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I'm not wild about gotcha journalism. But geez I'd love to ask some of the people writing about climate some basic questions. What are total CO2 emissions per year? What percentage is due to the US? To China? To coal? To power generation?
How does the impact of methane compare to CO2? How long does CO2 last in the atmosphere (& how do we know)? Etc. When reading I often have the sneaking suspicion that the person writing has no quantitative understanding at all of climate.
Good intentions + no detailed quantitative understanding is simply a recipe for bad outcomes, in my opinion.
It's tempting to say "well, people aren't interested in wonkish, number-and-model laden writing". Maybe. But I wonder. In sport, people seem to love it.
I'm trying to imagine writing about basketball that eschewed all quantitative accounts of last night's big game. Most general climate writing seems a bit like discussing how good or bad LeBron looked on court last night, while ignoring points, rebounds, assists etc.
Funny thing is: of course, there's a tonne of great books, online classes etc that are full of this stuff. I've found the IPCC report(s) surprisingly readable and interesting. But it all seems sub rosa from the pov of popular culture.
What is the optimum long-term global mean temperature, compared with today's?
Fun question. Though it's much more subjective than most of mine, which are questions of fact (or are meant to imply such - e.g., the question about lifetime of the CO2 in the atmosphere is a question absent human intervention. But, of course, we may intervene.)
A key issue (for those of us who want to think quantitatively about this) is that we're dealing with such a complex system. Recently read that the fertilizer industry contributes more in terms of CO2 emissions than everything else combined, but not had opportunity to investigate.
Unlikely. Here's the US breakdown (electricity+transport already well over 50%) for GHG in terms of CO2 equivalent (so it includes, eg methane and other GHGs):https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions …
A followup question: what's the best way to show/encode this kind of information? I suspect numbers in a block of text don't build intuition without a lot of effort. Why aren't there more google sheets of semi-permanent facts with graphs out there?
Good writing.
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