Climate Change Question: When did you first learn about climate change??

@Thalassokrator said in #60:

Well, if you actually take a look at the observable data (like the Keeling Curve and tens of thousands of scientific papers from the last few decades), you'll have to agree that Climate Change is very much visible in real life. It's a phenomenon that is directly observable.

But the point is, you have to be willing to take a look in order to see something.
And what is the solution to this? To stop all the progress and go back to medieval times?
I think the main problem would be when the oil or natural gas end. In that moment we really would become medieval.

@asneiras said in #61:

Surely he is just giving a logical estimate and seems quite accurate.

There's nothing logical about a gut feeling. And it's demonstrably not accurate (as I have shown) whether it seems to be (to your gut feeling) or not. We are talking about objective reality here.

All of these studies have value and many of them are correct, only the interpretation that "we" give them is not exactly correct.

Says you. Yet you don't even argue why it is supposedly "not exactly correct", nor do you present any evidence or alternative interpretation. What am I to do with this baseless assertion of yours?

"Yes, the weather has always changed. But it has changed very slowly"

You either deliberately misquoted me (which would be intellectually dishonest) or you don't know the difference between weather and climate. I was talking about the global climate (global long term average of weather patterns over many decades), you changed it to weather (which is very much NOT the same as climate).

This depends on your slow definition, at the peak of any event things seems to change at a faster pace.

I implicitly gave a definition of "slow" change. Or rather I clarified what I meant by "drastic rate of change we experience now". Usually it takes thousands of years for the CO_2 concentration in the atmosphere to rise by 100 ppm (and it only does so at the boundary of a glacial period transitioning into an interglacial). Human activities have lead to an increase of 105 ppm over the last 63 years (despite already being in an interglacial). That's "drastic" when compared to the natural "slow" pace (which takes thousands of years). I thought this point would be reasonably clear.
It's even more drastic when compared with the rate of change that is typical during interglacials which (reading off values from the graph) seems to be around roughly 30 ppm per 10,000 years.

Maybe try reading the post you're responding to before doing so.

[...] at the peak of any event things seems to change at a faster pace

Not at all. At a function's local maximum the slope is horizontal and the rate of change is zero (by definition). In your words: At the peak of any event things change very slowly, otherwise it wouldn't be the peak.

https://i.ibb.co/QCDxvdL/thal.png

@bespredel88 said in #62:

And what is the solution to this? To stop all the progress and go back to medieval times?

Nobody is seriously proposing that.

While I understand why you personally wouldn't mind if your home country became a little warmer in the winters (I can empathise), Climate Change won't be all that great for the vast majority of humanity. And Russia mostly has continental climate (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continental_climate), which means very cold winters and (very) hot summers. Climate change might make your winters less severe, but it will unfortunately also increase the frequency of heatwaves in the summer.

More heat trapped in the Earth's atmosphere doesn't cause a continuous gentle warming (which indeed could sound enticing for people living in cold climate countries). It means more variability, more extreme weather events, more storms, more floods, more droughts, more intense heat waves etc. And all the problems that come with it.

If the warming goes on long enough, some currently inhabited regions (closer to the equator) could become uninhabitable (for part of the year) causing mass migration. There already are heat waves hitting India and Pakistan (and similar regions) which come very close to or even exceed (for a short amount of time) wet-bulb temperatures of 35 ºC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature#Wet-bulb_temperature_and_health

I quote: "A sustained wet-bulb temperature exceeding 35 ºC (95 ºF) is likely to be fatal even to fit and healthy people, unclothed in the shade next to a fan; at this temperature human bodies switch from shedding heat to the environment, to gaining heat from it. In practice, such ideal conditions for humans to cool themselves will not always exist – hence the high fatality levels in the 2003 European and 2010 Russian heat waves, which saw wet-bulb temperatures no greater than 28 ºC."

Climate Change is a net negative for humanity.
Proposed solutions include international cooperation that aims at significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions (mainly through increased use of renewable energy sources alongside others, changes to (public) transportation in urbanised areas, etc.), carbon capture (which will only work in conjunction with aforementioned emission reductions), as well as others (none of which require regressing to medieval times).

It's not as if such efforts hadn't worked before (international cooperation successfully reversed the depletion of ozone in the upper atmosphere, saving millions of lives from impending higher rates of cancer due to increased cosmic radiation):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol

I think the main problem would be when the oil or natural gas end. In that moment we really would become medieval.

Indeed, fossil fuels will run out at some point (100 to 200 years from now) anyways. We actually need some of these materials for other uses (cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, etc.). It's kind of a waste burning them up for transportation or electrical energy (if there already are cheap and renewable alternatives). If we could achieve significant emission reductions in the coming decades by switching to renewable sources of energy (solar, wind, hydroelectric, geothermal etc.) we would not only mitigate the effects of climate change but also help our children and grandchildren (by not passing on the problem of finite fossil fuel reserves on to them).

@bespredel88 said in #59:

But I would like my country , Russia, become a bit warmer :)
Until you're dealing with 90+ degree tempatures everyday. Trust me, you don't want the Earth to get hotter. Ever.

@bespredel88 said in #62:

And what is the solution to this? To stop all the progress and go back to medieval times?
Yes.

@asneiras said in #61:

This depends on your slow definition, at the peak of any event things seems to change at a faster pace.
Because they are.
@asneiras said in #61:
"Yes, the weather has always changed. But it has changed very slowly"
Weather and climate are 2 separate things. If you don't know that, then you need to go back to science class for 6th grade.

@LordSupremeChess said in #67:

Because they are.

Weather and climate are 2 separate things. If you don't know that, then you need to go back to science class for 6th grade.

You should know that language is fluid what is weather and what is climate today as a different meaning from some years ago. Just as "the weather" word meaning as always chamged and always will

@asneiras said in #68:

You should know that language is fluid what is weather and what is climate today as a different meaning from some years ago. Just as "the weather" word meaning as always chamged and always will

Bollocks! The term "climate" is a scientific term and therefore rigorously defined such as to leave little to no room for ambiguity. This definition hasn't significantly changed since at least 2001 when the IPCC gave the following definition:

"Climate in a narrow sense is usually defined as the "average weather," or more rigorously, as the statistical description in terms of the mean and variability of relevant quantities over a period ranging from months to thousands or millions of years. The classical period is 30 years, as defined by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). These quantities are most often surface variables such as temperature, precipitation, and wind. Climate in a wider sense is the state, including a statistical description, of the climate system."

The referenced "classical period" of 30 years was set up at the WMO's 1934 Wiesbaden meeting (89 years ago), where the technical commission designated the thirty-year period from 1901 to 1930 as the reference time frame for climatological standard normals.

Rigorous scientific classification of climate zones dates back to the 19th century, for example: the Koppen climate classification was first published in 1884:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Köppen_climate_classification

By contrast:

"Weather is the short term state of the atmosphere (and of the troposphere in particular) at a specific time and place, including the temperature, relative humidity, cloud cover, precipitation, wind, etc."

I think it's fair to argue that this definition is thousands of years old (and hasn't changed by much since then).

@asneiras said in #56:

a smaller change will be assimilated, for example, a fungus eats a particular plant that was responsible for creating humidity in some random place. That local spot dries up slowly, but it won't affect places farther away.
"some random place" cannot be defined.