MightyBigMinus posted:

no thats a trivializing & catastrophizing dramatic narrative

true doom is knowing it'll probably only be a few hundred millions dead, a few billion immiserated, and drag on for a century

there will be no closure, only suffering

far worse than ww2 on both a total and relative basis, but none of the rich will see an iota of justice

thinking that collapse will actually bring a kind of closure/justice is simply an escape fantasy. organic systems are fantastic at long slow decay. the future is death but on a timescale that to us means... gotta go to work tomorrow.

Notorious R.I.M. posted:

The survival of humanity is dependent on phytoplankton continuing to produce oxygen. When you jam CO2 into the atmosphere it buffers into the surface ocean. Faster CO2 loading rates buffer more of it in the surface ocean before it has time to disperse and whoopsie you get more ocean acidification. The rates that we're doing this and causing acidification have no geological correlate in history. None. It's truly novel

Last I checked studies a while ago they were predicting we'd see consequences of this (regional undersaturation where carbonate or aragonite can't form) starting in the 2030s.

This planet has ways to annihilate every last mammal and we're toying around with finding out how.

Notorious R.I.M. posted:

The survival of humanity is dependent on phytoplankton continuing to produce oxygen. When you jam CO2 into the atmosphere it buffers into the surface ocean. Faster CO2 loading rates buffer more of it in the surface ocean before it has time to disperse and whoopsie you get more ocean acidification. The rates that we're doing this and causing acidification have no geological correlate in history. None. It's truly novel

Last I checked studies a while ago they were predicting we'd see consequences of this (regional undersaturation where carbonate or aragonite can't form) starting in the 2030s.

This planet has ways to annihilate every last mammal and we're toying around with finding out how.

BrotherJayne posted:

Lol, heard studded tires on the bare hardtop yesterday. We def used to have a good amount of snow and ice by now, just fog and rain instead

uguu posted:

Do you have a link handy? Looks pretty epic 🤩

Xaris posted:

I had a longer post typed up but gave up. the one thing I will say is the future is very uncertain. there are two key facts:

1) there are still immense, utter fuckton, of fossil fuels left in the ground. much of that is in coal. Much of that directly in the imperial core.
2) the survival of most of humanity is entirely dependent on mega agriculture -- all powered by fossil fuels. As climate becomes more unreliable, most crop failures, less water (or too much water), we're going to need to expend even more energy than we do now to overproduce (brute force) through the calamities through continuing to expend humongous amounts of fossil fuels.

i see it as a bifurcation point: can we quickly build out as much coal and oil as possible while we still have the material and labor means to do and pump out thousands of coal plants quickly, or do we wait even too long to build out more fossil fuel generation that by the time fertilizers, easy water, cheap transportation, and immiserated labor runs out that it's too late to bring the gravy back?

i think things can continue the squeezing blood-from-stone grind of slow decline-collapse, if we can keep consuming immense amounts of energy and the infrastructure to extract and consume remains in place (and expands even). this means the imperial core will continue to exist longer solely because it owns significant energy required and keeps the periphery in check with force. But, if we fail to start consuming even more energy and planning around having to ramp it up, then it can go downwards very quickly.

with enough energy, you can brute force through disasters, it is a magic material, absolutely unparalleled. The amount of work a human can do in a day is around 600 watt-hr, but then here comes fossil fuels wherein a barrel has the energy potential of 700,000 watt-hours, or equivalent to a person working for 40 hours per week for over 4.5 years that requires no food, no healthcare, nothing, it's the perfect slave force-in-organic form. The average American person consumes 60 barrels a year, or the equivalent of having 70,000 slaves dedicated to their whims. the amount of "work" (in both the thermodynamic sense and the literal labor sense) you get out of fossil energy is unprecedented, with enough energy you can rebuild a flooded Miami many times over, you can raise it many times over, you can continue to building extravagant military industrial complexes to subjugate the colonies, and you can continue to keep producing insane amounts of burgers for the burgerpeople, hell you could build a loving dome over Phoenix and keep it air conditioned to 62 degrees during the 140f summer.

Capitalism is also a cybernetic system that optimizes to produce and consume as much as energy as possible. it's not going to give up energy. but it is capable of undermining itself: it will become fragile, redundancies taken out because it's not profitable, ignore and let the problems fall into dissarray and by the time it realizes it's too late, well..

we best start seeing more and more coal plants coming online writ large.... or else

OIL PANIC posted:

can somebody who spells it 'fracing' answer a question about EROEI for me?
on a per-well basis, what is the primary contributor to reduced EROEI, an increase in the energy required to achieve production, a decrease in the average output of any given well, or some other factor/ combination of factors (eg., is the rate at which the typical well produces decreasing?)?
i guess i'm asking for an on-the-ground view of how the big picture as described in Tom Murphy's the energy trap plays out.
thanks

Chamale posted:

A Taylor Swift fan died of heat exhaustion at the concert in Rio de Janeiro yesterday, where the heat index hit a record 58° C (137° F). The venue banned fans from bringing in outside water, and ran out of water for sale during the concert.

1glitch0 posted:

Speaking as an economist, the lesson to be learned here is that the water was priced too low for the amount of water available. Classic supply and demand. Next time the price of the water should be higher to more properly correlate with demand. That way there would have been enough water for everyone.

OIL PANIC posted:

can somebody who spells it 'fracing' answer a question about EROEI for me?
on a per-well basis, what is the primary contributor to reduced EROEI, an increase in the energy required to achieve production, a decrease in the average output of any given well, or some other factor/ combination of factors (eg., is the rate at which the typical well produces decreasing?)?
i guess i'm asking for an on-the-ground view of how the big picture as described in Tom Murphy's the energy trap plays out.
thanks

vegetables posted:

My understanding is:

-we need fossil fuels to get enough nitrogen into the soil to feed 8 billion people. The nitrogen doesn’t just stay once it’s there, it has to be fossil fuelled back at a certain point in the cycle

-so the level of nitrogen in biomass now is, literally, artificially high— cessation of artificial processes would reduce the amount within the system by a lot

-so any widespread collapse now more or less has to mean huge numbers of people will die, because the system supporting us is fragile and requires many industrial-level processes to keep going

But this could be very wrong. It’s the reason why I think comparing this collapse to pre-20th century ones undersells the impact of it; the level of the drop is a lot higher.

quote:

What Happens When You Put a Fossil Fuel Exec in Charge of Solving Climate Change

.....Sultan Al Jaber, the Ph.D. economist turned renewable-­energy executive turned ADNOC CEO, who is presiding over the U.N. climate conference to be held in Dubai in December. The conference, known as COP28, comes as, at the close of the hottest year on record, scientific consensus demands that we cut fossil-fuel use right now. At the same time, money continues to flow into fossil fuels; more than $1 trillion in new funding was invested this year alone, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

Al Jaber, as the head of both COP28 and one of the world’s largest fossil-fuel companies, is tasked with reconciling those realities. Sitting in a meeting room at the Emirates Palace hotel dressed in the traditional white thobe and sneakers, he is both a target for criticism and a symbol of possibility. “A phasedown of fossil fuels is inevitable, it is essential,” he tells me. “We have to accept that.” At the same time, he says, the world is not ready to entirely kick oil and gas. “We need to get real,” he says. “We cannot unplug the world from the current energy system before we build a new energy system.”

Most years, the COP president plays a largely functionary role, shuttling between member countries to find common ground on wonky areas of climate policy. Al Jaber has taken a very different approach. He has extended an invitation to oil and gas companies and prioritized private-sector climate solutions. In Al Jaber’s view, the success of COP28, not to mention the broader efforts to fight climate change, hinges as much on embracing the private sector and shifting market conditions as it does on wonky negotiations. “There’s going to be a paradigm shift,” he says. “The political process needs to be well complemented with private capital and a business mindset.”

bawfuls posted:

technically you could run the Haber process on some other energy source and also produce H2 feedstock from hydrolysis of water but of course that’s a LOT more energy intensive than using fossil fuels for both so again it’s the same old energy trap referenced upthread

vegetables posted:

My understanding is:

-we need fossil fuels to get enough nitrogen into the soil to feed 8 billion people. The nitrogen doesn’t just stay once it’s there, it has to be fossil fuelled back at a certain point in the cycle

-so the level of nitrogen in biomass now is, literally, artificially high— cessation of artificial processes would reduce the amount within the system by a lot

-so any widespread collapse now more or less has to mean huge numbers of people will die, because the system supporting us is fragile and requires many industrial-level processes to keep going

But this could be very wrong. It’s the reason why I think comparing this collapse to pre-20th century ones undersells the impact of it; the level of the drop is a lot higher.

Dokapon Findom posted:

Yes, this is Malthusianism correct

While the amount of food currently produced (and thrown out) could feed everyone who is hungry, people miss the point that this amount is already artificially and unsustainably high. Beyond keeping the fossil fuel game going indefinitely, the more difficult part seems to be organizing society in a way that that food will actually get to the hungry

As food scarcity grows we will likely see the opposite- proportionally more food thrown out and more people going hungry as fewer are able to pay the higher prices for it

spiritual bypass posted:

wow it's really gonna suck for those people who are not me!

vegetables posted:

My understanding is:

-we need fossil fuels to get enough nitrogen into the soil to feed 8 billion people. The nitrogen doesn’t just stay once it’s there, it has to be fossil fuelled back at a certain point in the cycle

-so the level of nitrogen in biomass now is, literally, artificially high— cessation of artificial processes would reduce the amount within the system by a lot

-so any widespread collapse now more or less has to mean huge numbers of people will die, because the system supporting us is fragile and requires many industrial-level processes to keep going

But this could be very wrong. It’s the reason why I think comparing this collapse to pre-20th century ones undersells the impact of it; the level of the drop is a lot higher.

Trabisnikof posted:

you can also fix nitrogen into the soil using crop rotation and nitrogen fixing plants, but that would require more crop space dedicated to human food production, rather than crop for energy or crop for animal feed


(dont forget 30% of american corn is turned into ethanol for gasoline)

Trabisnikof posted:

uguu posted:

Do you have a link handy? Looks pretty epic 🤩

quote:

...Comparisons between the Cretaceous and the near future are frequently made to suggest that marine calcification will not be impaired in a future high-CO2 world. The evidence cited for this is usually based on the occurrence of massive carbonate deposits during the Cretaceous such as the White Cliffs of Dover—carbonate formations that consist of coccolithophore calcite. Given the basics of carbon cycling and controls on seawater carbonate chemistry as reviewed above, it is obvious that such comparisons are invalid (see also Zeebe & Westbroek 2003, Ridgwell &
Schmidt 2010). This applies not only to the Cretaceous in particular but also to past long-term, high-CO2 steady states in general. Briefly, because two carbonate system parameters are required to determine the carbonate chemistry, similar CO2 concentrations do not imply similar carbonate
chemistry conditions (for instance, carbonate mineral saturation states can be completely different).

The anthropogenic perturbation represents a transient event with massive carbon release over a few hundred years. In contrast, the Cretaceous, for instance, represents a long-term steady-state interval over millions of years. As a result, the timescales involved (centuries versus millions of
years), reservoir sizes (a few thousand petagrams of carbon versus 10^8 Pg C), and controls on carbonate chemistry are fundamentally different.

The carbonate mineral saturation state of the ocean is generally well regulated by the requirement that on long (>10,000 years) timescales, CaCO3 sources (weathering) and sinks (shallowand deep-water CaCO3) must balance (Ridgwell & Schmidt 2010). In contrast, as pH reflects
the balance between dissolved CO2 and carbonate ion concentration, it is governed primarily by pCO2 (controlling CO2 for a given temperature) and Ca2+/Mg2+ (controlling CO3(2-) for a given CaCO3 saturation state) rather than by weathering. It follows, for instance, that there was no late Mesozoic carbonate crisis because CaCO3 saturation state was probably high and decoupled from pH. Only events involving geologically rapid (<10,000 years) CO2 release overwhelm the ability of the ocean and sediments to regulate , producing a coupled decline in both pH and saturation state and hence providing a future-relevant ocean acidification analog.

Delta-Wye posted:

thank u vegetables for this informative post about vegetables

kater posted:

the amount of post username combos this thread hits is in fact terrifying