Talk:2889: Greenhouse Effect

First description! FIRST 🤑 42.book.addict (talk) 18:45, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

Is there a category or a name for the set of comics which make the observation of "x thing happened closer to Y thing than today"? --Raviolio (talk) 18:57, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

Maybe Category:Timelines could work? 42.book.addict (talk) 19:00, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

It is also similar in structure to many of the comics in Category:Comics to make one feel old but has a quite different theme 172.69.6.156 23:06, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

Do we have a source for the "their answers closely match modern estimates"? that would be a good thing to add Happier7713 (talk) 19:35, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

A nit -- the Newcomen atmospheric engine was invented in 1712 and is usually thought of as the first steam engine (at least of the modern, western, world). 108.162.245.36 (talk) 20:25, 2 February 2024 (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

The Newcomen was certainly started it, and tends to be somewhat overshadowed (I actually walked past the oldest still-in-place Newcomen beam engine, earlier today... never seen it working (by hydrau;ics, these days), but it's there). But its practical efficiency was limited by its operation, and it took (Boulton and) Watt to make it into the potentially mobile powerhouse that drove much of the really developed stuff (beyond mine-drainage/etc).

Of course, it was also more fuel efficient, so if we'd have somehow done exactly the same amount of IR via Newcomen-style machines then we'd probably have accelerated the burning of resources across the same period, so... 162.158.74.49 00:10, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

I would say we did plenty of work. In 1896, noone had any idea what renewable energy is. -- Hkmaly (talk) 23:48, 2 February 2024 (UTC)

There have been windmills and watermills and fire from wood for thousands of years. The real problem is fossils, which release co2 from millions of years. In my opinion, it's about the attitude of "the right to consume" instead of "the right to use". --LaVe (talk) 06:35, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

“yet after 128 years there’s been close to no progress to changing our infrastructure to be renewable-energy based.” That might or might not be true, depending on how you define “close to no progress” but regardless of that, the comic does not make any such claim, and that part should be deleted frm the explanation of the comic. 162.158.186.35 05:06, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

Given what has appeared in other xkcd comics with a global-warming theme, I think the "close to no progress" reaction is permissible. Whether it is accurate is remarkably hard for me to pin down. A study I found in 2014 said that annual per-capita energy consumption in the USA rose from 100MM to 350MM BTUs between 1900 and 1973, and has since remained almost constant. 1973, of course, was the Arab oil embargo, which stimulated massive investment in energy efficiency that continue to the present day. Each of us now uses many more things for the same energy - but the population is increasing, therefore so is the bulk carbon-dioxide loading. A 2023 US Government attempt to forecast energy use in the USA between now and 2050, I found to be both unreadable and unhelpful in terms of assessing whether we are gaining on energy efficiencies and transition to renewables. There simply were too many variables in the inputs. And as 2020 demonstrated, our response to energy challenges will be forced by economics, not climate politics or comics IMO. 172.71.150.168 07:22, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

I was unable to find an article by "Crawford 1997" in which either of the quotes cited in the title text appear in full. They might appear in other articles included in the special issue of the journal Ambio devoted to the work that Arrhenius and colleagues did in the last decade of the 19th century. The two articles by Elisabeth Crawford in that journal, one sole-authored and one co-authored, provide considerable context for the discovery, including the various competing theories about global warming that were being debated among scientists at the time, and the remarkable observation by Arrhenius that such warming was not a bad thing. According to the Crawford sole-authored paper, Arrhenius wrote (translation from Swedish), "It [global warming] "will allow our descendants, even if they only be those of a distant future, to live under a warmer sky and in a less harsh environment than we were granted." 172.71.151.130 07:04, 3 February 2024 (UTC)

Arguably, it was Abraham Darby's invention of the cold tired blast furnace in 1709, that vastly increased iron production, was the real start of the industrial revolution and use of coal as a fuel. (It was actually banned in some places as being a dirty fuel for cooking and heating) Of course that might need up the nearer to / further from dates that this series of comics use. RIIW - Ponder it (talk) 09:51, 3 February 2024 (UTC)