Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
Deaths from people dying directly from a natural disaster are down, but long-term indirect deaths are not. Many people die from the variety of long-term effects of natural disasters.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsToZlTBeGc
Man-caused climate change is real, but it isn’t an existential crisis. It’s not going to destroy human civilization like a nuclear war would. Climate change will greatly damage economies and kill a lot of people, so it’s a serious issue that needs to be dealt with, but it isn’t existential.
Technologies like solar and windmills are good, but have trade offs. Many rightwing arguments like how inefficient these technologies are or how many birds they kill are based on original versions of these technologies that have been greatly improved upon; so these critiques are no longer valid and people making them either are ignorant on how outdated their information is, haven’t done their due diligence, or are being dishonest.
Cost benefit analyses on the benefits of reducing carbon emissions have already been done, and they overwhelmingly show that reducing emissions is worth it. However, it is only worth it if we cut emissions slowly. Cutting too fast likely makes the costs of cutting greater than the benefits.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbRBtpzjaVs
Texas is too hot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38ACs0gNZrA
“2024 was the hottest year in the instrumental record. How hot? Last year the global average temperature rose more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above the 19th century pre-industrial mean, according to most of the scientific organizations that track global temperature trends. This exceeds, for the first time, the aspirational goal set forth by the 2015 Paris Climate Change Agreement to limit the increase in global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Each of the 10 hottest years have come over the past decade.”
https://reason.com/2025/01/10/2024-was-the-hottest-year-on-record/
““We weren’t just hired — a lot of us were working with NOAA for a very long period,” he said. He also noted that his termination email cited that he was fired “because of his ability, knowledge and/or skills do not fit the agency’s current needs” — though he said he had received glowing performance reviews.
Several other people who identified themselves as NOAA or weather service employees wrote on social media that they, or family members, had received an email Thursday notifying them that they had been terminated. It appeared that many were considered probationary employees, meaning they were recently hired or promoted.”
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“”The fact of the matter is that the private sector, as it presently exists, simply cannot quickly spin up to fill any void left by substantial dismantling of NOAA and/or the NWS,” Daniel Swain, a UCLA climate scientist, said in a statement on social media. “The now-confirmed and rumored additional cuts to come at NOAA/NWS are spectacularly short-sighted, and ultimately will deal a major self-inflicted wound to the public safety of Americans and the resiliency of the American economy to weather and climate-related disasters.””
https://www.yahoo.com/news/mass-firings-across-noaa-national-021405929.html
“The big reason is that fossil fuel consumption is up. Oil and gas account for the bulk of this increase in emissions, with coal a distant third. While greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere are rising, their output is level or falling from some of the largest historical emitters. The European Union’s emissions are declining. US emissions are holding steady. China, the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, is on track to see its output grow by just 0.2 percent this year, one of the tiniest increases in years.
Bucking this trend are many developing countries like India, currently the world’s third-largest emitter. India has seen a huge increase in renewable energy deployment, but its still developing energy from all sources, including fossil fuels. The Global Carbon Budget found India’s fossil fuel emissions are on track to increase 4.6 percent this year.
There are a few additional factors that drove up emissions this year. The lingering effects of El Niño helped push global temperatures to record highs. Extraordinary heat waves in India and China pushed up energy demand for cooling, and that meant burning more fossil fuels. “We’re beginning to see some of those negative feedback loops where the climate crisis itself is impacting on the energy system and making it harder to reduce emissions,” Grant said.
Still, there are glimmers of good news. More than 30 countries have already managed to grow their economies while cutting carbon dioxide pollution, a clear sign that coal, oil, and natural gas are not the only paths to prosperity. These countries have already summited their emissions peaks and are now on the descent, breaking a pattern that has held for nearly two centuries.”
https://www.vox.com/climate/385183/cop29-climate-change-emissions-rising-trump-baku
Economists are greatly underestimating the costs of climate change due to a variety of bad methods.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNLZWVbEa1s
“Several factors converged to make 2024 so fertile for tropical storms. Hurricanes feed on warm water, and the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico provided ample nourishment as they reached record-high temperatures. Wind shear — where air currents change speed and direction with altitude — tends to rip apart tropical storms before they can form hurricanes, but there was little of that this year due in part to the ripple effects of the shift to La Niña in the Pacific Ocean.”
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“The world has already heated up by about 1.9 degrees Fahrenheit (1.1 degrees Celsius) since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. There’s some evidence of this warming playing out in various hurricane traits, but there are also places where it’s absent.”
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“scientists need more observations and more time to confirm whether climate change is having any influence on the number of hurricanes.”
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“the IPCC report does show hurricanes changing in ways beyond their overall numbers. One is that hurricanes in recent decades have likely been shifting toward the poles, farther away from their normal habitat in the tropics. That makes sense knowing that hurricanes need warm water, around 80 degrees Fahrenheit, so hotter oceans mean these storms can have a greater range.
Another changing trait is that hurricanes appear to be moving slower. That means the storms that make landfall spend more time parked over a given region, forcing the area to endure more wind and rainfall. Hurricane Harvey in 2017 was an exemplar of this as it sauntered along the Texas coast at 5 miles per hour and drenched Houston.
Rapid intensification is a climate change hallmark as well. This is where a tropical storm gains 35 miles per hour or more in windspeed in 24 hours. Hurricane Milton rapidly intensified from a tropical storm to a Category 5 hurricane with winds up to 180 miles per hour in just one day. The IPCC found that the global frequency of rapid intensification in tropical cyclones has likely increased over the past 40 years to an extent that can’t be explained by natural variability alone.
One of the strongest signals of climate change in hurricanes is rain. The average and maximum rainfall rates from hurricanes are increasing, largely a function of rising water and air temperatures. More recently, some researchers have begun to connect the increase in rainfall from individual hurricanes to climate change. The World Weather Attribution research group analyzed the rain from Hurricane Helene. They found the precipitation from the storm was 10 percent heavier due to climate change and that such extreme rain is now 40 to 70 percent more likely because of warming. Looking at Hurricane Milton, the researchers reported that heavy one-day rain events like those spawned from the storm are at least 20 to 30 percent more probable.”
https://www.vox.com/climate/378359/hurricane-climate-change-flood-helene-milton-warming
“This record ocean heat is a clear reason why Hurricane Helene — which has been traveling through the Gulf on its way to Florida — has intensified so quickly. Put simply, hotter water evaporates more readily, and rising columns of warm, moist air from that evaporation are ultimately what drive hurricanes and their rapid intensification.”
https://www.vox.com/climate/373874/hurricane-helene-florida-forecast-warm-ocean-water
“This October heat is largely the result of a phenomenon currently happening in the West known as a “heat dome” — which involves a high-pressure system trapping heat closer to the Earth’s surface.
Long-term climate change, however, is likely exacerbating the heat dome’s effects. Greenhouse gasses that fuel climate change also trap heat, leading to higher temperatures that can make an already hot heat dome even hotter.
According to a study from the climate nonprofit Climate Central, 91 million people in the US experienced 30 or more “risky heat days” this summer, and those were made twice as likely because of climate change. The organization describes “risky heat” days as ones warmer than “90 percent of temperatures observed in a local area over the 1991-2020 period.”
Climate change has also led to higher temperatures around the world throughout this past year, including a particularly hot summer in states across the US. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), this was the country’s fourth-hottest summer on record, when looking at temperatures from June through August 2024. During those months, the average temperature in the contiguous United States was 73.8 degrees Fahrenheit — 2.5 degrees above the average from 1991-2020.
That was noticeable in multiple places, including Phoenix, which experienced more than 100 consecutive days of 100-degree heat or higher this year. Globally, the world could also be on track to hit its hottest year on record.
In addition to getting warmer, summers are getting longer, with Drexel University researchers noting that seasonal temperatures are lasting 30 days longer than they have in the past, meaning well into October for some in the northern hemisphere.
That means fall doesn’t bring the same relief from heat it once did. As a September Climate Central report, which looked at 242 US cities, found, fall temperatures went up 2.5 degrees, on average, between 1970 and 2023.
The warmer fall days could have major implications for natural disasters, especially for wildfires in places like Southern California, where heat amplifies the risk of potential blazes on drier landscapes that have also seen decades of fire suppression. While wildfire season has typically run from early summer into the fall, it has the potential to go longer as higher temperatures persist.
More days with higher temperatures can also translate to increased cases of heat stroke, cardiovascular problems caused by stress on the heart, and respiratory challenges. They can extend, too, the window when people experience seasonal allergies.
Additionally, warmer falls could affect plant and animal preparations for hibernation, severely shortening the time they usually take to prepare for winter, and delaying processes like changes in foliage and leaf dropping. Farmers may increasingly need to shift planting and harvesting schedules for different crops as temperatures continue to fluctuate as well.
Short of major changes needed to curb human contributions to global warming, this year’s October heat waves aren’t likely to be a fluke. As Mann told Vox, “The warming will continue until we bring carbon emissions to zero.””
https://www.vox.com/climate/375996/extreme-heat-october-climate-change