Yeah, if climate change really was an “emergency”, mitigation would be extremely cheap. With big side effects. Nevertheless if it really were an emergency… in real emergencies, triage happens, and downsides are taken for granted.
Thankful that there’s no real emergency yet, but I suspect governments will drag their feet long enough that there will eventually be one, and then emergency relief will be deployed anyway, but it will cost way way more than 5bn.
I don’t know. My province in Canada is experiencing anomalous weather events year after year, and while things still look “okay” we seem to be encroaching on visible threshold events quite rapidly.
Sure, these events could mysteriously stop. Or stay very much the same, acting like a new normal that isn’t so destructive as to be an emergency. But the trend line is there. Fires increasing, biodiversity decreasing, floods occurring more dramatically and frequently, 100 year events predicted to be 10 year events not in decades but right now.
If that’s not an emergency, what is? If you’re thinking something like “when the province is stricken with drought for 10 years and everyone’s starving”, I hate to tell you but that’s well past the emergency date. At that point, you’re already done and the initial emergency happened.
It's technically true that total area burned globally has been on a downward trend.
That's a real piece of misdirect by Murdoch press though and typical of their editorial stance.
To quote Multi-decadal trends and variability in burned area from the 5th
version of the Global Fire Emissions Database (GFED5) [1] (one of many similar studies)
* Burned area declined by 1.21±0.66% yr-1 20 , a cumulative decrease of 24.2±13.2% over 20 years.
* The global reduction is primarily driven by decreases in fire within savannas, grasslands, and croplands.
* Forest, peat, and deforestation fires did not exhibit long-term trends.
So, managed areas are increasingly having fewer fires for a variety of reasons and they're a big part of the non ice areas across the globe.
Forest fires aren't decreasing, more worrying areas that typically don't see frequent fires are now seeing fires more often.
The Fox message is that beacuse total global fire area is reducing there's no need to worry about massive forest fires in places that typically don't see such things.
If ten thousand acres of seasonal grass fires doesn't happen does that really offset a thousand acres of old growth forest being torched to the ground?
If you're seriously asking for my recommendation, as if that wasn't already apparent to the meanest intellect, then I would strongly suggest you look to the raw data and read informed papers on the aquisition and interpretation.
All 'news' papers, especially those that are heavily political and editorially biased (Murdoch's media empire, for example), will shape for eyeballs and reduce to the lowest common denominator.
You can see that I chose to go directly to an overview on the Global Fire Emissions Database and chose to quote directly from there.
The trite bite "Fires are actually decreasing." is meaningless sans context.
Many people do not have the time to read papers, jobs and life get in the way, which is why we use newspapers. WSJ happens to be one of the least biased papers, with a slight right lean.
Fires decreasing globally is not out of context here. I find that information interesting. Sure fires are increasing in other places but it seems to me your main concern is around people hearing that fires globally are decreasing.
> From 1 January to 31 July, accumulated carbon emissions from wildfires across Canada total 290 megatonnes. This is already more than double the previous record for the year as a whole and represents over 25% of the global total for 2023 to date.
You know it's an emergency when the status quo is completely unacceptable and the government takes drastic measures (no more cars of any kind on the road, every physically able man/woman forced to work on whatever solution is chosen to help, that kind of thing - nothing close to what we're seeing today) with widespread support of the population.
You can't call it an emergency when no one would truly support emergency measures of the scale that would be enough to affect the climate (no, driving an electric car is not even close to helping if this was a true emergency - and I drive one myself).
> So if we never acknowledge it it is never an emergency?
Exactly. Do you think an emergency has some objective trigger?? No it does not, it's subjective, the people involved in the event are the ones who deem whether it's an emergency or not, even if they may be wrong about the gravity of the situation (which is why sometimes the rescue service may disagree with you whether you're in an emergency situation or not and refuse to rescue you, for example - that happened to me).
> Doing what?
Think about the Marshall Plan... if we really need to, I am sure we can get every man and woman to work on the manufacture and use of whatever device can collect CO2 from the atmosphere or whatever.
> Do you think an emergency has some objective trigger??
No. But it feels faulty to define an emergency by the reaction of the government. For example if we would have multiple years of crop failures, with associated mass starvation and unrest but let’s say the government sticks their fingers in their ears and proclaims “let them eat cake”. That would not count as an emergency per your definition. Do you feel that is right?
In fact when people are arguing if it is an emergency or not, they often argue about it because they do expect their government to do/don’t do things based on which side they are arguing. If we would define an emergency based on the actions of the government solely this would be totally falacious. But it is not. “We are in a climate emergency therefore the gov should do X.” is a perfectly valid thing to believe in. (And so is the opposite of course.)
> Think about the Marshall Plan...
Did the Marshall plan employ every able bodied adult? I must have missed that part of the history.
> I am sure we can get every man and woman to work on the manufacture and use of whatever device can collect CO2 from the atmosphere or whatever.
I will go with whatever then. We have these things called factories. They made manufacturing very efficient. There is zero chance that you could employ every man and woman meaningfully on a task like this. Simply you would run out of raw materials or organisational capacity before that happens.
There is a more fitting historical paralel to what you are proposing. It is very much akin to Mao’s Great Leap Forward. He got a lot of people to do a thing, but since it wasn’t the right thing to do it ended up as a total catastrophy.
No, but that would never happen in a democracy. I am using "government" here losely as "the voice of the people" which is roughly correct in most democratic, non-corrupt countries.
> Did the Marshall plan employ every able bodied adult? I must have missed that part of the history.
I don't know why you feel the need to ridiculize my argument. You know all too well, I'm sure, that while not every single person was involved, as many as deemed necessary were... if things got so bad the germans/japanese were approaching the American shore, I don't doubt every single person, except those already tasked with food production, would be called and happily accept their call of duty.
Think of climate change like a car driving off a cliff. The car is “safely” on solid ground until it isn’t. The problem is that at some point to avoid the emergency you need to hit the brakes or turn, and this particular car might not be able to turn or brake very hard without catastrophic effects on the occupants. Moving away from this metaphor, there is a possibility we cross a tipping point in the climate system (and may already have done so) that can be “reversed” through emergency geoengineering: but it’s not clear that the necessary level of intervention would be compatible with global agriculture and civilization.
those who believe we will hit a discontinuous tipping point are precisely those who should be advocating for geoengineering now, despite its unknowns and downsides… yet the voices to do so are curiously absent
I don't know if they should be advocating for geoengineering now, but we should definitely start getting used to the idea that we might need it very soon. That means a huge acceleration of research to test the techniques we have, and make sure they don't have unintended consequences (like accidentally destroying the ozone layer.)
> yet the voices to do so are curiously absent
It's easy to think this if you're not paying attention: the issue is very controversial and many people oppose it But a number of scientists signed onto a letter calling for additional research into this [1], and Congress and the White House OSTP are also pushing to speed up and increase research funding [2]. Of course, this kind of research could go away in a single election.
The biggest thing about this sulfur realization is that it's a massive experiment we have been accidentally running on its effectiveness and the side effects caused by it... And now without it.
Makes it a lot easier to validate your solution and be more sure of side effects
The biggest thing about this realization is that we just ran a massive natural experiment about its effectiveness and side effects without realizing it. An experiment that never would have been run if proposed, both politically and economically.
