Tiresia

Ah yes, the C bugs in the kernel libraries. We've all seen them.

Nuclear war would actually cool the oceans. All nuclear bombs combined contain about the same energy as Hurricane Katrina or a small supervolcano eruption. There would be a small fraction of a degree of temporary increase in global atmospheric temperatures, quickly overwhelmed by the nuclear winter as ash and dust in the upper atmosphere reduce global temperatures by several degrees for several years.

The only way I see humanity boiling the oceans is by deliberately releasing global-industrial quantities of super-effective greenhouse gases, actively designed to make the Earth as well-insulated as possible.

If the EU won't consider themselves to be at war when the part of the EU defensive pact zone that is called Greenland is invaded, they're losing all credibility both internally and externally. Why would the EU defend Finland or the Baltics or Cyprus? Why would the EU organize against foreign powers funding violent rebellions inside EU territory (similar to how Russia funded Transnistria or the US funded the contras in Nicaragua)?

There is no better red line for France to launch their nukes than the invasion of Greenland. As seen with Russia, any grace given to cult of personality dictators only emboldens them and their worshipers. The only fair response to madman theory is to call the 'insane' administration's bluff and let the people who don't want them and their families to become radioactive piles of ash take the responsibility of defying insane orders.

Run where? An even less hospitable planet?

Buy up primary resources that are unlikely to devalue from climate change (such as indoor farming, solar panel factories, and housing in walkable areas that are less vulnerable to climate disaster like Dublin).

Buy up the tools by which the powerful will desperately cling to power (such as the military industrial complex, media/propaganda channels, and privatized human rights like health care).

Bribe politicians, fund authoritarian-capitalist propaganda, and organize coups to put fragile dictatorships in charge of valuable strategic/industrial resources (like lithium, rare earths, fossil fuel, uranium, etc.).

edit: Thank you for taking my comment to heart!

Original comment:

With all due respect, I think you're being racist.

This is an active religious practice described objectively and with voice being given to those observing it. To dismiss it as "eastern mysticism narrative" is to deny Shinto itself a place in media on par with western religions.

A couple years back there was a similar bunch of articles about German Hunger Stones - stones expressing pity for the next people that would see the river level go low enough for them to be visible, because the drought would mean disastrous crop failure.

They're long-lasting traditional climate disaster markers, expressed through the worldview of the culture that discovered the marker, with a news article focused on the unhinged fact that they are now constantly warning that disaster is incoming.

Thanks for your perspective, I'm glad there are people like you who feel free to openly articulate in support of it. It's sad people are downvoting as disagreement, because I can't imagine them downvoting out of a good faith belief you're not contributing.

A) When the state owns the company, being "non-profit" is just a matter of accounting. And Uber wasn't a public service back when they were operating at a loss. The power structure is far more important, and when "the benefit of the Chinese people" is decided top-down through nonrepresentative means, that's not socialism even if you trust the dictator/oligarchy/overlord/etc. to play nice.

I am genuinely glad your government has given you ample housing, but that doesn't make your relation less one of being owned and managed. (not to say the west is better, just that China isn't good enough either).

B&D) The USSR is one nation, and a centrally industrialized dictatorship at that. As a point of scientific process, how are they supposed to have definitively proven wasteful capitalism is necessary as you claim? Even if they genuinely attempted degrowth, that's just one data point or approach. Different systems that fall under the same bucket can fail or succeed depending on more fine-grained specifics.

Also, the USSR slaughtered millions of small-scale farmers (so-called Kulaks, who happened to largely be Ukrainian) to make way for their industrial megafarms. They were not an example of trying degrowth, they were an example of an industrial centralized dictatorship being embargoed by most of the world.

Your point of not being crushed by the US is well-taken, and maybe Nixon did make an offer China could not refuse at the time. But I think that time has been over for the past 10-20 years. China can defend itself, and even if the military-industrial complex needs mass production to stay on par with the west that does not need to apply to the rest of the economy.

C) Take it from someone who lives in a mature and "prosperous" nation. The fruits of capitalist-style growth suck balls. You're not giving people a better life by building their industrial/living infastructure wrong initially, you're taking them away from family and craft and friendship. All things that threaten those in power, by the way

If you have time, look up Marx' description of societal alienation. He puts it better than I could. And feel free to ask me to look stuff up to.

China has the opportunity to build an economy that degrows from consumption patterns that assume a far lower level of industrialization.

It's sad that in their state capitalist philosophy of centralizing power over the means of production, they are still building a lot of inefficient consumerist infrastructure. Without that, the target green capacity could be a lot lower and much easier to achieve.

It is very impressive though that they could hit carbon neutrality only 10 years after the nations that outsourced their carbon-spewing industries to them while staying state capitalist. They're definitely doing a better job than the US, though the EU is probably doing better still.

Wouldn't that cause it to melt faster?

The better the top layer is insulated, the less heat from sunlight dissipates into the cold glacier and stone beneath. This means that the same amount of absorbed heat brings more of the top layer to the melting point than in a less insulated situation. Once the snow has melted it will go back to the old rate, but 22 days of delay would be optimistic.

Assuming the albedo is the same. If the glaciers are grey from dust and debris, then fresh snow will probably increase the reflectivity, which means less sunlight is absorbed as heat, which would cause the snow to last longer. So maybe 22 days of delay would be pessimistic. Or the effects might cancel out.

I don't know if the infrared and air-to-material heat conduction properties of glacier ice and snow are very different. It's probably less significant than albedo and insulation.

So my guess as an amateur physics grad is that during a heat wave (where air-to-material conduction is the primary driver), snow would melt faster than glacier ice, while during a typical preindustrial arctic early spring (where absorption of sunlight is the primary driver) snow would melt slower than glacier ice.

tl;dr: climate science hard

The important question is what you (yes, you, the person reading this) are going to do.

Climate change has made farming more difficult and expensive, which has lead to more subsidies, which has to be expressed as taxes and government loans, which is distributed over the entirety of right-wingers cutting federal expenses and centrists failing to replace them. The same story holds true for other industries, whether it's the cost to keep sweatshop workers from dying, the cost to grow cotton, the cost to replace services destroyed by forest fires or hurricanes or floods, etc. Capitalism finds alternative routes, but these always cost more. This directly affects your quality of life, but in a distributed stochastic way that you can't directly point to.

So maybe you've suffered from longer waiting periods in the justice system, maybe you're annoyed that inflation has wiped out a considerable portion of your purchasing power (whether capital or income), maybe a lack of infrastructure maintenance has caused potholes or train delays, maybe you could have gotten a well-paying job as a high speed rail engineer or some other forward-looking government project that was never funded, maybe you got food poisoning because FDA checks got cut, maybe the covid restrictions could have stayed in effect longer and someone you know wouldn't have gotten sick or died.

It's like a cruise ship that is taking on water, with all the ship's engineers focused on keeping the ship as stable and upright as possible rather than patching the hole or bailing out the water. They work harder and harder until at some point not even the full might of our regulations and charity and hoarded resources are able to keep it steady. And then everything goes wrong at once.

If your city has N homeless people, the N best places to sleep will be occupied by homeless people. Crazy how most cities will choose to make everyone uncomfortable because they would rather see a homeless person sleep in the gutter than seeing them sleep on a bench or not seeing them because they have the human right of indoor shelter.