Even though it looks like a cool bag of facts, this really is just a bunch of correlations without good citations indicating any causal effect.
Which is actually confirmed at the end:
> We can't conclude that these isolated incidents are caused by climate changes. On the other hand, we can conclude that such incidents have already become more common. And that it will likely cost us several hundred billion NOK to arm ourselves against all this water.
I'm worried that this kind of reporting only helps climate-change deniers.
I don't understand your complaint. Consider this fact:
> There is less snow in the lowlands. In parts of the Oslo wildlands, the skiing season has become nearly 40 days shorter.
So we have an observable, measurable, falsifiable fact. It correlates or trends with global mean temperature changes. We have a mechanism of action. We have an arrow of causality, based on established scientific observations and experiments going back decades. I'm not sure what else you want.
You mention lack of citations, but they do have citations. For example, the browning water section clearly links to this paper [1]. That paper looks at data going back three decades and emphasizes (in the title, no less) the very arrow of causality you want.
"Correlation is not causation" is a weird, toothless complaint here. They're not plotting fedoras on the x-axis and global mean temperature on the y-axis.
I'm worried that this kind of Hacker News comment only helps climate-change deniers.
Thanks, going through the slides, I haven't noticed the linked paper. It's worth noting though that the part I quoted is still a part of TFA, and does still embody the issue I mentioned.
EDIT: I see now. The "source" button they've used for citations doesn't work correctly for me in Safari and Chrome (it scrolls way up, and only if you scroll back down will it start showing the footnotes). It's also only in Norwegian.
The complaint is that it is a little too "on point" to be a serious discussion that weighs multiple angles. These are journalists determined to convey a particular point. It does not mean they are wrong. It just means it is not credible journalism.
Did they display only facts that correlate to the desired conclusion or did they examine the I consistencies and counter points as well?
I don't disagree with their conclusion but the other commenter's point is reasonable. We live in a world where facts are fungible based on how they're presented and interpreted.
Few things are cut and dry despite how they are often presented.
> this really is just a bunch of correlations without good citations
I only noticed the translucent "source" buttons after reading for 10 minutes or so. Maybe you missed them as well? Haven't looked at any of the sources myself though.
> this really is just a bunch of correlations without good citations indicating any causal effect.
Say your house gets broken into and there is a broken window and you are missing some cash and jewellery.
Would you _also_ say that calling it a burglary—absent any security camera footage—would be correlation without causation?
I mean, for all we know it might have been a bear which broke in and just happened to take only money and jewellery. There might be a blinged out bear partying at the local bar nearby!
It's easy to cast doubt on any theory, and much harder to advance a theory.
Also I see that you did eventually find the citations, but the tone of your comments suggest to me that you might just as easily transpose your doubt casting onto the sources, and the sources sources ad infinitum... But of course my claim is based purely on correlations.
Some things are obvious, some things are less so. Nuance matters.
> It's easy to cast doubt on any theory, and much harder to advance a theory.
I agree.
> Also I see that you did eventually find the citations, but the tone of your comments suggest to me that you might just as easily transpose your doubt casting onto the sources, and the sources sources ad infinitum... But of course my claim is based purely on correlations.
I'm not sure why you're inferring that. I both believe in climate change and find the sources I've now seen good enough for my non-expert point of view.
I'm casting doubt in an effort to improve the quality of the arguments, not to undermine climate change or its seriousness.
It’s certainly an issue, but in a complex system, you’ll never be able to pinpoint a single cause with a full evidence chain. It will never be possible to link a specific weather incident to climate change, like you could never directly link a single lung cancer case directly to smoking.
But what had pretty certainly been established is that climate change increases weather extremes.
This might be correlation, but there’s a plausible mechanism how increasing temperatures increases extreme rainfall: a warmer atmosphere holds more water. And for all the other examples, they also explain what’s the pathway from climate change to effect - warmer winters make more larvae survive, overwhelming the trees,…
If that kind of reporting helps climate deniers, no reporting is possible and all is lost.
> I'm worried that this kind of reporting only helps climate-change deniers.
As someone who believes in climate change, this is the exact sentence that I want to see more often. It feels less like an agenda is being pushed and instead the reader is meant to think critically.
We can't be sure what is and isn't climate change. All we can do is make observations and that's exactly what is being done here.
If you're indicating causation without any sensible proof, citation, or well-reasoned hypothesis, and just give a "scary" slideshow with "yeah, that might be climate change... or it might not, idk", then that will help people who are trying to show that "climate-change reporting is a bunch of BS" support their narrative.
A lot of people will then, when they see a few such examples, assume that all climate-change reporting is like that.
> If you're indicating causation without any sensible proof, citation, or well-reasoned hypothesis, and just give a "scary" slideshow with "yeah, that might be climate change... or it might not, idk", then that will help people who are trying to show that "climate-change reporting is a bunch of BS" support their narrative.
If you're determined to imagine that even stuff like literal temperature changes aren't sensible proof of climate change, that hypotheses linking the weather in Norway to the weather in the rest of the world or
temperature changes to changes in flora and fauna need to be thoroughly explained to be plausible, and don't trust that quoted academics have actually done the research unless the journalists hyperlink their original papers, then yeah, maybe the acknowledgement that climate isn't the only factor affecting flora and fauna in Norway (no shit!) is the clincher that it's all a big con.
But then, if you're determined to imagine that entire fields of scientific research and thousands of actual published scientific papers must all be irredeemably flawed because a pop science article which doesn't pretend to be anything other than a list of things observed in Norway takes a less rigorous approach, I'm not sure improving the article is going to change matters. It's not like news articles opposing the theory of anthropogenic causes for climate change or global warming in general are renowned for reading like academic studies...
If you're bringing up the question of what causes global climate change in response to an article that is pretty narrowly focused on local climate change in Norway, a lot of people will assume that you know that global climate change is generally understood to be caused by human behavior, but are looking for ways to cast doubt on that fact without actually arguing the point.
Humans aren't great as being logical. A scientist giving an expertly sourced claim with plenty of disclaimers is going to have their idea given less importance than a charismatic speaker using conviction and force but having no evidence and being entirely wrong. Humans like confidence more than facts.
I'm not sure what the fix is, because a scientist is generally speaking with the level of confidence that matches their knowledge and understanding. Do we ask them to be more confident even if it goes past what their knowledge and understanding can justify?
And thanks to the Gell-Mann Effect, even if you invest time and resources into convincing the population the expert is right in one case, they still default back to believe the confident and charismatic speaker who doesn't know what they are talking about (or even worse, is being purposefully misleading).
> So, attempting to be objective and realistic are harmful to the cause?
Yes, this can harm the cause. Providing honest true facts while not providing data supporting causation can cause people to become skeptical of climate change if some of true facts change because they were caused by something other than climate change.
That's the entire point, they didn't attempt to be objective nor realistic.
That's honestly the biggest issue with a lot of these radical climate activists too.
They use intentionally misleading arguments to exaggerate timelines and pretend we're already screwed. The media certainly doesn't help as more climate alarmism generates more clicks.
And of course, if you say that they're exaggerating then you immediately get branded a "climate change denier".
Now you have a generation of 20 year olds who think it's immoral to have children because of climate change and other dumb shit like that.
Radical in common speech (within the US) is used to describe an outlier in behavior - zealot, would be the closest synonym for the way radical is used. Violence over climate change would be radical. It's an example of very uncommon behavior, not a specific quality of a radical.
This slight disagreement is an issue of disparate definition. I believe the GP was simply being less than gracious in the interpretation of a comment, despite it making perfect sense how they came to their own understanding.
Thanks. Mostly I was just reacting to the term radical being applied to an article that expressed some mostly conventional views on climate change. What was the radical part?
The carbon footprint of a person in "the west" is far far larger than that of a person in China, India, etc. If reducing emissions helps the environment, then it is pretty obvious to anyone with a half developed brain that not having children (in the west) is a great way to reduce emissions.
Other reasons people don't have children:
- Socioeconomic disparities make it difficult to raise a family due to cost of living
- Uncertainty over the future with massive droughts (we have observed them), and ever increasing food scarcity imply that down the road, future generations will have a lot of issues to deal with, so why bring more people to needlessly suffer?
All in all, parent commenter assumes that young people are stupid, and fails to see that young people are generally concerned about their behaviour and the consequences. Commenter also fails to see that young people don't want to bring more humans to this planet because they don't want more people to suffer.
Bringing children to life is generally a very selfish act with dire consequences to anyone involved.
> Bringing children to life is generally a very selfish act with dire consequences to anyone involved.
No, it's not. I understand people having concerns about the future and especially regarding the expense of raising a child. But, to brand people "selfish" for having kids that they're able to provide good care for is silly.
If we are all "equal", then each one of us is allocated some amount of emissions that we may produce. Bringing children to the world reduces the slice of other people, and assumes that the kids will have a good enough life without too much suffering.
Many children have been born to families that had the wealth to provide for the children, but ultimately hurt them in the process or caused needless suffering.
> that not having children (in the west) is a great way to reduce emissions.
Why in the west? The west is already doing their (our) part by not having enough children to replace the current people here.
The 'rest of the world' has too many children, in some places even too many to literally just feed. Why deal with the areas where couples have <2, even <1.5 children on average and not with areas where the numbers are 5 or even more?
Also, doesn't that mean that we should also stop immigration? Moving someone from a poor country to a rich(er) one means more emissions since they tend to consume more due to more money than in their originating country.
The cost in emissions to raise a child in the west is far higher than in other countries.
> The 'rest of the world' has too many children, in some places even too many to literally just feed.
Countries like India and China have far lower emissions per capita than western countries, and especially if we account for carbon emissions and imports.
> Why deal with the areas where couples have <2, even <1.5 children on average and not with areas where the numbers are 5 or even more?
There are very few countries with as many children, all of them very low on emissions per capita, and the easiest way to drop that is by accelerating their growth, improving education, and QoL.
> Also, doesn't that mean that we should also stop immigration? Moving someone from a poor country to a rich(er) one means more emissions since they tend to consume more due to more money than in their originating country.
No idea. If you wish to reduce the need for immigration, the simplest way is to enable people to have children. US' policies on maternity, leave and so on are not helping the situation, and neither is the ever increasing CoL in European countries while we have as high tax rates.
> The cost in emissions to raise a child in the west is far higher than in other countries.
But the west is already way on the way to reducing population, even too much.
> There are very few countries with as many children, all of them very low on emissions per capita, and the easiest way to drop that is by accelerating their growth, improving education, and QoL.
if you scroll down to the second table, sort by most recent value, you'll see many many large countries with numbers way above 2 (replacement value), and pretty much none of them will be developed western ones.
Again, why should the west not have children, while the rest can have 5? Shouldn't we focus our efforts on those 5 per couple, instead of 1.5 or watever the average for eg EU is?
> No idea. If you wish to reduce the need for immigration, the simplest way is to enable people to have children. US' policies on maternity, leave and so on are not helping the situation, and neither is the ever increasing CoL in European countries while we have as high tax rates.
But didn't you just say that we shouldn't have children in the west, because children pollute? But moving poor people to richer countries pollutes too, since they earn more there and pollute more in turn.
> Again, why should the west not have children, while the rest can have 5? Shouldn't we focus our efforts on those 5 per couple, instead of 1.5 or watever the average for eg EU is?
I did not express that only we should do it. I simply said that having fewer children, especially in western world, is a very obvious way to reduce carbon footprint.
> But didn't you just say that we shouldn't have children in the west, because children pollute?
That's not what I said. I said that it is pretty selfish, both towards other people, _and_ towards the children themselves but people seem to have glossed over the latter.
Just because I find it selfish doesn't mean that we should be doing what I propose. If it was up to me, we'd be heading for a voluntary human extinction, but for better or worse, we are not. I simply pointed out that claiming that young people are stupid and fall into traps is not the reason they don't have children.
> Socioeconomic disparities make it difficult to raise a family due to cost of living
Rather, the number of children per family tends to go down as income increases - compare Congo (6.2 children per woman in 2020, $577.20 GDP per capita) with Norway (1.5 children per woman in 2020, $89,154.39 GDP per capita).
Those are not directly related (although in some way they are).
Lack of education, contraceptives and social nets means that women in congo will have more children on average. If you get them all that and a stable pension after (so they won't need kids to keep them alive when old) the numbers of kids will fall.
On the other hand, in the "rich" western countries, no matter how high the income number is (compared to congo), that doesn't mean that a young couple can actually afford a home large enough to have a kid or two (or more), childcare and all the other kid-related costs.
The sad part is if we’re already screwed it defeats the argument of doing much of anything anyway so everyone continues doing what they were going to do anyway.
I think you and the parent are both correct. If we are “screwed” (I.e no action will prevent runaway warming) then any response to prevent warming is pointless. However you are correct that being “screwed” or not is a false binary (we don’t know if warming is reversible but it is likely we can make a positive change and avoid runaway).
I don't have anything to say other then it's disgusting how people add the term "denier" on to subjects that aren't clear cut and settled like they believe they are, while also using an obvious illusion to the most horrible human event of the last century. (holocaust denier)
> I'm worried that this kind of reporting only helps climate-change deniers.
There is one thing consistent on the entire spectrum of climate-change deniers, from ignorant to sociopathic to self-interested: They're not working with reality.
So, catering reporting to their various bubbles of ignorance is a fool's mission.
That is needlessly lumping all "deniers" into one category. Some deny any evidence of any warming. Others admit there may be warming but there is nothing we can do about it. Still, others admit it is warming but it is not severe and our focus should be on mitigation strategies.
The language is very dramatic and sensational. It just feels more like propaganda to me than a scientific opinion. The reality is seldom this clean. This doesn't even pretend to entertain other opinions.
Not to dismiss the effects of climate change, but when we start blaming every environmental change we observe on climate change, I feel like we're bound to misdiagnose a bunch problems. That is a serious issue because reversing climate change is likely much more difficult and long-term (and perhaps conducive to forming defeatist attitudes) than identifying solutions to some number of unrelated environmental problems.
I find it curious that after all the pages they dedicate to saying that water is getting browner, they say that the primary cause of brownness is a reduction in the amount of acid rain over the last 40 years but some people suspect that warmer weather may be contributing to it as well. If the primary cause is reduction in acid rain, it seems weird to talk about how people aren't going to be able to wash white shirts in lake water as if it is a bad thing and how expensive water filtration systems are.
> This change has been taking place since the 1980s, and until the present day the main cause has been a decrease in acid rain. But now researchers think that climate change is also having an effect.
I guess the problem with that line of thought is that we don't have a control planet to compare results with. We know climate change is real, and we know that these changes are real, but we don't know if they're related because we can't get away from climate change. Maybe the answer isn't to dismiss these findings, but to stop climate change so we can know for sure.
You don't need a control planet. And you don't need to dismiss climate change. And we shouldn't stop aggressively trying to combat climate change. All I'm saying is there's bound to be environmental issues not due to climate change that we can fix rather rapidly, but since they've been chalked up to climate change we have stopped looking into the actual underlying reason. For example California has seen a steady increase in the number of wild fires each year. Someone says it's due to climate change. We accept the reasoning - makes sense. But maybe it's due to aging electrical grid infrastructure? After all most fires are started by downed power lines. And if it is due to old telephone polls, that's something we could fix now. But if we've already accepted that the increase in wildfires is due to climate change, why look into alternative explanations?
The solutions are already very clear, there is no difficulty or complexity here. It's just another example of the change that we observe all over the world, only this time documented in a beautiful web page.
Oh and the solution is quite simple: we need to stop burning things. It really is that simple.
This isn't about focussing on misdiagnosing problems, it's acknowledging that there is a problem in the first place and that we must make very significant sacrifices in our way of living.
The real discussion is mostly about: do we want a controlled change in our way of living or do we want nature crash down upon us?
It seems now that people don't want to change for the most part, just continue with business as usual and thus automatically choose the latter part.
That's because this piece is more propaganda than science. I'm not denying anything, but anyone serious about science should not be persuaded by pieces like this.
The NY Times does this kind of "presentation story" all over. I rarely read more than the first few captions, because I can't stand the continuous scroll format - it reduces the rate I can absorb the information in such articles by a factor of 4 or more, and increases the work required to get it (particular on the eyes, because reading text scrolling over pictures is hard eye work). I hate 'em. Give me text, charts and graphs, with pictures if they actually add something to the information in your story.
Luckily most of NRK's articles don't do this, but I agree. I always skim through articles to find out if I actually care enough to read it. And when I do read the whole thing, I often have to jump up a few paragraphs.
These articles completely break my reading flow to the point where I just give up.
That's because its propganda. The sleek feel is a diversion to lead your thoughts in a particular way. Not saying they are necessarily wrong, but that's all this is.
I kind of liked them when they first started popping up. But after you've seen a handful of them, you realize that they're basically just powerpoint presentations.
Norway is both a very eco-conscious country, and one of the world's largest oil producers...
The two don't cancel out - the CO2 produced from all that oil brought out of the North Sea is far more than the CO2 saved by having eco friendly well insulated homes, electric cars, and hydro dams.
Norwegians are the large-scale drug dealers who give a couple of grand to an anti-drugs charity...
Even if some of the problems shown in the article are not direct consequences of climate change, I am still sad that so much of the Norwegian nature is being destroyed. :-(
> And so, it is too late to prevent Norway or the world from changing. Because the changes are already in full swing.
Exactly, so its time to adapt.
The swage system can't handle extra rain? Time for an infrastructure upgrade.
Getting too hot? Time to accept the new reality and remove stupid laws banning or taxing AC, the East has been living on ACs for ages, its OK.
Support relocating homes in danger of landslides, and also support the new farms made possible from the warmer temperatures.
> Nevertheless, things are not completely hopeless. According to a new report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), we can still halt the rate of global warming.
> But to do so we must implement comprehensive changes to our society, according to the IPCC. We must change everything from our eating habits to how we build our cities.
Because this ain't happening and Climate change isn't going to stop any time soon.
> the East has been living on ACs for ages, its OK.
It's not OK considering this makes climate change worse, that we're trying to move out of fossil fuel, and that energy is also going to be an issue (regardless of climate change).
I agree that adaptation needs to be discussed. Ignoring it is delusional. However saying change isn’t happening isn’t fair. Many countries have built new energy infrastructure and investment in coal has become unattractive. It might not be enough to make climate activists happy, but we are definitely spending a lot of resources on this problem. Emissions targets are incentivising governments to reopen or reconsider nuclear. I don’t think carbon neutral by the end of the century is an unreasonable prediction.
>I meant that individuals won't change their lifes for climate change.
They will if it becomes cool and fashionable, as well as making not changing more expensive. We made cigarette smoking expensive and in poor taste pretty quickly.
Maybe, but I don't know how one woule spin things such as using a slower /more efficient computer or switching to a more inconvenient method of transport as cool
Keeping a phone for more than one year would be a start. Quality clothes over fast fashion. The end of seeing flying overseas and being a"foodie" as cool and recognizing it as the trashy behavior it is. Large gas-guzzling vehicles being recognized as trashy rather than cool. There are a ton of examples like this.
What kind of logic is that? If you have a problem, you should try to resolve it, not adapt to it.
This is in line with American school shootings; instead of getting rid of guns (trying to solve the problem), you give teachers guns and students kevlar vests (adapting to the problem).
There are a number of climate change experts who have come to that same realization. They have even suggested it is not as dire as many claim. People like Shellenberger, Lomborg and Judith Curry.
The nature of free market means if there is money to be made, there will always be sellers for whatever junk you need, including indulgences. After my readings into the topic, Shellenberger seems to be the new age indulgence seller for the class that climate denial profits the most. I am much more inclined to believe the people who are warning us about the danger even when it would lose us money overall, because they can't be doing so from a profit motive.
Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but the way they're presenting these climate change effects I'm thinking this can only be a localized good thing for Norway.
Their ground will also start to disappear as sea levels rise. So there are up sides and down sides for them.
Now consider the southern USA. They will also lose land as sea levels rise. And the same changes that make Norway more fertile and liveable make them less fertile and liveable.
So the overall affect is:
* Bad for everyone on average
* Bad for most people because they picked the best places/ways to live (often costal ones) under the old model and invested in those and now will have to move/change all that
I think we're about to see the current populous/rich areas realise they're fucked, and smaller colder places are the new them. How will the US feel when the corn belt moves north of the US-Canada border and it has to import food?
> Their ground will also start to disappear as sea levels rise.
Sea level rise is an irrelevance as far as costs of climate change are concerned. Particularly to Norway.
Gets talked about because it's easy to explain to children, not because our great grand kids will be underwater due to the third of a meter rise in sea level.
The rich countries have all sorts of ways of mitigating effects of climate change, the big losers will be India, Pakistan, Nigeria, etc. Which will also contain half the world's population by 2100.
Yes, and that's good news if you're Canadian or Siberian. But the vast majority of people live in places that will NOT become more fertile. So bad news over all.
And even for Canadian/Siberians there are a lot of issues that mean it's not just a blessing. Fancy a 400% immigration rate? Fancy no more ski-ing and having to buy aircon? Fancy no trees when insects normally killed by frost destroy them all?
"it will be ok for some people on average over a long period" could be worse but it's not good news...
This is confirmation bias at its best. Yes, Norway has barely any land affected by sea level rise. Because it's a mountainous country. Good job, gold star to you. But you left out the fact that the vast, vast majority of Norway's population lives on the coast where sea level rise does matter. Almost no one lives in the mountains.
Additionally Norway is highly dependent on the gulf stream to remain habitable, which could also be disrupted by Arctic ice melting.
Interesting point about the corn belt moving. Having a rough look at temperature isotherms and the location of the corn belt, it looks like it will take > 10F of warming to move it to the Canadian border. So it will likely only become an issue if we fail to address climate change this century.
Of course that is an average, North America could see a below or above average change in temperatures in that time. And with Crops, there is more than just temperature, there is also sunlight levels and rainfall and soil fertility etc.
I am not saying "corn will move x miles per year every year exactly until it crosses the border". More that places that can grow crops will change. So farmers will have to change their crops (or move) and people will have to change what they eat and places that are used to having an abundance may find they cannot grow anything. All of that is expensive and difficult and disruptive. This is the problem with any change, even a net good change.
With this also being a net negative AND an international change, it will be hard to manage even if we do suddenly find a huge amount of wealth and political will to help us...
That's an oddly specific question given sea levels have "only" risen 15-25cm since 1900 and most piers are more than 25cm above previous sea levels (and less than 120 years old). You will soon get your wish soon though, we're raising sea levels by 3.7mm PER YEAR. And that rate is only going up.
>Between 1901 and 2018, the globally averaged sea level rose by 15–25 cm (6–10 in), or 1–2 mm per year on average.[1] This rate is accelerating, with sea levels now rising by 3.7 mm per year.
I have no stake here; but he asked for a photo, and you replied with a Wikipedia link and an animation. Surely you understand the difference of evidence to him right?
Sure, if you are saying that you can’t see the difference that two photos of similar tides just like you can’t a photo of the curvature of the earth that would be a good argument.
Like I say, I don't know of any piers built only 1 foot above sea level (they start flooding as soon as there were waves no?), and built about 100 years ago... If you do please share!
I found a whole batch of videos for you, hope this works! I have seen people literally displaced because their house is gone, and it's astonishing to me that this information is suppressed to the point that people on the other side of the world holds your position.
I also hope so. It’s not like the country can’t afford it. It’s hard not to view Norway and other big fossil fuel exporters as being analogous to cigarette companies. Everyone knows what you’re selling is poison but you get a pass because we’ve come accustomed to it. In an ideal world, carbon fuels would be taxed at source - ie those countries who do the extraction and profit from it would be liable for the associated externalities. Currently efforts target consumers rather than producers.
Demand and genuine need is the issue, not production. Better that production is in Western democracies with high environmental standards than elsewhere.
The issue is using those fossil fuels to reduce how much we will need them in the future and using them to transition to green energy.
Cigarettes are a bad analogy. A necessary life-saving drug we all depend upon with bad side effects is more apt. Ramping up production of a better life-saving drug is the solution, not stopping production of the old one.
Yeah, we like to believe we and our oil is so "clean". It's just that we export it for others to burn, and import products produced with pollution attributed to other's soil..
Even if it does, others will increase supply to meet the rising global demand. That is a certainty, between emerging economies and westerners padding their numbers with immigration. Techno-optimists have unrealistic near-term expectations about abating emissions, and the greens are anywhere between conspiracy nuts and ancoms romanticizing primitivism.
Most indicators show that we have reached (or will reach within a year or two) peak global fossil fuel consumption. Even the EIA (who have been notoriously conservative in recognizing the transformative effects of renewables in energy markets) are conceding as much.
There is one throwaway line on there with no explanation. As it stands, 75% of fossil fuel use is not for electricity and is not yet abated with new technologies. Demand is always rising (emerging economies plus immigration) so I see no reason to believe we are anywhere near "peak" use.
I think the trajectory of emissions tells the better story.
I don’t see how the trajectory of emissions can differ from the trajectory of fossil fuel consumption.
Yes electricity generation accounts for roughly a quarter of emissions - very roughly the other quarters are due to transport, domestic heating/cooking and industrial. Hence the decarbonization of electricity generation is being pursued along with the electrification of the latter sources of emissions.
Given the trends,
I’m quite confident we’ll be successful lowering emissions. I’m less confident that it won’t be too late to avoid catastrophic climate change.
Unfortunately it seems unlikely with the labour party being strongly dependent on support from unions that are disappointingly obsessed with keeping(and growing) oil industry jobs at any cost.
And the conservatives want to do their hydrogen greenwashing nonsense of course. Then the 2 biggest parties after those are populist climate deniers(FRP) and populist luddites(SP).
Honestly, in the medium term (e.g. 2100) climate change will be a net positive for Norway. Less cold deaths, more outdoors, more farming.
The same is true of places like Canada.
The problem is, most people actually live in places like India, Pakistan and Nigeria. And unlike Norway these places aren't going to get more habitable, nor do they have the slack to mitigate and adapt to the effects of climate change.
Same is true for Russia, which is probably why they try to spread climate change denialism propaganda. And poor people in poor countries suffering will only create more labour to be exploited so that is also an advantage.
Is there a version of this that is readable that isn't a propaganda spectacle? Look at the narrative form and who it is trying to persuade. I thought climate change wasn't so much about meteorology as it was a general descriptor for a manufactured political climate, where one is either for the solutions or not, and therefore one can attribite literally anything to it. It is just a critical theory for dissolving reason and aligning people behind demagogues. Unemployment? Climate change. Social unrest? Climate change. Fertility rates? Climate change. Heart attacks? Climate change. It's intellectual chaff that only serves to center its ideologues. So long as you keep the reactionaries arguing about the weather they aren't going to offer meaningful resistance to the solutions being imposed on their countries and the co-ordinated demolition of national sovereignty to post-national governing bodies. It's a standard distraction theft.
I'm a bigger environmental advocate than any of these climate people, because I advocate boundaries on cities, anti-sprawl, changing building codes to incorporate passive energy methods and legalizing off grid and passive energy homes, national tarrifs on goods made in slave labour conditions, building refineries in the countries where resources are extracted, reducing unmanaged migrations from south to north to car dependent economies where people need heat 8mos of the year, dissolving the supply management of domestic agricultural goods and replacing them with high tarrifs on agricultural imports, among other things, because the job of a government is to sustain the national interests of the people it serves.
There are concrete economic and technology solutions to environmental harm. There are no solutions to "climate change" because it is about as intellectually rigorous as a yogic mantra. The only thing missing from that presentation was perhaps a Sarah MacLachlan soundtrack about how sad it was. Outside the bubble, this stuff is still very controversial. Propaganda is very persuasive, a lot of it is really inspiring and funny, and it's as soaring as a pop song, but just recognize when you are being played.
You make a lot of claims and sprinkle some rhetoric but I notice you don't actually provide any sources for your claims. Nor does it appear as though your claims are falsifiable.
>Is there a version of this that is readable that isn't a propaganda spectacle?
> Outside the bubble, this stuff is still very controversial.
Care to comment on why there Greenhouse gases are at their highest levels on 2 million years? Or why there is scientific consensus for human-caused climate change?
Talking about it in terms of greenhouse gases and carbon deliberately confuses a measure with the goal, with the effect of elevating and centralizing managers and their propagandists.
I was going to withdraw the comment because it had snark, and there are huge environmental issues with human causes - but there are concrete national policy solutions to them. What I object to is the use of climate change as a distraction for an unrelated agenda whose most basic principle is the imaginary idea of a zero sum understanding of nature and the world - and that every prescription for it stems from trying to be the authority who redistributes resources based on that zero-sum belief.
Even accepting the-scientific-consensus, I'd challenge any activist to show they are not merely using it as a so-called anti-capitalist straw man and a pretext for imposing management on people, instead of designing technology and principles that adapt to the feedback effect that we, like all other organisms, create by our very existence.
All organisms have an impact on their ecosystems. Humans have the ability to somewhat manage our impact on ours, but only at a limited scale. There is no crisis that justifies forfeiting self determination to a small cadre of technocrats setting global policy, as they are not equipped to fix it. So far, they have demonstrated they don't give a crap about the natural environment, but they do care a lot about imposing governance without accountability, and demolishing regional autonomy. Their propaganda is really tear jerking, but it's as cynical as the most rapacious capitalists in human history imposing ESG.
My argument is that people who affect the most concern about climate change are disingenuous opportunists exploiting fear and sentiment, and the ones who are indeed sincere are exploited by these forces of cynicism and mendacity who have greenwashed their own will to power. There's a clear line. There are those of us who see problems as opportunities for innovation, optimization, and adaptation, and those who see problems as a pretext to decieve and steal from others. When I see propagandistic displays, I'm pretty sure which side of that dichotomy they are on.
Thanks for taking the time to expand your argument.
But I don't understand where you get the notion of a "zero-sum understanding" from the linked article. Nor do I understand what in the piece you interpret as an instance of "propagandistic displays"?
I don't see why dealing with climate change is an anti-capitalist straw-man. Surely no one is arguing that wind and solar power should be state controlled. Across all western economies states are regulating a plethora of substances which are known to contaminate the environment, why should coal or oil be treated any differently simply because the damage they contribute takes longer to accumulate?
It is clear that the climate is changing, quite drastically at that, and that it will continue changing at an increased rate unless we change our behaviours. To me all the article does is point this fact out using local examples.
We likely agree about some behavioral changes. I'll go down the rabbit hole a bit because most people I talk to who think this way are too busy working land or running businesses to write much.
It's the propagandistic approach that discredits it. The article is well produced, but cloying and sentimental. The big question is who "We" refers to, as the people of Norway (or Canada for example) don't need to change most of our behaviours from say, 1980 or 1990 - but we should adapt our technology and de-globalize our supply chains to be in greater alignment to natural cycles.
From what I can tell so far, solar and wind have been a scheme to divert the tax base via subsidies to Chinese manufacturers, who paid back in kind through donations that kept the parties who did it in power via political donations.
Pollution and environmental harm are a function of political corruption, which is caused directly by the very large-govt managerialism climate change activists advocate for via ESG and the global governance movement.
The example from the article about the browning of water was the effect of less acid rain (an environmentalist success story), but they took the success from their ecosystem rebalancing itself and re-problematized it to create a renewed sense of panic and crisis for its own sake.
Closer to home, I live in an area whose aquifer has been emptied and wells over a rural area the size of a small city have run dry because, according to the engineers who dig the wells, the population of a downstream suburb has added tens of thousands of people over the last couple of years to neighbourhoods of single family homes that now house several families at once. This isn't industry driven climate change - this is ecological vandalism by politicians stacking districts with new people dependent on welfare promises, and political parties leveraging foreign government influence to stay in power. The real inconvenient truth is that our political classes are actively destroying our environment and inventing these sentimental narratives to avoid accountability for it.
The difference is that I think appeals to "climate" are bullshit, where only our environment matters, and they are not the same thing. We could neutralize our impact on our environment today if we rolled back the neocon globalization agenda of the 90s and rehomed our supply chains, built modern nuclear stations, actually enforced our respective national sovereignty, freed smallholder agriculture, and constitutionally pared back the public sector to a bare minimum. This kumbaya stuff is just cheap subversion to weaken our societies and position them for dominion by parties who want to centralize economic decision making for their own benefit, and climate is the pretext. This isn't climate denialism, it's principled objection to manufactured hysteria.
If you want to save the earth, lose 30lbs, stop using cosmetics, buy clothes that last and vehicles and tech you can repair. Educate your kids to be self sufficient. Grow a garden, even just some sprouts, and above all, take every opportunity to challenge the pernicious bullshit of mainstream narratives and propaganda that exploit and subvert your desire to be good.
Imagine some documentary director filming five minutes leading into a car crash that ends up killing the passengers in the front seats and leaving the rest severely disabled.
Afterwards she screens the film for us, but for unexplainable reasons she plays it at 1/1000 the normal speed.
We are supposed to figure out what is happening. We are somewhere midway the film.
Everything looks so earily calm. The driver seems confident on the steering wheel. The passengers are absorbed in their own pursuits. Rain drops hit the windshield. One by one, every few minutes.
I can confirm it has gotten warmer on average and we have a lot less snow
in the south. Less certain in the arctic regions to the north.
I look at photos from the 70s and the shift seems dramatic.
But then the photos i am shown are of times with huge amounts of snow.
It does not indicate an average.
Many models I have read indicate that Norway will become drastically
colder due to climate change if the Gulf stream changes.
Some newer research indicates this wont happen,.
Side note - For those that just have a hard time scrolling endlessly for the next sentence (e.g., handicap), in Firefox toggle the "Reader View" (F9) to remove all the spacing, and present the page in a readable format. I believe Chrome has a "Reader Mode" add-in. I do not know how to do it in Edge.
Interesting read, I was in Skjåk this August and the entire landscape is covered in pine. My mother in law who's 65 tells me how none of the trees existed around Grotli and the Skjåk region when she was younger, incredible to see how much the landscape has changed in a single lifetime.
Overall temperatures are warming but it's hard to call it "global warming" when there are tens of dead in the US due to a winter so harsh it's going to break records and when it's believed that the entirety of Europe may become much colder should the gulf stream stop (which some believe would be a consequence of warming).
In the grand scheme of things planet earth ain't dodging another ice age.
So there's that too.
If you want to rally more people to the cause I think it'd be wise to call it "man induced climate change" or something like that. Not just "global warming".
"Global warming" is unlikely to gain much traction when people are literally freezing to death in advanced economies.
It sounds like you've given up hope of avoiding catastrophic consequences of climate change, and/or are worn out by years of hearing about it, to the point where you actively insult efforts to report on climate change developments ("shut the fuck up Norway").
Websites like this are created by and for people who would rather do something than nothing. Or who care to learn more about the problem rather than throw up their hands and be content with the totally unhelpful phrase "the planet is fucked."
Yes, there are changes taking place, but overall a country with very long and cold winters should be better off at the end with a little bit of warming.
I don't believe in this global warming thing because winters around me as cold as they were in the past. But I hope that this is true because having warm climate is a good thing.
Which is actually confirmed at the end:
> We can't conclude that these isolated incidents are caused by climate changes. On the other hand, we can conclude that such incidents have already become more common. And that it will likely cost us several hundred billion NOK to arm ourselves against all this water.
I'm worried that this kind of reporting only helps climate-change deniers.
EDIT: Leaving the original comment in place, but it seems like there actually are citations behind the "Source" button which is present on many slides but doesn't work correctly for me on any browser that I've tried. Thanks to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34161145 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34161168 for pointing this out.