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CO2 Emissions Rose for the First Time in 4 Years (vice.com)
Human emissions of carbon dioxide have gone up for the first time since 2013, according to the UN's ninth annual Emissions Gap Report, meaning the world isn't on track to mitigate the worst of climate change's already disastrous effects. From the report: The report, published on Tuesday, says that while carbon emissions stayed relatively level between 2014 and 2016, carbon emissions in 2017 went up by 1.2 percent. Composed by climate scientists using the most up-to-date scientific data, the report aims to determine whether we're on track to meet the goals set by international climate agreements, such as the 2015 Paris Climate Accord. The "emissions gap" is the difference between how low our emissions need to be, and where they actually are. The UN report concludes that the world isn't hitting the emissions targets necessary to curb warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. While the goal is not impossible, it's unlikely to be met under current political conditions, which have rendered us unable to take significant action against climate change for more than half a century. "According to the current policy and [Nationally Determined Contributions] scenarios, global emissions are not estimated to peak by 2030, let alone by 2020," the report reads. "As the emissions gap assessment shows, this original level of ambition needs to be roughly tripled for the 2C scenario and increased around fivefold for the 1.5C scenario."
Yeah, stick your head in the sand and pretend things aren't happening...
at this stage you'll drown before long
Fully licensed blockchain psychiatrist
Carbon reduction is hard, there are often a lot of steps which are counter intuitive
For example it takes less carbon to ship Apple from China to California then it does from New York to California. Mainly because cargo ships use less fuel per ton of goods then shipping via semi-truck.
Then we have the Automobile guilt. While your home (in most climates) is polluting more then your car.
To fix this solution we need real leadership who is willing to realize the problem is more then just solar panels, wind turbines and electric cars. It is taking a look at all our energy usage finding wastes and inefficiencies. Making sure businesses are playing by the same sets of rules globally just so we don't offset our emissions to an other country, because they will undercut our price.
Such issues is too complex for average Joe Sixpack to deal with, or even an Latte drinking hipster. It will require a global change with everyone playing by the same rules, and firm penalties for anyone who wants to cheat the system.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
People who are ignorant of science are not "skeptics", they are "ignoramuses"
Flat Earthers, for instance, are not skeptical, They are willingly uninformed.
According to the chart on page 9 the US is doing pretty well.
Yet somehow China which has 27% of global emissions and went up 17% is marked as "on track to meet the targets under current policies".
Those targets must not be very serious
But it IS a political issue, as soon as we start talking about legislation mandating behaviors!
The true "denialists" aren't that relevant, if the science is solid enough to prove them wrong. You'll never get everyone to accept almost anything. We still have a Flat Earth Society and a number of people refuse to accept the theory of evolution.
What DOES matter is what you propose to do about the issue. If you want to research machines that could efficiently extract excess CO2 from the air? That's VERY different than trying to implement "carbon taxes" or imposing Federal regulations demanding a halt to the use of a particular fossil fuel (like coal).
Just because researchers come to a consensus that the planet's climate is slowly increasing in temperature doesn't mean they need to become political - advocating taxation and regulation. If our technological advances are what got us into this mess, they can get us back out too. People will always go with the options that cost them the least money, and give them the most benefit. Improve cleaner energy alternatives so they're cheaper and better, and people will gladly stop burning oil, natural gas and coal!
Unfortunately the climate change deniers are fed their diet of bullshit by a bunch of extremely wealthy people who stand to gain financially from continuing on the current course. (In the short term anyway).
These same wealthy people also control much of the US political system, so what they want, they get.
We should treat them with the contempt they deserve, but they have power and are not afraid to use it.
Skepticism would be asking questions and then listening to the answers.
But it IS a political issue, as soon as we start talking about legislation mandating behaviors!
Whether the science is correct is not a political issue. The facts are the way they are regardless of your political viewpoint.
What we chose to do about it (or even, whether we should chose to do anything about it) is a political issue. But that is completely different from the science question.
When I hear people denying the validity of the science, and when you question them they say the science is wrong because they don't agree politically with some of the proposed solutions: this is denialism. (You can tell these people because within about one minute of opening their mouth they start talking about Al Gore. Deniers are obsessed with Al Gore.) The validity of the science doesn't depend on whether your political ideology is able to solve problems or not.
Show me the CRU data used in the IPCC reports, unaltered, along with the methods they used to alter the data and reasons why.
Oh, you can't? You don't like peer review? You want to hide the data and delete a few weeks before a judge forces you to release it via a FOIA request?
The science IS political when you literally break the law to prevent peer review, and then claim since you weren't charged you did nothing wrong (which just shows the prosecutors are politically corrupt as well).
Not a single person can answer why the CRU did this in a way that doesn't make them sound like a partisan idiot shill.
It may be real, it may not, but the AGWers have lied so frequently and hidden data from peer review I pretty much assume they always lie at this point.
Just because researchers come to a consensus that the planet's climate is slowly increasing in temperature doesn't mean they need to become political - advocating taxation and regulation.
Political largely means who's going to do what. This problem is going to take money, and resources to solve. That's inherently political. Whether you use legislation or regulation to figure that out is just window dressing. You can't escape the politics.
Improve cleaner energy alternatives so they're cheaper and better, and people will gladly stop burning oil, natural gas and coal!
That's all great, except for the people selling oil, gas, and coal. Those people don't want to change, cuz it'll cost money. I think you'll find people heavily biased towards the status quo. Change is scary!
The point is, the world isn't quite as simple as you make it. There's vested interests in the world, and a large natural inclination AGAINST change. What if the investments take 10 years to pay off? We live in a world where a lot people consider a 1 year investment "a long time". There's also irrational behaviors (well documented) where people heavily discount the future. They'll chose $10 now over $12 in a week.
*don't give me "but...but...per capita emissions are lower in China!" First, it's an absolute problem, not a per capita problem. We don't talk about per capita CO2 levels. Per capita is West-hating ecomarxist apologists' desperate to find a way to blame the US for everything.
If you have, say, 100 in group A generating a total of 500x pollutants, and you have 1000 people in group B generating a total of 1000x pollutants, if A tells B that 1000 is more than 500, so group B needs to cut their outputs more than group A... why should B listen? Group A sounds like a group of greedy hypocrites, having a much higher standard of living that energy use brings while denying it to others.
Per-capita is extremely important unless you want to argue that one group of people is just far more important than another, and thus entitled to pollute more. If you go down that path, don't expect that the other people are going to pay much heed to your demands that they cut their emissions. Lack of per-capita controls is why I opposed climate treaties that put big caps on the US, but was fine with allowing, say, India to greatly increase their own per-capita pollution.
Seriously? Why the hell should people in Canada be able to release nearly 21 tons of GHG/person while you criticize India at 2.28 or China at 8. I live in Ottawa Canada, we might have the worst urban planning anywhere. The city almost entirely white collar jobs, young and educated. 95% the new housing in the last 20 years has been sprawling urban car dependent neighbourhoods. You have to have a car here. Half my neighbours have never walked to a store, hair cut or recreational facility in the entire time they have lived here. It's just not possible. People use their front yards for piling snow and the back yards for dogs to shit in. Kids can't walk to school because we don't have sidewalks and the snow banks and parked cars would mean walking in the middle of the road. Buses don't work because the streets aren't on a grid so there are no good places to put a stop. We have tens of thousands of office jobs in my neighbourhood and no one can walk to work. The offices are surrounded by seas of parking so wide everyone has to drive to go for lunch. It's actually terrible for our physical and mental health. Having kids in the suburbs should qualify as child abuse.
You want to fix climate change, bulldoze the suburbs with your politicians still there.
No one is skeptical about the science behind the Earth' s climate changing.
This isn't true. You see "CO isn't a pollutant, it's plant food" across the denialosphere.
People are skeptical of the completely off-the-rails scenarios that science proposes if we don't stop the warming.
If science proposes it then theres a line of reasoning to it from evidence.
Doomsday scenarios have been sold to the public since the beginning of time, and the solutions are always the same: Give the government more money and control over your life.
This is the fearmongering that fossil fuel interests are engaging in. But some things are taxed, and freedoms don't end.
Have you ever read up on the bullshit that "scientists" predicted at the first Earth day back in the 70s? 4 billion people were supposed to die from starvation by 1985.
Have you ever read up on the theory of Relativity? Scientists predicted gravitation and time dilations precise to the limits of measurement. And the predicted gravity waves have now been observed kicking off a new era in astronomy. Have you ever read up on medical science? Vaccinations? Germ theory and antibiotics? Life expectancy at birth has increased 60% in the USA in the years 1900 to 2000.
Scientists are nothing more than political mouthpieces.
Really. You don't believe in the medical advances or technological advances that have been made.
Do you remember networking before Wi-Fi?
Remember when it was Global cooling?
A misperception. The science was at best equivocal on coming global cooling.
The ozone layer?
Yes. We got rid of CFC emissions, but the ozone hole is still very extensive. It contributes to blindness and skin cancer especially in the southern hemisphere.
Overpopulation?
Yes. The world uses about 30% more resources that it produces every year. They are being depleted, and if it crashes it will get nasty.
Global warming? Anthropogenic global warming?
Yes. It's warming.
They've literally been wrong about the consequences of this shit every time.
They really haven't.
Stfu and face the facts that humanity doesn't understand shit about this world.
This shouldn't be a source of comfort. It means that there will be impacts of climate change that no one has yet realised.
It is a bit disingenuous not to mention that a big part of the US's recent reduction in emissions have been due to the 2008 financial crisis, and the temporary losses in production that resulted from it, and were not necessarily due to any particular nobility of purpose or deliberate action of the US government. When China suffers a big recession or depression (which seems likely in the near future, from what I have been reading), the same thing will happen to them.
Also, the Trump administration has repeatedly been opposing attempts to deal with, or even recognize the existence of, global warming and its consequent climate change. For instance, one of its first actions was to essentially tell NASA that it was no longer in their purview to point their satellite telescopes down at earth, and that they should exclusively be focused on outer space exploration (despite the fact that NASA had been the expert in earth monitoring up to that point). Apparently the Trump administration is so certain of the nonexistence of climate change that there's no longer any need to actually measure its status or get objective temperature measurements and other data. They've also been repeatedly weakening EPA regulations, claiming climate change is a "Chinese Hoax" etc., all without supporting evidence. I'm sure that the fact that the fossil fuel industry heavily disproportionately funds Republicans has nothing to do with all of that. /s
Regardless, when the government is doing virtually everything it can to fight any attempt at controlling climate change, and individual states like California are instead forced to take action (such as launching their own satellites) due to the fact that the federal government has basically completely failed to do anything (and states must then fight the federal government to do it!), I think it's shows a fair amount of chutzpah to attribute the credit for the U.S. carbon emission reduction at the hands of the federal government as if Trump deserves credit for the reductions that have gone on. (Definition of Chutzpah: A child that kills his parents and then throws himself on the mercy of the court on the grounds that he's an orphan.)
You do not appear to have considered the possibility that the point of the Paris accords was to get countries to agree, in principle, that there was a problem and that something needed to be done about it, and that it was never intended to be the final agreement between countries: it was only a first step, with additional steps added as needed when it became evident how effective it was, and to what degree countries were actually complying with it. The fact that the US is now trying to pull out of the Paris agreement completely means that we now have no credibility when it comes to the later steps in which we might have pressed for a stronger agreement or could have pressured other countries to comply more fully with their informal commitments. By characterizing the Paris agreement as "virtue signalling" you are missing the entire point of it.
Personally, I think the best solution to the problem is probably some sort of market-based solution such as a carbon tax, thus turning the market externality of greenhouse gas pollution into an internality that can be handled by competition within a free market. That's a very "conservative" approach to the problem (at least according to the old definition of "conservative" as opposed to whatever is going on now) but we won't ever get there as long as the party who is historically the one to advance such solutions instead finds it's in their financial and political best interests to pretend that the problem doesn't exist at all, and thus fight any attempt to solve it.
Characterizing the left as SJW's damages your credibility, by the way. That kind of labeling of opponents only shows that you think you know what they're going to say before they say it, and blinds you to nuances in their opinons that you may not be familiar with. This is not a "my tribe" vs. "your tribe" battle: It's a fight
You missed one of the options -
3. Stop spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year on polluting the air and propping up corrupt middle eastern dictatorships and fix the problem of fossil fuel reliance today.