Climate Change/Mass Extinction Megathread

[Valmy]

Also didn't a Texan city hit it's all time record of 44.4C yesterday?

Missed the city's name, Maybe El Paso ??

Sure enough.

But El Paso is a weird place in Texas:

1. It was founded in 1680 by the Spanish and wasn't part of Texas in any meaningful sense until after the Mexican-American War. It took no part in the Texas Revolution nor was it part of the Republic of Texas as it was in the disputed zone between Texas and Mexico. It was just on this side of Rio Grande so we ended up with it.

2. It is 800 km from the nearest other Texas city, San Antonio.

3. It is in another time zone from the rest of Texas.

4. It is over 80% Hispanic.

So despite being a massive city of 900,000 people most Texans kind of forget it exists. It is very culturally and geographically distant from the other big cities in the state. It might as well be its own state, the state of El Paso.

So that is to say that things happening in El Paso aren't really talked about much over my way, so this is the first I have heard of their particular heat wave. The whole city could vanish and it might take a day or two for the rest of Texas to notice.

[Admiral Yi]

Marty Robbins didn't forget about it.

[Iormlund]

Even with 45 degrees C outside

 

You serious? Hope its a dry 45 degrees C.

It is.

Though at those temperatures some of the air cooling evaporative systems at work fail, and you get high temps with high humidity, which makes physical labour almost impossible.

[viper37]

It's 15C here.  We could split that heat wave in two, it'll still be livable.

[Jacob]

Hydroelectric dam burst in Norway at Braskereidfoss (160 km NE of Oslo) due to storm and excessive rainfall.

[Duque de Bragança]

Iberia is really suffering, Portugal is in flames.

Well, not all Portugal obviously, but it's in bad enough e.g Odemira.





Couple days ago.

Unsurprisingly, Alentejo is hellish.

[Valmy]

Marty Robbins didn't forget about it.

Yeah and what does he do?

He hides out in the badlands of New Mexico! Because even it is more hospitable to human habitation than West Texas.

[Josquius]

So... Hawaii...
Do people in the US much care or is it one of those things like northern Ireland over here where being across the water makes it sort of not count?

[Admiral Yi]

So... Hawaii...
Do people in the US much care or is it one of those things like northern Ireland over here where being across the water makes it sort of not count?

I care a little less than some random area because Maui is very posh.

[mongers]

So... Hawaii...
Do people in the US much care or is it one of those things like northern Ireland over here where being across the water makes it sort of not count?

I care a little less than some random area because Maui is very posh.

This disaster seems to have been a literal perfect storm of factors including some climate change effects, just so happens this time it hit a more affluent population as compared to the norm, that is C.C. devastating more marginal societies in the 3rd world.

[crazy canuck]

So... Hawaii...
Do people in the US much care or is it one of those things like northern Ireland over here where being across the water makes it sort of not count?

I care a little less than some random area because Maui is very posh.

This disaster seems to have been a literal perfect storm of factors including some climate change effects, just so happens this time it hit a more affluent population as compared to the norm, that is C.C. devastating more marginal societies in the 3rd world.

That might be part of it, but I think a bigger part is that the US and Canada view that Island as a literal paradise.  To see that devastated is significant. 

[mongers]

This is part of the sustainable future :

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-asia-66470327

No doubt it won't materialise in the UK in any meaningful way, no doubt the battery docks will be NIMY'd away as dangerous sites of possible explosions.

[Sheilbh]

An example of why I think the key is China and India - and a rare example of the hopeful hockey stick graph Currently China is installing more renewable capacity than the US, EU and India combined - but we need India (and then Africa) on a similar trajectory:


Obviously at the same time there are also record numbers of new coal plants in China. But both are true.

Edit: Incidentally that uptick in Indian solar is hopeful but needs to shoot up as if we're to have a hope of hitting targets India needs to develop and grow their economy (with all the energy that'll require) without using fossil fuels the way Europe, North America and China did. Which is something new.

Separately I thought this was interesting given the recent hydrogen chat. It also reminds me of a bit by Sky's economics correspondent Ed Conway, who has a new book out called Material World that looks really good, on polyhalite. It's basically a type of salt that is incredibly useful in making (organic) fertiliser. But only started mining recently because no-one really had a use for it until they're trying to decarbonise (and make organic) fertiliser manufacturing - and now there's a mine in the UK, under the North Sea, which is expanding to the deepest mine in Europe for it.

It goes to my view that energy transition and moving to net zero is going to require a lot of production and possibly more extraction than even a fossil fuel based world, we just don't necessarily know what we're going to need because we haven't needed it before I also slightly wonder if part of what's happening in the world is we're moving from a slightly immaterial world to one where stuff is really important - access to, extraction, production, distribution etc...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/12/prospectors-hit-the-gas-in-the-hunt-for-white-hydrogen

[Valmy]

Yeah it is amazing. Things have gone so much better than anybody ten years ago could have predicted for wind and solar. That is why I have a hard time not being optimistic. My expectations for how much progress we made has been blown away. Can that keep happening?

But it still isn't anywhere near enough.

The next key is energy storage. That is blowing up here in Texas, I hope it goes that way elsewhere.

[Josquius]

India worries me.
China has the whole marginally lawful-evil thing going on. They think long term. They care about China and nobody else but China happens to be on planet Earth so...have to think of the whole thing.

India however... with the rise in the religious right there and their whole anti-science cyclical-time schtick... They're going to be the problem.

Africa I'm not too concerned about given they've previously shown with their adoption of mobile phones and skipping land-line tech that small scale local generation is very much up their alley rather than big centralised power plants, which does lend itself very nicely to solar and wind.
Africa is a problem in other ways- the population growth level in Nigeria is just depressing.