this post was submitted on 31 Oct 2023
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Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.

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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.

Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:

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Revealed: Exxon Made “Breathtakingly” Accurate Climate Predictions in 1970s and ’80s | Oil company drove some of the leading science of the era only to publicly dismiss global warming. (www.motherjones.com)
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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It's because of the choice of measurement.

I used to do consulting work with C level execs at Fortune 500s.

One of the most interesting points that was made was that you could look at what the marketing department's focus was and determine the metric the CMO's bonus was tied to. A huge focus on new user signups (even at the cost of existing customer churn)? CMO was being evaluated on number of new users.

Well public companies overall are evaluated on a quarterly basis within their stock market fillings. Beat your quarter? The market and the board are happy. Fell short? The CEO may find themselves out of a job as the company chases getting back to beating their quarter.

The problem is, that's an incredibly stupid bar to use as effectively the sole measure.

It's lead to things like Dell being on top of the electronics market and being the first to outsource support to try and save a few percent for the quarter and ending up the butt of jokes that dropped their market share significantly within a few years (even though everyone then followed suit).

And in the case of oil companies, it led to catastrophic mismanagement where the focus on today and the quarter meant sacrificing the entire world long term.

How might this have looked if instead the evaluation metric was a 50 year forecast? Would it have still been prudent to bury and ignore research, or would it have been wise to invest heavily in R&D in alternative energy that might pay off in 20-30 years but you'd have been ahead of your competitors because you were first to identify the forecasted impact of the status quo?

The Corporation, not AI, is the thing that will continue to make paperclips until it destroys humanity if it's improperly aligned.

And you align corporations by setting the measurements on which their success is evaluated. And we've somehow set it on 3 month increments.

An oversight which has likely already killed us all.