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Rime posted:Please See: Quting myself, because even though I'm an optimist, even I can see the writing on the wall: sitchensis posted:
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# ? Jul 4, 2017 15:24 |
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# ? May 14, 2024 18:46 |
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Re: Media - Remake Elysium around Arctic Council nations.
Accretionist fucked around with this message at 15:57 on Jul 4, 2017 |
# ? Jul 4, 2017 15:54 |
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Rime posted:
This is painfully backwards. Increased efficiency is good, the problem is Capitalism works by diverting any efficiency into more and more growth. You could have had a situation where less farmers used less land to produce enough food to feed the same population. Instead we have one where farmers are encouraged to continually double their output to feed an ever growing population that can be funnelled into sweatshops.
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# ? Jul 4, 2017 16:18 |
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Digiwizzard posted:This is painfully backwards. Increased efficiency is good, the problem is Capitalism works by diverting any efficiency into more and more growth. You could have had a situation where less farmers used less land to produce enough food to feed the same population. Instead we have one where farmers are encouraged to continually double their output to feed an ever growing population that can be funnelled into sweatshops. And which of those outcomes was obviously going to occur when Borlaug set his monster loose. We're not even touching on the environmental catastrophe from the intensive farming itself, mind, but just the human suffering which was inevitable to occur under existing socioeconomic systems. He knew his work would cause a population explosion, he knew it would require farming techniques which would sterilize the soil after a few decades of intensive use. He couldn't possibly have not foreseen this. "Good Intentions in a broken system" does not absolve him from causing the lives, suffering, and deaths of several hundred million people who would otherwise not have existed. It was the worst kind of god-playing. Rime fucked around with this message at 17:02 on Jul 4, 2017 |
# ? Jul 4, 2017 17:00 |
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Naturally, future generations would just have to figure out how to use scientific advances responsibly.
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# ? Jul 4, 2017 17:05 |
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Thread idea: let's identify a specific jurisdiction (probably somewhere in the US) where improvements to energy supply and infrastructure seem like an unrealized possibility, and work together to break down and define obstacles to this change, then see if we can come up with solutions.
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# ? Jul 4, 2017 17:30 |
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Discendo Vox posted:Thread idea: let's identify a specific jurisdiction (probably somewhere in the US) where improvements to energy supply and infrastructure seem like an unrealized possibility, and work together to break down and define obstacles to this change, then see if we can come up with solutions. Passanger trains literally anywhere but the stretch between New York and Washington D.C.
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# ? Jul 4, 2017 17:32 |
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a fuckwit with 20/20 hindsight posted:And which of those outcomes was obviously going to occur when Borlaug set his monster loose. We're not even touching on the environmental catastrophe from the intensive farming itself, mind, but just the human suffering which was inevitable to occur under existing socioeconomic systems. He knew his work would cause a population explosion, he knew it would require farming techniques which would sterilize the soil after a few decades of intensive use. He couldn't possibly have not foreseen this. "Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things." - Norman Borlaug Hello Sailor fucked around with this message at 19:12 on Jul 4, 2017 |
# ? Jul 4, 2017 19:10 |
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Hello Sailor posted:"Some of the environmental lobbyists of the Western nations are the salt of the earth, but many of them are elitists. They've never experienced the physical sensation of hunger. They do their lobbying from comfortable office suites in Washington or Brussels. If they lived just one month amid the misery of the developing world, as I have for fifty years, they'd be crying out for tractors and fertilizer and irrigation canals and be outraged that fashionable elitists back home were trying to deny them these things." - Norman Borlaug
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# ? Jul 4, 2017 19:15 |
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Wow these quotes did not age well.quote:This issue is timely today not just because of the current food shortages but because greens are calling for vast sums of money to be spent to ward off future climate change. And just as money was diverted from agricultural research for environmental projects in the 1980s, there’s a danger that immediate problems in poor countries will be shortchanged by pursuing the long-term agenda of wealthy Westerners, as Bjorn Lomborg has been arguing. When I wrote about Dr. Lomborg’s proposal to focus less on climate change and more on problems like malnutrition and disease, he told me: “I don’t think our descendants will thank us for leaving them poorer and less healthy just so we could do a little bit to slow global warming. I’d rather we were remembered for solving the other problems first.” Turns out those long-term agenda goals of wealthy Westerners were the short-term necessitates of literal billions of poor people around the equator. Whoops!
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# ? Jul 4, 2017 19:35 |
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Don't forget the many, many people who caught malaria because of the specious campaign against DDT.
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# ? Jul 4, 2017 20:09 |
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Utopia had it right - feed the world but couple it with a sterilization program.
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# ? Jul 4, 2017 20:11 |
TheBlackVegetable posted:Utopia had it right - feed the world but couple it with a sterilization program. gently caress ethics, if you could sign up for a basic income that was contingent on being sterilized i would sign right the gently caress up. it would be a net good, probably hell im getting that done anyways eventually
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# ? Jul 4, 2017 20:48 |
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Conspiratiorist posted:Naturally, future generations would just have to figure out how to use scientific advances responsibly. Yes. Because believe it or not, scientific innovations don’t wait to happen until people have reached some pre-determined point of enlightenment. Scientific innovations are always at the mercy of the social and political paradigms that exist when they are developed. "Modernizing" agriculture was an extremely important group effort among dozens of nations; if Borlaug had died in the crib then it’s not as if the possibility of higher-yield agriculture would have been safely snuffed out. At most, you’d delay it for a decade or two, and now you have a new person to blame. The only constants are change, and the question of how humans choose to adapt to the unintended consequences of that change. Well in this case the answer is “We’ve completely loving failed.” Borlaug is absolutely culpable, both for his assumption that yield increases alone would be enough to solve hunger without any regard for the surrounding political issues or long-term effects, and for his later move to outright climate denialism, but to place more blame on him than those responsible for our political and economic situation, and to actually lament that imminent famine was averted for millions of people is bizarre. It wasn’t inevitable that social democracy and labor organizing to overturn corrupt social structures would be trampled by neoliberal trade policies. It wasn’t inevitable that the world population would continue to explode despite the demonstrated success of 20th century government programs that promoted smaller families and provided free contraceptives in various developing countries. It wasn’t inevitable that parasitic corporate ghouls would take over government, cede all responsibility to, well, govern, and proceed to suck public institutions dry before loving off to their New Zealand bunkers. It wasn't inevitable that the most powerful country in the world would turn climate change into a partisan issue and accelerate the catastrophe. The majority of voters willingly chose those outcomes for decades, mainly because of cultural and racial resentments. We had the technological capabilities to address the crises that emerged after the Green Revolution; for political reasons we chose not to. The focus on Borlaug as Satan seems very much like an attempt to absolve Western voters of any guilt for the atrocities that are about to happen. These refugees simply never should have been born; we are only setting things right as we stoically blow them apart at the border and sink their ships. I knew there was a strain of environmentalism that embraced eugenics but I had no idea that it had become a mainstream view in this thread.
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# ? Jul 4, 2017 23:25 |
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Can we at least blame Midgley for leaded gasoline and CFCs?
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# ? Jul 5, 2017 08:38 |
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Conspiratiorist posted:Can we at least blame Midgley for leaded gasoline and CFCs? Man gently caress that guy.
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# ? Jul 5, 2017 09:03 |
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Conspiratiorist posted:Can we at least blame Midgley for leaded gasoline and CFCs? He was only trying to help! With the CFCs at least.
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# ? Jul 6, 2017 02:23 |
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...omepage%2Fstory Only 3 miles of ice is holding the Larsen C ice shelf to the Antarctic.
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# ? Jul 6, 2017 03:59 |
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So who's right? The Scripps lady or the Irvine guy?
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# ? Jul 6, 2017 05:58 |
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Current Policy Status: Even the threatening sounding crap is erring on the side of least drama: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jun/28/world-has-three-years-left-to-stop-dangerous-climate-change-warn-experts lol decarbonization in developed nations by 2050, we better enjoy our 3C of warming. I wonder how long it is before 3C becomes the new 2C. I'd set the over/under at September 2019 if I was gambling on it.
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# ? Jul 6, 2017 09:03 |
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Lol Australia: Climate Change Authority loses last climate scientist
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# ? Jul 6, 2017 10:06 |
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ISIS CURES TROONS posted:Don't forget the many, many people who caught malaria because of the specious campaign against DDT. Lol, you're actually serious. (The ban on large scale agricultural spraying of DDT saved millions of lives from malaria by preserving the effectiveness of DDT as an anti-mosquito agent still used in mosquito nets and so on. In some locations they almost wiped out mosquitos that were non-resistant to DDT.) Fangz fucked around with this message at 18:21 on Jul 6, 2017 |
# ? Jul 6, 2017 18:08 |
Can someone explain why certain climate people have a hard on for self driving (ostensibly electric) cars? Yeah, ideally it'll reduce human error and maybe reduce emissions but if it doesn't change consumption patterns or shift transportation design towards mass transit then what's the loving point? To say nothing of the economic disruption when a poo poo ton of people lose their (already lovely) jobs.
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# ? Jul 6, 2017 19:17 |
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It comes across as more realistic than getting people to use mass transit, which is ostensibly impossible in America. Redesigning every major city in America from the ground up to be livable without owning a car is the best solution as far as actual good being done goes, but it's also the least realistic option. They can't even get Miami to put any money toward preparing their city for it's destruction at the hands of rising sea levels, there's certainly no way to fix a problem so much bigger and more widespread than that.
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# ? Jul 6, 2017 19:22 |
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It's because they're electric. Also it may lead to cars as services especially since we're already visibly moving into a rentier economy as wealth disparity grows.
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# ? Jul 6, 2017 19:47 |
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There's other cool stuff you could do with self-driving cars, like special grade separated lines for autonomous vehicles that allow high speed, jam free travel. It's not the full communist trains now solution but it's a hell of a lot more realistic than, as mentioned, getting cities that won't even try to save themselves from climate change to completely rebuild themselves around mass transit.
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# ? Jul 6, 2017 20:09 |
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Rap Record Hoarder posted:Can someone explain why certain climate people have a hard on for self driving (ostensibly electric) cars? I think it's a somewhat clever way to break the fetishism of personal car ownership. Are people going to pay twice as much for a car that's half as efficient if they aren't piloting it?
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# ? Jul 6, 2017 20:10 |
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Because technological "innovation" in that department is being driven by libertarian fucktard techbros who think they are "disrupting the system", and the people financing it are drooling at a hard return to serfdom via extracting rent from every aspect of daily life. We're living in that grim cyberpunk dystopia friends, it's just very clean and sterile rather than gritty and decrepit.
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# ? Jul 6, 2017 20:12 |
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Rap Record Hoarder posted:Can someone explain why certain climate people have a hard on for self driving (ostensibly electric) cars? It's not really climate people driving that, it's folks who think it can be used to dominate other transportation sectors.
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# ? Jul 6, 2017 20:35 |
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Rime posted:We're living in that grim cyberpunk dystopia friends, it's just very clean and sterile rather than gritty and decrepit. Just you wait until ten years old electric cars are part of the budget transport service package. The overage fees when the five -year - past- MTBF battery pack strands you on the edge of the Colorado Desert are going to be very lucrative for your transport service provider. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 20:39 on Jul 6, 2017 |
# ? Jul 6, 2017 20:35 |
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so I know this is kinda uncharted territory but when Larsen C goes, will the resulting... state-sized iceberg just float slowly out to sea and melt? Is something that large affected in a directional sense by ocean currents? The image of some poor suckers in the falklands looking out to sea and finding the entire horizon obscured by ice is darkly hilarious.
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# ? Jul 6, 2017 20:52 |
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Ol Standard Retard posted:so I know this is kinda uncharted territory but when Larsen C goes, will the resulting... state-sized iceberg just float slowly out to sea and melt? Is something that large affected in a directional sense by ocean currents? It's going to fragment into a million pieces as it calves.
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# ? Jul 6, 2017 21:04 |
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Conspiratiorist posted:It's going to fragment into a million pieces as it calves. And I heard the bigger issue is it will release the glaciers behind it.
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# ? Jul 6, 2017 21:05 |
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Ice shelves are like corks that block/slow the flow of glaciers that feed into them; as the ice shelves themselves are floating ice, breaking off/up doesn't contribute to sea level rise directly but the glaciers they were blocking will start feeding directly into the ocean, increasing the rate of sea level rise. Also note that this large calving doesn't necessarily mean the shelf is collapsing just yet.
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# ? Jul 6, 2017 21:14 |
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It occurs to me that I haven't mentioned this here... sometimes you still run into people that bring up 'the pause' but there's a wee problem with it. Mostly, this shows up in satellite data over a very specific time period. For example, here's UAH v6.0 data (lower troposphere). Interestingly, if you look at it per decade, you see this: 1970s Mean : -0.284583 (1978 & 1979) 1980s Mean : -0.142167 1990s Mean : 0.00125 2000s Mean : 0.10425 2010s Mean : 0.223583 (through May 2017) Also, this pattern shows up in other data sets... for example, radiosonde surface data going back to 1958, which shows a much larger change: 1950s mean: -0.05 (1958 & 1959) 1960s mean: -0.118 1970s mean: -0.13 1980s mean: 0.06 1990s mean: 0.185 2000s mean: 0.352 2010s mean: 0.739 (through 2016) Curiously, this change seems to be accelerating since the 1990s when examined this way. Evil_Greven fucked around with this message at 14:22 on Jul 7, 2017 |
# ? Jul 7, 2017 06:10 |
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An interesting visualization: https://twitter.com/kevpluck/status/880927276032028672
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# ? Jul 9, 2017 02:40 |
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Party Plane Jones posted:2 https://twitter.com/EricLiptonNYT/status/883834425087324161 gently caress! FUUUUUCK! gently caress! AAAAAAAAGH! gently caress
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# ? Jul 9, 2017 03:21 |
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Arglebargle III posted:gently caress! FUUUUUCK! gently caress! Yeah that happened in Arizona of all loving places. The people running for Corporation Commission last election were on payroll of the local utility company and campaigned as "Sustainable Solar". Of course they were republican and being a mostly red state they won rather easily. So yeah, solar is absolutely hosed here in potentially one of the best states for it. Ironically Goldwater republicans are pro-solar but there are so few of them so it doesn't even matter.
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# ? Jul 9, 2017 07:29 |
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I'm so glad we allow monopolistic utilities to lobby government to kill competition.
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# ? Jul 9, 2017 14:58 |
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# ? May 14, 2024 18:46 |
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It's still the craziest loving thing, if you told people terrorists are gonna destroy Miami we would go to forever hell war over it, but tell them a bunch of businessmen are going to destroy Miami and they'll vote for them.
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# ? Jul 9, 2017 16:12 |