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4·3 days agoHistorically, dry forests in eastern Washington experienced frequent, low-severity fires, […] Western Washington forests, on the other hand, historically experienced high or moderate severity fires with centuries between major fires. These fires, that killed most trees in the forest, burned hundreds of thousands of acres. Given the naturally long intervals between fires, human exclusion of wildland fire in the last century has not had a large-scale effect on wildfire risk
You’re confusing two different ecosystems. The rainforests don’t have low intensity fires.
The natural fire cycle is discussed in the introduction. It’s 200-600 years between major fires in the western Washington rainforest.
I used to live in northern Washington until recently, and one of the reasons that was part of the mix when I left Washington was the fires I thought were coming.
The climate was changing super fast. There was a popular trail near my place, and in about 5 years it went from a mossy damp cool wet forest to dry, dusty and with lots of heat stressed trees. A couple of winters ago a storm took out about 30% of the forest in a day. A few days of scorching summer heat waves is all it takes to turn all that into fuel. Lighting was starting fires last summer.
Some of the trees in that forest are around 700 years age. This tells you there isn’t a natural fire cycle at all. Historically there were essentially no fires ever, not even every few hundred years. Never, never. That’s over now.
Humans are not adapting proactively to how fast things are changing. I feel a tragedy is coming.
With how the climate has changed, Washington’s rainforest is inevitably going to be a grassland or savana at some point in the future, and fire is what is going to take out the current forests. Once they burn they won’t grow back.
3·5 days agoIn the IPCC reports, Carbon Capture +Storage is a fairly significant variable.
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/03/srccs_summaryforpolicymakers-1.pdf
Under heading #19
- In most scenarios for stabilization of atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations between 450 and 750 ppmv CO2 and in a least-cost portfolio of mitigation options, the economic potential23 of CCS would amount to 220– 2,200 GtCO2 (60–600 GtC) cumulatively, which would mean that CCS contributes 15–55% to the cumulative mitigation effort worldwide until 2100, averaged over a range of baseline scenarios.
15% at the low end and 55% at the high end. And we haven’t developed this technology or begun to scale it yet.
I think it’s almost like Ponzi scheme accounting where your books balance as long as you get new investment in the future. We are planning on overshooting the carbon in the atmosphere and then doing negative emissions at some point later in the century.
In section 5, this part is pretty grim:
The Secretary General of the United Nations asserts that the goal of keeping global warming under 1.5°C is still reachable if nations increase their ambitions for future emission reductions.
In reality, the 1.5°C goal has long been deader than a doornail.** This raises the question: are we, the scientific community, doing an adequate job of informing governments and the public?
He’s saying that 1.5 hasn’t been reachable for a very long time and yet that delusional narrative is still out there at the highest levels.
This raises the question of why? What’s really going on where the society isn’t facing up to this?
2·12 days agoYou got mushroom plaque?
Lucky. I got mushroom plague.
In 2022, the country launched an ambitious strategy to become the world’s first digital nation. This initiative includes 3D scanning its islands to digitally re-create them and preserve their cultural heritage, as well as moving government functions to a virtual environment. In order to protect national identity and sovereignty, the project is also contemplating constitutional reforms to define the country as a virtual state, a concept already recognized by 25 countries, including Australia and New Zealand.
I recently saw this online debate about whether cities are the most sustainable or the least sustainable ways of living.
I could be convinced either way.
However, if you allow that lifestyle choices could be up for grabs, I can’t imagine that rural living wouldn’t be potentially more sustainable.
If you live in the country but live the way people live in the city with a 5000 mile diet, imported goods, daily commutes, shopping trips etc, then you have a city life with an even worse supply line that takes more resources.
However, living that way inside a city is obligatory. No matter what you are part of a giant factory that moves people and goods and energy and has to constantly bring in water and remove waste and so on, all adding tons of energy.
A country life at least offers the possibility of actually living locally with local resources but city people can never do this.
Of course nobody is really sustainable and we probably don’t know what it really looks like.
I once thought about the Amish people in Pennsylvania and wondered if they could be like a model for a way of living. They have an interesting set of choices around technology. Just getting rid of electricity, powered vehicles and making most items by hand you reduce your resources so much. But how many people are going to switch to horses if they aren’t forced to for survival?
It’s a good list of dangers… but the risk ratings? I don’t agree with the assessments much at all.
Also, one should probably rate a risk both for the odds of it happening and also for the odds of it being low or high impact if it happened. Here he seems to use the risk idea in either sense interchangeably.
Yesterday on my YouTube suggestions there was a video from a Mormon YouTuber who was comparing the Mormon religion / cult to MAGA and drawing parallels.
Her big point was that what Trump did was kind of take all these outsider / disenfranchised / cynical people and say…“you guys are right, DC is a corrupt swamp and I’ll go fix it”. With Epstein his point was “these Democrats like Obama and Biden and Hillary are a bunch of pedo-enabling horrible people”.
So Trump basically made this promise to people that validated their views and would do a huge reform because he wasn’t like that. Now suddenly Trump is saying “who cares, people still talk about this, fake news? What about Obama?”. The about face is too transparently self serving, like it’s really obvious (now, to everyone) that he, himself is likely also incriminated.
And why that’s an impossible position is that it makes the entire MAGA team look like what they hate. Or maybe another distraction is coming soon and people will forget.
I believe you shifted the decimal place. You should have 6%, not 0.006%
6% per degree of warming, and it could be 3 or 4 degrees or whatever…I believe they used 3.5° and a total damage of ~20% as one of the projections for the end of the century.
They also call for significant losses to production by 2050.
Nature paper is here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09085-w
We estimate that global production declines 5.5 × 1014 kcal annually per 1 °C global mean surface temperature (GMST) rise (120 kcal per person per day or 4.4% of recommended consumption per 1 °C; P < 0.001).
It’s a pretty weird and interesting paper. The big idea is that we will have to majorly revamp the agriculture practices to adapt to climate and weather. The climate and the weather would have extreme amounts of damage taken against how we produce food right now. What this paper argues is that we can mitigate some of these losses in many places, and that by shifting what we grow and where we grow it, we can still make farming work to a lesser extent than today…the paper attempts to model what the net future potential would be for a more resilient state.
Anyhow, there will be less food produced even after we adapt.
It’s not reliable.
This is STRAIGHT quoted from your source:
“This data is based on territorial emissions, which do not account for emissions embedded in traded goods. Emissions from international aviation and shipping are not included in any country or region’s emissions.”
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00139157.2025.2434494#d1e1978
Global temperature leaped more than 0.4°C (0.7°F) during the past two years,
many Earth scientists were baffled by the magnitude of the global warming, which was twice as large as expected for the weak 2023-2024 El Niño. We find that most of the other half of the warming was caused by a restriction on aerosol emissions by ships**
You are arguing just relying on this nonsense but I don’t think you have the depth or the context to understand how you’re being willfully misled.
That paper shows how 0.2° of current day GLOBAL warming is JUST from the emissions from ocean going ships!
Like…they are pretty clever in how they can trick people but leave them feeling confident that they haven’t been tricked. It’s “reliable”. But you don’t know what you don’t even know. They are leaving out all these major elements to paint a rosy picture.
Incidentally, there is a really great piece of science about our current conversation about primary versus secondary sources:
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2022AV000676
an excessive emphasis on data-intensive activities and the disproportionate investment of time and resources in these activities is leading to a displacement of more foundational scientific activities of our discipline. This not only impedes the scientific progress of our field
The money, time and effort going into (climate) data visualization and other communications is a huge distraction away from deep understanding. They are regurgitating old and obsolete information that has been discredited…instead of pushing knowledge.
Now, consider this:
“The IPCC aerosol scenario has zero aerosol forcing change between 1970 and 2005, which requires low climate sensitivity (near 3 °C for 2 × CO2) to match observed warming.”
Zero! These were highly credited people. Very credible. Highly reliable even.
We are now in a position to completely understand how to view this, we can confidently look at these models and see them as majorly wrong and an extreme downplay of what was happening.
So there are two sets of accounting books going around.
One set has cooked books with major, major accounting errors. Their predictions are not working out to be correct whenever something they didn’t consider changes they get caught out for fudging their math.
One set has been audited and reconciled. They are calling their shots ahead of time and predicting future outcomes and getting their predictions right on the money. Their model is probably not perfectly but it’s not egregiously vapid either.
Do you know what version of the science you’re looking at? Your reliable sources?
That isn’t a science source. Incorrect domain.
Do you read the funny pages for economy information?
The paper I linked in critical in understanding why these models are wrong.
Many of these models were tuned and calibrated by looking at the first twitches of climate change during the past 50 or 100 years (only). Mainly they were missing very large and important variables. When people have gone back to the paleorecord, they were able to see what was being omitted from the models.
This is exactly why all the headlines are screaming “faster than expected” “sooner than expected” “worse than expected”.
In short, industrial society was producing enough dust (+ water vapor + clouds) to almost totally cancel the warming effect in the short term. Which made it seem like the climate changes very slowly or not very sensitively. Models that didn’t know about dust and water and clouds were having all their numbers tweaked to “agree with reality”…making it seem like climate change isn’t that strong.
Only if you just keep at it, eventually that warming does kick into drive. So this is a very transitory stage. You cannot base a longer range prediction on these 15 year range narrow effects.
You don’t have better things to do. This is one of the most fundamental things to understand to put your whole life into perspective. Most people are either wasting their lives or they are building on a foundation of shifting sands.
Re-read the part with the asterisk in my previous comment. Like, they don’t come out and attack these 1.5 people directly, they just kind of point out the ridiculousness of the claim. Like…“when they say that stuff, they haven’t even thought it out”. It’s not even that they are wrong, they are just completely wrong. They don’t even have an actual argument, it’s really REAL nonsense. It’s a lot of work to try to dispel crap like that because it’s not even based on anything.
But of course, “reliable sources” is like a good example. If you delve into most of the logical fallacies / classical logic mistakes, what’s really interesting is that most of the fallacies are not actually logically tricky. What they are is social. In nearly all cases, someone lets their mind be confused by the perception of the social status or the value or the position of authority of the speaker of the false statement.
We humans survived by prizing group harmony and downplaying logic and reasoning. Like, we could not survive alone in the wilds, we HAD to protect our membership in the group.
My dude, you ARE in a suicidally stupid group. They are killing themselves and everyone around them. Trust no one.
Correct. The system only goes up 60% of the full temperature forcing in 100 years. So 75 years down the road from today you don’t see most of the temperature change, YET
Point 2: “Reliable sources”. They are likely wrong. Read the paper.
There is major politics and a lot of mistakes. They all downplay the severity for non scientific reasons.
The main human motivator was that if climate change was as dire and as bleak as the science suggested, there would be no hope at all. So nobody ever truly considered these scenarios because it was too scary and too politically impossible. Like…why bother thinking about problems for which there is no solution space? Instead focus on a narrow possibility that we are in a different problem that we have some agency within.
People have been looking at the science to see what they want to hear.
Here is a very clear example…
In this paper, they are talking about a comparison between the PETM and the climate forcing of today.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleocene–Eocene_Thermal_Maximum
This had PROFOUND effects on the planet. Anoxic oceans, mass animal mortality, acidification of the oceans, decline of plankton and corals etc etc. Palm trees grew in the Arctic.
I mean…this is human extinction level stuff. They don’t come right out and say it anywhere. But you have to understand the context.
If you want to share where you’re getting the “1.5 by 2100” I can try to dispel the idea more fully. It’s probably a junk source. [*]
[*] In this paper I just linked, they talk about how the pollution that comes with CO2 emissions (soot, dust, smoke and other small particles) acts like a sunscreen, and water vapor also interacts with this dust layer and amplifies the effect, rapidly cooling the planet. They discuss how many of the scenarios where we eg. stop CO2 to limit warming by 2100… DO NOT EVEN CONSIDER that dust will stop, and when dust stops temperature actually ramps up even more quickly than we have ever seen before. The dust contribution is a more rapid effect than the CO2 part. Basically the idea is not even scientific at all.
Then they go into the details:
We would need rapid phaseout of carbon within a couple decades. Then we need a global program of solar radiation management (geoengineering) with the example of the Pinatubo eruption given to save inundation of the coastal cities. THEN we need to rapidly find a way to do negative emissions and restore the atmosphere to preindustrial.
(Also, equlibrium warming isn’t the only warming at play. You read the whole thing. Right? The other one is ESS, which involves feedbacks.)
If you just read to the end of that paragraph, it concludes with this:
Required actions include: (1) a global increasing price on GHG emissions accompanied by development of abundant, affordable, dispatchable clean energy, (2) East-West cooperation in a way that accommodates developing world needs, and (3) intervention with Earth’s radiation imbalance to phase down today’s massive human-made ‘geo-transformation’ of Earth’s climate. Current political crises present an opportunity for reset, especially if young people can grasp their situation.
And what is ‘committed warming’?
They say:
If human emissions ceased, atmospheric CO2 would initially decline a few ppm per year, but uptake would soon slow—it would take millennia for CO2 to reach preindustrial levels
So the earth would eventually remove the CO2 via natural processes it’s not “committed”. It just takes thousands and thousands of years to go away again.
According to the paleoclimate data, the CO2 levels of today get you an equilibrium of 10° of global temperature rise. It takes about 100 years before the climate response happens.
https://academic.oup.com/oocc/article/3/1/kgad008/7335889?login=false
It’s amazing to me that you know what the solution is but you don’t know the problem.