Fojar38 posted:

Chinese solar panels are cheap and inefficient and are a byproduct of mercantalist trade policy more than far-seeing environmental policy, the Paris Accords require China to do literally loving nothing, and lol China can't even build a decent regular car.

You're being had by the propaganda of a crypto-fascist autocracy.

Notorious R.I.M. posted:

Climate papers in the 2020 - 2030 time window are gonna be fuckin wild

Salt Fish posted:

You're quite the optimist if you think there will be anyone funding climate research during Trump's 2nd and 3rd term.

quote:

In a paper published today in Science Advances, he proposes that mass extinction occurs if one of two thresholds are crossed: For changes in the carbon cycle that occur over long timescales, extinctions will follow if those changes occur at rates faster than global ecosystems can adapt. For carbon perturbations that take place over shorter timescales, the pace of carbon-cycle changes will not matter; instead, the size or magnitude of the change will determine the likelihood of an extinction event.

Taking this reasoning forward in time, Rothman predicts that, given the recent rise in carbon dioxide emissions over a relatively short timescale, a sixth extinction will depend on whether a critical amount of carbon is added to the oceans. That amount, he calculates, is about 310 gigatons, which he estimates to be roughly equivalent to the amount of carbon that human activities will have added to the world’s oceans by the year 2100.

quote:

The best-case scenario projects that humans will add 300 gigatons of carbon to the oceans by 2100, while more than 500 gigatons will be added under the worst-case scenario, far exceeding the critical threshold. In all scenarios, Rothman shows that by 2100, the carbon cycle will either be close to or well beyond the threshold for catastrophe.

Evil_Greven posted:

Here's more on how we're totally hosed

This study calculates that 4 million sq km of permafrost will thaw for each degree of Celsius increase over preindustrial levels.
There are approximately 19 million sq km of permafrost in the Northern Hemisphere.
2016 was roughly 1.1 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.

So, that's already about 20% destined to thaw, and this will in all likelihood increase.

Oh, one other thing - permafrost in the Northern Hemisphere hold somewhere around 1 trillion tonnes of carbon locked away.

For comparison...
Earth's atmosphere: 5,148 trillion tonnes.
Mean molar mass of the atmosphere: 28.97g/mole
Carbon Dioxide (CO2) molar mass: 44.0095 g/mole
Atmospheric CO2 parts per million (ppm), March 2017: 407.05 ppm
Atmospheric CO2 mass, March 2017 (atmosphere mass * (carbon dioxide molar mass / atmosphere molar mass) * CO2 ppm): 3.18 trillion tonnes of CO2

Yikes...

Worse, notice that this wasn't carbon dioxide but simply carbon.
Carbon molar mass: 12.0107 g/mole
Carbon mass ratio of CO2 (carbon molar mass / CO2 molar mass): 27.29%
Atmospheric carbon (Atmospheric CO2 mass * Carbon mass ratio of CO2): 0.8679 trillion tonnes

Arglebargle III posted:

A Buttery Pastry posted:

You couldn't sit that close to such a lava flow, without protective gear. Please only post scientifically-accurate comics in this thread.

treerat posted:

That mercantilist trade policy is doing wonders for Chinese domestic industry, including the solar industry which manufactures two thirds of the world's panels ranging in quality from the best to the worst. Reigning in pollution and maintaining public order are important goals of the Chinese regime. EVs are a way to sidestep complex internal combustion engines entirely. You're wrong.

quote:

Reigning in pollution and maintaining public order are important goals of the Chinese regime.

quote:

EVs are a way to sidestep complex internal combustion engines entirely.

Fojar38 posted:

The mercantalist trading policy is to allow them to dump them and drive out competition by drowning markets in cheap lovely solar panels. Everyone is pissed off at China because of this. While I'm sure there are more than 0 solar panels made by Chinese companies that aren't poo poo, the vast majority of them are.

Salt Fish posted:

Further more, presidents are only allowed to serve 2 terms, and it's highly unlikely that the funding for research would be zero dollars.

Fojar38 posted:

The mercantalist trading policy is to allow them to dump them and drive out competition by drowning markets in cheap lovely solar panels. Everyone is pissed off at China because of this. While I'm sure there are more than 0 solar panels made by Chinese companies that aren't poo poo, the vast majority of them are.

Fojar38 posted:

So far "reining in pollution" has involved the government saying "yeah we're gonna take care of the pollution lol" and doing nothing about it. Saying "China is doing X because the government says so" is exactly what I mean when I tell you you're being duped by an authoritarian regime's propaganda.

It's baffling how you can post this on the page after that horror show that was Chinese rivers and air indexes.

Fojar38 posted:

also


lol that's not how designing cars works.

Fojar38 posted:

lol that's not how designing cars works.

MiddleOne posted:

You're going to have to back that claim up. If Chinese solar panels didn't have a decent RoI for their subsidized price then they wouldn't be cornering the market.

Evil_Greven posted:

Mathematics predicts a sixth mass extinction

tl;dr we're hosed.

Also:

Guess what trajectory we're on?

I'm reminded of this:

Recall, giga = billion... so, yeah. It's not a question of if catastrophic climate change will happen at this juncture, but rather when.

30-40% of our CO2 emissions are estimated to be absorbed by the oceans, and we emit a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere... estimates range up to 40 billion tonnes in recent years. We know CO2 has risen in the atmosphere from 402.80 in June 2015 to 408.84 in June 2017, which is an average increase of 23.6 billion tonnes over the last two years.

Let's go for optimistic and assume 30% of the excess CO2 we emit goes into the oceans; this would make our emissions about 33.7 billion tonnes of CO2 over each of those two years, and suggests only about 10.1 billion tonnes of CO2 goes into the oceans. This equates to 2.75 billion tonnes of carbon per year, which means 109 years until hosed.

Now, 40% of excess CO2 is a bit worse... that suggests 39.3 billion tonnes of CO2 annually and 15.7 billion tonnes of CO2 going into the oceans, equating to about 4.3 billion tonnes of carbon each year - and 70 years until hosed.

109 to 70 years until catastrophe - that doesn't sound too horrible for us personally, right?

Unfortunately, that's just an estimate of our direct emissions at the past couple of years' rates. Permafrost will melt as mentioned above, which will increase atmospheric and oceanic carbon. We saw just recently where previous carbon sinks emitted carbon during the last El Niño. Our emissions might increase or decline, too.

There's also the matter of things going increasingly to poo poo before, which has already been happening - just some things to think about for our apocalyptic future.

ChairMaster posted:

I was under the impression that the Anthropocene mass extinction was already accepted as "underway", not "mathematically predicted". Also the world's not ending, this has happened 5 times before. It's just human civilization (and humans if we manage to properly sterilize the ocean of oxygen-producing phytoplankton).

ChairMaster posted:

I was under the impression that the Anthropocene mass extinction was already accepted as "underway", not "mathematically predicted". Also the world's not ending, this has happened 5 times before. It's just human civilization (and humans if we manage to properly sterilize the ocean of oxygen-producing phytoplankton).

ChairMaster posted:

I was under the impression that the Anthropocene mass extinction was already accepted as "underway", not "mathematically predicted". Also the world's not ending, this has happened 5 times before. It's just human civilization (and humans if we manage to properly sterilize the ocean of oxygen-producing phytoplankton).

Telephones posted:

I can't believe we let this happen.

ChairMaster posted:

Considering the loss of terrestrial megafauna a large scale mass extinction seems a little exaggerated, but I guess you could say that each major leap in human technology really kicked the Anthropocene into a higher gear. First the stone age and the loss of terrestrial megafauna, then agriculture and sedentary human settlement leading to a great deal of biodiversity lost to expanding human demand for land and food supply, culminating with the industrial revolution destroying 95% of all life on the planet in the long run.

my kinda ape posted:

I can't exactly prove that it's impossible but that's sort of like asking if the Black Plague could sweep through Europe again. Yeah the disease itself still exists but the conditions that caused it to be so severe do not exist and will not return unless we experience some sort of massive memory loss and technological regression.

The dust bowl wasn't just a really bad drought. It was a combination of drought and very poor farming practices that encouraged erosion and allowed massive amounts of soil to blow away. And this was happening in an area that's fairly arid. Practices to greatly decrease soil erosion were implemented during and after the dust bowl. Preventing soil erosion makes sense even apart from preventing giant dust clouds because losing your fertile topsoil means you're going to have dramatically decreased yields and the only way to counteract that is to spend lots of money on fertilizer. Herbicide resistance genes in corn, soybeans, and cotton allow for no-till farming practices which are incredibly good for preventing erosion and keeping the soil healthy.



This is, entirely coincidentally, nearly the exact same area that is going to have a problem with the aquifer running dry.


Take note that Nebaska, containing two thirds of the aquifer's total water, is largely holding steady.

It's a fairly arid area, but still wet enough to grow dryland wheat and sorghum.


The farmers in this area will probably see their yields drop by about half if they stop irrigating completely. Kansas and Texas in their entirety provided almost exactly 1/3 of the total US wheat crop in 2016. If those two entire states decreased their production by half (a ridiculously high number considering there's plenty grown not over the aquifer) then the US wheat production would be 1/6th less. If we combine the total US production of winter wheat with the production of corn and soybeans winter wheat is about 8% of total US grain production. (This is also a very generous number considering we're completely ignoring rice, spring wheat, Durum wheat, and sorghum, as well as other less popular grains like barley.) So 8% times 1/6th means we're going to have a decrease of about 1.33% total grain production in the US if the wheat production of Kansas and Texas is cut in half. These two states produce less than 7% of the total US production of corn and even less of soybeans as of 2016, so I'm just going to ignore those crops entirely but if you feel that's unfair then we can be even more insanely generous and round the total US production loss up to 3% or something. Quite the apocalypse!

Yeah it sucks for the people farming there who are going to see half their production gone when the water runs out but they're not exactly the entirety of the breadbasket of the United States and their methods of farming in the area they live in is not sustainable so it was bound to happen sooner or later.

If you see something wrong with my math or if I hosed up a statistic or something feel free to correct me.

Here's some maps and poo poo to better visualize my point.

Winter wheat ONLY. This ignores like 1/4th of US wheat which is other types grown mainly in the northern Midwest and Montana.



Soybeans



Corn


(2016)

ChairMaster posted:

Ten million years from now it'll look like it all happened at once anyways. There'll be a poo poo load of geological evidence of a species that popped up all over the planet all at once and then suddenly almost everything on the planet died.

MiddleOne posted:

You're going to have to back that claim up. If Chinese solar panels didn't have a decent RoI for their subsidized price then they wouldn't be cornering the market.

treerat posted:

China makes many fine panels. Dumping gov't subsidised panels is a good thing, it brings down the cost of solar power globally. Do your research and expect to get what you pay for if you buy bottom shelf panels. I don't give a gently caress if some idiots are pissed about native industrial erosion, maybe they should've prioritized solar more if they care so much.

quote:

I am under no illusions as to how much pollution China has or how much they grease the numbers. But they also have a plan to deal with atmospheric pollution. China realizes the damage pollution does to their economy and prestige but you can't just turn around a nation built on coal-powered manufacturing on a dime. Despite their lovely current status they are making big moves and setting themselves up to dominate critical clean technologies.

quote:

No actually EVs don't need an ICE, that is exactly how designing a car works.

gently caress You And Diebold posted:

Forget what show it was but I remember a segment talking about how easy it is going to tell when we were here because of all the weird compounds we're burning up there is going to be a layer in the soil record thats completely different full of man made pollution

Fojar38 posted:

You don't need a decent RoI if you can just make them cheap enough. It doesn't matter if Chinese solar panels are poor if you can buy a dozen for the price of one non-Chinese panel.

Fojar38 posted:

Except if it kills the solar industry in other countries it becomes a race to the bottom. Why put money into R&D to make better solar panels if some Chinese company is just going to dump in the market with masses of inferior but cheap ones?

Fojar38 posted:

"Look, I'm under no illusions that the Chinese government lies all the time and has historically frequently lied about this, but this time is different I'm sure."

Fojar38 posted:

You seem to think that the only part of a car that matters is the engine and that you can get an EV just by swapping the engine badda bing badda boom. Gosh why didn't car companies listen to this hot take; they could have a thriving global EV market by now!

Fojar38 posted:

You don't need a decent RoI if you can just make them cheap enough.

Fojar38 posted:

Except if it kills the solar industry in other countries it becomes a race to the bottom. Why put money into R&D to make better solar panels if some Chinese company is just going to dump in the market with masses of inferior but cheap ones?

treerat posted:

I don't think you understand RoI, go tell literally anybody buying any investment that RoI doesn't matter and you're gonna get loving laughed at.

quote:

It didn't do that. That is not what is happening. The dead companies were lovely companies, the good companies are alive and well.

quote:

They lie about their numbers, they don't loving lie about their long term plans. Xi is talking about EVs right now at the Communist Party Congress, calling it part of a 30 year plan. Xi is the most powerful Chairman since Mao and he is super serious about this, it is happening.

quote:

You seem to be ignorant of the fact that engines are the most difficult part of the car, a part which the Chinese are notoriously behind at building. A part which China is contemplating banning from their market.

MiddleOne posted:

they wouldn't be bought if they weren't worth their subsidized price.

Fojar38 posted:

People who buy things are 100% rational, got it.