Heat Domes Are a Red-Hot Warning on Climate Costs

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-07-03/heat-domes-are-a-red-hot-warning-on-climate-costs

by montalbano • 5 years ago

120 71 5 years ago

sokoloff• 5 years ago

Martin Weitzman, one of the few economists who warned that these risks were being ignored, was snubbed for the Nobel Prize.

Is failing to win a Nobel Prize now a snub? That seems ridiculous on its face.

mustafa_pasi2• 5 years ago

It was a political snub. The Economic Prize is always political. They gave the prize to a soft denialist, a guy whose message has always been to downplay the costs of climate change.

wazoox2• 5 years ago

Exactly. See the damning presentation from Steve Keen for OECD in 2019: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtKW3OK2_lk

From this cycle : https://www.oecd.org/naec/averting-systemic-collapse/

barney54• 5 years ago

William Nordhaus is not a “soft denialist.” He’s the economist that has done more to consider the cost and benefits of climate change than anyone else.

deregulateMed2• 5 years ago

I'm on team- Stop caring about the Nobel Prize.

It's political not merit based.

Either don't bring it up, or only mention the fails.

eplanit• 5 years ago

My respect for Nobel prizes ceased when they awarded the peace prize to Obama for simply having won an election. Nothing against Obama, but it revealed how meaningless and political Nobel prizes are.

kingsuper202• 5 years ago

Being nit-picky, there's no such thing as a Nobel Prize for economics.

ximeng• 5 years ago

Article by a guy called Noah!

mustafa_pasi2• 5 years ago

This is good news for climate action. The less predictable climate change costs are, the more likely it is that the ones holding the reigns of power will act. If it was entirely easy to predict that such and such places were doomed, then these people would just divest from those regions and leave them to their doom.

deregulateMed2• 5 years ago

Was thinking this yesterday, hopefully this is a wakeup call for moderates.

bairrd• 5 years ago

People are very quick to cry "someone should do something" when these extreme events happen. You offer the same people something, in the grand scheme of things fairly moderate like the Green New Deal, and they calcify back to their party affiliations. We're so doomed.

II2II2• 5 years ago

Don't worry. There will be mass migrations of people as oceans and deserts encroach upon inhabited areas. There will be wars over access to fresh water and agricultural land. Yet once mother nature has gotten humanity's behaviour in check, the hairless ape will persist.

(This response is not intended to taken literally. My point is that we will survive, though the process of adaptation may be painful and we may not like what we may not enjoy what we are adapting to.)

6f8986c3• 5 years ago

The green new deal does jack and shit about climate change.

wazoox2• 5 years ago

Keep in mind the scale of the experiment we're living in: between the peak of last ice age (when most of today's developed countries were either under a thick dome of ice, or dry cold steppes with roaming hordes of woolly mammoths) and pre-industrial climate, the global temperature increase was only 5°C, occurring over a few millenia (though this increase was enough to destroy completely this environment and its mammoths, wooly rhinos, cave bears, etc).

Now we're talking of adding 4°C in a couple of centuries. What could go wrong, really? Yeah, about everything, and really strong and fast.

People don't worry because they think of having 4°C daily increase temperature, no big deal: temperature swings daily by tens of degrees. But they should instead think of a fever: a 2°C fever is already pretty strong; a 4°C fever is a very serious condition, potentially deadly.

AlexanderDhoore2• 5 years ago

Global increase of 4°C means about 8°C increase on land (roughly double). Anything past 3-4°C global increase is just destruction of a massive scale. Just 2°C would be manageable, but we are going to shoot past that really fast (me things).

EDIT: My first sentence is scientific fact (double land temperature). My second sentence is mostly accepted by climate scientists, though the details can be debated (just how bad it's going to get). The third sentence is my personal opinion and only time will tell. But sure, downvote me.

syops5• 5 years ago

I’m not a climate scientist and a few degree increase used to seem like a small thing to me. Then I realized that increasing the global temperature average by a few degrees means putting in a massive amount of more energy into the system and then it clicked for me how much of a big deal this is. This massive increase in energy into the system over a very short period of time means lots of chaotic events will ensue before a new equilibrium is obtained.

madaxe_again• 5 years ago

It’s interesting that you touch on energy — temperature is a measure of the energy of a system, but most people don’t think of it in those terms.

If you consider how much energy it takes to raise the temperature of your living room by 4C (about 840J per m3), and then extrapolate that to the entire planet, it’s a phenomenal amount of energy, incomprehensibly vast. Then, consider that the oceans, with a heat capacity of 4.2MJ per m3 and a vast volume are also warming by entire degrees, and it’s just staggering.

magicalhippo• 5 years ago

Another issue I think is that the average hides a lot. Both (1, 2, 8, 9) and (4, 5, 5, 6) have the same average.

Now extend that to 365 days, and there's a lot of room for wild events leading to "just" a 1 degree increase in average temperature.

imtringued• 5 years ago

The biggest historic polluters don't care because their temperatures were nice already. It's primarily those regions that had awful temperatures to begin with that will suffer.

You hear all these people coming up with reasons why more CO2 is a good thing but this is always under the assumption that you live in a country that is not impacted by the negative effects. Everything is positive if you are blind to the negatives.

sandworm1013• 5 years ago

Tell that to British Columbia. BC is famed for stable temperatures. Thats why it is the most desireable place to live in Canada. Vancouver rarely gets below -5 or above 30, and then only ever for a day at a time. Then last week Lytton BC became hotter than a Saudi summer, shattering Canada's all-time hottest temperature by several degrees. Over a period of _days_ everything dried out. Lightning started fires. Now Lytton doesnt exist anymore. 90% burned to the ground and many dead. Climate change means change: the stable is becomes unstable and the moderate becomes extreem.

Roads in western canda are literally failing under this heat.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/alberta-infrastructu...

gmuslera• 5 years ago

Is global yearly average temperature what increases. It is an average that takes into account from the coldest night of winter in the south pole to the hottest days in the sahara. You should not see it as "today's temperature + 4ºC", specially in something as complex as the global climate system.

What you will see in the day to day scale is more extreme weather, reaching new highs, changing in climate features (like some essential sea currents, like the gulf stream, and also air currents like the polar vortex) and not so friendly weather for things that implies predictability, like agriculture, because bad weather in some critical stages mean the loss of crops.

Also, the increase of temperature, the extremes that it reaches, are not evenly distributed, the highest temperature anomalies happen around the poles, where you have a lot of factors that will provide a positive feedback to increase global warming (releasing buried/frozen carbon, less albedo due to ice melting, etc)

RandomLensman• 5 years ago

If I were to predict the future, I'd say we will see a move away from focusing on passive measures (such as reduction in carbon emissions) to active measures pretty quickly as the passive stuff is not fast enough.

Telling people they will collapse under the heat now while increasing taxes etc. for a long-term agenda will not work well in most societies...

dv_dt• 5 years ago

If the average is raised in a process that is described in as implied form by say a gaussian distribution, the tails of the distribution increase by far more than the average. And for climate change the std deviation will increase too.

fallingknife5• 5 years ago

Wait I thought outlier weather events like blizzards and heat waves weren't indicators of global climate as the media so likes to lecture about when it's not in favor of their narrative.

AlexanderDhoore2• 5 years ago

The trend is what matters, not the individual events. These "outlier" events are now happening regularly, so the trend has changed. Because climate change.

fallingknife5• 5 years ago

But this isn't happening regularly. For example the temperature record that was set in Canada in this heatwave had stood since 1937.

kingsuper202• 5 years ago

Wait I thought outlier weather events like blizzards and heat waves weren't indicators of global climate as the media so likes to lecture about when it's not in favor of their narrative.

It's probably fair to hold two ideas at the same time.

. Climate change is a way to accumulate rank and wealth in society.

. Climate change is real

It's interesting to ask what everyone is really after in terms of climate. Lack of change or natural events occurring. Would an upcoming ice age result in a cry for more CO2?

I like to think of it in terms of carrying capacity. Too many people results in environmental degradation (of all sorts), social unrest, scrabbling at the bottom for wages, squabbling at the top for status.

fallingknife5• 5 years ago

Well not many are after actually fixing it. If anyone clams to be worried about climate change and doesn't support nuclear power I stop listening.

hbogert• 5 years ago

I wish we could un-invent the notion of averages. Look at it in this case, 2°C increase. Everybody shrugs their shoulders. Yet it's these outlier events which will stop being outliers.

pl-94• 5 years ago

We need to mourn a normal life. We won't and we shalln't live the same life with the same goals than the previous generation. Mourning does not mean to become nihilist. But that the only way to get excited by new sustainable and resilient projects.

nickthemagicman• 5 years ago

Why is everything portrayed in a sensationalist outrageous bad negative way.

This is ultimately a neutral thing.

Climate change has been happening since the dawn of time.

The transition period will suck but human beings will adapt.

There may be positive things that come out of it as well.

betwixthewires• 5 years ago

I think this author is probably unaware, but in the case of the recent pacific northwest heat wave, it was due to something called an omega disruption of the northern jet stream, a phenomenon which IPCC models predict will occur less frequently with climate change. A shame he wrote an entire article based on not knowing this and did no research on it.

Climate change is almost certainly involved

No, it's not. Please, stop doing this. stop presuming that every weather phenomenon is in some way causally related to climate change. There are things that are. But know which things are before you write about them and blame climate change. You make "trust the science" look like a joke and it's no wonder so many people are beginning to think it is. Do your job. Do some research. Know what you're talking about before you talk about it.

Heat Domes Are a Red-Hot Warning on Climate Costs

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