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golden bubble posted:A lot of that is probably just the old belief that there is a cure for cancer. But cancer, or uncontrolled cell replication, is not a single disease. It is like finding a single fix for "my car engine will not crank when I try to start it." But the whole war on cancer basically assumes there is a single fix for uncontrolled cell replication. Eh, I think there is a general culture of "medicine is fake". I think you get it overtly and in a big way with the anti-vax movement but I think the smaller cultural manifestations are stuff like the persistent belief all medical news is just fake and the claim that the news is always cooking up fake news about medicine. Like I'm not saying there has never been inaccurate or overblown hype about medical breakthroughs that never come out but I will say that people in general are trained to hear something happening in medicine then not hear about it again and automatically say "WELL THAT MEANS IT WAS FAKE" instead of ever investigating if maybe the story they heard was true and was developed and does now cut some sort of death down some miraculous amount. Like the super amazing AIDS treatments you hear about in the mid 90? A bunch of them exist and are drugs people get now and a bunch of people will live normal life spans with undetectable levels of HIV in their blood and never get AIDS.
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Dec 12, 2017 22:47
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The northernmost city in the United States (which Wikipedia and the Post still refer to primarily by its white barbarian name Barrow instead of its indigenous name Utqiagvik, which it has officially gone by since this time last year) is warming so fast, the algorithm that filters erroneous data from the NOAA climate monitoring station removed the legitimate reports from the database.
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Dec 12, 2017 23:31
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Something which has been bothering me is the overarching uh, umbrella, of "climate change". Like, it's established that global temperature is the forefront issue of it, but should we include things like rampant deforestation? Extinction of wild species? Plastics filling the oceans and the wildlife within them? Like, just as we moved on from "ozone hole" to "global warming" to "climate change", at what point do we expand to just talking about "Total Biosphere Collapse"? 
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Dec 12, 2017 23:47
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Ganson posted:And at that point modern society is kinda hosed because the same bacteria will eat most of our water pipes, medical devices, food storage, etc etc. Hence the "never allowed to" clause at the end. If it did happen though, we would probably shift our most essential plastic items/infrastructure to more expensive degradation resistant plastics. And neither the spread of the microorganism/s nor the degradation process itself would likely be so fast that it catches human civilization wholly unprepared. The custom microorganisms would also most likely not be able to colonize all relevant environments because designing that type biologically viable organism is loving impossible.
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Dec 13, 2017 00:36
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That's a good point. I sometimes have a difficult time communicating all the issues revolving around environmental collapse. I can be effective discussing climate change by itself, but when I start talking about how there's a billion things that are coming to a head, I sound like an insane person. Climate change is bad, but if humanity was sensible and lived in harmony with each other and the environment we could probably peacefully live through the transition. But we aren't sensible. And we have pillaged the entire world. And there's so many huge mistakes we've made that need to be fixed. So it's probably a good idea to start shifting the language from climate change to, like you said, something like "Total Biosphere Collapse".
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Dec 13, 2017 00:42
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Rime posted:Something which has been bothering me is the overarching uh, umbrella, of "climate change". Like, it's established that global temperature is the forefront issue of it, but should we include things like rampant deforestation? Extinction of wild species? Plastics filling the oceans and the wildlife within them? Global Climate Change deals with the contributors and impacts of changing the climate. So land use change, like deforestation, are part of both sides of the equation both a cause and an impact. But as you approach things like plastics in the ocean, the case for impacts on the climate or impacts from the climate decrease. Certainly plastics in the ocean will impact the climate somehow, but probably far far less than anything else we label climate change. As we talk about the broader issues of societal sustainability or biome/ecosystem/biosphere collapse, that certainly would include Climate Change, but the answers of what are best for Climate alone doesn't always mesh with what is best for the environment at large, society at large, or some combination of the two.
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Dec 13, 2017 00:46
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Rime posted:Something which has been bothering me is the overarching uh, umbrella, of "climate change". Like, it's established that global temperature is the forefront issue of it, but should we include things like rampant deforestation? Extinction of wild species? Plastics filling the oceans and the wildlife within them? Ozone Hole is related to fluorocarbon. Which got bipartisan support to remove from use. Not so with CO2. MAGA!
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Dec 13, 2017 01:06
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basically there are a lot of issues at play here and instead of trying to handle them all at once you need to just pick whichever one you feel a connection to and work on that. for one person that might be the humanitarian consequences of rising sea level / drought / extreme weather. for another person, plastic in the ocean. for the next, renewable energy, for the next reforestation, for the next sustainable agriculture and methane management, and so on. nobody can be expected to be on top of all these causes, and trying to present them all to the public as sides of the same problem is going to be impossible, because you've got about two seconds to communicate a message to your audience and "the planet's dying" is too much for them to handle
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Dec 13, 2017 01:18
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of course one of the problems is that for a lot of people none of these issues are relevant, because the only thing that matters in their life is their car, or their retirement fund, or video games, or muslims. how do you get those people to care?
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Dec 13, 2017 01:20
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carbon tax
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Dec 13, 2017 01:29
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Telling someone "the world is dying" isn't really actionable either. It has to be broken down into things they can do and impacts that will challenge their lives.
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Dec 13, 2017 01:32
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VideoGameVet posted:Ozone Hole is related to fluorocarbon. Which got bipartisan support to remove from use. It was replaceable with a variety of alternatives in most applications, and those applications are comparatively limited in sheer scale.
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Dec 13, 2017 01:35
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Trabisnikof posted:Telling someone "the world is dying" isn't really actionable either. It has to be broken down into things they can do and impacts that will challenge their lives. what if i want the world to die i mean its extremely clear humanity was a mistake
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Dec 13, 2017 01:56
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Trabisnikof posted:Telling someone "the world is dying" isn't really actionable either. It has to be broken down into things they can do and impacts that will challenge their lives. Yeah, at a certain point certain apocalypse becomes an argument against environmentalism instead of for it. You have to at least pretend some problem is solvable and if it really isn't then it gets pretty silly to try and fight it and actually becomes the logical choice to just do whatever.
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Dec 13, 2017 02:14
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It's hilariously dishonest the way people try to compare CFC's and our easy victory over the hole in the ozone layer to the real problem that's going to destroy modern global civilization. Our entire fuckin civilization is built on greenhouse gas emission, CFC's weren't worth poo poo and there was hardly any economic problem with banning them outright. To imply that the scale of economic impact of even a slight reduction in fossil fuel useage is comparable to the end of CFCs is essentially an outright lie. Also, deforestation is almost exclusively an issue of developing nations now, and honestly if Brazil manages to gently caress over their entire rainforest, as much as it would be a huge loss to the scientific world, it's essentially their own problem, the world at large does not rely on that rainforest for stability and survival. The same is not true for the atmosphere that we all share, it's a genuine global crisis that will render our planet so vastly different from the one that's stability we rely on to prevent billions of people from starving to death and the rest of the world tearing each other apart in a blaze of nuclear hellfire that it takes precedence over the idea that maybe nobody will get to eat fish anymore.
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Dec 13, 2017 02:24
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ChairMaster posted:Also, deforestation is almost exclusively an issue of developing nations now, and honestly if Brazil manages to gently caress over their entire rainforest, as much as it would be a huge loss to the scientific world, it's essentially their own problem, the world at large does not rely on that rainforest for stability and survival. The same is not true for the atmosphere that we all share, it's a genuine global crisis that will render our planet so vastly different from the one that's stability we rely on to prevent billions of people from starving to death and the rest of the world tearing each other apart in a blaze of nuclear hellfire that it takes precedence over the idea that maybe nobody will get to eat fish anymore. I take it you haven't read much about the carbon sequestrating effects of the Amazonian forests or the models of the global climate impact from deforesting the Amazonian rainforest? Climate change is a crisis where local survivability will be threatened at a global scale and our response to that threat risk aggravating the harms themselves. Even if you or I don't eat the Amazon ourselves, the destruction of the Amazon will worsen our climate futures in a meaningful and measurable way. We cannot afford to ignore the Amazon no more than we can afford to ignore ocean acidification, desertification, invasive species, or any other of the now neverending list of harms we must mitigate correctly lest they feedback themselves.
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Dec 13, 2017 02:30
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ChairMaster posted:Also, deforestation is almost exclusively an issue of developing nations now, and honestly if Brazil manages to gently caress over their entire rainforest, as much as it would be a huge loss to the scientific world, it's essentially their own problem, the world at large does not rely on that rainforest for stability and survival. The same is not true for the atmosphere that we all share, it's a genuine global crisis that will render our planet so vastly different from the one that's stability we rely on to prevent billions of people from starving to death and the rest of the world tearing each other apart in a blaze of nuclear hellfire that it takes precedence over the idea that maybe nobody will get to eat fish anymore. Right, because technological breakthroughs have never come from studying nature. Let's remain ignorant of the physical, chemical, biological properties of species that we never got a chance to examine. loving dipshit.
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Dec 13, 2017 02:46
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ChairMaster posted:Also, deforestation is almost exclusively an issue of developing nations now, and honestly if Brazil manages to gently caress over their entire rainforest, as much as it would be a huge loss to the scientific world, it's essentially their own problem, the world at large does not rely on that rainforest for stability and survival. The same is not true for the atmosphere that we all share, it's a genuine global crisis that will render our planet so vastly different from the one that's stability we rely on to prevent billions of people from starving to death and the rest of the world tearing each other apart in a blaze of nuclear hellfire that it takes precedence over the idea that maybe nobody will get to eat fish anymore. Tropical rainforests provide a nontrivial amount of net carbon flux based on carbon sources due to decompositional processes and carbon sinks due to photosynthesis. Destroying them would impact the carbon budget of the atmosphere at large. Please go read basic research before you pull wild fantasies out of your rear end. Start with https://www.carbonbrief.org/tropical-forests-no-longer-carbon-sinks-because-human-activity
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Dec 13, 2017 02:52
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treerat posted:Right, because technological breakthroughs have never come from studying nature. Let's remain ignorant of the physical, chemical, biological properties of species that we never got a chance to examine. loving dipshit. I said in that exact post that it would be a huge loss to the scientific world you loving idiot. What exactly do you think that sentence meant? So many of you loving simpletons are so ready to take anything anyone says and read it like they're saying gently caress the forests we should just burn them all down. ChairMaster fucked around with this message at 02:55 on Dec 13, 2017 |
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Dec 13, 2017 02:52
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Minge Binge posted:That's a good point. I sometimes have a difficult time communicating all the issues revolving around environmental collapse. I can be effective discussing climate change by itself, but when I start talking about how there's a billion things that are coming to a head, I sound like an insane person. I'm gonna do that; I'm going to be calling it Biosphere Collapse instead of Climate Change from now. Makes sense, really, since the two effects with the most impact we'll be seeing are that and Sea Level Rise.
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Dec 13, 2017 02:57
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Trabisnikof posted:I take it you haven't read much about the carbon sequestrating effects of the Amazonian forests or the models of the global climate impact from deforesting the Amazonian rainforest? Notorious R.I.M. posted:Tropical rainforests provide a nontrivial amount of net carbon flux based on carbon sources due to decompositional processes and carbon sinks due to photosynthesis. Destroying them would impact the carbon budget of the atmosphere at large. Please go read basic research before you pull wild fantasies out of your rear end. Start with https://www.carbonbrief.org/tropical-forests-no-longer-carbon-sinks-because-human-activity Yea no poo poo, but the carbon sink potential of the amazon rain forest pales in comparison to that of our dying oceans, and both put together are not nearly enough to handle the amount of carbon we put into the atmosphere. If given the choice between saving the rain forest and putting an end to the use of fossil fuels, nobody would save the forest. That's why we talk about climate change separately from deforestation and biodiversity loss. They're both very important issues, but one of them is going to put an end to our civilization, and one of them is simply a tragic loss of beauty and scientific potential for no good reason other than people want to eat more beef. I get the feeling that people who wring their hands over how sad they are about species going extinct or how the forests are disappearing might just be the people who are still in denial about how hosed our climate really is, and how bad it's going to get in the next couple decades. By the way, since i guess I should just append this disclaimer to every post ever: NO poo poo, DEFORESTATION IS BAD. EVERYONE HERE KNOWS THIS AND NOBODY THINKS IT'S NOT A PROBLEM.
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Dec 13, 2017 03:05
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Pretty good article on the ongoing splits between the modernist and conservationist camps of the environmental movement. http://www.slate.com/articles/healt...h_all_dt_tw_top
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Dec 13, 2017 03:06
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Classic environmentalist attitudes not only played right into the hands of fossil fuel industries and let nuclear power become impossible to implement because of the idiot public's attitudes regarding it's safety, but they also continue to gently caress us all over with their anti GMO garbage and are happy to ignore the very basic science involved in the matter and how it can help us survive the damage we've done to the planet. People who refuse to acknowledge humanity's role as the stewards of our planet are no better than the people who think that the planet needs no help and will be fine no matter how much carbon we burn.
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Dec 13, 2017 03:15
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a loving slate post
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Dec 13, 2017 03:46
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Here's another article (from Wired) on the challenge of achieving the negative emissions that are somehow taken as a given in most long-term IPCC warming scenarios. It actually hits almost exactly the same points as the recent New Yorker article, but I thought this section was a nice summary of the issue:Wired: The Dirty Secret of the World’s Plan to Avert Climate Disaster posted:In 2007 IMAGE published an influential paper relying on BECCS in Climatic Change, and garnered much attention at an IPCC expert meeting. Other groups started putting BECCS into their models too, which is how it came to dominate those included in the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report (the one that prompted the BBC to call Karlsson). Very roughly ~5-10% of global GDP required per year for the rest of the century to meet the negative emissions targets assumed in the standard reference document used by most policy-makers. Also apparently recent observation favor more extreme warming models. Fun reading. enraged_camel posted:i mean its extremely clear humanity was a mistake I see what you're getting at, but honestly we're just doing what any other monkey species would have done given total uncontested control of the atmosphere. It could be worse, imagine if the geese were in charge?
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Dec 13, 2017 04:00
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ChairMaster posted:deforestation is almost exclusively an issue of developing nations now
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Dec 13, 2017 04:45
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ChairMaster posted:Yea no poo poo, but the carbon sink potential of the amazon rain forest pales in comparison to that of our dying oceans, and both put together are not nearly enough to handle the amount of carbon we put into the atmosphere. If given the choice between saving the rain forest and putting an end to the use of fossil fuels, nobody would save the forest. That's why we talk about climate change separately from deforestation and biodiversity loss. They're both very important issues, but one of them is going to put an end to our civilization, and one of them is simply a tragic loss of beauty and scientific potential for no good reason other than people want to eat more beef. The reason you're stupid is because you keep trying to pose this as "Well either we can care about the atmosphere or we can care about rainforests" where any sort of real climate solution involves an ensemble of tactics that addresses both. We aren't given the choice between the two, we need to do both. Denialists divide and conquer to ignore the synergistic effects of multiple feedbacks. Nihilists divide and conquer to fixate about how their one true cause will overwhelm everything.
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Dec 13, 2017 05:58
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Thug Lessons posted:Pretty good article on the ongoing splits between the modernist and conservationist camps of the environmental movement. It is good, although I think it kind of oddly uses the word conservationist in such a way that it comes off as synonymous with preservationist. In reality what the article describes as the "revolutionary" new policies of the modernist camp like quote:a new agreement with farmers and ranchers that requires them to "voluntarily" implement measures that will improve habitat for a variety of species. In return, landowners will receive greater financial assistance" Have been the norm for a long time. I'm sure their doing something cool and innovative but there's a long history of public-private partnerships in natural resource management and most conservation money in the United States is spent to make recreation and industry more effective. Part of why a human centric management of natural resources might seem revolutionary to a slate blogger is just that a Alabama state biologist improving Bob White habitat or stocking fish in a reservoir doesn't attract much attention in New York writers circles, its boring and mundane. Since the 1960s when people first started wonder if if hmm.. maybe there are downsides to dumping DDT over thousands of miles of forest land? I think there may have been a philosophical move towards preservationism, however in practice more hard-headed use-focused management has predominated. Of course if these new thinkers could get the Sierra Club's head out of its rear end on the subject of nuclear power, then I'd be excited.
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Dec 13, 2017 06:40
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It doesn't matter what the Sierra Club thinks about nuclear power when utilities and grid planners want to avoid nuclear power. Nuclear power proponents need to convince their customers first, before they worry about activists.
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Dec 13, 2017 06:44
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Nocturtle posted:I see what you're getting at, but honestly we're just doing what any other monkey species would have done given total uncontested control of the atmosphere. It could be worse, imagine if the geese were in charge? Nah, the only reason we're doing what we're doing is because a capitalist country happens to be the most powerful one on the planet during the most crucial time in history. It was basically a stroke of sheer misfortune.
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Dec 13, 2017 06:45
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Trabisnikof posted:It doesn't matter what the Sierra Club thinks about nuclear power when utilities and grid planners want to avoid nuclear power. Nuclear power proponents need to convince their customers first, before they worry about activists. Considering that every single nuclear project has gone overbudget, it's no wonder why Nuclear power hasn't been too hot. Really the fact that solar/battery storage is growing at an exponential rate and the fact that solar/battery prices has been going down by an equally incredible rate is the only thing that gives me even a bit of hope that we aren't totally hosed.
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Dec 13, 2017 06:49
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ChairMaster posted:I said in that exact post that it would be a huge loss to the scientific world you loving idiot. What exactly do you think that sentence meant? A huge loss to the scientific world: essentially Brazil's own problem? I think that even if I ignore the claim that deforestation doesn't affect climate your post is still loving stupid.
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Dec 13, 2017 06:55
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Evil_Greven posted:Yeah, but that was not the lifeblood of modern civilization with alternatives available only for some applications. Hamburger isn't the "lifeblood of modern civilization." Cutting way back on Animal Agriculture would do more than everyone being given a Tesla 3. Although send me the Tesla 3. I won't complain.
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Dec 13, 2017 07:13
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treerat posted:A huge loss to the scientific world: essentially Brazil's own problem? I think that even if I ignore the claim that deforestation doesn't affect climate your post is still loving stupid. Do you seriously not understand the difference in a loss of scientific potential and a loss of stability of human civilization? Or are you just grasping at straws for a way to read my post incorrectly. You don't have to answer that, it's definitely the latter. Stop being a dumb rear end in a top hat and just admit that you couldn't be bothered to read the whole post that you responded to in the first place.
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Dec 13, 2017 07:40
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VideoGameVet posted:Hamburger isn't the "lifeblood of modern civilization." Cutting way back on Animal Agriculture would do more than everyone being given a Tesla 3. Most people in this thread refuse to accept the fact that the best things you can do to lower your impact on the environment are don't have kids, stop loving driving and flying and stop eating meat, in descending order. Even bringing up two of those reliably causes a derail in which people refuse to accept that eating meat has a huge environmental impact and that creating another human life to consume and create waste is literally the worst thing you can do for the environment. This would be worse if individual action was worth anything anyways, but people who claim that it is tend to just be huge hypocrites who pretend like recycling plastic bottles and planting some trees makes them a loving hero of some sort. ChairMaster fucked around with this message at 07:59 on Dec 13, 2017 |
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Dec 13, 2017 07:54
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ChairMaster posted:the best things you can do to lower your impact on the environment are Ok, so overall your goal here is just to be mad at everyone regardless of any particulars.
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Dec 13, 2017 08:01
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Salt Fish posted:Ok, so overall your goal here is just to be mad at everyone regardless of any particulars. This is the D&D climate thread.
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Dec 13, 2017 08:06
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The following two statements are not contradictory: - The largest contributors to your carbon footprint are having kids, transportation, and eating meat. - It does not matter at all if you reduce your carbon footprint to any extent that may be possible in your nation, there are billions of people with much lower footprints than yours and their presence hasn't saved the world any more than your changes will. People who refuse to accept the latter still ignore the actions that that the former calls for. These people are dumb hypocrites who do mostly useless things to make themselves feel better about destroying the planet.
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Dec 13, 2017 08:07
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Also you people know perfectly well that arguing online is performative, and that nobody is going to convince anyone else directly of anything over the internet. If I can get even one spectator to realize that all nonviolent action is a total waste of time then I will have done my job. If that one spectator happens to have a terminal disease or they don't care about what happens to them or something maybe they'll even do something that has a more positive impact on the environment than all of us put together times a thousand. I'll be a veritable internet hero. It's my way of making a positive change in the world, even though I don't care enough to put myself at risk. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Dec 13, 2017 08:21
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ChairMaster posted:Also you people know perfectly well that arguing online is performative, and that nobody is going to convince anyone else directly of anything over the internet. If I can get even one spectator to realize that all nonviolent action is a total waste of time then I will have done my job. If that one spectator happens to have a terminal disease or they don't care about what happens to them or something maybe they'll even do something that has a more positive impact on the environment than all of us put together times a thousand. I'll be a veritable internet hero. Are you sure it's not just a total waste of time?
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Dec 13, 2017 09:26
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