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StabbinHobo posted:trying to make burb's sustainable is like putting filters on cigarettes and being proud of how much less tar you're inhaling. Nailed it.
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Apr 30, 2017 14:17
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Another green benefit to living in a city setting as opposed to an isolated country setting is the poop situation. Being on city sewer seems like a better solution than an off the grid composting toilet. With city sewer your poop goes to a treatment plant where the bacteria in it is killed, I don't know if a guy or a family living 50 miles away can treat his poop as efficiently and reuse it as fertilizer without it going through a sewage treatment facility.
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Apr 30, 2017 21:26
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Burt Buckle posted:Another green benefit to living in a city setting as opposed to an isolated country setting is the poop situation. Being on city sewer seems like a better solution than an off the grid composting toilet. With city sewer your poop goes to a treatment plant where the bacteria in it is killed, I don't know if a guy or a family living 50 miles away can treat his poop as efficiently and reuse it as fertilizer without it going through a sewage treatment facility. Mostly yes, with the caveat that we'll likely need to devise a better nutrient cycling system to get waste products on a city scale / level of intensity back into productive soils rather than just into landfills, which is where a lot of the cooked end product of municipal treatment ends up right now. Incorporating parts of the latter system into the former.
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Apr 30, 2017 22:17
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Ol Standard Retard posted:Mostly yes, with the caveat that we'll likely need to devise a better nutrient cycling system to get waste products on a city scale / level of intensity back into productive soils rather than just into landfills, which is where a lot of the cooked end product of municipal treatment ends up right now. Incorporating parts of the latter system into the former. So if we can solve this poop riddle we can also combat the land and soil degradation we will experience from climate change. What can brown do for you?
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Apr 30, 2017 22:28
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Burt Buckle posted:So if we can solve this poop riddle we can also combat the land and soil degradation we will experience from climate change. What can brown do for you? It actually isn't even that far flung of an idea. Numerous cities have and still do utilize their municipal waste in some sort of land use/ conservation system. Fort Collins CO blasts theirs (after some testing to make sure it is within tolerances after processing) onto a giant field the city owns and it looks like a lot of extremely healthy grass. Numerous other countries and cultures have done similar things in the past. In many cases, the hardest part is getting people on board with plans to put waste anywhere but "away." There is a lot of irrational behavior surrounding feces and waste in general that needs to get dealt with.
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Apr 30, 2017 22:51
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Burt Buckle posted:Another green benefit to living in a city setting as opposed to an isolated country setting is the poop situation. Being on city sewer seems like a better solution than an off the grid composting toilet. With city sewer your poop goes to a treatment plant where the bacteria in it is killed, I don't know if a guy or a family living 50 miles away can treat his poop as efficiently and reuse it as fertilizer without it going through a sewage treatment facility. A composting toilet can be perfectly effective, so long as it is properly designed and maintained (lol). Don't overestimate the efficacy of municipal sewer systems, in many cities your toilet water goes through the same pipes as the runoff which enters you storm drain and even a few millimeters of rain can be enough to force the system to overflow into neighboring streams and rivers. Also while treatment facilities are great at removing a lot of stuff and in the United States you could safely drink the water coming straight out of the sewage processing plant, they sometimes still carry a lot of phosphorous and nitrogen and so have serious negative environmental effects.
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Apr 30, 2017 23:08
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The turn of the 20th century saw cities collecting night soil on carts and barges for use in nearby fields. Period proto-environmentalists describe a partially-closed nutrient cycle centred around the "biological city" where, before refrigeration and logistics permitted you to buy cheap fresh vegetables anywhere, fresh vegetables could be sold at enough of a premium to nearby city dwellers to justify the expense/labor of operating proxy farms on otherwise-poor land by buying shitloads of poo poo. We can (and do) use human poo today, but mind that petrochemical fertilizer is cheap, available, and sanitary.
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Apr 30, 2017 23:31
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We eat fossil fuels.
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May 1, 2017 00:23
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Conspiratiorist posted:We eat fossil fuels. Sorta, fossil fuels are the cheapest source of the hydrogen we use in fertilizer.
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May 1, 2017 00:46
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Generalist hyperbole regarding fertilizers, pesticides, and transportation. For developed countries, our food production relies on fossil fuels every step of the way.
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May 1, 2017 01:18
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Potato Salad posted:Sorta, fossil fuels are the cheapest source of the hydrogen we use in fertilizer. Do you mean nitrogen?
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May 1, 2017 03:57
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Fasdar posted:Do you mean nitrogen? I don't think he does. http://lmgtfy.com/?q=haber+process
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May 1, 2017 04:45
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Sorry I hadn't heard the haber process expressed that way. Usually people say "fossil fuels are the main source of nitrogen," since that is what the haber process produces. That fossil fuels provide sources of hydrogen in the reaction is also true.
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May 1, 2017 04:50
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Fasdar posted:Sorry I hadn't heard the haber process expressed that way. Usually people say "fossil fuels are the main source of nitrogen," since that is what the haber process produces. That fossil fuels provide sources of hydrogen in the reaction is also true. Yyyyeah hydrogen is loving everywhere and not even close to a limiting reactant in... I dunno any agricultural or botanical process. It's in water. Invoking Haber as a source of hydrogen is weird although technically true. We eat fossil fuels, with some small adjustments to modern intensive monoculture we can make good headway on preserving and enriching our currently cultivated soils. To really bail on fossil fuels for ag use we'd need to "decentralize" the entire land use of the industry, abandon just-in-time food availability, shipping, vendors, and marketing (pipe dream), eat locavore diets on an unprecedented scale, etc. IMO as an environmental health and ecology guy it's far more effective at this stage to encourage city densification and advocate for the loving decarbonization of the electric grid that should've started in the seventies and never stopped. Like seriously it is loving barbaric that we use fossil fuels to generate electricity. Gunshow Poophole fucked around with this message at 05:13 on May 1, 2017 |
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May 1, 2017 05:11
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Ol Standard Retard posted:... No, no we don't.. I'm not saying that movement in that direction would be a bad thing, but it's misleading to pretend like current food practices are inextricably linked to fossil fuels. Most of what you mention--decentralize land use, abandon JIT food availablity, shipping, locavore blah blah all revolves around one thing: transportation. Pretend for a moment that Li-ion batteries are at ~$50/kWh and photovoltaics are ~500% cheaper than they are today. It goes without saying that in such an environment, fossil fuel use for electricity production and land vehicle propulsion would be eventually totally displaced. Which means you could knock yourself out trucking strawberries across the continent all winter long if you wanted to, without fossil fuels. Nitrogen fixing is the less tractable part of our current agriculture system that depends on fossil fuels. But by any measure this accounts for < 5% of total emissions, probably <= 2%. Methane emissions and land use changes are, by far, the most significant agricultural contributor to GHG emissions and these don't have (directly) a whole lot to do with fossil fuel consumption. In other words, even if you totally displaced the use of fossil fuels for both transportation and nitrogen fixing, you could carry on doing more or less what we are doing now, but would still produce the majority of the agricultural emissions we are producing now. So yes, we do need to really reconsider the way we grow our food if we wan't to curb GHG emissions, but that is mostly due to attributes of modern agriculture that do not in fact fundamentally depend on fossil fuels.
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May 1, 2017 07:21
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So what is the story about this. https://twitter.com/EcoSenseNow/status/856685861873659904/photo/1
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May 1, 2017 10:16
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Orions Lord posted:So what is the story about this. The guy who posted it is being deliberately disingenuous, it's not useful data, his conclusion is not actually supported by the graph.
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May 1, 2017 10:28
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I dunno if he's being deliberately disingenuous, looking at his tweet history he seems like a total nutter. He's already got his mind made up about climate science and he cherry-picks data and lovely graphs that reinforce his beliefs. Seems strange because he's also heavily involved in golden rice and anti-anti-GMO stuff so it's not like he doesn't understand science. The stuff he says just doesn't even make any sense, like graphs that disprove his position are just made up by NASA promoting alarmism so that they can get their funding for next year. Seriously? Amazing that someone could be so riddled with self-deception.
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May 1, 2017 10:52
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Orions Lord posted:So what is the story about this. Not knowing the background of this guy or anything about his MO. Firstly, he is only looking at a very specific part of the planet, while the average temperature of the planet will increase it does not mean all places on the planet will have increased temperature. It isn't unreasonable to find locations whose temperature do not vary much. Perhaps he found one of those few regions. Secondly, temperature reconstruction going back farther than 1900 start to get suspect. Thirdly, there is a very clear warming signal from 1985 onwards, with many consecutive years being warmer than 10 degrees. He has effectively diluted the warming trend by extending the data back to 1650. That is to say, the gradient of the green line would be steep if the data range was from something more reasonable, like when we started emitting CO2, 1900 or so. He has also omitted data from 2009 to 2016 because presumably it makes his plot look worse. He has basically used two main graphical tricks here to make it look like there isn't a connection between CO2 and temperature. He has extended the time series much further out than appropriate, reducing the gradient of the green line. He has made the CO2 plot very large, occupying 6 times as much vertical space on the plot as the temperature making it look like there is a disconnect between temperature and CO2. Simply adjusting the axes to more reasonable options would make the warming stick out very obviously.
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May 1, 2017 10:58
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Morbus posted:Methane emissions and land use changes are, by far, the most significant agricultural contributor to GHG emissions and these don't have (directly) a whole lot to do with fossil fuel consumption. In other words, even if you totally displaced the use of fossil fuels for both transportation and nitrogen fixing, you could carry on doing more or less what we are doing now, but would still produce the majority of the agricultural emissions we are producing now. Anybody who's serious about GHG emissions will not include beef in their diet. cattle and other methane producing ungulates should be a highly restricted commodity. And land use changes shouldn't be an issue because we already have enough land to feed everyone, we just need to effectively distribute it better by not throwing half of it in the trash.
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May 1, 2017 11:47
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^ also this, which speaks back to the nutrient cycling issue we'd hopefully address as we skip down the road to our gay space communist future Morbus posted:No, no we don't.. Yeah this is exactly what I said though, given we can't pretend what you want to pretend at the current time. which is why it's way better to just not worry about ag emissions specifically as transportation and decarbonization is a much better get / focus for real change given that it's more broadly impactful. In short, 
Gunshow Poophole fucked around with this message at 14:16 on May 1, 2017 |
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May 1, 2017 14:12
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Minge Binge posted:Anybody who's serious about GHG emissions will not include beef in their diet.
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May 2, 2017 00:17
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We just need catalytic converter buttplugs for cows.
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May 2, 2017 04:14
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BattleMoose posted:He has basically used two main graphical tricks here to make it look like there isn't a connection between CO2 and temperature. He has extended the time series much further out than appropriate, reducing the gradient of the green line. He has made the CO2 plot very large, occupying 6 times as much vertical space on the plot as the temperature making it look like there is a disconnect between temperature and CO2. The third graphical trick is that the CO2 chart is of annual emissions, not overall concentration in the atmosphere. He's comparing a measurable result of CO2 concentration with the rate of change of that concentration, and even then his graph is still obviously showing an upwards trend and conveniently stops at 2010.
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May 2, 2017 05:01
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That in and of itself isn't really a rebuttal, since the "point" of the graph is to say "Look! CO2 emissions started going up exponentially during the 19th century to now, and yet the overall trend that the temperature is following is the same trajectory it had been on for hundreds of years--it was already warming!". The reason it's deceptive is, as someone else noted, the temperature record (including the one in his stupid plot) shows a clear departure from its previous history starting around the industrial revolution, and he has just made it look smother by compressing the vertical scale and diluting the steepness of the recent warming by fitting over a much longer time range before there was significant warming. Not only that, but the graph tries to pass of what is in fact a recent long term warming trend as something that has been occurring for 350 years. It's really stupid because if you scrutinize the temperature record in that very same plot even a little, it's clear that something is going on. For hundreds of years the temperature in Whocarestonshire, England bounced between cold years <= 8C and hot years >= 10C, with not much long term trend. Then right around the late 19th / early 20th century when CO2 emissions start to pick up, no more "cold" years around the 8C mark. None, for the last century. The "cold" years keep getting warmer, until they become the same as normal years used to be. And in the last 30 years, you see an unprecedented 30 year warm period.where the average annual temperature is always > 10C.
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May 2, 2017 08:03
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The graph would also probably look more interesting if sulfate emissions were plotted as well, given that they have a net cooling effect. Edit: Here it is: https://www.skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=267 Notorious R.I.M. fucked around with this message at 08:18 on May 2, 2017 |
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May 2, 2017 08:12
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Orions Lord posted:So what is the story about this.  Someone found a non cherrypicked graph. Hmm, I wonder what is happening on the right there.....
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May 2, 2017 08:39
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hooman posted:
Brexit heating up
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May 2, 2017 08:54
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Lol who gives a poo poo about climate denialists. They'll be posting about how no one has all the facts even if they were piling up sandbags around their homes as long as the corporate money continues following in.
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May 2, 2017 08:57
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Better yet when someone posts a graph from 1700 to now, just post one from 1Ma to now with a nice lil pointer of us doin a sick kickflip out of the quaternary at the edge.
Notorious R.I.M. fucked around with this message at 09:00 on May 2, 2017 |
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May 2, 2017 08:58
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shrike82 posted:Lol who gives a poo poo about climate denialists. They'll be posting about how no one has all the facts even if they were piling up sandbags around their homes as long as the corporate money continues following in. Politicians give a poo poo as they are used to show that ''there is still debate'' and ''not all facts are known'' and ''we shouldnt rush into things without knowing everything''.
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May 2, 2017 09:44
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And trying to argue with them using reason helps because...
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May 2, 2017 09:54
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shrike82 posted:And trying to argue with them using reason helps because... Because it works? With local representatives there's a good chance of changing their position on issues with sound arguments and dispelling untruths.
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May 2, 2017 10:15
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Notorious R.I.M. posted:Better yet when someone posts a graph from 1700 to now, just post one from 1Ma to now with a nice lil pointer of us doin a sick kickflip out of the quaternary at the edge. It's kind of sad and telling that the best relevant graphic visualization of "the history of temperature" is a goddamned web comic. https://xkcd.com/1732/ It's not just any web comic, but still.
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May 2, 2017 10:19
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Nice piece of fish posted:It's kind of sad and telling that the best relevant graphic visualization of "the history of temperature" is a goddamned web comic. Less than 1 glaciation cycle is a pretty zoomed in view so idk about that being the best. If you zoom out, once we leave 2C it's pretty clear we're out of anything we've seen in the Eemian or any other Quaternary glaciation cycles. Something interesting is bound to happen sooner or later. 
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May 2, 2017 10:26
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Notorious R.I.M. posted:Less than 1 glaciation cycle is a pretty zoomed in view so idk about that being the best. Maybe visually and narratively speaking more intuitive and more likely to convince, to use that definition of "best". "Best" as in most accurate and all-encompassing? Definitely not, but still useful in terms of educating and convincing someone mostly ignorant on the issue. Also, Notorious R.I.M. posted:Something interesting is bound to happen sooner or later. Absolutely, if by "interesting" you mean horrific suffering and death. I have great faith in the human ability to adapt to changing conditions, but at some point we are going to be looking at a tipping point where cascading failiures of a very complicated system alter the conditions for food production, water availability and resource availability to the point that mass migrations and refugees will become completely endemic in the third world. Catastrophic loss of life to shortly follow. On the topic of theoretical adaptations and solutions: The only real "magic technology" that I can think of to even begin to make a dent in the problems we're facing will have to be of the self-sustaining exponential type, just because of the sheer scale of things. Bio-engineered plants, bacteria or insects are likely candidates, but the potential for horrible unintended effects is pretty huge with this kind of thing. At this point, is it worth risking swapping one problem for an equally huge one, even if it were a possible stopgap/solution to climate change? I find this very difficult to answer, but like I've griped about before, a political solution is unlikely and way too far off and slow - there'd need to be a literal revolution and the death of capitalism as we know it for a political answer to be possible. So magic science it is.
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May 2, 2017 10:55
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Does the death of the third world, the middle class, and gradually worsening conditions for the poor in developed nations over the next couple centuries count as an adaptation/solution? Because I think that's the realistic, pragmatic approach policy makers are taking as an assumption the absence of deus ex miracle tech solution.
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May 2, 2017 12:13
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Conspiratiorist posted:Does the death of the third world, the middle class, and gradually worsening conditions for the poor in developed nations over the next couple centuries count as an adaptation/solution? It's also an automatic consequence of globalist consumer late-stage capitalism. Correlation, but not necessarily causation. Though for all I know sure, it might be something that's either actively discussed or at least silently agreed upon as an acceptable sacrifice. It's impossible to know, though, and I prefer to assume ignorance and incompetence over malice.
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May 2, 2017 12:19
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Conspiratiorist posted:Does the death of the third world, the middle class, and gradually worsening conditions for the poor in developed nations over the next couple centuries count as an adaptation/solution? I don't think anyone is actually planning for it (Instead you have denial and delusion on the part of the stakeholders). However, looking at Australia and Europe today that is probably exactly what liberal democracies response will be if things ever get that far. MiddleOne fucked around with this message at 12:45 on May 2, 2017 |
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May 2, 2017 12:40
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I don't think anyone's being malicious when they prioritize their own lifestyle over some vague notion of solidarity with the third world. I'd vote for a Trump-figure that puts American lives over some socialist figure that commits national suicide to 'share' some climate burden with the developing world.
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May 2, 2017 12:46
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