northern Africa's..
Basically, a region above, & a region below, the entire Equator may end up being uninhabitable, or the entire tropics, even.
As a former NASA Chief Scientist noted: Venus's climate IS a possible outcome.
The climate-problems we've got now, are NOTHING, compared with what they're going to be in another decade.
& again, the following decade..
.. until we reach the maximum-speed-of-change, & begin slowing-down the speed-of-change.
Since we won't allow slowing-down to begin, ..
.. then human viability may be off the table.
Whole-species DarwinAward, due to our political-motivation, instead of objectivity+practicality.
Earned, though: Universe IS honest, that way..
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