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Man, I came to this thread to find out exactly how hosed we are as a species, and instead I'm reading some bullshit about why we should murder oil executives.
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Jul 23, 2013 10:39
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Squalid posted:The danger to those cities is often exaggerated, although if you work in agriculture or some kind of manufacturing your job might be at risk. Dangers to Vegas are definitely not exaggerated. Below is a picture showing the city's growth between 1984 and 2009. Note the massive shrinkage in the nearby Lake Mead, to the right: 
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Jul 31, 2013 03:56
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Barnsy posted:Don't get me started on what the loss of predatory sharks is going to do to the world's oceans! What is the loss of predatory sharks going do to the world's oceans? (Is it bad? Do we even want to know?)
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Aug 30, 2013 04:34
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effectual posted:Fear motivated Noah to make a raft. (/sarcasm) And the good news is, he was reborn as Elon Musk and making spaceships!
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Sep 20, 2013 04:49
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Michaellaneous posted:Not exactly possible since those are my parents. Perhaps this is one reason you are having problems convincing your parents: you seem to be thinking in terms of weather (i.e. no longer getting snow in your hometown) whereas climate change mostly manifests itself in the form of extreme weather events. It doesn't necessarily mean all places will actually get warmer. So the moment it snows your parents are probably like, "see! the planet is not warming up after all!"
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Dec 15, 2013 15:39
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bpower posted:Theres been a lot of talk about despair and realism verses hope and fantasy in this thread. I usually fall in to the former camp.I've been listening to a lot of Chris Hedges' speeches recently and they've opened up a lot more philosophical options. He thinks, and this is very simplified of course, we should fight even though we know theres almost no hope of victory. Its the only moral stance to take. As he quotes for someone else,who I've forgotten unfortunately, "I dont fight fascists because I think we'll win, I fight them because they are fascists." That should be our attitude when fighting the "forces" destroying the environment. Saying "gently caress it, i'll grow my own food" is not enough. We all must as individuals do what we can , and that means everything we can, to fight. Hedges btw thinks we are doomed, but we still must fight. Most people value the short term over the long term and they are unwilling to make sacrifices in the former for gains in the latter. This has been demonstrated with plenty of studies and experiments. My theory is that this is why we are ultimately hosed on the climate change front. Climate change is something in which we need to make sacrifices in our current lifestyles in order to prevent catastrophe in the future. It's essentially a problem that will get worse due to the very nature of humans. What I'm curious about is whether there might be a significant overlap between climate change deniers (I call them the NFG crowd, as in "No Fucks Given") and other short-term thinkers such as:
This would be trivial to test using randomized surveys.
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Dec 22, 2013 12:23
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Happy_Misanthrope posted:hugely unpredictable weather with severe financial strains on a system already held together with wishes and duct tape My hometown has a Mediterranean climate, which is fairly moderate year around. Over the last few years though, the weather has been quite unpredictable with wild up-down swings. Last week it was below 32F, which caused many temperate-climate fruits (esp. citrus) to freeze and perish. Next week it's going to be in the 70s, and many people are worried that it will cause trees to bloom -- in December! Things aren't looking good for a region that's primarily agriculture-dependent.
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Dec 22, 2013 17:49
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Happy_Misanthrope posted:"Things have been poo poo before in recorded history, so don't worry about poo poo becoming much, much worse to a much, much larger group of people in a significantly shortened timeframe". Be careful. If you give him too much poo poo, he's going to start harassing you via PMs like he tried with me. I suggest putting him on ignore and moving on (like half of this forum has probably done).
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Dec 22, 2013 22:07
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Climate change itself is not going to cause extinction, but it will lead to a lot of wars over the remaining fertile and inhabitable lands. The United States may be able to deal with the massive migrations from coastal regions to inland areas, but other countries have neither the infrastructure nor the stability to bear such drastic changes in habitation patterns. The thing that makes me mad the most about all this is that those who put the climate change wagon in motion and are refusing to do anything meaningful about it won't be around to suffer the consequences. It will be us and our children (for those of us who choose to have them).
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Mar 18, 2015 07:34
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Uranium Phoenix posted:Actually, given that the vast majority of over-consumption is from the rich, it's actually the rich who should stop reproducing. But then who will create the jobs?
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Mar 19, 2015 08:41
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cowofwar posted:Also to point out that the weird jet stream this year is not climate - it's a weather event from a single year and cannot be determined to be an effect of climate change one way or another as this deals with probabilities and frequencies. Yes, but we do know that freak weather events and patterns will be more likely in the future due to climate change. http://arstechnica.com/science/2015/02/extreme-weather-events-in-our-future-climate/
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Mar 19, 2015 23:23
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The problem with the "stop having kids" argument is that it's basically a suggestion to enter a genetic prisoner's dilemma on a global scale. Even if you yourself decide not to have kids, many people won't, and in the long run their genes will survive while yours will perish.
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Mar 20, 2015 02:01
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Lemming posted:The true fact of "the single biggest thing you can do to reduce your carbon footprint is not have children" was posted and people like you lost their minds. Actually, the single biggest thing you can do to reduce your carbon footprint is to commit suicide: it reduces it to zero! 
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Mar 20, 2015 17:58
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There's definitely something to be said about being overwhelmed in general. There's so much stuff that demands attention. Do we spend time learning about and trying to do something about the plethora of social issues (gay marriage, racism, immigration, etc.), political issues (elections, primaries, etc.), international issues (Middle East, Russia, Latin America, etc.), economic issues (income inequality, sexism in tech, etc.), or climate change? I say "or" because people have limited time and attention. The average person works 45-50 hours a week, and would rather spend the rest of their time socializing with friends and family or on leisure activities rather than reading articles and books and forum threads to educate themselves about everything and then try to figure out what they, as individuals, can do about the topic. This is why I don't really see much hope when it comes to tackling climate change: it requires everyone to care and change their actions, but most people won't simply because they don't have the mental bandwidth for it. I myself struggle with keeping up with everything, and without the various informative threads on D&D, I probably couldn't.
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Mar 24, 2015 21:43
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Wisconsin cutting environmental damage, limiting talk of climate changequote:Since taking office in 2010, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker has reshaped the state’s Department of Natural Resources (DNR). He appointed a former state senator and critic of the agency to be its secretary and hired an outside “deer czar” in response to hunters’ complaints about the state’s management of the deer herd. Gov. Walker also re-wrote state mining regulations to clear the way for an ill-fated iron mine proposal that was finally abandoned last month. Several days ago, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that the mining company’s lobbyist and spokesman had been considered for appointment as the DNR’s deputy secretary—until officials realized there was a federal law specifically preventing that kind of thing. (He was, instead, hired for a job in another agency.)
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Apr 10, 2015 14:48
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Happy_Misanthrope posted:Looks like Shell is now buying into the conspiracy. Watch him get kicked out by the board of directors and get replaced by someone who is "fully onboard" with "doing whatever it takes" to "maximize shareholder value."
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May 24, 2015 06:40
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Trabisnikof posted:Uh, that's what he's saying? Yes, but he also accepts global warming: quote:The Shell boss said he accepted the general premise contained in independent studies that have concluded that dangerous levels of global warming above 2C will occur unless CO2 is buried or reserves are kept in the ground. “We cannot burn all the hydrocarbon resources we have on the planet in an unmitigated way and not expect to have a CO2 loading in the atmosphere that is often being linked to the 2C scenario,” he said in an exclusive interview with the Guardian. It would seem to me that Shell board of directors may want a global warming denier at the helm. Maybe I'm just being cynical, though.
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May 24, 2015 06:55
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markgreyam posted:I told this to a work mate with who I occasionally talk climate change with (in a much more optimistic sense normally) and he started to get irate, asking me what I was doing about it and if I wasn't going to do anything then why did I talk about it, and questioning the same of these scientists and the people coming up with the numbers in the first place. Does no-one else like doomsday porn on a Monday? He was getting irate because you were piercing his bubble of It's Always Sunshine and Rainbows. Most people cannot handle the idea that their life is going to change for the worse soon due to factors outside their control, so they either stick their head in the sand or they lash out harshly to try to silence the other person.
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May 25, 2015 08:46
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Fasdar posted:What everyone agreed on, moreover, was that there has, thus far, been a total failure by actual scientists and practitioners to relate to the public just how much we can do, and indeed are doing already. I don't think it's a failure on part of scientists and practitioners. You gotta remember that there's very serious money behind denying climate change and trying to cast doubt into climate science. Combine this with people's general unwillingness to make non-negligible changes to their lifestyle, and you've got yourself the current status quo.
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May 25, 2015 08:52
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Trabisnikof posted:To be fair, if one is complaining about climate change but are also unable to list the things one is doing (and striving to do) to adapt and mitigate, one tends to sound like a bit of a tool. That's not the point, though. Even if the guy had listed the things he's doing, his coworker would probably have given an equally irate response, something along the lines of, "too bad you're just one person" or "well i can't do that because".
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May 25, 2015 08:55
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Nice piece of fish posted:Yeah... yeah. My plan is to make a poo poo ton of money and be one of the rich fucks living in Elysium, while everyone else (i.e. you guys) suffers down here on Earth.
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Jul 28, 2015 02:11
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echopraxia posted:So what exactly is there to be done in concrete terms? I've been reading this thread for as long as its been around and the same solutions keep being brought up in a depressing cycle but I've never seen a concrete realistic plan for altering the infrastructure and social systems we need to change. Is there any way we can actually implement CANDU, Solar, Wind etc. starting tomorrow of is there no hope? There is no hope. Pretty much all of the reliable models and reports indicate that we're past the point-of-no-return and the planet will undergo catastrophic warming within this century and the next no matter what we do. Anything will do now will only slow down the chain reaction, and that by negligible amounts.
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Jul 28, 2015 03:50
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pwnyXpress posted:As someone mildly qualified, we are not all doomed. Well, yeah. The first world will be mostly OK. Even those in coastal areas will have the personal resources and the state's support to relocate inland. The rest of the world though? Yeah, they're gonna be thoroughly hosed.
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Jul 30, 2015 05:13
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Meta Ridley posted:Reading up on climate change is pretty depressing. The human species is so narcissistic and the human psyche so will-fully ignorant that I think we will wipe ourselves out within 200 years. You could say 'gently caress Republicans and Big Oil' but Republicans are still human beings. The flaw is with the human species itself being susceptible to stupidity and ignorance, especially on a wide social psychological level, and we have these psychological behaviors because they were beneficial at some point in our evolution. No no, you see, we can easily stop global warming, all we have to do is convince everyone to not have a kid!
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Aug 3, 2015 06:54
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Yiggy posted:This is some absurd bootstrapper mentality being applied to individual climate footprint. My choices, like the choices of most people, are contingent to the point of having almost no choice. "Just make your commute more efficient! Its being done! Telecommute!" Those sorts of things take space to breath, figuratively speaking, and in our economy there is very little room for that. And this is from someone who has already done a lot to walk the walk. People here want to snap their fingers at individuals to fix climate change by min/maxing their carbon footprints on the ground level in the face of gigantic systemic issues. That anyone is surprised that these "solutions" fall on dear ears is kind of wacky. Furthermore, a few thousand (or even a few million) people deciding to live leaner won't do jack poo poo in the grand scheme of things, when we're talking about a planet that has eight billion people and with more on the way. Not to mention the fact that making such sacrifices puts the person at a significant disadvantage compared to their peers. If you commit to only taking the rail to work, you're basically artificially limiting your own job choices (to those jobs that are within a reasonable distance to rail lines), which hurts you and your family.
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Aug 3, 2015 16:48
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Don't worry guys this guy figured out how to minimize one's carbon footprint!
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Aug 4, 2015 05:45
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Friendly Tumour posted:My argument is that we're incredibly hosed and thinking about it makes me suicidally depressed. Well, committing suicide is a good way to permanently reduce your carbon footprint to zero!
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Aug 21, 2015 02:05
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So VW just admitted that their "defeat device" - the device that detects when a car is going through an emission test and temporarily lowers emissions to pass the test - has been installed on 11 million vehicles worldwide. http://arstechnica.com/cars/2015/09/volkswagen-admits-11-million-diesel-cars-have-sneaky-software-installed/ quote:On Tuesday, Volkswagen revealed that 11 million diesel cars worldwide have been equipped with software allegedly used to cheat emissions tests.
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Sep 22, 2015 17:27
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How do you distinguish between people who deny anthropogenic climate change vs. those who deny climate change altogether?
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Sep 27, 2015 19:32
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Sucks for NOLA, but Miami could not sink fast enough. All of Florida, in fact. Either that, or... 
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Oct 14, 2015 00:23
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quote:Reducing global average new-vehicle CO2 emissions by 90 percent by 2050 (compared to Toyota's 2010 global average) Is that number with or without a defeat-device?
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Oct 16, 2015 05:41
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How are u posted:A seawall ain't gonna do poo poo to save South Florida. People who are after the "next new hot thing" don't care about a 60-year timeframe. They're typically looking to buy, sit on it for a few years and flip.
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Oct 18, 2015 21:23
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SKELETONS posted:No optimism allowed, even though we are living in the most prosperous period of human history and all these problems are absolutely solvable if you're a wealthy first-world nation.
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Oct 20, 2015 04:20
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Trabisnikof posted:That's far from certain, as that article even points out, <2C is still a possibility. Which is rather incredible when you think about our recklessness. The problem is that that possibility is decreasing at an astonishing rate.
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Oct 20, 2015 04:33
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CommieGIR posted:Progress cannot happen without heaps of bodies, apparently. As long as they are not white bodies...
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Oct 20, 2015 16:46
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computer parts posted:I mean, by that criteria a flying car isn't really that impressive either. It's just a car that floats. Besides, we already have personal, single-passenger airplanes, and have had them for a long time. The only thing that makes a flying car different is that it would, in theory, be flown daily, and more casually.
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Oct 23, 2015 17:54
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This is exactly why poo poo is hopeless. A sizable portion of the population is intent on humanity's self-destruction. They are like cancer cells who want to grow uncontrollably, even if it kills the host.
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Oct 25, 2015 20:57
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Trabisnikof posted:Not really. Just because some states are filing suit doesn't meant they'll stop the law. Any plan that can't survive any opposition is a bad plan. They may not be able to stop it, but the problem is that they are slowing down progress by forcing the country to defend the obviously correct plan of action. Literally every climate model we've seen clearly shows that we are already way behind where we need to be in order to not turn the planet to hell. We don't have the luxury of wasting time and resources on frivolous lawsuits or petty obstructionism. Yet that's exactly what we're doing.
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Oct 26, 2015 00:18
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Trabisnikof posted:Unless they get an extension to the implementation date they actually aren't slowing down anything. You realize that Congress is full of their obstructionist Tea Party critters who have the ability to bring the entire nation to the brink of bankruptcy if they don't get their way, right? That lawsuit is only ONE front on which the battle is waged.
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Oct 26, 2015 01:49
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CommieGIR posted:What, massive climate change WON'T do the same thing? No but you see, we will all be dead by then and it will be a problem for future generations to deal with. Which is fine, we all had challenges growing up so why should they have it easy, right?? Harden the gently caress up, motherfuckers!!
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Oct 26, 2015 14:15
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