goochtit posted:

Blast from Tonga’s Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano in January could eat away at ozone layer, warm Earth

quote:

“I know a lot of people working in climate science who say one thing in public but a very different thing in private. In confidence, they are all much more scared about the future we face, but they won’t admit that in public. I call this climate appeasement and I believe it only makes things worse. The world needs to know how bad things are going to get before we can hope to start to tackle the crisis.”

TACD posted:

Confusedslight posted:

Just lol that we are alive in these times.

goochtit posted:

Blast from Tonga’s Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano in January could eat away at ozone layer, warm Earth

silicone thrills posted:

lol im so tired.

Stereotype posted:

i want off this ride honestly

Confusedslight posted:

Just lol that we are alive in these times.

Stereotype posted:

i want off this ride honestly

TACD posted:

If people really started to internalise the idea that catastrophe is unavoidable, they’d probably start behaving really unhinged, maybe even cancelling their news subscriptions.

goochtit posted:

Blast from Tonga’s Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai volcano in January could eat away at ozone layer, warm Earth

starkebn posted:

If you were born after 1970 (1870?) then nothing's ever really mattered

e: 1770? 1492?

Real hurthling! posted:

44bce

silicone thrills posted:

lol im so tired.

Pryor on Fire posted:

Don't forget that as the atmosphere warms the ability for it to hold more water vapor at all altitudes goes up, so the warming makes the H₂O greenhouse factor even worse. This doesn't necessarily mean more clouds to increase albedo, just more greenhouse effect.

Basic Poster posted:

I did move to the woods to idk...do non normal stuff like, hoard beans and what not. But I think really rob whatever his name cool zone podcast man was kind of right. Sure, it's all going to end horribly and there is zero chance of us doing anything about it that won't get you instantly prisoned in a rapidly worsening prison system and I'd rather starve in my bed than starve in a cell I guess.

But old rob-o still thinks that "community building" and "dual power structuring" is like...the only way to like...earth ship the mole people to some possible future with printed out Wikipedia or whatever.

I can't help escape the notion though that the long form organic project of these gay dead forums has always been (I'll get argued that is was just large scale game griefing) banding together, understanding the intricacies of systems, and exploiting them. Largely for fun, but exploiting them never the less.

I have not found on the whole Internet a larger population of informed and very smart people that could certainly make as good a stand as anyone. I know your and my imagination immediately goes to pictures of 90s goon meets and that anything attempted would devolve into some on fire furry wife swapping hell stench of a barter town but...man can dream.

Our Final Warning: Six Degrees of Climate Emergency, Mark Lynas posted:

Harvest failure

Four degrees will see temperatures rise above the thermal tolerances of staple crops across virtually all the world’s major food-producing areas. High temperatures of up to 39°C cause ‘direct damage to enzymes, tissues or reproductive organs’ of crop plants. Above these ‘lethal thresholds’, plants may simply be killed outright. Heatwaves in the four-degree world will see temperatures reach the high 40s Celsius in the mid-latitudes, and soar into the 50s in the sub-tropics. Once critical crop temperature thresholds are included in models, they simulate losses of nearly 50% of the US maize crop, with most of the current-day Corn Belt being knocked out of production.

When droughts are added into the picture, the future for food production looks even scarier. The authors of one recent paper analysed the US Dust Bowl of the 1930s and then factored in the temperature increases expected later this century from global warming. While the worst Dust Bowl years led to crop losses of up to a third between 1933 and 1939, add in four degrees of warming and the losses soar to 80% or more. Just the warming effect on its own would mean that a typical year would see yields equivalent to the terrible Dust Bowl year of 1936. The researchers warn in the paper’s introduction that ‘damages at these extremes are highly sensitive to temperature, worsening by ~25% with each degree centigrade of warming.’ For four-degree temperature rises, losses could therefore be reaching 100%, obliterating the entire harvest. These conclusions hold not just for maize in the central Dust Bowl area, but for wheat, soy and other crops across the Great Plains and Midwestern states. Four degrees of global warming, in other words, turns virtually the entire area that produces crops in the US into a Dust Bowl state.

This matters not just for the livelihoods of US farmers or domestic food supplies for American consumers, but because the US is the breadbasket of the world. Maize yields in places like Iowa frequently set world records. The top four maize-exporting countries – the United States, Brazil, Argentina and Ukraine – account for 87% of global maize exports. Four degrees is projected to wipe out 139 million tonnes from their combined corn production – more than the current average global annual maize exports of 125 million. In other words, there will be no maize surplus in producer countries to be exported to hungry city dwellers in consumer countries. Factor in the expected rise in global population to 10 billion or so by mid-century and the consequences hardly bear thinking about.

And it gets worse. In the one-degree world, surpluses in one place tend to balance out deficits in another, and therefore even in bad years the world has enough food. (The fact that over 800 million people remain hungry is down to poverty, not a shortage of overall supply.) Synchronised harvest failures involving multiple regions are unknown in the modern world – they have simply never happened. As the authors of a 2018 paper in PNAS write: ‘Collectively, the probability that these large-exporting countries will incur simultaneous production losses greater than 10% in any given year is virtually zero under present-day climate conditions.’ In a four-degree world, however, this probability rises to 86%. The implications are not difficult to grasp, particularly because recent history gives us a clue. During the relatively minor 2006–8 food price crisis, Brazil, Argentina and Ukraine imposed export bans on maize to safeguard domestic supplies, reducing global export supply and further pushing up prices, with similar restrictive trade policies being implemented for rice and wheat. With synchronised crop production shocks across several of the world’s major producer countries, global harvests would fall drastically short of demand for the first time in the modern era.

A similar concern applies to wheat, possibly the world’s most vital crop in that it provides a fifth of all the calories consumed by the human species. The global wheat trade equals those of maize and rice combined. Wheat production is also concentrated in a small number of key areas: the top ten wheat-producing regions account for more than half of total production and nearly all global exports. Drought is already having an effect; in recent decades drought impacts on global wheat production have doubled. As global temperatures rise, however, water scarcity shocks begin to ricochet throughout the world’s crucial wheat-producing areas. As an international group of scientists wrote in a 2019 paper:

By the mid-21st century, severe water scarcity is most likely to occur in an almost continuous belt from the Iberian Peninsula in the west to Anatolia and Pakistan in the east. Significant increases in severe water scarcity will also very likely affect southeastern Ukraine, southern regions of Russia, and western parts of the United States and Mexico, as well as southwestern Australia and South Africa.

In an average year, by the time global temperatures hit four degrees, nearly two-thirds of the worldwide wheat-producing area will be gripped by drought. There is also a big increase in the risk that simultaneous drought-driven harvest failures strike multiple key wheat regions for three years in a row. Be in no doubt what this means. The world will run out of food.

This is another reason to be sceptical of broad average changes typically projected by crop production models: long-term averages disguise the variations that can happen on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. Yet as humans we need to eat every few hours, not every few years. It would only require a serious global food deficit to be sustained for a few months on just one occasion for stockpiles to be exhausted and a significant proportion of the world’s population – beginning with the urban poor in developing countries – to begin to starve. And we are not just talking about the world trade in commodity crops. Studies have shown that horticultural production is also extremely sensitive to the warming climate, with yields of vegetables and legumes slashed by a third in a four-degree scenario. The livestock sector will be seriously affected; one-third of the global cereal harvest is currently used for livestock feed, and with the world’s grazing lands desertifying and/or too hot for outdoors livestock rearing, animal production will similarly suffer drastic losses as cattle and other stock die from thirst and heat stress.

There is another possibility, of course. We could try to move crop production out of current breadbasket areas and towards the poles to keep step with global temperature rises. One study shows that three-quarters of the current-day boreal region will be crop-suitable in a roughly four-degree warming scenario. In the northern hemisphere, agriculture would shift into Arctic Canada, Alaska, Siberia and Scandinavia, with cultivable areas moving as much as 1,200 kilometres north of current croplands. But in reality, the feasibility of this is doubtful; it would require destroying most of the existing boreal forest, and ploughing up thawed permafrost and tundra areas to sow corn and wheat. All this would release millions of tonnes of additional CO2, and require massive amounts of fertiliser. There is also the danger that droughts and heatwaves will be severe even in the Arctic by this stage, and that wildfires would also threaten food crops. Continental regions like Siberia will in particular be suffering extreme heatwaves, so only areas close to the Arctic Ocean are likely to remain reliably temperate for cultivation. Most northern polar land regions have thin, rocky soils with little prospect of yielding much harvest even under the most optimistic scenarios however. In the Southern Hemisphere the option of shifting crop-production zones by a thousand kilometres towards the poles is not available at all – the continents peter out at the higher latitudes and there is barely any new land to farm.

Perhaps the final option for humanity, faced with synchronous failures of major world food crops all around the world, would be to abandon farming altogether and produce food in indoor industrial systems using genetically engineered microbes and chemical feedstocks. Temperature, nutrients and humidity can be controlled in a closed cycle, and energy supplied from cleaner sources like solar, wind and nuclear. But the scalability is doubtful. Could we really provide for the calorific needs of 10 billion people by synthesising food in big vats? The scale of such an enterprise might be analogous to today’s oil industry, with pipelines and gigantic ‘food refineries’ on the edge of every town. It is one thing to produce high-value niche outputs using synthetic biology; quite another to find the feedstocks and energy to replace most of the world’s arable farming, which currently uses free solar energy and soil nutrients across millions of square kilometres. Having compromised the habitability of many of the world’s cities, we will also have destroyed much of the world’s cultivable land.

Failing that, it is anyone’s guess how long modern civilisation could withstand food shocks of the magnitude predicted for the four-degree world. No model can forecast what the results will be. Will we intelligently plan a decades-long adaptation effort, sharing the burdens of heroic sacrifices and immense technological change fairly, in order to maintain at least the minimum necessary for everyone’s daily calorific needs? Or will a sequence of collapses take place, with billions of people fleeing heat, drought and starvation, and the ensuing global disorder and conflict usher in a new dark age? It would be better not to conduct the experiment, and to continue farming on existing agricultural land. But at four degrees this will no longer be an option.

Radical 90s Wizard posted:

The posts are now coming from inside the floods, hell yea

lil poopendorfer posted:

The state of renewables in the US

https://twitter.com/LookedExpensive/status/1552179902136233984

Stereotype posted:

i can't even begin to explain how little i give a poo poo about china collecting data about me

HiroProtagonist posted:

is this like, a question of too much kinetic energy? or an uninsulated line?

seems like thing meant to spin as fast as possible spinning too fast and catching on fire might be a problem except there's two turbines next to it that aren't moving.

Stereotype posted:

i can't even begin to explain how little i give a poo poo about china collecting data about me

silicone thrills posted:

https://www.tiktok.com/embed/7125999127552412970

holy gently caress just some massive disassociation vibes from this.

TACD posted:

The narrative of “we can fix this if we just recycle and use efficient lightbulbs” probably plays a lot better than “earth is doomed because you all kept using plastic straws, sorry”. If people really started to internalise the idea that catastrophe is unavoidable, they’d probably start behaving really unhinged, maybe even cancelling their news subscriptions.

And they’re obviously never going to tell the real story of “earth is doomed because of the unimaginable brain–diseased greed of a few dozen billionaires”. Society will probably collapse with neighbours murdering each other for causing the end by throwing plastic bottles into the general waste; there will never be a widespread reckoning with the planetary apocalypse wrought by a few psychopaths with hoarding disease for numbers.

Cup Runneth Over posted:

honestly i don't think there's even anything specifically wrong with the billionaires as human beings. the hoarding, number obsession thing is deeply human; look at MMO players, people climbing comp shooter ladders, playing EVE. this is just what happens when humans accrue that kind of power and make decisions with these kinds of stakes without being mentally inoculated against those natural psychological impulses. that's why I've said and maintain that the Great Filter is capitalism. put any random person through the process of accruing a whole shitload of money and they will also turn into a psychopath; I mean, look at any leftist podcaster/streamer that hit it big for an example.

the truth is the game was rigged from the start