Astral Codex Ten

IPCC

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IPCC

Article

IPCC is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between October 11, 2021 and January 26, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “The IPCC predicts sea levels will probably rise another half a meter”; “The scientific consensus says it’s very unlikely that will happen - according to the IPCC, “a ‘runaway greenhouse effect’—analogous to [that of] Venus—appears to have virtually no chance of being induced by anthropogenic activities.""; “The IPCC claimed that climate change had increased droughts in the fourth report, retracted that claim in the fifth”. It most often appears alongside California, Lincoln, NYC.

Metadata

  • Category: Organizations
  • Mention count: 3
  • Issue count: 3
  • First seen: October 11, 2021
  • Last seen: January 26, 2022

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Please Don't Give Up On Having Kids Because Of Climate Change
October 11, 2021 · Original source
The current scientific consensus, as per leading scientific organizations like the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is that climate change will be very bad, but not world-endingly bad.
Inline links: climate change will be very bad, but not world-endingly bad
(source) This has already been pretty bad, with unusually many hurricanes, wildfires, and droughts. It’s hard to tell how many people have died of climate-change-related causes. Maybe thousands? Maybe tens of thousands? Probably trillions of dollars have already been lost to disasters and agricultural problems. But tens of thousands of deaths and trillions of dollars lost is completely compatible with the average person in the First World not really noticing much of a change to their daily lives. The next 75 years of global warming are going to be worse than we’ve gotten already, maybe millions of lives lost and tens of trillions of dollars in damage. In aggregate, they’re going to be a giant disaster. But the average person in the First World, probably including your child, still won’t notice much of a change to their daily lives.
Inline links: source
I want to focus on sea level rise because it’s easy to quantify and display. Sea levels have already risen about a quarter of a meter since 1880. This has flooded some low-lying islands, damaged some coastal cities, and devastated some wetlands and other habitats. But the average person in the First World hasn’t noticed. The IPCC predicts sea levels will probably rise another half a meter to a meter by 2100, so maybe 2-4x as much as they’ve risen already. This also won’t be very noticeable to average people. Here’s San Francisco now (top picture), after 1m of sea level rise ie the IPCC’s worst-case scenario for 2100 (middle picture) and after 3m of sea level rise ie the worst-case scenario for 2200 (bottom picture):
Inline links: have already risen, half a meter to a meter by 2100
Highlights From The Comments On Kids And Climate Change
October 13, 2021 · Original source
The IPCC claimed that climate change had increased droughts in the fourth report, retracted that claim in the fifth. For hurricanes, a long discussion by Chris Landsea, who wrote a substantial part of one of the IPCC report's section on hurricanes is at https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/Landsea/gw_hurricanes/
Inline links: https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/Landsea/gw_hurricanes/
If you actually read the IPCC reports with care, instead of the news media, things look a lot less bleak. Here are some of my favorite quotes:
You wrote, "The IPCC predicts sea levels will probably rise another half a meter to a meter by 2100".
Bounded Distrust
January 26, 2022 · Original source
(before you object that some different global-warming related claim is false, please consider whether the IPCC has said with certainty that it isn’t, or whether all climatologists have denounced the thing as false in so many words. If not, that’s my whole point.)