As I read that report it seems to conclude that the rich nations will benefit from climate change. Which I suppose may explain why those same nations have largely done nothing to address carbon emissions.
We are having massive forest fires all across the country every summer, something I do not recall as a child. The west (everything west of Ontario) is in a massive drought. The east is getting tornados and flooding and the impacts of increasing hurricanes coming from the south.
The forest fires are because you don't recall them as a child. Forests need to burn, that's the natural order of things for millions and millions of years. That's why redwoods are fire retardant. It's why eucalyptus trees need fire to grow. Only when us dumb humans started putting them out all the time did it become such a big problem. Now there's far more flammable material in a forest to burn than there would have been if we allowed periodic fires, so when they do occur, it's insane.
Global warm is real and has real effect, but people need to stop attributing absolutely everything to it.
> The forest fires are because you don't recall them as a child. Forests need to burn, that's the natural order of things for millions and millions of years
This doesn't apply to many of the wildfires farther north in Canada, because no lives there in the first place. Historically the year-round moisture has made the trees "fire retardant". Now they can experience thunderstorms and burn for weeks and cover NYC in a blanket of smoke.
In terms of comfortable weather, I hope so, but I will add that there are millions of square kilometers of untouched forest that have rarely experienced dry spring/summers as we saw in 2023.
Canada had multiple wildfires so far away from civilization that it was impossible to reasonably control, but due to wind patterns the smoke covered much of Ontario and the northeastern US, including NYC, for nearly 2 weeks. Not to mention the other wildfires further west that impacted other parts of the population.
And there's a lot more forest to burn beyond that.
I think the optimal tenperature for infrastructure would be something in the 20C’s.
Much higher and tar starts to melt.
When it goes to -20 and below, you need to invest in sanding and snow plowing trucks to make the roads less slippery.
But when it gets to around 0, I suspect it’s actually the worst. Now you can use salt instead of sand & gravel. But you get many freeze-thaw cycles that wreck concrete and tarmac as liquid water seeps into places, then freeze & expand, etc. Toronto has this problem whereas Calgary does not.
A little bit of warming might be bad for much of Canada’s infra!
Locally? Probably yes. but it would still need tons of infrastructure change to for example pipe water to the great plains to avoid water shortages etc. But I think we'd still feel the effects that it has on other parts of the world, making it much harder to actually see any benefits
My understanding is climate change weakens the jetstream, which results in more frequent winds pushing cold air from the North Pole to the south, and pushing that cold air farther south.
Remember a few years back when Texas froze? Climate change means that will happen much more frequently.
So yes Calgary is cold. But this is a symptom of something much larger.
> climate change weakens the jetstream... this is a symptom of something much larger.
I don't like being downvoted when I'm right, so here are some sources for those doubting my comment.
The cold in western Canada is from a Polar Vortex, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/polar-vortex... Watch the video and they explain how polar vortex's occur from a breakdown in the usual jetstream and experiencing polar vortex's in el nino years is strange.
That data of coldest days each year is not sufficient to draw any conclusions from.
Yes, Calgary gets cold that's clearly not new. What is new, that from some quick google searches, this year they've had both record cold and record warm and record low snowfall and over the summer record fires. Which goes to my previous point that there is something larger going on.
This is not really a useful nor practical perspective in my opinion. You can be fully aware of it, but still live your life without unnecessary stress. Similarly, one day you will inevitably, invariably die. That doesn't mean you should live the rest of your life in fear.
It is certainly a calamity. The extent to which the threat is existential is very much open to debate, however. While doing nothing and letting it happen is a stupid and likely more costly choice in the long run, the idea of it being "existential" sounds like hyperbole to me. I suspect we'll adapt with moderate difficulty.
> the idea of it being "existential" sounds like hyperbole to me
I was speaking more generally about people's emotional responses to threats they perceive as calamitous or existential.
I've noticed that as I get older, the emotional highs and lows are less pronounced than when I was younger. Probably some combination of life experience, growing historical perspective, and an acceptance everyone's mortality.
Bus driver taps sign: Weather isn't climate. Occurrences of extreme weather isn't climate change. Long term trends in the frequency of extreme weather however, could be linked to climate change. But one dry or cold spell no matter how extreme isn't possible to attribute to climate change.
Pay attention and stop emitting carbon. This is an opportunity to push a paradigm shift of accessible and clean energy, able to be produced just about anywhere, instead of having to go to great lengths to extract it and combust it. I welcome the developing world’s increasing appetite for electricity, let’s get it done in a way that enhances human life, instead of forcing mass migrations and, more likely, death sentences to people who are unfortunate enough to live in countries that will one day be inhospitable to people.
Face the facts, if renewables were accessible, able to be produced everywhere and cheap as Big Green, Big Finance and Big Government says, the market would have already chosen it. But the reality is that renewables suck, and will completely obliterate the economy of every country pushing it blindly as it is already doing with Germany and the UK.
Meanwhile this will do nothing to reduce the use of renewables, because while the G-7 is committing economic suicide, it is only making oil cheaper for the rest of the world that is eager to develop themselves.
You can have as much bad science and marketing speak saying otherwise, but the energy prices tell the truth: Solar and Wind are fucking expensive. And we are justing playing with it because 40 years ago, we had people like you along with the Big Oil doing as much as they could to arrest the development of Nuclear Energy.
- improve local climate. Cities experience more extreme temperatures, especially in summer, than rural areas do because of many cities lacking tree shade, especially (as usual...) in poor neighborhoods [1]. How this can be done? Get rid of parking strips alongside streets, plant trees there, and build out public transport such as buses, trams or subways to replace individual transportation.
- help the local flora that does exist to become resilient - replace dying treets and bushes that can't cope with climate change with more resilient species, ban "mandatory mowing / watering / species of grass" clauses in HOAs (and enforce severe fines against anyone caught violating or pressuring HOA members to violate)
- improve local emissions. Fossil cars still emit lots of NOx that are (among other effects) lung irritants [2], and all cars and trucks produce brake and tire dust that are both lung irritants and contribute to the microplastic problem. Again, the solution is to build out public transport, to ban entire classes of cars and to take care to provide housing that is near to employers to reduce the amount of miles traveled in the first place.
- improve (or create!) "safe havens" for the community at large to mitigate the impact of climate change especially for the poorest and the elderly, like public "heat/cold rooms" for either winter or summer. Not everyone can afford installing or running AC systems or is allowed to install one in their first place, or the landlord doesn't care.
- improve cities' water handling aka "sponge cities" to mitigate the effects of severe rain and snowfall events - basically, create local paths where water can pass through to become groundwater instead of overflowing storm drains and wastewater treatment plants
All of this is basic stuff that will greatly improve the lives of residents in general and help become society at least able to adapt to climate change and its associated events, and in many cases does not require approval from higher-up authorities. Hell, a lot of it can even be done by (literal) grass-roots activists banding together.
good luck fighting NIMBY to allow high density housing. NIMBY block all new development ironically by using environmental regulation.
We all know building denser housing is better than expanding out. But people have all their saving tied to their house so no way they are going to vote for denser housing.
There is no way to "pressure" nimbys or politicians because their voting block has to much to lose.
I did not advocate for denser housing. For what it's worth: to the contrary, I advocate for strengthening rural areas - it makes property ownership possible in the first place, building out dense housing requires a lot of very expensive infrastructure, and the complete disconnect behind urban and rural life style and quality is one of the biggest contributors to the current political divide.
No it's not. Not by far. That's just to get cars out of already existing dense urban areas because as long as you take aboveground space for parking cars, you can't plant trees there, and massive amounts of cars in relatively small spaces produce really nasty local emission concentrations.
> rural areas with trams, buses and subways?
Suburbs can be perfectly well served by buses, connecting to train stations that in turn connect to larger agglomerations. The idea is to have a dense enough mesh so that almost no one needs a car for their day-to-day individual transportation needs. Employment-related transportation (such as farmers, tradespeople and the likes) is obviously going to need dedicated vehicles even in the future, but the primary goal is to get the 80% [1] of individual transport made using cars down to as close to 0 as possible because that's where the masses are made.
