this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2024
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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world.  About 1C of total warming.  Second chart:  about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability.  Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases.  About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

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[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 month ago

Ahh, you're talking the risk assessments and the associated floodplain maps. So yes, many of the maps are decades out of date, despite the legal requirement they keep them updated.

Those maps, by nature, are based on historical data but then use projections to assign future risk assessments. My point was that while we may have consensus on increases in global temperature, what that means for specific areas is almost impossible to forecast in a way that wasn't true before. For example, we know that major ocean currents may be in danger because of global warming, but we don't know when or if that will happen and exactly what exact effect it will have on a specific parcel of land, and that effect may be quite acute.

Between extreme weather events, changes in land use, etc., the unprecedented nature of the changes we're facing and the complexities involved mean that no matter how accurate the previous data and no matter how bleeding edge the climate modeling we use, any new maps are going to be much more unreliable than they've been previously.

And because those maps are expressly tied to the National Flood Insurance Program, that means potentially billions being lost because the map was wrong. Of course the map is wrong now, but that's unfortunately how bureaucracies think - better to be wrong because of inaction rather than sticking your neck out.

The real problem going forward is that the very fundamental idea of being able to map weather risk is a fiction. It would be far better to assume most areas are going to see extreme flooding and then judge how resilient the area is to that flooding and make policy decisions based on that. Even with perfect maps and models, people in the next 50 years need to understand that there will be no climate havens and that it's not a question of if you'll experience an extreme weather event but when.