Anthropogenic Climate Change

Not to a degree comparable to geoengineering, though, although the theory of the Little Ice Age being man-made exists. That does not change my point that this is taking the effects of geoengineering on the very light shoulder, though.

New Scientist: The ancient Romans burned so much wood for fuel that it served to cool the planet. Article is paywalled but you can see the beginning in the preview.

So yeah, anthropogenic climate change and accidental geoengineering has been a thing for a while, it's just the industrial use of hydrocarbons that's fueling the current crisis.

Edited by Ramidel on Nov 5th 2023 at 2:08:24 AM

The paper it's based on: Effects of land use and anthropogenic aerosol emissions in the Roman Empire with most impacts limited to portions of the Roman Empire.

The (rather modest) citation count.

Edited by SeptimusHeap on Nov 5th 2023 at 1:37:28 PM

Changing the climate is one level of difficulty. Creating a specific change on purpose with few damaging side effects is a different thing entirely. Just ask all those people who introduced new invasive species to control a previous invasive species.

The non-profit Climate Central analyzed mean temperatures from November 2022 to October 2023 for 170 countries and found all but 2 exceeded 30 year norms, making the past 12 months the hottest ever recorded.

• The 2 countries that were below their 30 year norms were the northern island country of Iceland and the mountainous Lesotho.
• 5.7 billion people were exposed to 30 days of above average temperatures, 4.9 billion experienced 5 days or more streaks of locally extreme temperatures, and 1.9 billion experienced temperatures where climate change made those temps twice as likely to happen.
• Houston had the longest streak of 22 days with above average temperatures, New Orleans, Jakarta, and Tangerang were second at 17, Quiling and Austin third at 16, and San Antonio, Zapopan, Guadalajara, and Bekasi were fourth at 15.

I feel more and more discouraged whenever I end up reading newspapers :'D Haven't figured out way to deal with that

I know what you mean. 

What helps me personally (besides avoiding news and engaging in other activities) is remembering that time will change everything, good and bad.

This idea gives me solace.

Reading history helps with that.

Quebec man who blamed 2023 wildfires on government pleads guilty to setting 14 fires: Brian Paré posted conspiracy theories about fires, climate change on social media

So it seems that a bunch of these forest fires last years were, in fact, man made, and not caused by climate change.

It seems this guy had been starting forest fires, and then spread conspiracy theories blaming the government for starting them to justify climate change action.

Edited by Redmess on Jan 18th 2024 at 1:52:16 PM

Yeah I'd be more willing to blame most wildfires on arson than climate change. Bias as a Greek perhaps.

Well, maybe not most, but some are definitely lit by idiots like this one.

Can us Americans sue him as well for all the smoke those fires gave off and rolled down to New York?

I mean, I don't think that's the case, even in the article it was pointed out the largest fire he started didn't get very big at all, and 99.9% of the fires (and presumably acres burned) were lighting complex fires.

So unless arsonists have invented lightning guns, that's pretty obviously not the case.

Regardless of the source of the fire, climate change can exacerbate it if drought causes the timber and brush to be dryer than they would normally be. This isn't a super straightforward equation, though, and that's why determining the precise amount of increased risk due to climate is difficult.

In some areas, rainfall will increase, mitigating wildfire risk. But those areas could also become hotter (or colder), could have more extreme weather events, etc.

Some people demand exact figures or they refuse to believe the claims. This is obviously impossible as well as a red herring, and we shouldn't fall into their rhetorical trap.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 18th 2024 at 9:26:05 AM

Holy paōa!

People can only provide a spark, not a blazing inferno and climate change can only turn a spark into a blazing inferno, not create one out of thin air. It's not an either-or thing.

Lightning is the primary source of naturally occurring fires, and climate change is expected to induce stronger and more frequent thunderstorms. So you get both in the same package.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 18th 2024 at 11:50:05 AM

Yeah, if climate change causes more storms, then climate change can certainly provide a spark... along with fuel, through droughts.

Climate change can and does cause more forest fires, and more intense ones.

And yes, humans can most certainly cause forest fires, too. I'm not sure what you mean by humans not being able to cause an inferno. They most certainly can.

They were saying that you can't get a human individually lighting every single square centimeter of a huge forest fire and that climate change makes it a lot more likely that a human lighting a fire will cause a huge inferno.

Besides, it's not at all obvious that there will be more lightning with climate change. And even if, more lightning with rain means fewer, not more, fires. As far as I know, the changes in lightning activity and lightning+rain with CC is an unsettled question.

The big weather disaster thing that's 100% going to happen is hurricanes getting worse though. We're, uh, inevitably going to get a Category 6 at this rate and pretty much nothing we've ever built could withstand that, and we don't know how far inland it could get.

Like, right now? It's possible for a category five to bounce around the Caribbean, shoot straight up Florida and eventually hit Toronto with a huge storm that causes a ton of flooding and damage, let alone anything before that. A 6 going directly up Florida would basically result in nearly everything getting shredded.

Edited by Zendervai on Jan 18th 2024 at 12:35:24 PM

Also Medicanes becoming more frequent. Europe and the Middle East will be joining in the "fun" as well here.

Currently there is no Category 6 because the scale isn't opened ended. A ridiculous hurricane with windspeeds in the tens of thousands of kilometers per hour would still be a Cat 5 by technical definitions.

That being said the scale probably will be revised to be open ended if we get enough Cat 5s of meaningfully different strengths.

They already amended the naming system to get rid of the Greek letters and just have a backup list of names because of the awkward possibility of having to retire, and eventually run out, of Greek lettered storms, something that was considered absurd when the naming system was created.

Edited by Falrinn on Jan 18th 2024 at 9:59:45 AM

I don't think that running out of Greek names was the problem?

When they ran out of actual names (from the list of 21 each year), they'd switch to Greek letters, but in 2021, since there was 30 hurricanes, it caused a lot of confusion.

So they're just extending the list of names.

We were nowhere close to running out of greek letters, but 2021 forced them to confront the possibility of having to retire greek letters for the first time.

How the naming system works (for those in the US monitoring system in the Atlantic and East Pacific at least) is that every 6 years names will be reused unless the storm causes significant loss of life in which case the name will be retired forever. If they ran out of names in a given year, they would previously use greek letters to name the storm. Since greek lettered storms happened very late in the season it was virtually unthinkable for such a storm to do enough damage to have it's name retired.

What happened in 2020 is that we had greek lettered storms do enough damage to at least be seriously considered for retirement. Rather then skip those letters in future years, which could eventually lead to the greek alphabet being exhausted, or refuse to retire greek letters regardless of damage they replaced the greek alphabet with a backup list of names that's reused every year (instead of every six) that can have names retired as needed without causing problems.

Edited by Falrinn on Jan 18th 2024 at 2:32:31 AM

So no more Katrinas, right?