Climate Change - increasingly horrible disasters loom

yet basically all of the west is colder than average, and I never made it a mystery that I only care about my country and it's allies.

and I never claimed warming is positive for Indonesia either. I just don't internalize their costs into my utility function as no rational person would.

oh and empty space can be filled in due time, it's not like history ends in 50 years from now.

In future it would help a great deal if you prefaced every post with "I'm a total **** and don't care about anyone apart from me and my family, so..."

then we wouldn't need to read any more because your "world" view isn't even politics - it's just extreme selfishness and callousness dressed up as politics, with a chaser of extreme state violence against its own citizens.

lol I wrote "Europe saves tens of billions per year in heating costs thanks to warming".

that's my claim, any answer about what happens elsewhere don't change that.

you can try to go around that as much as you want because it's a huge problem for your narrative, but it doesn't change the truth.

and it's a problem for your narrative because a lot of people are as selfish as me if not more. they can be on board with expensive emission reductions if they believe that's very important for their own benefit or for their children. they wouldn't if they knew it was just about helping alien people in far away countries

There is just no point discussing with you.
You literally mentioned cold countries after my post about AC.
Ma doood stop pls

no you liar, I wrote EUROPE in the post BEFORE you answering with AC.

EUROPE.

Oh lol I just realised you think Europe = cold countries.
Ok / thread u win

what is this about, Malta and Cyprus losing? other than those two micro countries (which are around the planet average, and still don't lose from warming, but don't gain much either), the rest are colder than the planetary average, which is normal given they are all far above the tropics.

yes that includes Spain in aggregate and Italy in aggregate

You're the dishonest one.

All of Southern Europe (which I omitted from my list), which includes Portugal, Spain, Greece, Turkey plus Southern France and Southern Italy.

Also lol at Malta being around the average. Have you even been there?

Turkey isn't europe. Not that the UNDER ZERO CELSIUS TEMPERATURE in Ankara last night would make you right btw.

Portugal has more days needing heating than needing AC, same for Spain, same for Greece.

Oporto today is 13-5 (max-min, celsius). Lisbon is 16-5

Thessalonika is 9-2, Athens 12-7 (tomorrow 12-3).

Madrid 12-1, Barcelona 12-8 (tomorrow 12-3).

Southern Italy isn't tropical ffs. Potenza is 4-1 now. Naples 12-8. Ragusa 12-10.

Nice, France is 12-4 today. 4 celsius. That means you need to heat by TWENTY CELSIUS in hospital/healthcare settings, by 14-15 in houses not to freeze (more if you like to be comfortable without being heavily dressed at home).

You can't use the weather you remember (or have been told about) in the best seasons of tourist seaside areas, to think about those areas.

A lot of southern Italy, Spain, and Greece is hills/mountains/elevated plateaus. There isn't only the seaside. The only place in Italy where buildings don't come with heating automatically is Lampedusa. In Spain, it's canary islands.

No country in europe is even close to Rio de Janeiro where the coldest moment of the coldest day is usually double digit celsius.

Might be that in Crete you get close to that. And? people in Greece live mostly elsewhere.

WORLD average. Planetary average. Excluding unhabitated areas. Average of actual countries people live in (otherwise the mass of northern canada, groenland and antartica bring down the average).

In other words, more than half of the people in this planet live in countries that are as hot, or hotter, than Malta.

Yes i have been there and i also lived there for a bit, when i was evaluating changing fiscal residency to be able to play poker without being tortured by the italian taxman. Then italy passed decent laws about that and i didn't need to do that anymore (people still need to leave if they want to play live MTTs outside the EU though)

We aren't concerned abut global averages and idk why you keep bringing it up because it's irrelevant when all that matters is the total global energy demand from heating and cooling.

This whole argument hurts my brain. Humans have successfully altered the climate of the planet, quite dramatically. But, we are arguing about electric bills? Seriously.

It looks like we (humans) are deciding that it is a big nothingburger and the new wave of twitter scientists are pushing measures that will accelerate the process.

We definitely deserve what we get.

The climate for now hasn't been altered "quite dramatically" by human intervention yet. That might happen at some point down the line in some model/scenario if we keep emitting like now or more.

Hasn't happened yet, science isn't telling you it happened yet, i have no idea why you believe it already happened.

Are we arguing about material resources? yes, all the times, that's expected, rational and reasonable and it will be as long as material scarcity will exist.

There is no "we" btw. There are 8 billions different individuals, divided in different groups with different utility functions, values, preferences, there is no "we" that makes any decision.

One third (ONE THIRD) of current emissions are caused by China. One sixth by the USA.

Even if you had "twitter scientists" all on board for the most aggressive emission reduction you could think of for the USA, the politics for it ready to go with a POTUS and a congress fully on board, the political will among the populace to GO TO ZERO ASAP, spending many trillions per year for many years to achieve that, THE CLIMATE WOULD STILL CHANGE ALMOST THE SAME IF OTHERS DON'T DO THE SAME.

IS that part clear to you? it could even be the case that if the USA radically reduces emissions then others get more sloppy in their own reduction lol, after all, daddy USA is paying the price, why shouldn't we freeride on that?

There a we, you just not in it.
You can come in at anytime, we are just like that.

There must be a part of you knowing you are acting in bad faith here.

I thought it might be interesting to provide a contextual post to this discussion. Poker players have more math aptitude than most, so I'll provide some math here.

For simplification, let's put Earth's temperature regime into 4 possible modalities. Cold, Cool, Warm & Hot.

The main determinants of Earth's temperature are

1) incoming solar radiation which varies with Earth's orbital cycles (Milankovitch Cycles)
2) Earth's greenhouse gas concentrations which determine how much outgoing heat radiation escapes
3) Concentrations of factors which might block incoming sunlight such as clouds and aerosols which might come from humans or volcanic activity.

With zero greenhouse gases like CO2 in the atmosphere, the temperature would be in a Cold regime and the water on Earth would be solid ice. No humans.

For the last 2.6 million years since we entered the Quaternary Period until one century ago, earth's CO2 concentration was between 160 and 280 ppm. That's a SMALL percentage. One in 4,000 to 6,000 parts. But is it really small as climate deniers like to emphasize ?????

For each single ppm of CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere, the weight is 7.8 Billion Tons. That's HEAVY. Instead of putting CO2 levels in terms of ppm (parts per million), let's put it in Mt. Everest equivalents to make it more relatable. Mt Everest weighs 175 billion tons.

So, at zero (0) Mt Everest equivalents, we are in a thoroughly COLD regime with no humans on Earth.

For the first 2.6 million years of the Quaternary until a century ago. We oscillated between 7 and 12.5 Mt Everests worth of CO2 in the atmosphere.

At 7 Mt. Everest's worth of CO2, we are in a COOL regime called a glacial maximum with places like Boston and New York under ice. Just 7 Mt Everests worth of CO2 at that level is the difference between life and no life.

At 12.5 Mt. Everests worth of CO2, we are in a WARM regime such as the planet was a century ago.

Humans have only lived during COOL & WARM regimes.

Today, atmospheric CO2 is 427 PPM. That equates to 19.0 Mt Everest's worth of CO2. But CO2 is not the only greenhouse gas. If we factor in the increases associated with other greenhouse gases like methane, the CO2 equivalent is now ~ 525 ppm or 23.4 Mt Everests worth of CO2. Each year that goes by now, we are adding about 0.2 Mt Everests worth of greenhouse forcing to the atmosphere.

We are on the fast track to an unsurvivable HOT climate.

If you don't grasp this, then you probably belong to a social tribe which has denial of basic physics as part of its core belief system. You live in a society which provides you a survival advantage TODAY to burn fossil fuels. We have a simple conflict of interest between personal survival today and collective survival down the road. We're not wired to sacrifice personal short-term advantage for collective long-term advantage and thus we will probably go extinct in the not too distant future.

I realize that its going to be received as insulting to inform people of their ignorance and explain why their brains are not wired to handle the truth. People are wired to survive TODAY. And it's hard to survive today without fossil fuel combustion.

If you want to get into more detailed physics, I'm happy to engage.

If you shrunk the globe to the size of a billiard ball, your 24 Mt. Everests would barely register on the surface. You'd feel them, but only because the human fingertip is extremely sensitive. It'd be like feeling a single granule from 300 grit sandpaper on an otherwise perfectly smooth surface.

You use it in your story because people think it's big, and it is, but not in relation to the planet itself.

You say humans have only lived in cool and warm regimes, but what makes you think we wouldn't easily adapt to a hot one? Of course, it's convenient that you define the scales here.

Math and Everests are too abstract. Where are we on a scale from plain tortilla chip to Flamin' Hot Cheeto?

Any single mountain is indeed small compared to the Earth as a whole, but the contents of a single mountain have proven the ability to impact the entire Earth climate.

In 1991, Mt Pinatubo erupted in a VEI-6 scale event which introduced aerosols that blocked sunlight and reduced global temperature by ~ 0.5C for several years.

In 1815, Mt Tambora erupted in history's most recent VEI-7 event, also producing light blocking aerosol. It caused global crop failure and the summer of 1816 was characterized as the year without a summer.

Approximately 74,000 years ago, the Toba super eruption WEI-8 nearly caused humans to go extinct. Our population was reduced to a few thousand mating pairs.

Greenhouse gases are obviously not the same as light blocking aerosols. Their impact is not as immediate. But imagine 11 Mt. Everests being completely detonated and spewing out gases that warm the planet.

In the year 1750, prior to the massive liberation of energy from fossil fuels, there were 800M humans who exhaled 800 lbs of CO2 each, a figure that is constant over time. That'[s a total of 640,000,000,000 lbs or 320 Million tons of CO2 per year. We lived in balance with plant life. We take in oxygen and exhale CO2.

Since 1750, our CO2 output has increased from 320M tons to 40,000M tons. An increase of 130x.

CO2 is plant food, right ? Well the process of plants eating is called photosynthesis and when plants eat, CO2 is converted to carbohydrates. We're producing more than plants can eat.

Thanks for acknowledging your insanity by indicating a willingness to conduct the experiment of whether humans can survive a HOT planet. Read up about the Paleo Eocene Thermal Maximum of 55M years ago. We would have no chance.

See, now why do you have to talk down at me at the same time as citing debunked theories about near-extinction in an attempt to frighten the children? It makes me question everything else you say.

No sweat, bud. Where there's a will, there's a way!

If will was determinant of outcome, we'd be immortal Gods.

But we all die. Species all come to an end.

We aren't even a particularly successful species. A few hundred thousand years. Alligators have us by a factor of 500x.

Alligators are far better than humans at the only thing that matters .... Survival.

Alligator brains aren't big enough for the fantasies that humans tell themselves about the value of things like cryptocurrency. They eat, excrete and make baby alligators.

One thing they have in common with humans. When there isn't enough food to go around, they eat each other. There's nothing like involuntary population reduction to show us what us that humans are just like other carnivores. It's coming.

I hear god was inordinantly fond of beetles

They're low enough on the food chain that they might have a fighting chance to survive our self destruction. With luck, God will throw them a useful mutation that will help them digest plastic.

It will help the human legacy if some benevolent critters can destroy the evidence of our stupidity from the fossil record.

snow in New Orleans spreads into Florida and the Carolinas

New Orleans could be snowed in until Thursday

https://www.wptf.com/2025/01/22/winter-storm-that-dropped-record-breaking-snow-in-new-orleans-spreads-into-florida-and-the-carolinas/

WPTF-AM

Winter storm that dropped record-breaking snow in New Orleans spreads into Florida and the Carolinas

https://www.nola.com/news/weather/snow-plow-new-orleans-winter-storm/article_2f9b416a-d84c-11ef-a32e-9fe9e39ac60c.html

NOLA.com

New Orleans could be snowed in until Thursday, Mayor LaToya Cantrell