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VideoGameVet posted:Got some hate email about my Climate Trail game because it "emits carbon" on the basis that is software. Yes but then people USE the game and their machines consume electricity which emits carbon! /sarcasm Yeah, that's a pathetic cop out. By their logic, they should stop shopping, eating, driving, existing because it also consumes or emits carbon. Smash the looms now.
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Jan 6, 2022 19:52
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Sending emails with my mind so no carbon is used
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Jan 6, 2022 19:57
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You claim to want to reduce co2 emissions and yet you are made of carbon? curious.
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Jan 6, 2022 20:25
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Slow News Day posted:This guy is a NASA climate scientist, and founder of Climate Ad Project: Yeah, Kalmus specifically has a pretty gloomy vision. And he's not the only one. One good example would be Timothy Lepton, who co-authored the 'Hothouse Earth' paper that was a big deal a few years back, and honestly has been publishing variations on this paper for 15, 20 years now, (though none of the previous papers had a graph quite as cool as this one. Another would be Kevin Anderson, a UK climate scientist who's been extremely influential on Extinction Rebellion, who I would count as the most important (and certainly most radical) climate activist group on Earth, as well as in prominent climate campaigners like Greta Thunberg. And there's climate scientists who are pessimistic, even problematic, in other ways: Stefan Rahmstorf was a lead author on the IPCC's AR4 report and is also a lead advisor to the German government and has strongly pushed the shutdown of nuclear power that country is pursuing now. But in my experience, these people are mostly outliers. Most climate scientists are skeptical of these kind of ideas. A better example of the mainstream outlook in climate science would be this article co-authored by Peter Frase, lead author on the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report, Fifth Assessment Report, and current Sixth Assessment Report, as well as climate scientist for the Hadley Center, which is not quite NASA but is a good contender for the second-most prestigious climate research program right behind it: quote:This crisis will not be solved quickly or easily, and overheated polemics are not helping. While it won’t be good for us, it also won’t be the literal end of the world. But the apocalypse is a needlessly high bar to take action. Though most of the challenges we overcome as a species are not existential risks, they are nonetheless critically important. We see a real risk that dwelling on doom may serve to obstruct climate action rather than motivating it, promoting fatalism and further polarisation. There is also evidence that fear is not a very effective tool to engage people around the climate. But dismissing the severity of climate impacts and the real possibility of worst-case outcomes is also an extremely dangerous gamble. The risks are serious enough, and we need a common understanding of the urgent need to tackle them. That phrase, "neither good for us, or the end of the world", is one that comes up frequently among climate scientists. It's a paraphrase of pioneering (and late, RIP) climate scientist Steve Schneider, who did some of the fields formative research starting the the 1970s and was a fixture of the field all the way until his death in 2010. This, from what I've seen, is close to the mainstream position of climate scientists. There are some people like Kalmus who will promote very negative assessments that get close to "the end of the world", but not that many. The standard position is to oppose both outright denial/lukewarmism, and to oppose doomism. So unless you're cherry-picking, it's unlikely you're going to end up with a position much like the one commonly advocated here.
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Jan 6, 2022 20:31
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Agree that “But dismissing the severity of climate impacts and the real possibility of worst-case outcomes is also an extremely dangerous gamble.”
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Jan 6, 2022 20:34
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What did I say about cherry-picking?
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Jan 6, 2022 20:39
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Well, I agree with the quote in general. But boy do people and governments often like to ignore the bottom half of that graph when ensuring us it’s all On Plan.
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Jan 6, 2022 20:40
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CommieGIR posted:Smash the looms now. It’s probably not even that. It’s probably to waste his time with an ingenious argument they don’t really believe.
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Jan 6, 2022 20:44
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I also think part of the problem is that there are many meanings of apocalypse. There are people who think it is an apocalypse in the colloquial sense. People who don’t think it is in the colloquial sense. People who think it is in the most literal sense, etc. I’m in the most literal meaning of the word (in its Greek and religious origins) camp.
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Jan 6, 2022 21:05
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Thug Lessons posted:What did I say about cherry-picking? You've been very clear that it's only good when you do it
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Jan 6, 2022 21:14
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Bar Ran Dun posted:
The most literal meaning is something like 'a revelation", the Greek root words means to uncover. Apocalypses (I.e. someone recounting a dream or vision rich in symbolic meaning) were a common genre of writing at the time the books of the New Testament, it just so happens that the only one that made the final cut was also about the end of the world but eschatology isn't part of the literal meaning of the word.
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Jan 6, 2022 21:56
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DynamicSloth posted:Pedantry corner: Yes exactly. But then that gets filtered through the context of the New Testament and Neoplatonism. So generally still does pick up in a very broad sense that it’s object, what is revealed, as being about ends, eg death of Jesus on the cross or even ends in a idealist sense regarding revealed changes in the logos the reasons underlying how the world is.
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Jan 6, 2022 22:03
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And I think that’s my argument for apocalyptic and existential. Climate change will change the underlying order of the world as we live in it. We we inevitably be made aware of this change (it will be revealed) regardless of if we make it through mitigations or just let it happen. Bar Ran Dun fucked around with this message at 23:38 on Jan 6, 2022 |
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Jan 6, 2022 22:19
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VideoGameVet posted:Got some hate email about my Climate Trail game because it "emits carbon" on the basis that is software. Hey I don't know if you're responsible for the Steam implementation of this game or not, but I tried downloading it via Steam and it seems like the executable is in the wrong directory. I see that the https://www.theclimatetrail.com/ website doesn't mention the Steam version at all, so I might be barking up the wrong tree. Oh also that person is clearly an idiot troll whose son/daughter liked the game and made the mistake of sharing it with their insurrectionist parent. https://store.steampowered.com/app/1162400/The_Climate_Trail/ https://steamcommunity.com/app/1162400 Also, this topic reminds me of one of my favorite climate change-related games, Clim City. Inspired by Sim City, the goal of the game was to lead a town through a variety of reforms and upgrades in order to hopefully meet climate change goals. You had to manage public support, finances, CO2 levels, and other elements while trying to make the best decisions to beat a difficult 50 year clock. The game was made in French but translated into English. Sadly, I haven't been able to find a version of it hosted anywhere anymore. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXrwjyDipyI https://www.citeco.fr/en/clim%E2%80%99city https://physicsworld.com/a/web-life-climcity/ Kaal fucked around with this message at 22:50 on Jan 6, 2022 |
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Jan 6, 2022 22:31
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Kaal posted:Hey I don't know if you're responsible for the Steam implementation of this game or not, but I tried downloading it via Steam and it seems like the executable is in the wrong directory. I see that the https://www.theclimatetrail.com/ website doesn't mention the Steam version at all, so I might be barking up the wrong tree. Oh also that person is clearly an idiot troll whose son/daughter liked the game and made the mistake of sharing it with their insurrectionist parent. Best to download from: https://deepstategames.itch.io/the-climate-trail-10 I need to get the Steam page updated.
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Jan 7, 2022 00:26
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VideoGameVet posted:Best to download from: https://deepstategames.itch.io/the-climate-trail-10 Thanks! I'm looking forward to playing. And nice media interview!
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Jan 7, 2022 03:54
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Kaal posted:Thanks! I'm looking forward to playing. And nice media interview! Thank you! It's also on the iOS and Android App Stores.
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Jan 7, 2022 06:45
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Thank you!! Just had a quick play on the ipad (SO MUCH CARBON USED!) ; realistic and grim, slick design too, good work 
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Jan 7, 2022 07:12
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Pardon me, I'm just ruminating on my current mental state regarding the environment in general: I have been watching Youtube videos of the ecologist William Rees, who considers the overshoot of human enterprise (civilization, industry, population etc.) to be an overarching metaproblem of which climate change is only a smaller subset. In his opinion we as a species are heading for a collapse due to the combination of psychological and social factors at play. He talks about economics being dangerously disconnected from ecology, among other topics. Oh, such happy prospects. Part of the reason I am currently somewhat medicated. Another scientist who I particularly look up to is the mycologist Paul Stamets, who has discovered solutions to the bee colony collapse problem, new medicines for many infectious diseases etc. and seems like a generally cool dude.  Some people in this thread might have heard of a certain Pentti Linkola, a fisherman and thinker who advocated some form of eco-fascism and warned about the path modern civilization was taking. In his mind democracy was a failure because complex problems were beyond the voting public's and politicians capabilities to solve. Cheerful stuff. During his lifetime he was on security services watchlists for his views, but he wasn't a Theodore Kacynski type himself, more of an admirer of such. I would disagree with Linkola on the topic of the usefulness of violent actions because of their counterproductivity overall in shaping public opinion. Insert joke about the virtues of cannibalism here.  Anyhow, I am not a scientist but I have a question for wiser minds: Suppose we spread greenhouse gases and other pollutants into the atmosphere and by extension into the oceans from millions of point sources like that specimen of a human being Bolsonaro, does entropy guarantee we can't effectively remove all that crap from the air and water since it becomes dispersed? Sure we can plant more trees but is that even hypothetically ever nearly enough? Millions of years worth of fossil materials dumped into the air in a century or two. Another question comes to mind: EVs are all the rage around where I live, but producing them involves mining, long supply chains and more greenhouse gas emissions, not to mention the increasing need to produce more of all that juicy electricity somehow. How do EVs look overall in their environmental footprint? Any good sources on this? I can't discuss environmental problems or the state of society with anyone because I end up causing too much anxiety in others with my opinions. Where do you folks vent your minds? 
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Jan 7, 2022 22:13
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I see electric vehicles as a necessary evil because there was absolutely no way that we're going to be ripping our car dependent infrastructure out and replacing it with trains by 2100 in America. At least if we focus on zero carbon grid infrastructure, the industries propping up automotive manufacturing might become less carbon intensive. Fair warning, my read (and that of many itt) that we're basically hosed. Hemming and hawing about what we could be doing or what might possibly happen in the future is an idle academic exercise in posting--and that's fine insofar that posting is a nice pastime--but the paths to mitigating the climate crisis lie on the far side of top-to-vottom voting rights reform, public re-education, and...honestly?...illegal vigilante action against executives in fossil fuel and adjacent financing that we really don't have the stomach for.
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Jan 7, 2022 22:26
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with respect to anxiety, there have been a lot of good prior conversations about climate grieving, and the sooner you can go through the process, the better for you I found that going through that process starting several years ago also helped me grieve America's darker turn toward adopting eugenics as the national policy response to the pandemic
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Jan 7, 2022 22:28
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"We're hosed" is a spectrum, and means different things to different people with different perspectives. Some folks think we'll all literally be dead in 20 years. Other folks think that things aren't quite as bad and that human civilization will adapt well enough that we'll be chugging along in 2100, with millions to billions of deaths globally between now and then as we figure out painfully how adaptation works. For me, personally, at this point in life and on my own climate grief journey, I don't need to know with certainty where on that spectrum we will end up. I started walking through the stages of grief back in 2012-2014, full of anger and depression. Through many years I've become a lot more zen about it, trying to take solace comfort in activism and giving up to god, so to speak, the things I cannot control. Nobody really gets to choose their destiny, we're all along for the ride and we try to do the best we can with what we've got. Nothing in life was ever guaranteed. For me its enough to know that: things are bad, they are certainly going to get worse before there's a chance of them getting better, and the best thing I can do is try to work with others to effect positive and necessary change to mitigate things from becoming even worse than they will. We must be the brave, bold, and fierce ancestors of those who come with us and after us.
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Jan 7, 2022 22:50
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SlightlyMad posted:Anyhow, I am not a scientist but I have a question for wiser minds: Suppose we spread greenhouse gases and other pollutants into the atmosphere and by extension into the oceans from millions of point sources like that specimen of a human being Bolsonaro, does entropy guarantee we can't effectively remove all that crap from the air and water since it becomes dispersed? Sure we can plant more trees but is that even hypothetically ever nearly enough? Millions of years worth of fossil materials dumped into the air in a century or two. Earth has a carbon cycle that will remove the carbon dioxide over very long periods. Some of it will initially absorbed into the biosphere, sequestered in the soil and dissolved into the oceans, with something like 80% of it absorbed in the first few centuries and 90% it absorbed in the first few millennia. The rest will be removed from the atmosphere over tens or hundreds of thousands of years through a process called chemical weathering - essentially the sequestration of carbon in surface minerals, rocks and mountains. All pollutants will eventually be absorbed by chemical and geological cycles, some faster than others, and CO2 is actually a extremely long-lived one because chemical weathering takes so long. Once emissions cease, <1% of methane will remain in 50-60 years, nitrous oxides will be gone over a period of hundreds, plastics are going to vary a lot but the majority will take hundreds.
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Jan 8, 2022 00:38
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Potato Salad posted:I see electric vehicles as a necessary evil because there was absolutely no way that we're going to be ripping our car dependent infrastructure out and replacing it with trains by 2100 in America. Personally I would prefer global death to a world in which car culture survives in a "green" form.
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Jan 8, 2022 01:16
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Potato Salad posted:I see electric vehicles as a necessary evil because there was absolutely no way that we're going to be ripping our car dependent infrastructure out and replacing it with trains by 2100 in America. American infrastructure won't last to 2050 when the EV's that they're planning to sell are applied to it. We'll be ripping all the roads out to re-bed them deeper anyway, might as well let go of the car and save ourselves but lol Americans.
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Jan 8, 2022 11:02
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SlightlyMad posted:Pardon me, I'm just ruminating on my current mental state regarding the environment in general: As TL wrote, carbon sequestration happens naturally and there is nothing in physics that prohibits it. If you are referring to the second law of thermodynamics, it doesn't apply here because the atmosphere is not a closed system. Artificial carbon sequestration is also a thing and there are many approaches and experimental installations all around the world. Right now it's not really economically feasible or sensible to really scale it up in any significant way so it's all just for research purposes. There are also ideas to speed up natural weathering mechanism, which could remove human emissions completely from the atmosphere in an economically feasible way and very short time, but we don't really know the ecological implications of doing this so it's also all just in research stage and might remain there forever. EVs generally have a lower carbon footprint than ICE vehicles, but by how much depends on how you actually generate the electricity to charge them. Their total charging energy requirements are relatively low compared to total electricity production of a developed nation so that's mostly a right wing and doomer talking point to muddy the waters. The EV rollout is good. But yeah, mid to long term, car usage needs to be reduced to rural areas and commercial transport and has to be exorcised out of urban populations by legislative means and good public transport infrastructure. No way around that. It's definitely feasible in most of the world that are not the US. Dunno how you would even approach the problem in the US, city planner really hosed the country for the next century or so. Gonna need a special solution. GABA ghoul fucked around with this message at 11:40 on Jan 8, 2022 |
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Jan 8, 2022 11:38
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I need to look more closely, but EVs being heavier, will cause more wear to roads--particularly if we switch trucking over to EVs which already cause the lion's share of damage to our roads. The real problem with EVs isn't their individual carbon footprint--it's that they perpetuate land use decisions that are burning the planet down. Anything that perpetuates personal vehicles as the sole viable transportation cost for our society shouldn't be allowed. And this is without adding autonomous bullshit to the mix which is definitely going to lead to an explosion of vehicle miles traveled per year and congestion which is going to further push sprawl.
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Jan 8, 2022 15:50
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I'm not a fan of cars but I guess EVs are necessary but I have no idea how we meet our goals of decreasing emissions when all of that charging is going to enormously increase demand the on electrical grid.
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Jan 8, 2022 21:17
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Crosby B. Alfred posted:I'm not a fan of cars but I guess EVs are necessary but I have no idea how we meet our goals of decreasing emissions when all of that charging is going to enormously increase demand the on electrical grid. Well all those point emissions from ICE cars going away would be the main way it decreases emissions. I thought that was pretty obvious actually. Then the grid incorporates renewables to accommodate the new load. At least in theory. But even if that doesn't happen perfectly, centralized sources of pollution in the grid are easier to tackle than a couple billion tiny point sources.
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Jan 8, 2022 22:37
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Don't get me wrong, I'm not disputing that it won't result in a reduction of aggregate but I don't see how in the hell renewables are going to keep up with demand if EV growth continues.
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Jan 8, 2022 23:23
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It's going to take a long time to set up the infrastructure but ultimately it will take a lot of less people, resources and money to fuel vehicles with electricity rather than gasoline. Over-reliance on renewables will be a problem regardless of EVs, and you're already seeing how that plays out in California, but I think in the long run utilities will recognize the problem and start building out gas instead.
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Jan 8, 2022 23:43
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stirlo posted:Thank you!! Just had a quick play on the ipad (SO MUCH CARBON USED!) ; realistic and grim, slick design too, good work Hey thanks! Check out the eBook in the game as well.
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Jan 9, 2022 07:12
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Minenfeld! posted:I need to look more closely, but EVs being heavier, will cause more wear to roads--particularly if we switch trucking over to EVs which already cause the lion's share of damage to our roads. Really not an issue compared to large trucks. Damage to roads is proportional to the vehicle axle weight to the 4th power: https://www.insidescience.org/news/how-much-damage-do-heavy-trucks-do-our-roads Besides most EV's (Hummer excepted) are not exceptionally massive. But we really do need to change how cities are laid out so you DON'T have to use a car or at least you need a car on occasion, you could use a carshare and have an electric car to use.
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Jan 9, 2022 07:16
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Magic Underwear posted:Well all those point emissions from ICE cars going away would be the main way it decreases emissions. I thought that was pretty obvious actually. Then the grid incorporates renewables to accommodate the new load. At least in theory. But even if that doesn't happen perfectly, centralized sources of pollution in the grid are easier to tackle than a couple billion tiny point sources. It's pretty decent, even in coal country  ... but the manufacturing of the car itself emits lots of carbon.
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Jan 9, 2022 07:19
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VideoGameVet posted:
Do you think there's enough interest in discussing these kind of topics for there to be an urban design/housing/infrastructure thread? I've done some reading inspired by stuff discussed in this thread and I don't know if there's enough interest to make its own thread?
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Jan 9, 2022 09:18
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road potato posted:Do you think there's enough interest in discussing these kind of topics for there to be an urban design/housing/infrastructure thread? I've done some reading inspired by stuff discussed in this thread and I don't know if there's enough interest to make its own thread?
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Jan 9, 2022 17:25
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cat botherer posted:Speaking of posts, would anybody be interested in a probability/decision making under uncertainty thread? Massively relevant to climate change but also rona, etc. Most people, shockingly even in these forums, are terrible at thinking this way. I would post
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Jan 10, 2022 03:06
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https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/10/politics/us-fossil-fuel-emissions-coal-increased-2021-climate/index.htmlquote:In a troublesome sign for President Joe Biden's climate goals, US greenhouse emissions rebounded from a pandemic slump faster in 2021 than the overall economy, according to a preliminary analysis by the nonpartisan Rhodium Group.
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Jan 10, 2022 19:32
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road potato posted:Do you think there's enough interest in discussing these kind of topics for there to be an urban design/housing/infrastructure thread? I've done some reading inspired by stuff discussed in this thread and I don't know if there's enough interest to make its own thread? There's an urban planning thread already, it's just old atm: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3864792&pagenumber=1&perpage=40
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Jan 10, 2022 20:39
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road potato posted:Do you think there's enough interest in discussing these kind of topics for there to be an urban design/housing/infrastructure thread? I've done some reading inspired by stuff discussed in this thread and I don't know if there's enough interest to make its own thread? There's barely any activity in this thread, I don't think D&D has enough posters to support splintering off everything. Also, usually splintering off into a containment thread in D&D is suggested when people are discussing something you disagree with and don't want to be brought up.
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Jan 11, 2022 01:11
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