Hexbear

4 points

4 years ago

2 C is the amount of warming that scientists and economists have somewhat agreed is the “reasonable” amount of heating that will occur if we start changing things right now. Above that and we start getting really bad climate feedback loops that could theoretically push temperatures to +5 C

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Pezevenk [he/him]@hexbear.net

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3 points

4 years ago

As far as I know there isn’t much basis to 1) managing to keep it below 2C (which is considered unlikely by now) or 2) that 2C is particularly important anyways. Bad stuff will and does happen below 2C, and there isn’t that much evidence that says “x happens at 2C” afaik. Like, I’m pretty sure they picked it because it’s a round number. The answer to the question “how much should we limit climate change” is always “more than what we are doing” and the answer to “where’s the tipping point and does it exist?” tends to be “who the fuck knows, it’s probably somewhere upwards of now”. I’m not sure I like how some people are taking the tipping point stuff and running with it to argue that it’s pointless to do anything anyways.

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4 points

4 years ago

Predictive modeling is just predictive modeling, and science is just science. The expectation of people (of which I’m not going to presume where you fit on this) is that these academic pursuits are supposed to be infallible or that they are the hard authority on ANY matter is farcical. The truth is, they are working with the data as the receive it, and with knowledge that has been ascertained, and its a giant machine (academic work that is) that every now in then has some break through or idea that gets mainstream and popular amongst people and politicians.

So idk if I’m just riffing with you or not, but yeah it’s always been “who the fuck knows”, even the papers that you’ve seen cited in news articles like the one in this thread, they all work off the preconditioned assumption that they could be wrong, and everyone should know that. But 2C of warming is essentially, according to what we know right now, the point where it gets really fucked.

And yeah, I know academics are stuffy and arrogant a lot of the time, think they’re really right and are willing to fight like hell to look at data and outright lie or obfuscate the truth. But at least on this, whether they’re lying and it could be sooner, or later, it hardly fucking matters, because if we don’t do anything at all, it’s pretty much guaranteed, unless you (I’m using the general case of you) are a climate denier.

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Pezevenk [he/him]@hexbear.net

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2 points

4 years ago

But 2C of warming is essentially, according to what we know right now, the point where it gets really fucked.

Yes, what I’m saying is that given what I’ve seen this is just not the case, 2C is just a somewhat random threshold. It’s not something academics came up with as an actual threshold. I’ve been searching about where this came from and the sources I’ve found seem to say that it’s not really an important threshold, just something that’s sorta useful to think about as a milestone: https://theconversation.com/why-is-climate-changes-2-degrees-celsius-of-warming-limit-so-important-82058

The reason I’m not crazy about these sorts of thresholds people come up with is that if we pass them or if we discover we are bound to pass them, then many people will just use it as an excuse to say “welp, we did what we could, now stop bothering us and let us do whatever”. Though I will admit I don’t know as much as I would like to about the subject and I’m planning to read some books on climate to better understand what is happening.

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2 points

4 years ago

2C warming “limit” comes from the “Report on the structured expert dialogue on the 2013–2015 review” FCCC/SB/2015/INF.1 published by the UN. You can just copy and paste that to get a pdf, since I’m not sure I can just post a link to a pdf here.

Furthermore from this same document (which is the one most commonly cited by the media and the one most people haven’t read at all but is where all these ideas somewhat were coalesced). Pg 15 of this same report goes into detail about what is expected at +2C. You can read the full thing there, once again but the narrative put forward by the commission is that “… some unique [ecological] systems would be at high risk; the risks of combined ocean warming and acidification would become high, and, for some phenomena such as mass coral bleaching, very high; and crop production would be at high risk…” with still some potential for crop production to be adapted. Furthermore, scientists go on to express that the +2C “limit” should be considered a “guardrail … that needs to be stringently defended, while less warming would be preferable”

Note that this is also 6-8 years old, but the consensus among academics present at this hearing is that “bad shit will happen, and we need to limit it to 2C or the risks for even worse shit go up significantly” (and that’s my editorialization but is an idea echoed by these experts throughout this report). They were likely also bourgeois academics, considering that they are at the UN, of all places, giving testimony, so the actual information has probably 1.) developed to further understanding in 6-8 years and 2.) is probably actually worse than what the bourgeois academics are willing to let on, in their interest, to not look like “sensationalists” to be able to collect more funding for their respective universities.

Like I said, these limits aren’t even described by the scientists themselves as this sort of magical thing. They admit that going a bit over is recoverable, and that staying below is preferred. It’s this pervasive anti-intellectualism and further still complete obfuscation of the facts, downplaying of the impact is going to have on us, by the media and, not to be overly harsh, but people such as yourself who, you even admit don’t know as much as you’d like, talk about this with an authority on the matter, thats going to continue to lead to the exact “well we went past that limit nothing else to do but die” mentality. I know the US education is abysmal, but I also know, having been a product of one of the shittier manifestations of it myself, that we all learn (or should have learned) how to talk about things that we aren’t experts in, by citing experts and reports that are found, and then discussing their merits in our analysis. For what its worth, most of the socialist literature that we all claim to have read sometimes, all also do this same “quoting and discussing” method that I’m talking about. It’s something we, as the collective “left” should all get back to doing, since we look all like dumbasses when we don’t.

Your own source is just some journalistic rag (not to mention its listed as one of the first 3 articles if you google searched “2c climate change limit theory”), that doesn’t even cite anyone even saying that the source of the theory of 2C is an economist. They just say it as though it were a fact and then go on to link the paper he wrote in 1975, as though the work of climate scientists in weighing the merit of that idea or the data that we have today in 2021 showing that 2C, as a concept, and as a pretty model-able idea, is completely negligible.

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Pezevenk [he/him]@hexbear.net

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1 point

4 years ago

I really disagree with the “bourgeois academics” thing. I won’t get into it but I will say it is a huge oversimplification and a big misunderstanding of material interests, and it leads us to wrong conclusions. This same line of argumentation has been used by climate denialists to argue the exact opposite, that climate scientists are exaggerating risks precisely to increase interests and funding of their disciplines. It’s kind of a dangerous road to tread on, and predictions have generally been reasonably accurate within a certain margin of error so far, ignoring the noise of bad research produced by fossil fuel corporation funded “scientists” etc, so I’d rather stick to that than get into weird rabbit holes about exactly how bourgeois the academics are.

It’s this pervasive anti-intellectualism and further still complete obfuscation of the facts, downplaying of the impact is going to have on us, by the media and, not to be overly harsh, but people such as yourself

Uhhh sorry but I never did or said anything “anti intellectual”, if anything the only one doing that here is you with the bourgeois academics stuff. All I said is that the 2C limit is nothing particularly important scientific, like some kind of magic switch, just something that was put there as a milestone, which you even agreed with so I don’t know what we’re doing here really.

Like I genuinely don’t understand your post and what you are trying to prove. The person who wrote the article I linked to (which btw doesn’t say anything that’s particularly in opposition to what you are saying) isn’t some rando journalist, it’s a meteorology professor who is a member of climate change awareness groups and advisory boards, and he used to be the NOAA’s chief operating officer. I never claimed I did in depth research on this particular topic, so idk what the first results thing is about. I’ve got some books on climate science for that and I have downloaded the IPCC AR5 report but I’ve only had time to skim them yet. However I haven’t really found any reference to 2C there. Like, if you showed me something that said there is something particularly important about that specific number then I’d love to see it but you really don’t seem to disagree that 2C is not that special beyond being much riskier than 1.5 but less risky than 2.5C, so I’m really not sure what you are trying to do beyond start some kind of debate out of nothing.

Like I said, these limits aren’t even described by the scientists themselves as this sort of magical thing. They admit that going a bit over is recoverable, and that staying below is preferred.

Yes, exactly, that is what I have been saying. It could have been 1.9. It could have been 2.2. That’s all I said.

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0 points

4 years ago

I wasn’t trying to debate or really even fight. It isn’t really my intention when communicating to ever debate (they’re useless) but to contribute to the discussion we were having. I know this is long since dead but at the end of the day, I have to have some honor about this and admit to my mistakes.

Like I said, I wanted to first apologize to you, sincerely. I think that among the confusion about what it was you were saying, and what exactly your viewpoints were, I unnecessarily railed against your post, when really my issues are my own, aimed at “internet discussion” culture being really low tier forms of discussion usually.

What follows is basically a huge effort post, but I’m hoping you do actually take the time to read it, judge its merit and hopefully at least clarify what I was trying to do, and feel free to respond back if you feel like having a conversation about it.

I wanted to offer up clarifications about what I wrote, because you communicated that you weren’t really able to understand what I was doing. Like I said, the point, for me, is never to just sit there and shit on someone for no reason. And I tried to be as favorable in my interpretation of what you were saying as possible, but I think that still in the end the ideas on what these ‘limits’ are supposed to represent is still not ultimately understood, from which I think you’re drawing some really damaging conclusions to the collective understanding on what is going on here.

In the report itself they describe it more like “‘x event’ has ‘y amounts’ of risk associated with it” which should clue you in to the complicated nature of talking about this with any degree of certainty. To enumerate, on pg.15 of that report, they list various degrees of risk associated with generally catastrophic ecological events at +2C, and later on +4C, to weigh them against each other. There is also general consensus (not linked, but sources are widely available on both these matters) that there are certain climate runoff effects associated with permafrost melting in Siberia (which is already occurring at current levels of warming), or, explicitly listed here, ocean acidification, which is categorized in that document as “high to very high risk” in certain areas. Your words I was responding to, were when you said “… 2C is just a somewhat random threshold. It’s not something academics came up with as an actual threshold…” come with the obvious presupposition that there is someone out there saying, to quote the journal you linked, that we “fall off a cliff” at 2°C". Which I am saying is completely incorrect, that no one person taken serious, nor is there any (that I can find) peer reviewed publication on the matter out there that has ever been saying that. So yes, we agree, but you have managed to mischaracterize aspects of it, and draw harmful conclusions from this, such as when you replied to another person saying “…we’re very far from agricultural collapse…”, or that it was your guess that “…2C is just some somewhat arbitrary threshold to have as a target.”, when the document I provided both highlight that crop yields are at “high risk… with some adaptability” at +2C warming, and that this “+2C warming guard-rail” is intended to highlight,not arbitrarily that significant deviation from +2C warming could and would have devastating impacts if it were, and as it is likely, to occur. So much so that the general consensus throughout the article, although not explicitly expressed, but implicitly expressed, is “either we keep warming to 2C or less, or if we go above it in any significant manner the next thing we should be planning for is what to do about 4C of warming”, which I am saying is probably because they have in mind that the probabilistic likelihood that one or more of these climate feedback loops occur is high, considering the vast amount of literature on the effects of permafrost melt in releasing CO2 and methane into the atmosphere, or how the death of the ecology in the ocean by acidification leads to, at first, more CO2 being absorbed by the ocean, and then as things die, less being absorbed by the ocean, causing a sort of “sling shot effect”, as what we are already emitting is being less absorbed by the oceans.

Yeah, it’s a shit-posting website, but when you or I or anyone out there goes and states things with authority, people who are reading that will either say “yeah that person is bullshit” or “that makes sense to me”, and when its on a topic with as much nuance, with these crazy probabilistic outcomes, which impacts us the most, which carries existential calamity as its conclusion, it is critically important that we approach that conversation with diligence, or we should just not be having the conversation at all, to save the reader the terror caused by badly concluded, often fantastical views on the issue. Which means, as clearly as possible, citing our sources, discussing those sources, and if possible analyzing them, in a clear and concise manner, and then delivering our conclusion on it, so that everyone can clearly see why and how you come to think the way you do, wrong or right. Which is what all of years 8/9/10/11/12 of school are for, and not to mention college, were primarily devoted to developing, and which is precisely the thing that it seems people quickly forget the minute the conversation takes place on the internet. My mistake is here too, so I’m not free from criticism.

This touches on what I think was a mischaracterization of my bringing up of bourgeois academics as somehow anti-intellectualism, when I used those same academics as the source for where I’m drawing conclusions, I just don’t really understand how that makes much sense at all. It’s just important to analyze your sources to be transparent to whoever is reading. The purpose is to show you and everyone else that I am analyzing these sources and not just baseless accepting what they are saying, or that it is still 100% relevant. And not to lecture you, when we attack sources, like the journal you provided, it’s to point out “Hey this source is not characterizing something correctly, or is flawed in its understanding by bias or other credible factors” or “Hey the article you read I think was misunderstood by you and your conclusions aren’t necessarily correct”. The article did make some mistakes, of course, in liberal academic fashion, making that their first and most pompous point, that “the economist shouldn’t have more credibility on this matter than I do” without giving any background to the fact that this person was a climate economist (which is just a fancy position for “someone trying to tell capitalists that they have a way to organize the production to not destroy the planet, that involves them staying in power”) comes to mind first. But also that article sneaks the final, and most harmful idea in at the end, when stating “… if it is not met, we should do everything we can to meet a 2¼°C or 2.5°C goal…” which, takes no accountability of the published research on climate runoff events, and effectively just gives capitalists the out to say “Oops, well we passed 2.5C guess we’ll have to settle for 3C” and incrementing onward, clearly just a dangerous idea in general.

The point, or “why” I wrote all this today and yesterday, is not to debate-bro you endlessly so you submit to my form of thinking, but to just show you “hey, the conclusions and characterizations you’re drawing aren’t what they are saying at all. Here’s the document where ALL of this talk comes from, in the media and otherwise, that you weren’t able to find (which is okay!), here’s what they are saying.” I don’t expect everyone to know so much about everything. At the end of the day, I’m working class, you’re probably working class and if not then great, you have much more time than I do to research this stuff and I hope that you’ll learn more than I ever will about it. But what I wanted to do was to outline what I’ve just said above, and then to outline that “we really need to think about what we are saying, and if we are making claims, we need to show where we get our conclusions from, and analyze those sources too.”

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