Climate and Environment: Cat 5 Hurricane Milton, 165 mph winds

It’s because it’s easier to heat up land than a giant ocean.

Area where I am is fine, but goddamn much of Vermont is a fucking mess with all the flooding.

So apparently scientists in South Korea claim to have found a room temperature ambient pressure superconductor, but most scientists are highly skeptical of their claims. Most likely this goes nowhere, but if they’re actually right, I believe this would be an escape from climate change?

The number of people desperately trying to maximize personal credit for this thing is a pretty big green flag. We’ll see.

I don’t know about that. but, the consequences would definitely be drastically world changing.

There’s a lot of reasons to be skeptical. Their method is easy to reproduce so it should be known soon.

People have made the exact same claims many times before, it’s always been shown to be false. Lots of people are saying these guys’ particular study has a lot of red flags but some to be optimistic about.

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Right, this feels like a longshot but there’s a chance, and we’ll know soon. In the mean time, not being a science bro, I’m curious to hear more about the awesome implications. Sounds like being able to efficiently store and transmit electricity in ways that make solar power far more feasible for all our energy needs? Quantum computing? Levitating magnet trains?

I assume most of this stuff would be years away even if this discovery holds, but it seems like it would give us a lot of outs against climate change in maybe 10 years?

The only thing I’m sure about how this is actually going to run out is that it won’t stay the way it is all that much longer. Either we’ll drastically reduce our emissions somehow (unlikely) or we’ll really go gloves off with the geoengineering. I doubt the planet will even be allowed to pass 1.5C of warming even if we have to trigger even more ecological disasters to stop it.

I think I said this next door, but yeah my optimistic (possibly SSC-ish) take is that we’ll expoententially ramp up our attempt to science the fuck out of this crisis and eventually succeed, as long as there’s money to be made by someone in the process.

Yeah I don’t think we’ll stop consuming the amount of energy we do, but I do think we’d be willing to invest 15% of global GDP for 10 years on R&D to let us leave it all hanging out.

Yeah this is simply not going to be allowed to happen. We would 100% put coolants in the atmosphere first. And unfortunately that’s where this conversation goes from here unless we run hotter than the sun on science.

5G is turning the frogs gay was probably just a trial run for demonizing whatever technology is invented to solve the climate crisis

coolants in the atmosphere? we’ve outpaced even the most dire predictions made as recently as 10 years ago that were projected 20-30 years in the future. Lots of this stuff can enter a feedback loop where this stuff accelerates. Even if we can somehow bring down the temp doesn’t matter, the water that circulates in this current has a 1000 year cycle, it’s very sensitive to salinity, you can’t just suddenly change that chemistry on a dime.

the gulf of mexico is so hot right now it’d probably burn you if you stayed in it too long. we haven’t even technically entered el nino, and believe me if you think this year is hot you’re gonna laugh by this time next year.

we’re fucked. the end is beginning. this is literally the opening scene of “day after tomorrow.” lol.

They’re going to release vast amounts of reflective particles into the atmosphere, or they’re going to dump unbelievable amounts of iron dust into the ocean, or a few other distinct possibilities that would work.

The problem isn’t that these solutions wouldn’t work, the problem is that they have pretty significant drawbacks that while maybe not as bad as breaching 1.5C and seeing the currents break down are still extremely bad.

Let’s be super clear all that is happening here is that we geoengineered the planet hotter by accident. The problem is that the scale of warming event we’ve created is really really big and has already had huge impacts, and that was distributed over a significantly longer period than we would have to bend it back the other way. So we’d have to go fast and going fast = doing something on a pretty big scale.

If you look back at history you’ll see this pattern happen repeatedly. Pretend there’s no problem until it’s festered into a really big problem that has the potential to destroy everyone - overreact to the problem to a gigantic degree and do something super destructive that destroys the original problem but usually seeds the next problem. And so on ad infinitum.

Climate change is a big goddamn problem that itself was spawned when humanity solved the problem of where to get cheap energy for over a century.

What I’m sure about is that being fatalistic about it is bad for your mental health (as is following it closer than necessary it’s not like it’s something you can do anything about). It’s really bad for sure, but try to be grateful you weren’t born in the year 536 lol. They had a much more compelling reason to think the world was ending than we do. Several.

The geoengineering thing is happening. Just how we warmed the world up by releasing a ton of carbon there’s options for cooling it back down. I’m not a scientist, but I do know an ever increasing amount of resources are going to get pointed at that problem until something works. Hopefully we don’t end up doing something horrifying. I’m pretty scared of what we might do to the atmosphere of earth between now and the end of this century.

my mental health is fine, what seems less healthy is looking at the last 30-40 years of “danger! stop now or else!” we’ve just blown right past over and over and concluding it will be fine this time, as we’re in the middle of what is likely developing into a global war and massive supply chain and resource issues.

buy land in alaska is the healthy thing to do

Bad news, according to my actuary brother the place in the western hemisphere that is going to stand up the absolute best to climate change is… Ohio. Apparently it’s north enough that it’ll remain livable, far enough away from the ocean that hurricanes won’t be a major issue, and it already kind of sucks and will continue to kind of suck right on through this basically.

I’m still not buying land in Ohio.

https://www.science.org/content/article/spectacular-superconductor-claim-making-news-here-s-why-experts-are-doubtful

Boooooo I’m here for the optimism and naive hopefulness!

The world is due for some rungood, after Trump and COVID and the war and food shortages.

Carbon capture at scale and flying trains or bust!

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