Paradoxish posted:

This thread or maybe some other D&D thread has seemed really, really aggressively anti-garden, with the arguments generally being more about the practical time commitment required. I'm with you, though. My girlfriend and I decided to start gardening a few years ago and... it's not actually a lot of work? At this point we grow a sizable portion of the produce we eat and I'd be hard pressed to say that we average even a combined two hours per week on gardening work. And that's including the larger amounts of time spent planting and harvesting. For most of the season there's hardly anything to do at all.

How are u posted:

There's some small satisfaction in being right, and to the absurdity that's put us into this situation. Also, humans have always been drawn to apocalyptic poo poo.

Notorious R.I.M. posted:

tbh it's really just basic confirmation bias in terms of what literature people choose to consume and propagate. there's never really any substantial discussion on the articles just AAAAAAAH ITS BAD.

Same poo poo with that permafrost paper that dropped the other day. Everyone wants to just hoot n holler instead of discuss the cool and exciting details of thermokarst formation.

TROIKA CURES GREEK posted:

Like community gardens are fine, it's just that they produce a marginal amount of food (particularly from a calorie perspective) for a fuckton of effort. I wouldn't be surprised if many people end up burning more calories from the gardening than they actually get out. Producing a lot of stuff for little effort is just not a normal thing in gardening, so you are experiencing a combination of a huge amount of luck (no disease / bugs), live in a climate conducive to it (most people don't), have a good amount of space (most people don't), a large amount of planning and knowledge, and are greatly underestimating the amount of work involved (people do this for hobbies they enjoy). You also have a partner that enjoys it, which makes the overall activity much more enjoyable and a lot easier. Basically it's a nice hobby for middle/upper class people, I don't think many people working 3 jobs are thrilled by the concept, and can easily have their entire effort wasted because they just got too busy to water everything one day or deal with an insect invasion.

Climate change makes it all worse, of course, because you need to deal with huge swings in temperature and things like frosts in the middle of summer following by 110 degree heat waves. Or additional pests and disease.

friendbot2000 posted:

Why are the wildfires a bad thing? Genuinely asking because I know that in California a lot of redwood species can't drop their seeds without fires so wildfires equal good thing for forests.

friendbot2000 posted:

Why are the wildfires a bad thing? Genuinely asking because I know that in California a lot of redwood species can't drop their seeds without fires so wildfires equal good thing for forests.

PNAS posted:

Long-term perspective on wildfires in the western USA
Published online February 14, 2012
Understanding the causes and consequences of wildfires in forests of the western United States requires integrated information about fire, climate changes, and human activity on multiple temporal scales. We use sedimentary charcoal accumulation rates to construct long-term variations in fire during the past 3,000 y in the American West and compare this record to independent firehistory data from historical records and fire scars. There has been a slight decline in burning over the past 3,000 y, with the lowest levels attained during the 20th century and during the Little Ice Age (LIA, ca. 1400–1700 CE [Common Era]). Prominent peaks in forest fires occurred during the Medieval Climate Anomaly (ca. 950–1250 CE) and during the 1800s. Analysis of climate reconstructions beginning from 500 CE and population data show that temperature and drought predict changes in biomass burning up to the late 1800s CE. Since the late 1800s , human activities and the ecological effects of recent high fire activity caused a large, abrupt decline in burning similar to the LIA fire decline. Consequently, there is now a forest “fire deficit” in the western United States attributable to the combined effects of human activities, ecological, and climate changes. Large fires in the late 20th and 21st century fires have begun to address the fire deficit, but it is continuing to grow.

friendbot2000 posted:

Why are the wildfires a bad thing? Genuinely asking because I know that in California a lot of redwood species can't drop their seeds without fires so wildfires equal good thing for forests.

Oxxidation posted:

these wildfires are so severe that they're scorching the land completely, making it impossible for anything to grow

Nocturtle posted:

edit: ^^^^^ so you're suggesting that the intensity of the recent blazes is much higher than what the ecosystem is adapted to and we should not expect normal regrowth? Do you have a link?

vorebane posted:

We basically need boats carrying mass kelp farms, absorbing carbon on long rear end trips to deep ocean. I don't actually know the physics maybe there are intake hotspots? Then we gotta haul the kelp to be sequestered some place. And that would probably incur too much carbon to do it, but maybe it's doable going green powered?

Notorious R.I.M. posted:

speedrun the azolla event

TROIKA CURES GREEK posted:

It would make Stalins look like Jimmy Carter. Or rather John Taylor.

this broken hill posted:

this thread makes stalin look like james taylor

Rime posted:

British Columbia is burning at rates which were not forecast to hit until 2050, largely driven by a weakening jetstream as the arctic melts.


The C02 Emissions from wildfires in BC alone are estimated at over 190 Million Tonnes annually. All human activity in the province only generates 60 Million Tonnes.

Good thing the Arctic has a huge reserve of heat lurking below it now, which will accelerate the melt rate as we approach blue ocean.


But yeah, plant a tree and pull some weeds or whatever best floats your boat towards the apocalypse.

paradex posted:

I don't think a lot of people understand the reality until it hits them. The BC fires are so devastating that Seattle, hundreds of miles away, was having a very bad time. I had headaches, my eyes watered, kept coughing, the sky was orange, people started wearing masks and getting pissy, and it only lasted for for a week and a half and this is in the most passive city on the planet.

People are going to go loving nuts when climate change actually starts effecting them.

Burt Buckle posted:

Sometimes I get this feeling that you guys enjoy seeing articles that suggest things are worse than previously thought.

Happy_Misanthrope posted:

What other articles are being produced these days

Rime posted:

Stalin only dreamed of achieving the kind of bodycount I yearn for.

European Geosciences Union posted:

Deadline for climate action – Act strongly before 2035 to keep warming below 2°C
30 August 2018
...
“In our study we show that there are strict deadlines for taking climate action,” says Henk Dijkstra, a professor at Utrecht University in the Netherlands and one of the study authors. “We conclude that very little time is left before the Paris targets [to limit global warming to 1.5°C or 2°C] become infeasible even given drastic emission reduction strategies.”
...
The researchers caution, however, that even their more modest climate-action scenario is quite ambitious. “The share of renewable energy refers to the share of all energy consumed. This has risen over the course of over two decades from almost nothing in the late nineties to 3.6% in 2017 according to the BP Statistical Review, so the [yearly] increases in the share of renewables have been very small,” says Rick van der Ploeg, a professor of economics at Oxford University, who also took part in the Earth System Dynamics study. “Considering the slow speed of large-scale political and economic transformations, decisive action is still warranted as the modest-action scenario is a large change compared to current emission rates,” he adds.

Burt Buckle posted:

I’ve seen quite a few about carbon capture tech recently. Hopefully it continues to decrease in cost at the same rate that solar has.

Bishounen Bonanza posted:

The thread the last few pages is on the money. So many people out there think that some new carbon capture tech is going to save us from having to radically alter our society, when in reality we have to decarbonize to survive, then maybe if we are lucky we can undo some damage with capture tech.

StabbinHobo posted:

i have to wrap this in a loving wall of caveats about his spoiled manchild behavior and his psycho gambling addict financial strategy

but if you can put that aside

literally no one is doing more for the cause of decarbonizing right now. which isn't to say his impact is more than marginal, just that, its quite large.

put it this way: assume all the things he's aiming for would have happened anyway without him/tesla. every other car manufacturer would eventually have electrified, and then ~20 years later as the fleet of rolling stock turned over, assuming the grid was being decarbonized in parallel, the "car and light truck transportation" segment of carbon emissions will be massively reduced.

if he hadn't dumped his paypal money into saving the roadster and then building the model s, that whole process, I argue, would have taken *at least* 5 years longer, easily 10.

that difference in emissions, if the transition occurs over 2020 - 2040 instead of 2025 - 2045, that has got to be well into the hundreds of millions of megatons if not a handful of gigatons.

so yea he's an evil ceo, but, scoreboard.

StabbinHobo posted:

if he hadn't dumped his paypal money into saving the roadster and then building the model s, that whole process, I argue, would have taken *at least* 5 years longer, easily 10.

paradex posted:

I don't think a lot of people understand the reality until it hits them. The BC fires are so devastating that Seattle, hundreds of miles away, was having a very bad time. I had headaches, my eyes watered, kept coughing, the sky was orange, people started wearing masks and getting pissy, and it only lasted for for a week and a half and this is in the most passive city on the planet.

People are going to go loving nuts when climate change actually starts effecting them.

Trabisnikof posted:

There's absolutely no proof of this at all.

quote:

If anything, your logic would lead to Nissan getting the credit, since they're the ones actually selling the most popular (and cheaper) EV.

quote:

You're going to claim the "coolness" factor is why everyone is getting into EVs, which is certainly the narrative Musk likes to propagate, but it isn't backed up by the on the ground reality.

quote:

If Brown signs into law AB 100, that'll be instantly more towards decarbonization than Musk ever will do.

this broken hill posted:

bioremediation you dumbasses. you absolute plebs

Hello Sailor posted:

Sorry fuckwit, but it's not going to save us.

this broken hill posted:

Corsec posted:

I'm currently under the impression that we can't decarbonize with current technology without a humanitarian collapse even greater than the fall of the Soviet Union in the first world, and utter ruination of the third world. But I can't remember exactly where I got that idea from, so I'm not sure if its really true and wondering what the real facts are. It'd be nice to be proved wrong.

Corsec posted:

If we substituted fossil fuels with the best currently available non-fossil fuels technology then will it be compatible with maintaining, or even improving, current living standards? How feasible is it to decarbonize while also maintaining living standards in the first world and also providing improved living standards to the third world?

I'm currently under the impression that we can't decarbonize with current technology without a humanitarian collapse even greater than the fall of the Soviet Union in the first world, and utter ruination of the third world. But I can't remember exactly where I got that idea from, so I'm not sure if its really true and wondering what the real facts are. It'd be nice to be proved wrong.

THE BAR posted:

What has he done, besides making cars that eat up our limited lithium supplies?

quote:

As in, what has he done, and not one of his workers? Cause all I can find on google is things he wants to do, or things he has said could be neat.