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call to action posted:Well, it's thirteen percent of current carbon emissions. Which need to get to zero. Which then need to get to net negative as the aerosol effect dissipates. "Big" isn't the word I'd choose. 13% of current carbon emissions is 4.8Gt of CO2. That's nearly the entire emissions of the US. So no, "big" might not be the right word, maybe "huge", "gigantic" or "enormous" would be better.
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Apr 18, 2018 18:48
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Thug Lessons posted:That might be true worldwide, the estimates vary, but it's definitely not true in industrialized countries. In the US agriculture makes up 9% of human emissions, which is less than 1/3 that of transportation. 9% for the USA is correct but that doesn't account for the deforestation contribution to climate change, needed outside of the USA to support consumption in the USA itself.
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Apr 18, 2018 18:53
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VideoGameVet posted:9% for the USA is correct but that doesn't account for the deforestation contribution to climate change, needed outside of the USA to support consumption in the USA itself. The US is a net food exporter. The beef Americans eat comes almost entirely from American farms, with what little we do import coming mostly from other industrialized countries that are not deforesting to grow beef. They aren't really creating much, if any, deforestation outside their borders (or inside them for that matter), at least not for beef purposes.
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Apr 18, 2018 18:58
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Thug Lessons posted:The US is a net food exporter. The beef Americans eat comes almost entirely from American farms, with what little we do import coming mostly from other industrialized countries that are not deforesting to grow beef. They aren't really creating much, if any, deforestation outside their borders (or inside them for that matter), at least not for beef purposes. Well, there is Palm Oil. How much of that do we produce domestically?
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Apr 18, 2018 19:39
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VideoGameVet posted:Well, there is Palm Oil. How much of that do we produce domestically? Well, you were originally talking about livestock, and I'm pretty confident the offshored emissions there are low. I'm not sure about agriculture as whole. The US does help drive deforestation through the importation of goods like palm oil, but they also offset deforestation by exporting goods like beef, soy beans and corn to countries that would otherwise have to deforest to produce. I don't know what the actual carbon balance is offhand w/r/t agriculture. The US economy as a whole does offshore some emission, but not enough to radically shift the balance:  Palm oil specifically is something environmental policy would want to target. It not only drives land-use change emissions but also deforestation of high-biodiversity rainforest. I'd be in favor of at the very least imposing sustainability requirements on palm oil imports, and if that fails, banning importation.
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Apr 18, 2018 20:01
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Thug Lessons posted:but they also offset deforestation by exporting goods like beef, soy beans and corn to countries that would otherwise have to deforest to produce. That's not how consumption, trade or economics works.
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Apr 18, 2018 20:41
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MiddleOne posted:That's not how consumption, trade or economics works. Okay, why don't you explain it to me then?
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Apr 18, 2018 21:00
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Thug Lessons posted:You guys have no connection to the research. On the rare occasions you have numbers to back up your predictions of doom I have to come in here to correct you because they're wildly inaccurate. You're a guy on the sidewalk holding up an "the end is near" sign that I stopped to argue with because your asinine apocalyptic ideology makes a nice punching bag. I've been busy for a while and am just now catching up on this thread. Most of the people complaining about TL need to take a few months to seriously just learn climate dynamics. It's fascinating poo poo and it doesn't require presumptions about what will happen to humanity. Actually understanding climate dynamics will let you understand what the spectrum of outcomes is like at different degrees instead of this stupid rear end "Collapse? Y/N" mindset that seems ubiquitous in this thread. As for individual contribution to mitigation, if you seriously think poo poo is going to hit the fan in your life time, then you should probably learn austere self sufficiency as a matter of preparation. Micromanaging your energy and food budget down to the dollar will help you understand what contributes to our climate burden and to what degree as well as helping you live happily with less poo poo.
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Apr 19, 2018 01:14
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Thug Lessons posted:Okay, why don't you explain it to me then? De-forestation is happening as rapidly as it is because the land is extremely more valuable as agricultural land and there's no real regulatory effort to change or legislate away that equation being made locally. The US stopping exports of certain goods like meat and soy might theoretically increase the value of producing certain commodities on the de-forested land but realistically it probably wouldn't make a dent on today's rate of de-forestation as the valuation of the land is already extremely skewed. The US would have to crash the value of every commodity that can be grown on the land to alter de-forestation in any meaningful way. And it would have to do so drastically because if there's one thing we know about goods like meat it is that societies can and will exponentially increase consumption as prices fall relative to spending power. Furthermore, by exporting soy and corn (goods commonly fed to animals in industrial meat-production) at heavily subsidized price-levels the US is actually making it more efficient to produce say beef on the de-forested land (which itself is increased in value by being exported to the EU). The US trade is not off-setting or generating de-forestation, it shapes how it's currently happening. MiddleOne fucked around with this message at 05:41 on Apr 19, 2018 |
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Apr 19, 2018 05:38
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Notorious R.I.M. posted:I've been busy for a while and am just now catching up on this thread. Most of the people complaining about TL need to take a few months to seriously just learn climate dynamics. It's fascinating poo poo and it doesn't require presumptions about what will happen to humanity. Actually understanding climate dynamics will let you understand what the spectrum of outcomes is like at different degrees instead of this stupid rear end "Collapse? Y/N" mindset that seems ubiquitous in this thread. That isn't at all what happened in the discussion. TL's position is that reducing consumption is ideologically wrong and racist as well. Nobody is saying "collapse y/n". I'm not a scientist so I'm not going to study "climate dynamics", but there's plenty of smart people that know a lot more than I do that are putting forth dire warnings. "Austere self sufficiency" isn't going to matter in the most gun-having, psychopathic country in the world, if that's what it takes to survive. The prepper mindset is extremely dumb, as humans aren't islands - the only thing left is to agitate for political change. call to action fucked around with this message at 15:33 on Apr 19, 2018 |
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Apr 19, 2018 15:30
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call to action posted:That isn't at all what happened in the discussion. TL's position is that reducing consumption is ideologically wrong and racist as well. Nobody is saying "collapse y/n". I'm not a scientist so I'm not going to study "climate dynamics", but there's plenty of smart people that know a lot more than I do that are putting forth dire warnings. Much like you don't understand TLs position you don't understand mine either. And believe it or not you can create change in more than one way!
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Apr 19, 2018 18:06
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I've seen discussion about a blog from Argentinia's economic collapse. Did anyone ever find it? People were discussing how winners were communities (rural towns and urban neighborhoods) and losers were loners, especially rich loners in compounds whom raiders would hit like pinatas.
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Apr 19, 2018 18:52
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MiddleOne posted:De-forestation is happening as rapidly as it is because the land is extremely more valuable as agricultural land and there's no real regulatory effort to change or legislate away that equation being made locally. The US stopping exports of certain goods like meat and soy might theoretically increase the value of producing certain commodities on the de-forested land but realistically it probably wouldn't make a dent on today's rate of de-forestation as the valuation of the land is already extremely skewed. The US would have to crash the value of every commodity that can be grown on the land to alter de-forestation in any meaningful way. And it would have to do so drastically because if there's one thing we know about goods like meat it is that societies can and will exponentially increase consumption as prices fall relative to spending power. The only point here is that the US is capable of producing agricultural products for export more sustainably than many competitors. There is a huge, inelastic demand for soybeans in China, with about 90% of it met by two countries in equal share: Brazil and the US. Both have ramped up soybean production massively to keep up with that rising demand. Brazil has done it by chopping down 200,000 km2 of Amazon rainforest, and the US has done while reforesting at a rate of 0.12% a year. Without US supply, Brazilian farmers are going to find a way to meet that demand, and that probably means chopping down a whole lot more Amazon to grow it on. This is an oversimplification, and a whole host of factors are going to determine if and at what rate a country is going to deforest, but I don't see the point in denying that international trade is one of them.
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Apr 19, 2018 19:01
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Unable to rebut things, I see. Well, anyway,  Since 2016, Half of All Coral in the Great Barrier Reef Has Died It can be easy to forget, when gazing at their hard and gnarled exterior, that corals are animals. They do not make food on their own; like chimpanzees, golden retrievers, and sea cucumbers, corals have to find something to eat. But they approach this problem in a unique way. Tiny, photosynthetic algae live in coral tissue. The algae turn sunlight into food for corals, and corals give them a place to live in return. This symbiotic relationship between animal and plant undergirds every interaction in the tropical coral reef. Warm water severs this symbiosis. When corals are exposed to heat, they expel the colorful algae from their tissue. To human eyes, this causes them to lose their color—they “bleach”—but it also robs them of their food source. If temperatures do not soon return to safe levels, the corals starve and die. At least, that is the conventional thinking. About 50 percent of all the coral that perished in the 2016 bleaching event died in the autumn and winter, long after temperatures had returned to normal. Those corals never regained their algae after evicting them, and they slowly starved to death. “But about half of the corals that died did so in March, at the peak of summer temperatures,” Hughes told me. “We were surprised that about half of that mortality occurred very quickly.” In other words, some corals did not even survive long enough to starve. “They died instantly, of heat stress,” Hughes said. “They cooked.” Also...
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Apr 20, 2018 02:01
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Uh oh, you said "cooked". Discredited. The Great Barrier Reef dying is normal and to be expected.
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Apr 20, 2018 06:05
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 I found this one fascinating. I assume it looks similar for cars, houses and everything else? I mean, I kind of know a lot of the carbon came from manufacturing, but I don't really feel it. When I look at my iPhone's screen, I know it's (metaphorically) spitting out carbon right now, but I don't think of the fact that it's my second, and that the production of either took a lot of energy. Thug Lessons posted:The only point here is that the US is capable of producing agricultural products for export more sustainably than many competitors. There is a huge, inelastic demand for soybeans in China, with about 90% of it met by two countries in equal share: Brazil and the US. Both have ramped up soybean production massively to keep up with that rising demand. Brazil has done it by chopping down 200,000 km2 of Amazon rainforest, and the US has done while reforesting at a rate of 0.12% a year. Without US supply, Brazilian farmers are going to find a way to meet that demand, and that probably means chopping down a whole lot more Amazon to grow it on. This is an oversimplification, and a whole host of factors are going to determine if and at what rate a country is going to deforest, but I don't see the point in denying that international trade is one of them. 
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Apr 20, 2018 10:32
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call to action posted:Uh oh, you said "cooked". Discredited. The Great Barrier Reef dying is normal and to be expected. gently caress, I think for 50% destruction some harsh language is allowed. I just saw in the news the GBR is suffering from another heatwave. If the heat keeps up for too long, the Reef may be gone soon. Sobering.
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Apr 20, 2018 12:32
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Cingulate posted:
To answer your question in this specific case though, the two seem to basically be equivalent at this point ín Denmark - which is why the people responsible for our building codes are increasingly shifting toward a life cycle analysis view. For any country where building codes are much laxer however, but with a similar climate, the embodied energy in building materials is probably still a minor matter in a relative sense. Conversely, highly efficient buildings in locations that put more demand on the safety performance of the building (such as in earthquake zones) might be leaning even more heavily into the materials side of things. And like I mentioned, the energy used matters a lot too, and might be pretty sub-optimal given the energy supply - like how many people in France have their homes hated by gas or oil when they've got nuclear power as an option.
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Apr 20, 2018 12:32
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Libluini posted:gently caress, I think for 50% destruction some harsh language is allowed. I just saw in the news the GBR is suffering from another heatwave. If the heat keeps up for too long, the Reef may be gone soon. Sobering. The GBR will die and nothing we do can stop it. It's a question of time and it probably only has one or two more nino events before it's almost all bleached.
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Apr 20, 2018 20:58
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On the other hand, Herring could actually benefit from ocean acidification:Ars Technica posted:The effect is indirect; the increase in CO2 increases herring’s food supply. Yes the destruction of the great barrier reef is very sad, but canned sardines are a significant fraction of my food budget so climate change is ok now. Also if the GBR is dying imminently does that mean it's ok to break off pieces as souvenirs? It's not going to get deader.
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Apr 20, 2018 21:13
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my local paper posted that coral reef story. one of the always angry right-wingers stated that "... and elsewhere, coral reefs are forming in brilliant colors because the zooxanthellae occasionally migrate and abandon the corals they live with, causing the corals to lose their color. What you’re not being told is that warm ocean currents do not swirl along the same path forever. Ocean reefs transform as part of how the earth works since the earth was formed." lol
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Apr 20, 2018 21:47
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WaryWarren posted:my local paper posted that coral reef story. one of the always angry right-wingers stated that "... and elsewhere, coral reefs are forming in brilliant colors because the zooxanthellae occasionally migrate and abandon the corals they live with, causing the corals to lose their color. What you’re not being told is that warm ocean currents do not swirl along the same path forever. Ocean reefs transform as part of how the earth works since the earth was formed." It's happening everywhere, of course. For example: “Coral cover in the Caribbean has been trashed for 20 years,” Bruno told me. “But it wasn’t like that in the ’80s. In the mid-’80s, you could go snorkeling in Florida and it was like flying over a Kansas wheat field—golden coral for acres and acres and acres.” “Now that’s totally gone,” he said. “Coral cover in the Florida Keys is like at 3 percent.”
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Apr 20, 2018 23:18
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hey he's not wrong
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Apr 20, 2018 23:26
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Lol imagine how much grief you must feel if you're part of a community with strong ties to the ocean
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Apr 21, 2018 04:29
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call to action posted:Lol imagine how much grief you must feel if you're part of a community with strong ties to the ocean unfortunately don't have to imagine
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Apr 21, 2018 07:15
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call to action posted:Lol imagine how much grief you must feel if you're part of a community with strong ties to the ocean but the dog is located on the US coast of the pacific ocean and the flames are dead starfish.
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Apr 21, 2018 21:22
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Could a good portion of the species from the GBR be preserved in aquariums and laboratories so that their DNA could be spliced and reproduced to survive elsewhere? Just a thought.
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Apr 21, 2018 22:39
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Grouchio posted:Could a good portion of the species from the GBR be preserved in aquariums and laboratories so that their DNA could be spliced and reproduced to survive elsewhere? Just a thought. I know that in the past there have been researchers who have collected their gametes for preservation purposes, so maybe. But theres no point doing that if theres no way to make the ocean less acidic.
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Apr 22, 2018 14:38
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Just dump in a bunch of bleach lol it'll work out.
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Apr 22, 2018 23:10
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I know, reddit, but it's the heavily moderated /r/askscience section: https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/8dk08m/in_the_last_510_years_theres_been_tremendous/ While I don't agree with the technological and political optimism that inevitably concludes every comment, I've got to say that I appreciate that people are beginning to understand that we've done literally nothing to stop or even mitigate climate change so far.
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Apr 23, 2018 16:20
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https://twitter.com/AlaskaWx/status/986971341541793797?s=19
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Apr 23, 2018 16:55
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Ssthalar fucked around with this message at 17:07 on Apr 23, 2018 |
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Apr 23, 2018 17:05
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enjoy some 2017 throwback posts from the resident climate optimistThug Lessons posted:Several prominent climatologists released a book today presenting a model that suggests that warming can be limited to 2 degrees by keeping to the emissions limits set in the Paris Agreement and by producing at least 50% of the world's energy from zero-emissions sources by 2060. Thug Lessons posted:I'm actually pretty familiar with Kevin Anderson. I've listened to several of his lectures. I don't have time to listen to this one right now, but at least as of last year he was adamant that 2 C is achievable, but that it required dramatic (yet bearable) emissions cuts that aren't being enacted. And I actually happen to be in full agreement with that. lol Thug Lessons posted:Emissions have actually leveled off over the past three years. lmao Thug Lessons posted:You live in a fantasy scenario that endorses genocide.  Thug Lessons posted:Humans achieved overshoot maybe... 50,000? 100,000? years ago. The overshoot calculations we use to study animal population don't really apply to humans because we're far more adaptable than any other species ever to exist, so it's at best a metaphor. science doesn't apply to humans 90s Rememberer fucked around with this message at 17:08 on Apr 23, 2018 |
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Apr 23, 2018 17:05
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lol what the gently caress is the point of analyses like that "Beacon of Hope" thing? "If we actually tried to decarbonize, we could mitigate the worst effects." Yeah, no loving poo poo, the problem is the political will behind it and who's paying for it.
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Apr 23, 2018 21:18
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call to action posted:lol what the gently caress is the point of analyses like that "Beacon of Hope" thing? "If we actually tried to decarbonize, we could mitigate the worst effects." Yeah, no loving poo poo, the problem is the political will behind it and who's paying for it. some people put the cart before the horse. "there is a possible way to prevent this disaster so obviously we will pursue it and follow this plan which will lead to climate success". does it matter that a year later nothing has been done and the entire plan is called into question? no, another plan will come along just fine to replace that one that will keep us at 2.5c warming, or 3c warming, or whatever new target they come up with that allows them to justify "things will be ok and stable"
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Apr 23, 2018 21:22
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self unaware posted:some people put the cart before the horse. "there is a possible way to prevent this disaster so obviously we will pursue it and follow this plan which will lead to climate success". does it matter that a year later nothing has been done and the entire plan is called into question? no, another plan will come along just fine to replace that one that will keep us at 2.5c warming, or 3c warming, or whatever new target they come up with that allows them to justify "things will be ok and stable" Significant progress is unlikely to happen on climate change until enough old conservatives die. Here's US-specific data: Republicans do not believe in climate change or aren't worried about it:  Seriously, only 40% of self-identified Republicans think global warming is caused by humans. The North Pole just melted by itself! However Republicans are going extinct: Party Identification Varies Widely Across the Age Spectrum   A wider partisan and ideological gap between younger, older generations  Some people think we just need to do a better job convincing "uneducated" Trump voters about the dangers of climate change, which is both patronizing and clueless. You can't convince reactionaries, as only significant personal hardship will cause them to re-evaluate their beliefs. There's been a scientific consensus on climate change for 30 years, and people that haven't accepted it by now probably never will. However it's incorrect to conclude that because nothing has been done to date, nothing will be done in future. Progress is stymied until conservatives become irrelevant due to attrition.
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Apr 23, 2018 22:13
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Nocturtle posted:Significant progress is unlikely to happen on climate change until enough old conservatives die. Here's US-specific data: This is a global problem, not just a US one. That said, if what you're saying is actually true (and I don't believe it is) then we are completely hosed because we definitely do not have time to wait. It doesn't matter how optimistic or pessimistic you are, there is literally no valid, evidence based position where it's okay to sit around and wait for a couple of decades. We will blow through our carbon budget in that time and be forced to resign ourselves to increasingly horrific outcomes both in terms of long term consequences and the drastic mitigation strategies that we'll be forced to employ. Waiting for the olds to die is never, ever a useful approach for any problem. It doesn't work, and in this specific instance we won't even really be dealing with the same problem by then.
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Apr 23, 2018 22:25
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There are forums and threads all over the internet full of space exploration fans who are preaching the necessity of colonizing other planets. These people are convinced that it will not be all that difficult to establish a permanent human presence on Mars, and that will we be able to terraform it in some fashion. Meanwhile, in climate change discussions, everyone is convinced that the human race will die out if the Earth warms up by 5 degrees. I'd like to see these two groups meet up and talk. "We can live on a sterile ball of rock with no atmosphere or magnetic field" and "If the delicate balance on earth is disrupted we're all going to die" should go together like potassium and water.
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Apr 24, 2018 05:38
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Orange Sunshine posted:Meanwhile, in climate change discussions, everyone is convinced that the human race will die out if the Earth warms up by 5 degrees. Hmm actually a thousand generations of suffering isn't so bad when you realize that not all humans will die. Thanks that really puts it in perspective for me.
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Apr 24, 2018 06:04
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self unaware posted:enjoy some 2017 throwback posts from the resident climate optimist You're pathetic. drat, you sure owned my by obsessively reading all my posts and finding I say... nothing particularly controversial.
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Apr 24, 2018 06:11
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