The comically named Inflation Reduction Act included a tremendous amount of money for scaling up clean tech manufacturing in the US, and it’s been getting deployed quickly. The DOE Loan Programs Office got something like $400B in loan authority. Overall, the IRA was probably the largest single bit of climate action the US govt has ever taken. Unfortunately, people mostly hear about that work when it becomes part of political football (Solyndra and Tesla both got money from the DOE LPO to help them scale up, and the political fallout from Solyndra was the first time most people had heard of it). But it’s happening.

Global warming will cause suffering, but extreme poverty was worse for billions than any projections from 2.0C above baseline. The global population grow by 3 billion people since 1988 yet extreme poverty is way down.

What nobody talks about is there’s not enough oil and natural gas left to miss 2C by much. At current consumption rates we run out of both in ~50-60 years. Coal isn’t competitive with renewables and as soon as we stop pumping hydrocarbons the associated influx of Methane also stops. So we’re almost guaranteed to miss 2.5C of global warming, and stopping at 2C is likely.

So congratulations humanity, all that money spent on R&D instead of directly cutting emissions without any solid alternatives actually worked!

No, doomerism discourages people from trying. It also comes from the same place intellectually as the luddite wing of the green movement, which is one major reason we didn't replace coal with nuclear energy decades ago. (The others being that coal is cheap and fossil fuel lobbyists are powerful. But without the luddite greens opposing it we might have gotten somewhere.)

Doomerism leads people to go ahead and buy a ridiculous gas hog SUV they don't need because why not, we're all gonna die. Doomerism means we should cancel all our green and next-generation nuclear development because it doesn't matter. We're all gonna die.

Look up the Moore's law like progress of solar, wind, and batteries. Look up how much renewable energy we're adding, the uptake rate for EVs, etc. We are not doing enough but we are not doing nothing.

The previous poster is right. The global average is below the threshold and the global average is the only number that matters re: physics. Physics doesn't care about politics. The goal now must be to keep chipping away at those higher numbers in developed economies and to make sure the developing world gets renewable and nuclear energy before they decide to industrialize with coal like China did.

Either that or at least make sure we're cutting emissions in mature economies as fast or faster than developing economy emissions are increasing so the average does not exceed the limit.

Considering that since 1988 world population went from a little over 5bln to 8bln, our output per capita rose by around 10%, which is not great, but also not terrible.

Meanwhile the number of infants globally peaked around 2013-2017 and according to revised estimates overall population will peak late this century reaching 10.4bln - largely in countries with a small carbon footprint anyway.

We're going to blow past that 2°C target and millions will die due to extreme weather, but I firmly believe life on Earth and our species will survive, especially now that the "business as usual" scenario is considered highly unlikely due to how differently e.g. China's coal usage changed compared to projections.

We were asleep at the wheel for maybe 20 years too long on renewables, but the pace over the last 10+ years has been mind-boggling, and especially the pace the last 4 years.

Nothing is going to turn that tide meaningfully.

I'd like to know how anyone with an ounce of reality thinks we're going to reduce emissions substantially faster than we already are.

Rome wasn't built in a day.

We've cut our emissions down massively, our electricity is pure solar, our meat consumption is 30% of what it was and we've flown once in 5 years (and then a fairly short flight). Home heating is still gas but we've halved usage by dropping the temp to 18c (from 21c) and better insulation.

Cars are still petrol but we've gone from 50k km / year to 10k km / year most made in a tiny 1 litre car (the other is a Prius). We don't have enough solar to cover that and the electric mix here is carbon intensive enough that we're better off using the petrol car until it needs replacing before switching to electric.

Hopefully at some point America will start taking their emissions seriously; it's crazy that you guys are so inefficient.

Nope, being a doomer makes you look dumb and people dismiss your whole message when your overblown predictions don’t come true.

Think about the illegal immigration hawks talking about how people will cross the borders and start raping and pillaging everything in their path. When that of course turns out to be false, people dismiss their position entirely rather than look at actual issues.

China is currently at the forefront of deploying renewable energy. They install more Solar than rest of the world combined. They are investing 100s of Billions in manufacturing cheaper solar panels and batteries. China now has >50% new cars sold as EVs.

China sees this as an opportunity and delivering on it. Meanwhile majority of Americans voted for Trump, the sentiment is anti climate change and 'drill baby drill!'.

The cheaper Solar and batteries become, the more they get deployed. Like we solved hole in the Ozone, I'm optimistic we'll transition to a net zero energy future but pessimistic that US may get left behind and it'll be too late for many of the industries to compete with China. We are too short term focused.

With a new conservative presidency, oil subsidies, and a climate change denier as the proposed head of the Department of Energy, it's looking like the US will have a regression for the next four years, in the best case.

>Nor are people looking at the data and going, "yeah, I ought to do something...

Seems to me the answer is a global plan that will actually control emissions in a cost effective way - say taxes on carbon, free trade in solar/batteries/evs and trade tariffs for countries that try to ignore that. I'd vote for that.

Failing that, me cancelling the trip to Thailand is not going to make a noticable difference, so whatever.

In the UK we mostly do dumb stuff to make our electricity almost the costliest in the world, kill industry and make no global dent in CO2. Stuff like that is why emissions have gone from 22 to 40 gt/y.

> But it also isn't hurting because we'd be doing exactly the same nothing if they were cheerful.

Of course it is hurting. If we really want people to change then we need to understand human psychology.

We need to create hope and not fear. Ask Kamala how fearmongering worked for her.

If you follow your argument logically, it says there's nothing to do and we're in a good place.

You said we need to have 5.4tCO2/person/year on average across the world. You then presented a table that shows that we are in fact _under_ this target (4.7t). In your follow-up comment you claim that the lower-income countries are "never going to emit much more than they do now". So by your argument the world average will probably stay below the 5.4t goal and we're on target.

try suggesting that people should eat more vegetables and less meat - they see red and shout down any chance of reasoning.

Sounds good, but who counts as poor? If you mean countries like Honduras then sure, let's help them out as long as they have effective financial controls to prevent corruption. But China is the largest emitter, and while they still have a huge number of poor people they also have nuclear weapons aimed at us. There's no possible political scenario where US taxpayers agree to subsidize China.

When our incoming president proposes to appoint a climate change denier as the head of the Department of Energy and also plans to raise oil subsidies while dissolving subsidies for clean energy, I think perhaps enough shame has not been handed out.

We've let blatant lies and science denial get way too far. We currently have people completely detached from reality running our nation states, and we have droves of people who will believe them when they say the sky is green. From a sociopolitical perspective, it's bad.

I mean "good" in the sense of long-term achievement of reasonably high quality of life for humanity, without a collapse in human population. (My understanding is that if there are no catastrophes, the current trajectory is expected to level out somewhere around 11 billion. Of course, if we also happen as a species to make radical progress on life extension, that will also have to weigh in to long-term changes in reproductive behaviour, etc.)

Of course we should all do what we can. (I eat less meat than I used to, and don't drive.)

>If you think about it, that's disrespectful towards people living there; they are not noble savages.... they will surely want to have all the goodies that we have and emit all the greenhouse gasses associated with that lifestyle.

The hope is that whatever the developed world has settled on by 2050 to achieve net zero, lower-income countries will be able to switch to directly instead of going through a phase of fossil fuel consumption. China was too early; India for example might see a much healthier trajectory. The association of greenhouse gasses with the lifestyle of the richest countries is hoped to be only incidental.

In the US, we also have large numbers of homes that have not been brought up to modern efficiency standards and cheap/outdated, grossly inefficient heating/cooling contributing. That number could probably be brought down quite significantly without negatively impacting quality of life by “simply” (I’m aware it’s a huge undertaking) properly insulating homes and in urban/suburban areas banning heating/cooling solutions below a certain efficiency threshold.

I'm Canadian most of our emissions this past year was because of forrest fires.

In that case there is so much to win by improving the mining/refining processes.

Yeah that sounds right, I'm just wondering where the materials and the labor come from. We don't just have 5% of GDP worth of those laying around, they're currently allocated to other things. Not saying it's impossible, but it's hard to estimate the repercussions.

GDP is a number without lot of meaning. Better thing to compare is the percentage of tax revenue. Total tax revenue of the world is $14.8T. So you need more than 30% relative increase in taxation.

> The price of renewables has plunged to be cheaper than fossil fuels

Is there a source for this? If you're referencing LCOE, remember that does not account for storage costs for intermittent power sources (wind, solar) so it's an incredibly misleading number.

Money isn't fake, it's a useful abstraction for describing the allocation of goods and services. We could describe the cost of transitioning from fossil fuels in terms of labor hours spent, miles not traveled in an ICE vehicle, tons of lithium mined, etc. But money lets us collapse all of that down into one number that we can get our heads around and which is useful for figuring out things like how much we need to raise taxes

Just because it is not solid, does not mean it is not real.

As long as it has value to people - it is real.

Meaning, as long as you can use it to buy things. And that is what people care about.

That stops the moment, people don't believe in the currency anymore. Then they will either use a different currency they do trust - or go back to trade little pieces of gold.

In this context money is just a unit of measurement. If we say that we need more of a particular kind of infrastructure and reduce a particular kind of activity, etc, then the discussion requires being able to say how much of those (many!) things and we can quantify all of those in terms of dollars.

It's a strawman to say that money is fake because no serious economist argues that money is "real". Of course it is fake. We use money because it's a useful way to organize society

It is a wealth transfer from people who currently have cash and earn cash (workers, since increases in pay lag the rate at which currency loses purchasing power) to people who have assets and COLA adjusted annuities (wealthy people and old people).

Yeah, the salaried folk who find out in hindsight will be really happy as well. /s

Look at Covid fiscal response causing permanent 30% inflation in the last 4 years. The climate+demographic response money printing operation will be way bigger than that.

> About half of CO2 emissions are electricity, heating and transport. Not beef.

Methane is between 30 and 200 times more dangerous than CO2 and a single cow produces 200 pounds of it per year.

Another fun fact: the mass of all cattle on the planet is higher than all other animals combined. All of them from cats to rhinos and wild horses.

> Telling folks to stop eating beef now is compounding the problem by making people just give up.

That's exactly my point: the real issues aren't related to government policies related to just focusing on CO2 emissions from energy but how much and what we consume.

What we eat, by far, is the element that most impacts the planet. By far. The others, besides using more public transport are very small.

But nobody wants to hear or face it because it implies how we live and eat.

Hell a single cotton shirt requires 2000 liters of fresh water, a scarce resource, I don't see as much arguments about how we consume but plenty of neverending EV and electricity gaslighting.

It's much simpler to point at vague problems

Pricing in externalities is probably the only way we can solve carbon emissions, and would still be very difficult. We would need global participation, otherwise carbon emissions can just be outsourced to other countries. Also, we need to decide the price of emitting carbon. Perhaps survey economists from every country and aggregate the answers somehow.

Lucky the Earth is infinite and so perpetual growth will work. /s

> You - as a citizen - don't need to reduce your consumption, but we as a society must manage that all activities are priced properly.

Oh, I agree, I'm not against eliminating anything, but a pollution sort of tax I would be perfectly fine with.

Like eggs taxed more than tomatoes, poultry more than eggs, pig more than poultry, etc, etc.

But it has to be taxed enough to make some dent in it.

I would be if I said it’ll work… at that point there won’t be anything to lose so might as well print.

Any large expenditure is going to cause inflation since it competes with the rest of market for materials, labor, or any other limited resource. It doesn't mean we shouldn't do it but we can't just ignore the consequences.

We have some crazy incentives to install new gas boilers in MA. I very specifically wanted to switch from gas to an air source heat pump and found there was only one company in the area who was willing to quote it (alongside their own, much cheaper, quote for a gas combi boiler) and their quote was outrageously non-competitive with local fossil fuel burning (in large part because our electricity is around $0.30/kWh, but also because they were the only supplier and even they didn't really want to do the work).

Even if the ASHP lasted forever, required no maintenance ever, and you had to buy a new gas boiler every 10 years, it would literally never make economic sense even if there weren't $2500 incentives on the gas boiler, but the movement on electric rates is definitely in the wrong direction if one wishes to displace natural gas with electricity (even at 400% efficiency).

Every year that things stay like this is pushing back the likely time to next re-evaluation for that property by another 20 years.

>So, no the cost is only marginal if you accept you will follow the depreciation curve of you infrastructure. And that's way too slow to reach the goal.

The linked article also mentions a way less aggressive timeline, which means there's less of "tear out existing equipment and replace with renewable" going on, which raises costs. Moreover, the argument isn't that there's no such costs, only that they're being overestimated.

>and builds solidarity/class consciousness.

Likely Trump voters are about the least likely to be receptive to terms like "solidarity/class consciousness", and implying that they're rubes that can't think for themselves is the exact sort of rhetoric that caused the Democrats to lose the election.

Replacing CO₂-emitting technologies is already happening. To argue for this plan would require proving at least the following:

1. Spending Wisely: Invest in technologies that work and also do not introduce more problems.

2. Trusting Who Spends: Governments or others must use funds on solving the issue (not just giving money to cronies).

3. Global Cooperation: Countries working together (does Russia who sees warming as helpful comply).

4. Dealing With Inflation: The plan should address the inflation it causes, as it will raise living costs for people already struggling.

5. Better Use of Funds: Proving this use of funds is better than spending on other global issues.

The amount of CO2 yet to be released depends on the amount of fossil fuel yet to be extracted. Current oil discoveries, wells, and coal mines will all be exploited as long as they are profitable.

It will be necessary to lower demand for fossil fuel enough that new prospecting becomes unprofitable. This will happen eventually due to the physics of oil drilling.

If you consider the amount of energy contributed to the world economy from fossil fuels, there is no clear path how to market alternatives in quantities that can make fossil fuels obsolete.

A more realistic scenario for around 2050 is that coal-power increases while oil for personal transportation is replaced by batteries due to high oil price.

A new energy source is not like a new technology that can be developed. It needs to be discovered - as in a scientific break-through. A plan can not assume that break-throughs occur.

GDP measures the total production of an economy. That is mostly equivalent to energy_consumption * p_efficiency.

Investing in new technologies that increase efficiency has always been a good decision. Maybe you can improve solar panels by a further 5% and batteries by 10%?

Realistically, energy_consumption will need to decrease, but that isn't actually that terrible.

Right, fossil fuels cause around 8 million deaths a year from air pollution [1], so regardless of climate change it'd be worth making a dent in those numbers.

And no, air pollution isn't just a problem in places like India and China, it kills over 100,000 Americans a year and costs society $886 billion. [2]

The evidence of anthropogenic global warming existing is extraordinarily strong [3] [4], but you're right, even if somehow 97% of climate scientists with studies published on the matter from 1991 to 2011 and 99% of them from 2012 to 2020 were wrong (in addition to NASA, The European Space Agency, NOAA, the World Meteorological Organization, and the national academy of science (or equivalent organization) of basically every country that has one), it'd still be worth avoiding millions of deaths a year and having established independent energy security.

1. https://www.bmj.com/content/383/bmj-2023-077784

2. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1816102116

3. https://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/8/2/024024

4. https://doi.org/10.1088%2F1748-9326%2Fac2966

Air pollution and CO2 emissions are different things. One causes cancer and heart issues, the other causes global warming.

Large amounts of particulate in the air (for example from a volcano) would probably cause global cooling since it blocks out the sun.

Those studies are... questionable, considering that US submarines have an order of magnitude higher concentration and the sailors on board don't turn into drooling idiots.

https://nap.nationalacademies.org/read/11170/chapter/5

Did you miss the part where the OP was proposing to basically rob the poor by inflating the currency? The poor and lower middle class already barely make ends meet even in the US, let alone the rest of the world. Plus, nobody can guarantee that the warming will stop. There have been periods in Earth's past when it was almost twice as hot as it is today. There have been periods when greenhouse gases (CO2 specifically, Ordovician period, 500M years ago) were _six times_ what they are today. Earth is still not Venus-like. Explain that one to me. Perhaps there are parts to this that we do not understand, and it might be premature to sacrifice the world economy and the livelihoods of the bottom 90% by income on this altar?

Note that I'm not saying that we shouldn't reduce polution, or build more green energy. Nuclear, solar, wind - all of the above, please. Let's just not turn this into a religion about which you can't ask any questions for fear of being burned at the stake, and to which any sacrifice is worthwhile and you're a heretic if you suggest otherwise. Science must be questioned, otherwise it's not science.

I can technically carry five small people on my cargo bike (urban arrow with extra front bench and rear mounted child seat) but people already think I’m extreme for some reason.

I use much less energy here in the Netherlands than I did in California and my quality of life is much higher.

Sure, but I said mostly plants, not all plants. I’m not trying to take away Thanksgiving turkey. But most of the meat we eat we do thoughtlessly and it’s not especially good anyway.

... and if you would compare it with those meat alternatives most probably healthier too.

If folks go vegan, go full vegan and accept permanent change in your life, not some desperate half-assed attempts to change as little as possible, which don't seem to work. That's valid for any diet, or any other change in life.

Ie I eat beef steaks maybe once a year. I can really appreciate them, but its just not something that I feel should be part of my frequent diet, can prepare tons of other tasty stuff that are lighter on meat. Control a bit your emotions and understand where they come from, and you can be happy as a clam with any diet.

> You're asking for global human behavior changes. Does that seem realistic?

https://www.lung.org/research/trends-in-lung-disease/tobacco....

    Long term, smoking rates have fallen 73% among adults, from 42.6% in 1965 to 11.6% in 2022.
    Over the last five years, smoking rates have fallen 17% among adults, from 14.0% in 2017.

With sufficient education, awareness, and incentives. I don't see why not.

There's already a massive shift in the hospitality industry with paper straws and bio-decompositable cutlery, saving the world from a tremendous amount of plastic.

Sure, we effected major changes by making it illegal to build homes next to jobs so re-legalising that should make a big difference.

And/Or adjust the population to a lower number. Many things are doable. But the collective consensus in not there and will not be there. Having children is mostly a privilege not a right.

Probably not working is even better...

They don't seem to care about that part.

As a wise man once said: „nature decays! But latinum is forever.“

Coordination problems aren’t typically too difficult. The USB C switch, or the python 3 switch all had serious frictional costs, but are generally doable in aggregate.

I think asserting it is a coordination problem is just a self-serving excuse for defection. It’s not as if we can’t switch if not everyone switches all at once. We just don’t want to go through the frictional costs of switching if others defect.

Yep, the primary problem is Africa.. but if the earth becomes inhabitable (this will happen sooner or later) this problem will be solved. But it'll most likely be brutal and preventing that brutality is precisely what I think humanity should focus on..

Yep, it's getting better in developed countries, but this will not lead to anything good unless we deal with those countries with very high fertility rates (like in Africa)..

Air travel is only 11% of all transport emissions, so it's not all that significant, especially given that it's often the only real option for covering vast distances.

But Americans do drive everywhere, and that's 48% of all transport emissions (just cars, not even counting trucks, with that it's more like 73% for all road transport). So yeah. Nobody gives a fuck.

Fun anecdote but I don't see how a handful of individuals being alleged hypocrites is relevant

By people that aren't aware of the problem or their ability to collectively change it, sadly. Everyone I know wants to do right by them and theirs; climate change having a meaningful impact on those doesn't seem to be on most voter's radar somehow

I do kinda feel like a responsible leader, that should be elected anyway for reasons other than intended climate policy, should also have the guts to put a topic on the table that means scary change for a massive decrease in worldsuck on a timescale we're comfortable estimating the broad effects for

Four wolves and a sheep voting on what is for dinner

Most people put trust into the non-obvious facts that the Earth is round, that it revolves around the sun, that humans evolved from apes... Why is it that climate change, specifically, is so hard to believe in?

We've known human caused climate change has been a thing for over a hundred years. You can disagree with a take but it's a fact that this has happened.

One factor: 38% of population in NYC had air conditioning in 1970, 90% do now.

The OP mentioned this as a symptom - "20 years ago I rarely used AC in the summer, now its on nearly every day from May to September." Increased AC use and the associated waste heat is a significant contributor to the urban heat island effect. https://news.asu.edu/content/excess-heat-air-conditioners-ca....

Well, the link you cite puts forward 2 hypotheses that could explain localized temperature change in Greenland, and does not mention "maybe this was global temperature change."

> Do you really think a change in air temperature of 8-15C over decades is repeatedly localized in just one place?

Sure .. we can see this kind of "stutter" in dynamic environments all the time, vortexes "pulsing" in stream water for example.

The "rapid warming" followed by "slow cooling" pattern speaks to a lower tempreture being the long term natural stable temp. for the local region duringthat much longer period .. but interrupted by a pulsing in the climatic cell stability that routinely brings warmth in from the equatorial zone - likely via water currents, possibly via air currents.

Such things can happen during stable global mean land|sea energy levels as that's literally just an average of the activity of all the cells across the planet.

> Do you really think a change in air temperature of 8-15C over decades is repeatedly localized in just one place?

I don't understand your point. This isn't a question where we have to extrapolate from this one study - you can look at similar measurements done in other places and answer this question once and for all.

Instead, you simply declare the hypothesis wrong, because...? You don't bring up an argument, you just ask whether others really think that.

We’ll be lucky if people blame technology, instead of other groups of people that they are then motivated to take vengeance on. That is what I fear.

Economically taxation would be the solution.

But the Carbon Tax credits/handling shows that we aren’t grown up enough to handle taxes properly.

$391B over ten years. The total sum of this effort is less than 2% of our GDP. UNCTAD says it'll take 18% of 48 countries GDP (distributed appropriately).

I think it was a serious question that was relevant to the conversation.

Aka the big grift

Florida - that's where Trump is staffing many folks in his cabinet. They banned the words "climate change" and "global warming" from being mentioned in any official document.

Florida - also where there are $100B+ disasters every year.

America is now the Florida of the world!

Korean and Japanese birth rates are very low.

The West is following suit.

We'll likely see a global population decline.

>The only way someone in a high income country can prevent this is to buy oil and permanently bury it.

This is needlessly roundabout (especially considering that the oil starts buried). One could simply scale down production (by regulation).

Cost of fuel is not the whole picture if they don't have the infrastructure to consume it

Maybe they'll do decades-long investments to set up new oil infrastructure after we've moved away from it, but even then: it isn't a 1:1 exchange. What we reduce doesn't simply pop back up elsewhere because, evidenced by our moving away in this scenario, there's economical alternatives. Even if it came back 100% in another country a few decades later, buying time really does help us here because we can take more and more preventative and adaptative measures. It won't prevent any and all issues, but a +3°C world in 2200 is still vastly better (and more predictable) than a +5°C world from accelerated oil use

Rather than buying and re-burying oil, you're probably getting a higher ROI (lower climate change adaptation costs) by spending those euros (that you'd otherwise spend on burying oil) on helping everyone (including oneself) not produce greenhouse gasses

An average American produces 14 tons of CO2 and an average Chinese person produces 9. Of those 9, he produces 3 at work, building TVs that are then bought by US consumers.

US/Canada/Australia have the worlds highest emissions per capita, except oil states like Kuwait. They have no moral high ground to lecture anyone about climate change.

If you disagree that we should consider population size when we compare emissions, I am open to that idea.

In that case we can make similarly absurd comparisons, between USA and Slovakia.

It is only thanks to China that we have affordable batteries and solar panels at all. And without China there would be no hope of green energy transition whatsoever

The data you linked to shows per capita emissions in the US are 70% higher than in China.

Money is fake so we can print as much of it as we want. The problem is that innovation can't be bought with money. Newton did not invent calculus because he wanted to get rich, he invented calculus to understand the universe. Money is not the issue.

The perceived risk of dramatic unexpected effects is too great for people to consider this before things start getting really bad.

We’ll see how people feel in 50 years.

Is there enough left?

Step 1: Figure out how to monetize reversing climate change.

Just write react app and scale it to as many servers as possible. After seeds funding ofc.

The history of life is a history of extinctions and I don't think humanity is an exception to that rule.

Sure it's more accurate to say current known methods are expensive or have side effects. For example, Carbon capture is very expensive. Another example, is sulfur dioxide provides reflective properties which was artificially cooling the earth (from shipping exhaust) until it was banned because it causes acid rain and a host of health problems.

We'll probably find other interesting geo-engineering techniques over time, but it is very unwise to bank on future solutions. Many things, like nuclear fusion, have been "just around the corner" for years and years.

Climate change is accelerating at a rapid pace. Go look at a chart of CO2 emissions over time. I think people default to thinking we're in some stable or slow state, when we're far from it. We're not just increasing CO2 emissions, we're increasing the rate of emissions. Debt (tech, financial or otherwise) when you have a path to pay it off is a useful tool, but taking climate debt with no known good solution is very unwise.

> I don’t agree that we know that it will be more expensive to cool.

This is not an agree or disagree situation. This is "I haven't googled it"

SO2 emissions are still strongly trending downward globally (e.g. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/so-emissions-by-world-reg... ). The change is especially dramatic in the US, per EPA reports. Conifers in my neighbourhood look remarkably healthier than what I recall from my childhood as a result.

The line of logic is that people attempt to push propaganda against the narrative to completely discredit it. Oil industry has been doing it from the sixties. They'll find any small mistake in the science, and say "see? They're wrong! Nothing bad will happen..."

Sure, the models might be a little too doomer. That doesn't actually change anything, and for the past ~70 years the only type this type of stuff was brought up was to deny climate change.

your argument has an invalid premise: "Models say X is happening." It's not the models that are saying X (temp goes up) is happening, it's empirical data.

A better argument is:

- We observe X is happening

- create a model of X happening

- use model of X to predict X in the future

- model of X might be or might not be flawed

- meanwhile, X is still happening in the real world

No. The greenhouse effect can be demonstrated in a lab. It requires complications to create mechanisms that deny the world outside the lab the evidence found within it.

We have no idea how to quantify the short-term effects. But increase the CO2 concentration in an insolated gas and its temperature will go up.

That doesn't seem like it applies here. The argument is that "expert consensus has consistently said a thing", which is a very reasonable stance to take.

The default would be to assume the scientific consensus is correct, then being evidence/reasons to show when it's not.

If you were really interested in answers you could look at the experiments of John Tyndall in 1859 that demonstrated what gases most absorb and retain radiant energy. He identified CO2 as one of the most important ones.

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That shouldn't be a problem for anyone grasping colloquial semantics. At any rate: falsify the hypothesis that climate change isn't influenced at all by human activity. Establish a causal relationship. Show me the studies. I'll wait.

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We keep getting told the average Joe is to blame for eating meat and taking flights whilst large corporations/industry laugh at us. Make it make sense.

What I'm asking is, what mechanisms allow such expansion to occur over distances that would be relevant to the measurement? The expanding edge of an urbanized area might be many kilometres away.

We've got satellites that can measure the inflow and outflow of radiation and see an imbalance.

We've got spectrographs that can look at that radiation to see which radiation is not balanced. We can see that what is happening is radiation coming in at wavelengths that the atmosphere doesn't block heats things which reradiate much of that energy as infrared which the atmosphere blocks.

Thanks to spectroscopy we know that it is CO₂ in the atmosphere that is largely responsible for this blocking.

We know that the increase in CO₂ levels over the last couple of hundred years is largely from fossil fuels rather than things like decaying vegetation, forest fires, animal respiration and flatulence, or volcanic gases because of isotope ratios in atmospheric CO₂.

CO₂ from living things or recently living things contains ¹⁴C. CO₂ from fossil fuels and volcanoes does not contain ¹⁴C. CO₂ from volcanoes contains a higher ratio of ¹³C to ¹²C than the ratio in atmospheric CO₂. CO₂ from fossil fuels contains a lower ratio of ¹³C to ¹²C than the ratio in atmospheric CO₂.

That allows scientists to look at the isotope ratios in the atmosphere and figure out how much of the CO₂ there came from fossil fuels and how much came from volcanoes. The result is that most of the increase is from fossil fuels.

As a sanity check that result also matches well with the amount of CO₂ that we'd expect to have been released based on the amount of known fossil fuel use.

So no, it is not a natural rise.

The article you posted says:

"Now that we have succeeded in capturing the natural climate variability, we can see that the projected anthropogenic warming will be much greater than that.”

That does not seem to support your claim of "natural rise".

"A continuous record of the past 66 million years shows natural climate variability due to changes in Earth’s orbit around the sun is much smaller than projected future warming due to greenhouse gas emissions."

“Now that we have succeeded in capturing the natural climate variability, we can see that the projected anthropogenic warming will be much greater than that.”

"For the past 3 million years, Earth’s climate has been in an Icehouse state characterized by alternating glacial and interglacial periods. Modern humans evolved during this time, but greenhouse gas emissions and other human activities are now driving the planet toward the Warmhouse and Hothouse climate states not seen since the Eocene epoch, which ended about 34 million years ago."

Please read the article you're linking. Unless this is an awkwardly executed joke that I'm missing?

The +1.5°C cannot be attributed to the natural transition from an ice age. It is happening way too fast compared to the thousands of years the Milankovitch cycle operates on. Also, you're conveniently ignoring the fact that, if anything, the climate should be getting cooler, not hotter, as we are entering an ice age, not exiting one[1].

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milankovitch_cycles#Present_...

And we all know how well adapted humans were for that period, right.

I'm not sure if this link is intended to contradict or reinforce the image from the previous link. The text of that link indicates that the research concluded that the Earth is currently much warmer than it ought to be given known natural processes.