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Sogol posted:I am posting with limited bandwidth so I hope the graphic ports ok. I can’t actually see it. Apologies if it is fubar. Fixed your imgur link. Thanks for the cool posts. Reminding me a bit of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, but you're more grounded than Pirsig.
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Jan 4, 2019 02:35
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maybe i'm just dumb but i just can't see how that stuff is meaningfully different than like six sigma seven habits blabbering
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Jan 4, 2019 02:57
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Corsec posted:How can a constructivist describe the generic nature of “points of view” without attempting to describe a reality existing beyond their own unique “point of view”? Not meaning to be hostile, just curious since I'm encountering this for the first time. Doesn’t seem hostile at all. Not entirely sure I understand the question though. I am currently involved in a grant proposal inquiring into the conditions for ethical and unethical research. There are a bunch of things involved. The main things for ethical research in the way we are framing it have to do with social construction and implicit bias. There is a great deal of neuroscience on the virtual impossibility of an individual actually encountering and altering their implicit bias. This is that thing of the held mental model or paradigm not occurring as a mental model, but rather as a self evident and often ‘necessary’ truth. This is true for individuals and something analogous is true for disciplinary silos. Ethical research in this sense then involves a process that acknowledges the social construction and is full of all sorts of dissonance that is not framed as a right/wrong, but rather as the means for an inquiry that reveals the implicit bias (point of view). It does not try to get rid of it, or assert anything about that as a possibility. Rather we try to include and account for it. It takes a great deal of container building and relational work to create the space where the dissonance can be tolerated and consciously related to as the path forward. So, of course we are more or less always attempting to describe reality beyond our own point of view. The objectivist endeavor and therefore the scientific method as a whole is intended to do that. It asserts two things about itself that are problematic while trying to establish an “authorized” point of view, or eliminating “point of view” altogether. It asserts about itself that it is not socially constructed. It asserts that competition is the context for growth and development. One the one hand this makes it very useful for manipulating the world occurring as if made up of separate objects and the subject as separate. The attempt to “see everything from nowhere.” Incredibly useful as a Holocene survival strategy. Also deletes actual costs, etc. and is responsible not only for amazing advances within a materialist paradigm of manipulation, but can also be understood as fundamental in the production of our current condition. Constructivism is not subjectivism or solipsism. There is assumed to be a world of emergent phenomena occurring. (Frankly, for me, there is much more evidence of an emergent world of phenomena than there is for my existence as a separate self. All my evidence for latter is memory and that seems less than trustworthy, if incredibly persuasive.). Again, for me at least, attention is placed equally upon correlation with that emergent world and understanding the individual and collective process of re-presentation. Something is presented, which is then re-presented. In a simple sense it is all memory since it all takes time. We (point of view) cant even apprehend a basket ball as a whole without memory, construction and extrapolation. Sometimes one way I might investigate something about this with someone is to examine a learning process and one way to understand that process. Let’s take learning to drive a car, if you have done that. What was it like the first time you drove? Merged on to a highway? Had other people in the car, etc. For most people there seems to be a mix of anxiety and exhilaration. Now compare to your current experience of driving. On the phone. Listening to music. Talking to people. Eating. Get in the car, drive 90 minutes. Arrive. No recollection of the last 90 minutes. Etc. Now lets look at the car. It’s a few tons of metal and plastic wrapped around a contained explosion, piloted by a random individual, hurtling across layers of burnt earth, separated from calamity and disaster by a few colors, social conventions and the random state of the random pilot. (The entire means of production is basically fire and collision, e.g. contained explosion. It also carries with it the entire supply chain and footprint of all that.) Now, is your current state of being when driving or your initial state of being a driver more accurately correlated with reality? In essence, we adopt a delusional point of view that facilitates functioning. We delete, distort and generalize data and experience in order to do this and then delete our active participation in that process as well. All around us we are participating in actively generated process that we treat as passively occurring, deleting our own participation in favor of a particular model of functionality. This is also how systems of oppression work. The processes of oppression are taken as passive, occurring for the oppressed as if a flaw in themselves, a state of nature or an act of god. When it is first revealed that such process and structure are being actively produced for the benefit of a few, those revelatory acts themselves seem violent. In fact they are just revealing the pre-existing violence. Speaking in a sweeping sort of way we might consider an overall Holocene point of view or paradigm. The adoption and scaling of that point of view has produced a shift in the geological era of the planet. Humans now collectively act on planetary systems at the same or greater scales as those systems themselves. Collective human activity now functions as a force of nature. However, the Holocene point of view producing that has not adapted to the actual emergent conditions it has brought about, e.g a collective delusional point of view adopted and enforced by the beneficiaries. Since it no longer correlates to the emergent state of the planet it takes an increasing amount fo force to keep in place... and it was originally based on force and violence anyway, e.g. the Baconian paradigm in which Nature is seen as a woman to be tortured and subjugated, etc. Sogol fucked around with this message at 23:35 on Jan 4, 2019 |
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Jan 4, 2019 07:00
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Epitope posted:Fixed your imgur link. Thank you for the fix. Ironically my undergraduate education is exactly the education Pirsig is criticizing.
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Jan 4, 2019 07:01
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StabbinHobo posted:maybe i'm just dumb but i just can't see how that stuff is meaningfully different than like six sigma seven habits blabbering Six sigma assumes mechanistic systems. Sometimes complicated systems. It is not useful for working with complex systems or emergence. Applying methods or mental models appropriate to mechanistic systems to complex systems creates much mayhem. The reverse is also true.
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Jan 4, 2019 07:06
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Sogol posted:The objectivist endeavor and therefore the scientific method as a whole is intended to do that. Seeing Ayn Rand's "epistemology" called the foundation of science does indeed feel like an act of violence.  Clearly she was influential, but was it not in more of a religious if not cult way? Of course science is an arm of the civilization undertaking it, not the unbiased truth many of us would like to believe it builds. So if we're all worshiping money, science won't be immune. Still, it's allowed us to see the predicament we're in, if not a way to do anything about it.
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Jan 5, 2019 10:31
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Epitope posted:Seeing Ayn Rand's "epistemology" called the foundation of science does indeed feel like an act of violence. It’s not Rand. She is inconsequential here really. A narcissistic blip, and not really what I am referring to as the objectivist endeavor. Starts with the pre-Socratics and Thales in particular. Here though I was more referring to Sir Francis Bacon. Thales is considered the "father" of science because he asserted that both the source of all things and the difference between things was water. The significance of this is that does not refer to gods in any way. The pre-Socratics (Seven Sages) where more or less asking about material and change. Bacon is considered the "father" of the scientific method. He conceived of the world as composed of separate objects to be dominated. Nature was a woman for him. It needed to be tortured to reveal its secrets. It’s explicitly violent. (Women were still property and he was married to 14 year old when in his 40's or something.) I particularly like what I emphasized in what you said. And yes, there is an amazing part of the method when it curves back around on itself. Here is something I feel is useful from Lakoff and Johnson’s "Metaphors We Live By": https://studfiles.net/preview/4538360/page:19/ The Choices Our Culture Offers We have given an account of the way in which truth is based on understanding. We have argued that truth is always relative to a conceptual system, that any human conceptual system is mostly metaphorical in nature, and that, therefore, there is no fully objective, unconditional, or absolute truth. To many people raised in the culture of science or in other subcultures where absolute truth is taken for granted, this will be seen as a surrender to subjectivity and arbitrariness — to the Humpty-Dumpty notion that something means "just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less." For the same reason, those who identify with the Romantic tradition may see any victory over objectivism as a triumph of imagination over science — a triumph of the view that each individual makes his own reality, free of any constraints. Either of these views would be a misunderstanding based on the mistaken cultural assumption that the only alternative to objectivism is radical subjectivity — that is, either you believe in absolute truth or you can make the world in your own image. If you're not being objective, you're being subjective, and there is no third choice. We see ourselves as offering a third choice to the myths of objectivism and subjectivism. Incidentally, we are not using the term "myth" in any derogatory way. Myths provide ways of comprehending experience; they give order to our lives. Like metaphors, myths are necessary for making sense of what goes on around us. All cultures have myths, and people cannot function without myth any more than they can function without metaphor. And just as we often take the metaphors of our own culture as truths, so we often take the myths of our own culture as truths. The myth of objectivism is particularly insidious in this way. Not only does it purport not to be a myth, but it makes both myths and metaphors objects of belittlement and scorn: according to the objectivist myth, myths and metaphors cannot be taken seriously because they are not objectively true. As we will see, the myth of objectivism is itself not objectively true. But this does not make it something to be scorned or ridiculed. The myth of objectivism is part of the everyday functioning of every member of this culture. It needs to be examined and understood. We also think it needs to be supplemented — not by its opposite, the myth of subjectivism, but by a new experientialist myth, which we think better fits the realities of our experience. In order to get clear about what an experientialist alternative would be like, we first need to examine the myths of objectivism and subjectivism in detail. The rest of the chapter defines objectivism, from within the point of view of his theory of course. I think this supports your point? In case we are losing track, the utility of this conversation for me has to do with how we talk about something as massive and complex as climate change with the intent of creating a ground for what meaningful action is possible. I realize it may not seem useful to others and it is one remove away from the actual conversation in many ways since we are describing one way to frame such conversations, rather than actually having them. I feel it is important nonetheless. Sogol fucked around with this message at 11:52 on Jan 5, 2019 |
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Jan 5, 2019 11:38
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Excuse me if this is a bad blog but Star Slate Codex wrote a piece of 90s environmentalism: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/01/01/what-happened-to-90s-environmentalismstar slate codex posted:Imagine that twenty years from now, nobody cares or talks about global warming. It hasn’t been debunked. It’s still happening. People just stopped considering it interesting. Every so often some webzine or VR-holozine or whatever will publish a “Whatever Happened To Global Warming” story, and you’ll hear that global temperatures are up X degrees centigrade since 2000 and that explains Y percent of recent devastating hurricanes.
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Jan 7, 2019 04:55
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first pass, to call so many of those things *either* alarmist or solved is kindof insane this guy is thinking like a software developer where we can just fix the glitch and its good now how the gently caress can you declare "victory" on water pollution when flint is happening how can you declare victory on air pollution when epa just walked back a bunch of poo poo that graph of whales should be terrifying not a loving mission accomplished for a wiggle at the end. oh and japan just formally walked from even the fig leaf constraints they were operating under so you should very reasonably expect things to get incrementally worse. he has wildly conflated "some progress" with "therefore everythings gonna be ok" edti2: lol he says he's not worried about an elevated extinction rate because with crispr we can bring whatever we need back, this guys an idiot StabbinHobo fucked around with this message at 06:23 on Jan 7, 2019 |
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Jan 7, 2019 06:13
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Even if there's a lot to criticize in that article, I do think it raises an interesting point - there's definitely a lot of "boy who cried wolf" feeling about climate change - I'm probably about the same age as that authour, and it's hard to understate how immensely dire all the things he mentioned were considered through the 90's. Every kid was taught in school that the world was perilously short on rainforests, and there was no more room for garbage, and acid rain would melt all of our faces off, and every fuzzy animal you've ever thought of would be dead. We watched cartoons about these problems. They were absolutely talked about in the same dire tones that climate change is talked about now - that "this time it's different, this one is REALLY important unlike all those other problems", and that our generation would be the ones to live with all the problems facing the earth. And even if they weren't 100% solved, the world we live in 25 years later is not anywhere near as bad as everyone told us it was going to be. It's 100% natural that the human brain is going to apply pattern matching to that and assume climate change is the same, because it's talked about in the exact same way, with the exact same urgency (maybe even less urgency to be honest). I don't know what the solution is, but I do feel like it's something worth considering when talking to Gen Xers about climate change.
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Jan 7, 2019 12:26
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Your post was rather infuriating to read. Yes things are still critical and more than ever, it’s just that you have stopped caring. I still think about learning about saving the rainforest as a kid, and when I look at the starts of things do you think I’m like ‘eh, cried wolf?’ No! It’s still being destroyed and it still loving matters! The disheartening thing is this makes me think that nobody really cared in the first place.and just because you cannot understand timescales and why preventative action is needed on climate change doesn’t mean it is not a critical situation - rather past that point already. So fine, bury your head in the sand. I hope it gets cooked.
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Jan 7, 2019 12:55
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I'm not saying that I assume climate change doesn't exist, or is a big problem, just that brains are a thing that we have less control over than we think, and it's sort of unavoidable that they're going to come up with "hey this problem is being described exactly the same as this other problem that we were able to tackle, so this isn't a problem / is less of a problem than it's being made out to be". I haven't stopped caring one bit, but I'm making a conscious effort to educate myself and get over the pattern recognition of my brain. This is going to be the case for everyone - it's natural, and if it doesn't happen to you I don't know what to tell you, outside of congratulations for being a paragon of logic I guess. I don't think that nagging feeling at the back of your brain is uncommon, and I don't think "well gently caress you and you're an rear end in a top hat" is a great response. Like what do you even want to accomplish besides being smug that you're right about climate change while the world burns?
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Jan 7, 2019 13:02
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Alternate response: *frog, speaking to other frogs in pot* “You guys look like fools for being so concerned! It’s been a while now and it’s barely even hot in here!” Edit: apologies for attacking you directly, you can probably tell this is something that hits a nerve with me Mozi fucked around with this message at 13:21 on Jan 7, 2019 |
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Jan 7, 2019 13:13
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Look, all I'm saying is that it's worth investigating why people don't treat climate change as seriously as they should, and recognizing that someone who's optimistic about climate change while still recognizing it's a problem and taking steps to reduce it isn't a wholly bad thing. I donate to organizations fighting climate change. A big factor in how I vote is based on a party's stance towards climate change. I do everything I can to reduce CO2 emissions in my personal life. If the fact that I'm not completely nihilistic while I'm doing those things makes me deplorable, that seems like a counterproductive stance to take to me. To make a constructive point here, maybe a good way to talk to people who look at the problems from the 90's and how they're not as big a problem as they were talked about is to focus on how the reason at least some of those weren't a problem is because of the effort people made to solve them, and that we need to apply the same effort to climate change. Saying "this time is different, and it's a real problem this time" is something that's been said about every environmental issue ever, and is unlikely to be super effective at changing people's minds.
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Jan 7, 2019 13:21
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enki42 posted:Even if there's a lot to criticize in that article, I do think it raises an interesting point - there's definitely a lot of "boy who cried wolf" feeling about climate change - I'm probably about the same age as that authour, and it's hard to understate how immensely dire all the things he mentioned were considered through the 90's. Every kid was taught in school that the world was perilously short on rainforests, and there was no more room for garbage, and acid rain would melt all of our faces off, and every fuzzy animal you've ever thought of would be dead. We watched cartoons about these problems. If you'd read a single news article in the past 12 months you would already realize that everything which was an environmental concern in the 1990's is infinitely worse off today, and even the loving Ozone layer is starting to go again thanks to production of banned chemicals in China. These issues did not go away, nobody who knew about them in detail stopped talking about them. The media simply turned a blind eye for nearly 20 years and then suddenly, "whoops, looks like all that poo poo got worse again!" If that many people are too loving stupid to put A+B=C together without a talking head on the television informing them of the consequences, they deserve what's coming. That article is loving dumb. Slate Star Codex is always loving dumb, he's a youtuber in blog format. The people who are commenting on that article and read him regularly are, largely, blithering simpletons. enki42 posted:Look, all I'm saying is that it's worth investigating why people don't treat climate change as seriously as they should, and recognizing that someone who's optimistic about climate change while still recognizing it's a problem and taking steps to reduce it isn't a wholly bad thing. They don't investigate climate change because they are loving idiots and there is no shortage of "sources" out there, like that stupid loving article, which reinforce a worldview that they find more comforting than the notion that we're on the verge of extinction. The best solution for these sorts is to ignore that they exist altogether and rigorously stomp on them with hard facts when they poke their heads up, much like you would a trump supporter or capitalist. Personally I don't give enough fucks to waste time trying to convert environmental luddites, they're all going to die anyways so gently caress 'em. Rime fucked around with this message at 13:29 on Jan 7, 2019 |
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Jan 7, 2019 13:25
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I've already said that I don't necessarily thing things are "solved", but absolutely 100% they are not as bad as they were expected to be. In a lot of cases that's due to efforts to combat them, but it's absolutely false to say that things are as bad as the media perception of them was in the 90's. I'm finding this conversation frustrating because I'm not exactly sure why the stance of "we should do everything we can to solve climate change but there's hope" is so unacceptable in here. Even if there isn't hope, surely someone who does everything they can while holding onto a false sense of hope is worth something? If everything is completely, utterly hopeless than why are you even in here rather than just giving up and having fun while the world burns? I don't even think that the article needs to be "right" in terms of whether the problems are actually solved - there is absolutely a perception that acid rain, landfills, deforestation, and animal extinction is less of a problem than it was in the 90's, and it's important for people to realize that any progress that was made was due to human effort and attention rather than the problems solving themselves. enki42 fucked around with this message at 13:41 on Jan 7, 2019 |
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Jan 7, 2019 13:32
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enki42 posted:I've already said that I don't necessarily thing things are "solved", but absolutely 100% they are not as bad as they were expected to be. 19% of coral reefs are gone, 20% of the Amazon is gone, and what was it, 60% of the animal species on Earth are gone? Things are as bad as they told you they would be, you just can't see it in your day to day life because (presumably) you live in the developed world.
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Jan 7, 2019 17:17
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Lightning Knight posted:19% of coral reefs are gone, 20% of the Amazon is gone, and what was it, 60% of the animal species on Earth are gone? Things are as bad as they told you they would be, you just can't see it in your day to day life because (presumably) you live in the developed world. Don't forget that we'll likely see the end of ocean life as we know it within our lifetimes. Seems like extinction is worse than we actually imagined in the 90s even if there have been efforts made to bring some token mammals back from the point of near extinction.
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Jan 7, 2019 17:21
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enki42 posted:I don't think "well gently caress you and you're an rear end in a top hat" is a great response. Like what do you even want to accomplish besides being smug that you're right about climate change while the world burns? I felt the same emotional response to your post for what it's worth. As far as I'm concerned everything is now worse than people suggested it would be decades ago, because people then assumed we'd do something about it. No one told me that I'd never see flocks of lapwings or clouds of moths in headlights or flower-filled hedgerows again, as just one small example, but here we are. My local environment causes me constant grief, because I remember how lovely it was, so to hear someone say 'oh it's not as bad as they said it would be' is infuriating. (What I hope to accomplish with this post is to discourage you from saying that.)
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Jan 7, 2019 17:57
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Can someone reiterate for me why carbon sequestration is a necessity rather than one of many possible climate change solutions? That is, I recall that bringing emissions to 0% would not be sufficient to stop global warming, but I don't recall the mechanism making that the case (besides the obvious things like 1.5C or 2C being themselves too costly/damaging. I'm thinking along the lines not of the impacts we have now continuing but rather that temperatures would continue to rise even in a zero-emission world).
Perry Mason Jar fucked around with this message at 18:16 on Jan 7, 2019 |
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Jan 7, 2019 18:13
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Perry Mason Jar posted:Can someone reiterate for me why carbon sequestration is a necessity rather than one of many possible climate change solutions? That is, I recall that bringing emissions to 0% would not be sufficient to stop global warming, but I don't recall the mechanism making that the case. The shitload of carbon already out will continue heating until we reach a new equilibrium, and god only knows what that is. +2? +4? They change it every year, we know we've already passed 1.5 degrees with aerosols accounted for. Also it's acidifying the oceans at a furious pace. Want to stop it? You need net negative carbon emissions, suckling that poo poo back out or we have the bad ending.
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Jan 7, 2019 18:17
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Perry Mason Jar posted:Can someone reiterate for me why carbon sequestration is a necessity rather than one of many possible climate change solutions? That is, I recall that bringing emissions to 0% would not be sufficient to stop global warming, but I don't recall the mechanism making that the case (besides the obvious things like 1.5C or 2C being themselves too costly/damaging. I'm thinking along the lines not of the impacts we have now continuing but rather that temperatures would continue to rise even in a zero-emission world). Maintaining a temperature of 1.5C by 2100 requires a brief overshoot in the 2nd half of the 21st century that is then lowered via negative emissions. Essentially, we've waited long enough that realistic emissions pathways can't practically reduce to zero quickly enough, so we have to go negative.
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Jan 7, 2019 18:27
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Perry Mason Jar posted:Can someone reiterate for me why carbon sequestration is a necessity rather than one of many possible climate change solutions? That is, I recall that bringing emissions to 0% would not be sufficient to stop global warming, but I don't recall the mechanism making that the case (besides the obvious things like 1.5C or 2C being themselves too costly/damaging. I'm thinking along the lines not of the impacts we have now continuing but rather that temperatures would continue to rise even in a zero-emission world). Three angles:
That's the basic explanation. Also, we'll probably need to hit every angle we can every way we can and it still won't be enough. Our science and technology is woefully inadequate for this.
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Jan 7, 2019 18:28
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enki42 posted:I've already said that I don't necessarily thing things are "solved", but absolutely 100% they are not as bad as they were expected to be. In a lot of cases that's due to efforts to combat them, but it's absolutely false to say that things are as bad as the media perception of them was in the 90's. Extinction rates across the board are high and even insect biomass is plummeting from rainforests. "There is a absolutely a perception that [everything] is less of a problem than it was in the 90s" by whom? People like you that don't bother keeping up with current literature? Your average person will notice about the time that the groundwater aquifers and snowpack runoff they depend on for food start to dry up and prices skyrocket. You can thank the green revolution for insulating us from reality.
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Jan 7, 2019 18:37
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https://twitter.com/YaleE360/status/1082075594362441730
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Jan 7, 2019 18:46
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enki42 posted:I've already said that I don't necessarily thing things are "solved", but absolutely 100% they are not as bad as they were expected to be. In a lot of cases that's due to efforts to combat them, but it's absolutely false to say that things are as bad as the media perception of them was in the 90's. The disconnect here is that while we've made improvements in mitigating things that directly affect people today, like smog in LA, environmental degradation has not slowed down hardly at all. Even where it has, it's not encouraging. Of course we're not going to slash down the last 100 acres of rainforest as fast as we do the first, but that's hardly a victory. This ties in pretty well to the in depth conversation above that most people skipped over. One point if you want a highlight is in this post BrandorKP posted:Anyway on the subject of systems I’d like you to read this post I wrote for the trade thread: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3862896&userid=91236&perpage=40&pagenumber=3#post488441466 Brandor talks about a steam engine, where engineering allows for more and more efficient use of the same amount of resources. The unfortunate reality is the margin for error goes down. So, while a small rise in whale population is better than them going to zero, a small population is going to have a much reduced chance of surviving a challenge like, say, ocean acidification. In short, the 90s weren't wrong, and there isn't a problem with messaging* so much as there's a problem with perception*. *edit to clarify us using words differently- The media/environmentalists message- "this is dire" wasn't wrong or crying wolf. People's perception "I'm not being bitten, there is no wolf" is what's wrong. Well, maybe not wrong that they're not being bitten, but misleading as there are friggin wolves out there. Epitope fucked around with this message at 20:46 on Jan 7, 2019 |
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Jan 7, 2019 20:29
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Epitope posted:The unfortunate reality is the margin for error goes down. I'd say it this way low inventory, low stocks, can open up the possibility of catastrophic failure of a system.
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Jan 7, 2019 22:24
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Just impregnated a lady lol (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST) (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Jan 7, 2019 22:26
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A Buff Gay Dude posted:Just impregnated a lady lol Your username says otherwise my overly muscled friend.
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Jan 7, 2019 22:28
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I think I would want to consider it in terms of scale, and I think that blog just posted has a scale and scope problem. Scale produces homogeneity and suppresses diversity. The system becomes more vulnerable to changes in linear variables. More subject to catastrophic failure and collapse, from the point of view of whatever singular result the scale was intended to produce, e.g. yield. "Tipping points" can be understood as metastable regimes. The shift in such regimes is non-linear, meaning it tips in one direction much more easily than the other. E.g. a clear like goes to a turbid lake much more easily than a turbid lake to a clear lake. Such shifts can happen due to linear or non-linear variables. We often increase the likelihood of such shifts or collapse through the attempt to optimize some singular output of a natural system. That is what scale does more or less. Also, about efficiency increases, I think Jevons Paradox is a real thing.
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Jan 7, 2019 22:37
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Jevons is real but certainly not universal. Some systems of incentives are designed such that efficiency increases consumption, but others do not. We're seeing real world examples of economies decoupling economic growth from energy growth, but you're correct to point out that effort is required to make sure efficiency doesn't increase consumption.
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Jan 7, 2019 22:49
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Yeh, I guess local community choice energy would be an example. Could you name some others?
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Jan 8, 2019 01:27
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Global warming of oceans equivalent to an atomic bomb per second over past 150 yearsquote:A Guardian calculation found the average heating across that 150-year period was equivalent to about 1.5 Hiroshima-size atomic bombs per second. But the heating has accelerated over that time as carbon emissions have risen, and was now the equivalent of between three and six atomic bombs per second. Checkmate, 90's environmentalists! 
Rime fucked around with this message at 02:54 on Jan 8, 2019 |
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Jan 8, 2019 02:48
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imho jevons only applies in a net-energy-growth system. in a fixed or contracting system I don't think it would hold true.
StabbinHobo fucked around with this message at 05:20 on Jan 8, 2019 |
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Jan 8, 2019 05:16
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Sogol posted:I think I would want to consider it in terms of scale, and I think that blog just posted has a scale and scope problem. Scale produces homogeneity and suppresses diversity. The system becomes more vulnerable to changes in linear variables. More subject to catastrophic failure and collapse, from the point of view of whatever singular result the scale was intended to produce, e.g. yield. "Tipping points" can be understood as metastable regimes. The shift in such regimes is non-linear, meaning it tips in one direction much more easily than the other. E.g. a clear like goes to a turbid lake much more easily than a turbid lake to a clear lake. In that short summary of Panarchy they quote Ludwig, who talked about the example of ships stability, that (ships stability)is something I know a great deal about . There is a comparable model. In initial stability there is a value called GM. GM is the distance between the center of gravity of the vessel and the metacentric height. Basically this value gives one an indication of the stability of the vessel. A ship with a positive GM is stable. One with a negative GM is not. If a vessel has an off-center weight it can start to list. This is straight forward. Weight on one side makes the ship list to that side. This is a normal thing happens all the time with off-center weight be they liquids (like fuel) or cargo producing small lists. But back to a negative GM. A negative GM will cause a "loll". During a loll a vessel tips over like a list to one side. The only observable difference is that a vessel with an angle of loll might flop from one side rapidly to the opposite side. A very with a loll in seas causing rolling could very easily capsize. Even a very small negative GM can cause a very large loll because a tangent is involved.  Now there was the question of how do we teach people to recognize this situation and save their lives and the cargo. The answer was ships stability for Merchant Mariners. A great deal of work went into translating vessel stability into understandable language. The most widely used in the US textbook on the subject is, per the author, written for someone with a seventh grade education who was also drunk. Similar effort may be necessary come up with language to communicate the nature of this type of "tipping point" state. In stability, a negative GM is an existential threat. Once the ship capsizes everybody dies. Sogol posted:Such shifts can happen due to linear or non-linear variables. We often increase the likelihood of such shifts or collapse through the attempt to optimize some singular output of a natural system. That is what scale does more or less. Here's the problem and I'm going to be concrete with an example. Vessels benefit from economies of scale. The amount of fuel needed to move a ship is mostly driven by area of the ship's hull under the waterline, a square. The amount of cargo the ship carries is driven by the volume of water the ship is able to displace, a cube. Thus larger is more efficient. Vessel size always tends to increase until other constraints (maximum depths of channels, the size of the panama canal, or terminal size and loading rates, ability to make safe vessels, etc) create an upper ceiling. But here's the tldr of what I'm trying to say. The math drives scale. It's a similar situation with farms and businesses. It (the math) might even be what drives growing inequality in capitalism over time. Competition is always going to create an incentive for business or states to want scale's efficiency advantage. So scale in one variable causes this problem, where the larger system gets distorted and potentially fails. But math is the underlying reason for the efficiencies of scale. So we need constraints to prevent this type of system failure. I'd prefer designed ones, feedback controls, to return the system to stability. The natural constraints when they appear, tend to cause collapse. The lack of designed controls is an existential threat, in the same way a negative GM is. Edit: and yes I'm implying this is the situation for both climate change and capitalism. Bar Ran Dun fucked around with this message at 05:49 on Jan 8, 2019 |
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Jan 8, 2019 05:46
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BrandorKP posted:In that short summary of Panarchy they quote Ludwig, who talked about the example of ships stability, that (ships stability)is something I know a great deal about . There is a comparable model. In initial stability there is a value called GM. GM is the distance between the center of gravity of the vessel and the metacentric height. Basically this value gives one an indication of the stability of the vessel. A ship with a positive GM is stable. One with a negative GM is not. If a vessel has an off-center weight it can start to list. This is straight forward. Weight on one side makes the ship list to that side. This is a normal thing happens all the time with off-center weight be they liquids (like fuel) or cargo producing small lists. But back to a negative GM. A negative GM will cause a "loll". During a loll a vessel tips over like a list to one side. The only observable difference is that a vessel with an angle of loll might flop from one side rapidly to the opposite side. A very with a loll in seas causing rolling could very easily capsize. Even a very small negative GM can cause a very large loll because a tangent is involved. I notice maybe a couple of differences in the way I think about these things. Mostly we are agreeing about the system dynamics though I think. One difference is that unless you believe in something like Platonic forms, math doesn’t cause anything. Of course I understand what you mean, but it is these small metaphors and their entailments that condition how we see the world, select data, draw conclusions and act, etc. You also seem to be speaking from a “free market” mythos and all of its entailments relative to things like competition. Though the equilibrium metaphor is illustrative there are some problems with the overall context. For instance, what does it mean for shipping to be efficient or have gains in efficiency? In the current model, efficiency will only be understood as increase in the maximization and consolidation of profit, perhaps expressed as a competitive reduction in cost. The profit-debt model is so thoroughly socialized that those of us from industrialized cultures tend to think of it as a necessary and self evident truth, when in fact historically speaking it first comes about in the 1500’s in Italy. It is an effect of longer ship voyages and larger ships (and so the much larger risks) associated with the violent colonization and enslavement activities of the European powers. The debt based economy, insurance and such all follow from this. They are neither self evident nor necessary. We live as if they are both. Competition as a frame is even harder. More or less it is based on misattribution from Darwin. He never talks about survival of the fittest and such. We assume natural selection functions as a variable because we viewed phenomena through the lens of “Enlightenment” individualism. Maturana makes an interesting suggestion. Suppose for a moment that natural selection is not a variable, but rather a constant. This means that only one trait selection is possible within the niche. It shifts the dynamic of growth and development from one of competition based on the individual as a unit of analysis to a collaborative production of the entire niche. The dynamic of growth and development becomes collaboration, within the context of which competition might (or might not) take place. Your ship example does get at something really useful it seems to me. I will shift context. Let’s talk about trees and beetles. You have a forest. It is getting cyclically devastated by beetles. So you decide to control the beetle population (e.g. through the heavy use of pesticides). This works. It creates more mature trees. However, the beetles actually only eat mature trees. You end up amplifying the “problem”. You are doing this because you are attempting to reap the benefits of scale, e.g. maximizing the yield of the forest which depends on mature trees. The benefit of scale is the production of some singular outcome, e.g. GDP, mature trees, etc. This in turn relies on relating to the living systems of the world as if they were separately existing objects. You are actively causing the forest, as a metastable regime, to tip. Instead, do not attempt to maximize yield, or any singular outcome, in order to reap the supposed benefits of scaled activity. Probe the edges of the metastability. Treat managing (and limiting) the maturation of trees (and therefore yield) as more important than the management of beetles... is a simple way to say it. You have to abandon your pre-existing notions of scale and efficiency to do so. There are good case studies of this relative to marine environments, soil, forests and especially lakes, which are easiest to study. If you attempt to do this in the current corporate/capitalist paradigm you will be interacted with as if you are doing something immoral, since the maximization and consolidation of profit is viewed as a moral absolute. If you work for a corporation you have explicitly agreed and contracted to uphold this morality. (I am not judging some "you" individually. Just stating what you have agreed to in that case.). The global legal and military structures are intended to enforce this paradigm. They do other things as well, but they are all secondary, just like safety is secondary in any industrial asset. Famine is not a moral violation from that institutional view. Genocide is not. Slavery is not. Constraining a so-called market or compromising the consolidation and maximization of profit is and will be acted on accordingly, up to military intervention depending upon the scale of the perceived violation. The “secret war” in Angola is just one of the many, many examples of this. Most are related to fossil fuels and constitute an enormous hidden cost or subsidy depending on your point of view. It is this. Scale systemically produces homogeneity and suppresses diversity. Usually in our current model of these things it also requires active objectification, which means violence and the application of force to keep in place (since it does not occur naturally in a way that is intended to produce singular or linear outcomes). It is a property of a system designed to maximize some singular outcome in a way that we call efficient. The homogenous, monolithic structure makes the entire system resilient to fewer variables. Far more vulnerable to linear variables. (E.g. linear accretion of something over time v non-linear events such as an asteroid strike). And that lack of resilience means the likelihood of total collapse is much, much higher with much larger impact. The variable effecting the system does not just effect part of it, but since in order to meet the “efficiency” model the structure is homogeneous and monolithic it effects the entire thing at once. (interesting examples from architecture relative to bombings and catastrophic collapse in the UK.) What I am then interested in is participation in conscious, benevolent change (usually in phenomena understood as social-ecological systems) that mitigates the massive amounts of suffering and destruction associated with collapse. On the way there it is necessary to address the massive inequities, violence and unnecessary suffering being actively produced (but related to as if passively occurring and necessary) associated with having successfully adopted models of scale and efficiency. It is something like this for me at least. Probably overstated, and certainly always accomplishing less than I would like.
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Jan 8, 2019 17:03
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https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1082640941335408641 "“The big takeaway for me is that we haven’t yet successfully decoupled U.S. emissions growth from economic growth,” said Trevor Houser, a climate and energy analyst at the Rhodium Group."
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Jan 8, 2019 17:09
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Greenland melt drives continuous export of methane from the ice-sheet bedquote:Ice sheets are currently ignored in global methane budgets1,2. Although ice sheets have been proposed to contain large reserves of methane that may contribute to a rise in atmospheric methane concentration if released during periods of rapid ice retreat3,4, no data exist on the current methane footprint of ice sheets. " quote:Overall, our results indicate that ice sheets overlie extensive, biologically active methanogenic wetlands and that high rates of methane export to the atmosphere can occur via efficient subglacial drainage pathways. Our findings suggest that such environments have been previously underappreciated and should be considered in Earth’s methane budget Another day, another emissions source the IPCC doesn't take into account.
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Jan 8, 2019 17:11
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Methane is the endgame
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Jan 8, 2019 17:15
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Carbon emissions up as Trump agenda rolls back climate change workquote:A new analysis shows US greenhouse gas levels are increasing as the Trump administration unravels efforts to slow climate change. Shiiiiiiit, I thought everything was better than the 90's? 
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Jan 8, 2019 17:26
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