I remember all the hate USA got when it didn't sign the Kyoto Protocol. Its emissions have fallen ever since then, despite population rising by a quarter.
The US target in the Kyoto Protocol was a 7% reduction from the 1990 baseline in 2008-2012. That target has still not been reached, because the emissions continued growing until the mid-2000s.
easy to cut emissions when you deindustrialize
Yes that helps but more important was the fracking revolution that replaced a lot of coal with gas.
Probably the easiest way would have been to draw a line around each factory in the US, declare that those now counted as outside-US for emissions purposes, and then declare that now the US was a zero-emissions country.
Done and dusted, problem solved.
How much of that is due to outsourced production though?
Our modern lights, screens and appliances all use less energy than 30 years ago.
And as a result we're using our lights, screens, and appliances far more than we were 30 years ago.
US emissions peaked in 2007 and have since fallen to 1980s levels: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=52380
2021 reversed this trend. Guess why?
Was 2021 too early for AI training to be the reason?
Climate policy fails because the proposals are eye-wateringly expensive, amounting to trillions of dollars annually. In contrast, the CFC protocols and treaties worked splendidly because they were cheap, costing only billions of dollars to switch to chemicals which didn’t interact with ozone.
Changing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is not the only way to change the climate, and is unlikely to be the cheapest way to change the climate. But acknowledging that would require having a diplomatic/societal technology to determine what the optimal climate should be.
> Changing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is not the only way to change the climate, and is unlikely to be the cheapest way to change the climate.
We are changing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and it is the main driver for the climate change. You probably wanted to say, that not changing the amount of CO2 is unlikely to be the cheapest way to keep the climate as it is, didn't you?
Roger Pielke Jnr has coined "Pielke's Iron Law" .
It is :
"If there is an iron law of climate policy, it is that when policies focused on economic growth confront policies focused on emissions reductions, it is economic growth that will win out every time."
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/the-iron-law-of-climate...
It looks like a pretty good rule of thumb.
Who cares about the optimal climate, we just need the rate of change to remain at a low enough level that nature (including humans) can adapt. We seem to be on the edge of that limit already.
Aren't we going to lose Trillions of dollars forever to climate change anyway?
It’s very hard to prove conclusively that any measures would actually help the situation.
If we sit on our thumbs and do nothing about it perhaps (the uncertainty bars around long term damage are massive though). But changing CO2 levels is not the only way to avert that damage.
What else is there? Geoengineering sounds interesting but nobody knows what the ultimate effects would be in a complex system like the Earth. And if geoengineering is done on a global level there will probably be winners and losers. How do you negotiate that?
The strong do what they have to do and the weak accept what they have to accept.
> But changing CO2 levels is not the only way to avert that damage.
It is currently. Everything else is basically gambling on technology that doesn't yet exist.
We removed sulphur from ship fuels and managed to increase the temperature by 0.1C almost immediately. We may not intentionally be using non-CO2 methods to influence the climate but we are certainly capable of it by accident.
So you propose we roll the dice and hope for more accidents to happen?
I propose we use our powers of reasoning and knowledge of chemistry as a species to try to do better than just rolling the dice and hoping for the best. Economic suicide and blind luck are not the only options. But for some economic suicide appears to be the goal.
What are the viable alternatives that you have in mind?
The headline focuses on a difficult number but the article pointed out 63 effective policies that government can focus on. Unfortunately, these seem to be the tougher policies like carbon tax which people aren't fans of... But it makes sense, you pollute you should pay for the cleanup.
And with the worsening weather events (Hurricane Helene ripped through the Florida Keys and other areas in its path), we are seeing the consequences of our collective inaction.
While that's predicted to happen, it doesn't appear to have happened yet.
https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes/
> In summary, it is premature to conclude with high confidence that human-caused increases in greenhouse gases have caused a change in past Atlantic basin hurricane activity that is outside the range of natural variability, although greenhouse gases are strongly linked to global warming.
Don't forget about the category 4 Hurricane Helene from September of 1958.
Every time there's a huge storm you shouldn't just go about yelling "climate change!", just like you can't claim we've fixed climate change just because we have a few nice calm sunny days.
Right. It's not about 1 storm in isolation. Climate change is evident through the very clear and measurable patterns of weather over time, not to mention glacial loss, ocean acidity, etc.
At
https://i2.wp.com/www.climate4you.com/images/GISP2%20TemperatureSince10700%20BP%20with%20CO2%20from%20EPICA%20DomeC.gif?zoom=2
There have been many efforts to model the temperatures and make predictions. At
http://www.energyadvocate.com/gc1.jpg
I guess, I want to know what the how accurate the models from 1998 on have been.
Iirc, “An Inconvenient Truth” was put in 2006. I remember it winning Best Documentary.
I can't say for 1998, but this paper[1] compares the IPCC projections made from 2000 and onwards.
The earlies estimation underpredicted temperature rise while later ones did better.
I also checked the IPCC predictions from 2001 myself a couple of years ago[2], and across multiple factors like sea rise, glacier loss etc observed values seemed to be within the predictions.
> We find that climate models published over the past five decades were generally quite accurate in predicting global warming in the years after publication, particularly when accounting for differences between modeled and actual changes in atmospheric CO 2 and other climate drivers.
https://eps.harvard.edu/files/eps/files/hausfather_2020_eval...
18 years later and it's still the misleading propaganda it has always been.
CIA Superior: What did we learn, Palmer?
CIA Officer: I don't know, sir.
CIA Superior: I don't fuckin' know either. I guess we learned not to do it again.
CIA Officer: Yes, sir.
CIA Superior: I'm fucked if I know what we did.
CIA Officer: Yes, sir, it's, uh, hard to say
CIA Superior: Jesus Fucking Christ
(From "Burn After Reading", a wonderful movie)
I was contemplating tossing in a “If the policies you followed have brought you to this, of what use were the policies?” but it’s more than likely that these policies were designed to fail and were a distraction. Climate change to TPTB is a situational comedy.
Not really surprised.
Every time I open Apple Weather and look at the daily average it seems to be ~ +5c the norm, about a year ago I just put it down to "must be a warm summer" but it's been like that for almost 12 months now. It's autumn and it's crazy warm.
Either Apply weather has some serious bug, or it's the climate that's ruined. Even the trees seem a bit confused.
What's that data going to look like in a decade? I really hate to think.
You might live in an unusual place or Apple could be providing misleading data. The 5c above norm isn't accurate for the majority of the world.
...or I might be living in a place experience an extreme heatwave induced by anthropogenic warming ?
"Melting Glaciers force Switzerland and Italy to Redraw Borders"
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/sep/29/melting-...
It's anthropogenic (human caused) warming.
When there are cold years we are told this is short term weather and not long term climate. But every warm year and storm is evidence of long term change.
Record high temps are almost 75% of new temperature records. The ~25% that are new lows ate due to arctic cold slipping down with our more wobbly jet stream. And the ice melt has hidden almost 90% of the net heat increase. Ice melting the last degree consumes much more heat than going warmer. This is all happening much faster than any time in our geologic record. We are at serious danger of runaway warming.
Good. Accelerate.
wtf..?
You're reading the wrong sources. The actual science is clear, the earth is undergoing rapid climate change due to human-driven CO2 release.
Please read my comment closely. Whether that’s true or not, according those scientists we can’t use how we feel about seasonal weather as evidence of it.
My point is we're not actually being told that cold weather is weather and hot weather is climate change, except maybe by people wanting to muddy the waters on the issue
That's a good point. 1 storm in isolation is not evidence of anything. A pattern of increasingly severe weather events is.
Good. Now on to make it 100%. Stop climate communism and government overreach.
What a weird statement. Ideally 0% of policies would fail, since the goal of having a policy is to succeed. If you're opposed to any climate policy, you should wish for NaN% failed policies instead (i.e. no policies at all).
Aiming for 100% failed policies sound like a way to make everyone, including you, unhappy.
Public failed policies prevent or deter future failed policies. You must hope for failed policies to get to NaN% policies.
Amazed it’s that low.
As a group, wealthy people (in the global sense — i.e. anyone reading this) aren’t inconvenienced enough by climate change yet. So there’s a 0% chance that they’ll supports any climate policy that negatively impacts their quality of life in any way.
But they also don’t want to feel like Part of the Problem, so they’ll enthusiastically support do-nothing policy.
Even if we were affected we wouldn't support policy that negatively impacts our quality of life. The point of policy is to improve QoL.
> So there’s a 0% chance that they’ll supports any climate policy
/me reviews dozens of serious mass actions, hundreds of long form publications, and legislation in California and elsewhere.. wondering how this fits with "zero percent" of anything.. can we regroup and rephrase a bit here?
> Yet in the vast majority of policies there was no discernible emissions reduction beyond what would be expected based on long-term economic and population dynamics.
There are 2 billion more people, or 33% _more_ people, than there were in 1998. What reduction was "expected?"
> In developed countries, pricing stands out, whereas in developing countries, regulation is the most powerful policy.
Ah. We keep the poor destitute and we allow the rich to buy indulgences. Perhaps your "expectations" are entirely flawed?