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Arglebargle III posted:Something will happen, certainly, but my point is that the dots have not been connected to global collapse of modern civilization. Maybe somebody has and I'd be interested to see that. But the dominant story in the last few pages of the thread of total collapse of civilization and a catastrophic return to primitivism (which is itself an anachronistic concept) hardly seems inevitable to me. Yeah dont worry, civilization probably won't collapse, just several hundred million people will probably die. I don't understand why this is a big issue, civilization is hard to get rid of even in the very worst crises but that doesn't mean horrific catastrophes won't be any less horrific. This is just fixating on a kind "ehhhh, I guess society will continue to operate so it can't be too bad" sentiment, don't worry it'll be loving bad and you will likely be affected whether or not civilization crumbles.
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Oct 9, 2012 13:39
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Arglebargle III posted:
 you can't be serious, I'm saying I don't understand why people fixate on the whole "Global warming activists think that civilization will collapse" when in reality "all" that will happen is a billion people might die and the world will be thrown out of whack as if that isn't horrifyingly catastrophic. Its common for people to paint those seriously concerned about global warming as a bunch of chicken littles who have this crazy idea that the world is going to end, even on these very forums, and then just going deaf to the serious issues regarding global warming because, hey, it ain't the end of the world right?
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Oct 9, 2012 17:10
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You don't understand that the collapse of civilization is a big issue?
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rscott posted:
Then we could be in an untenable situation. Still, at least I'm kind of getting the impression that hurricane sandy might have spurred a significant amount people to look at the real fallout of Climate Change in their lifetimes, and stop acting like its all in the far future. Of course I don't know if there's any evidence at all that the hurricane was in any way influenced by Climate change, but its still drawing attention to the issue.
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Nov 3, 2012 03:26
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Geoid posted:Those that complain about overpopulation rarely realize if we returned to the 'good old days' of low demographic growth they'd probably be dead before reaching age 5.  nobody who actually holds this flowery view of the past exists.Why is population control such an anathema? You do know that most of the time it isn't forced sterilization and one-child policies, but instead educating women and encouraging family planning as well as improving peoples general lot in life gets the best results yes?
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Nov 5, 2012 20:59
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deptstoremook posted:I think most people who are troubled by population control (myself included) feel that having rich Westerners "educate" global Southerners on how to live their lives has negative overtones of imperialism and tends toward the paternalistic policies Europe and America have exhibited towards the rest of the world during the last 500 years. Unfortunately, those policies have often included forced sterilization, extermination, and cultural (or literal) genocide. Well I can understand the issue of the west lording it over the rest of the world over how they should have kids, but that ignores the fact that the most effective birth control programs were almost entirely home grown, usually without any major western involvement. Look at Iran, the birth rate there collapsed from the nineties onwards, even under the insular theocracy. Its no coincidence that it also has one of the best educated female populations in the middle east. Even if someone takes the view that overpopulation was such a problem that they should start forced sterilization those sorts of coercive methods are horribly ineffective. Look at India, Indira Gandhi's forced sterilization campaigns were disastrous politically while also being ineffective, and ultimately self-defeating since they created animosity toward family planning. But India's birth rate is now less than half what it was in 1960 regardless, since people still make the decision of their own accord not to have as many kids for their quality of life.
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Nov 5, 2012 21:58
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tatankatonk posted:
Certain environmentalists being ignorant or callous about the reality of class distinctions and privilege is one thing, but "Nature as an end in itself", is this a bad thing? We do not have a good track record over the last 12000 years, its been an ever accelerating loss of biodiversity that's not improving, read Zorak's thread on non-human rights and I think it shows that the creatures under the worst pressure are very close to humans in terms of intelligence and social complexity. Do we have the moral right to consign these animals barely a step below us to the scrapheap if they may get in the way of our prosperity? Does that make me another Aspen environmentalist if I think that preserving them takes precedence over most other concerns?
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Nov 8, 2012 22:21
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Guigui posted:One of my friends who worked for the WWF felt this way - but what really seemed to get him down, was the thought that future generations won't care that Tigers, Whales or other large animals are extinct - because they were extinct before these future generations were born. You know, this actually something that really sticks in my craw more than anything else. People, especially now, have a tendency to view the natural world as separate from the human experience, which is so far from the truth, a vast amount of human culture is evidently based on our views of nature, this is glaringly obvious to anyone whose ever seen something as simple as a child pretend to be a tiger or a bird. And what I find fascinating and kind of disturbing is looking at how people used to view long-dead creatures, have a look at these paintings:     Just look, these are clearly not dusty skeletons of woolly Rhino's, Mammoths and Giant Elk were assembled in a museum, to the painters of these images they were real, alive and involved in almost every aspect of their lives. They had massive significance culturally and practically, human paintings from this era are exceptionally rare, but animal ones are all over the drat place. My point I suppose is that looking at these really makes me sad about the idea that something that once seemed so commonplace and as indispensable as cows in the Irish countryside are now totally lost to me and everyone else alive today. What I wouldn't give to see a actual giant ground sloth I can tell you. To think that the same fate would come to pass on animals as familiar as a bottlenose dolphin, or a tiger, or a Gorilla, just another pile of old bones in a museum, depresses me to no end. Its a cliche, but every animal we lose is a hit on our whole culture as well as our environment IMO. This is also one of the reasons why I get very irritated when I sometimes hear the suggestion that Environmentalism concerns chiefly privileged white people in the west. If you go to just about any country on earth you can see that that is bull, look at India, a very highly populated, poor country with some serious environmental issues, but a culture so intimately linked to such a vast amount of specific animals that conserving creatures like Rhinos and Tigers has major pull there. khwarezm fucked around with this message at 03:45 on Nov 9, 2012 |
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Nov 9, 2012 02:49
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An opinion piece from the Atlantic by Zachary Karabell on taking a more pragmatic approach to Climate Change. Most people don't seem to be aware that Climate change will entail more than just higher sea levels and warmer summers, and I think the lack of perspective for anywhere outside the Richer west really weakens his points.
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Jan 12, 2013 02:56
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Sylink posted:
Then what, pray tell, caused it? The impact theory is the most suggested alternative but the evidence is flimsy at best. Most scientists seem to agree that intense global warming caused or exacerbated by the Siberian traps and a massive methane release was the culprit.
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Feb 2, 2013 02:31
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Clipperton posted:How many future generations are we allowed to care about, then? What's the cutoff? Well I tend to care most about the generation that we know is clearly going to be affected horribly by Climate change and which 99% of won't see any benefit from spending vast amount of resources to try and realize pie in the sky nerd fantasies when said resources could be put to work on earth to combat climate change. Maybe I'm being callous towards those hypothetical people who could be killed by a hypothetical meteor in a thousand years, but I tend to prefer combating threats that we are being affected by right now in a manner that's effective. This is all getting totally off-topic, if people are really interested in discussing off-world colonization maybe they should make a thread for that.
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Jul 4, 2013 22:06
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Clipperton posted:Good job reading the thread, chief. For the thousandth loving time, no one here is advocating putting resources into space colonisation instead of combatting climate change, in fact quite the opposite. Holy moley I almost thought this was a thread about climate change and not stupid fantasies about space colonization. If you were serious about space colonization then it would cost astonishing amounts of resources, time and money to be pulled off for any appreciable amount of people, as far as I'm concerned it would be better to wait until after (or rather if) we've dealt with the problems of climate change before pursuing such an adventure. There's already a ton of other concerns that draw resources and attention from combating climate change (imagine what would have been achieved if America put forward the amount of resources it spent in Iraq and Afghanistan toward combating climate change instead) and I have no interest in seeing space colonization add to that.
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Jul 4, 2013 23:12
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Clipperton posted:
People were advocating space colonization for its own sake and bemoaning the fact that climate change takes away from it which which I thought were odd priorities and off-topic, especially since it fixated on the eventual end of all life on earth in the far future which is putting the cart before the horse to say the least. I apologize if I can across as a bit aggressive in my first response but the last page was talking about the logistics of terraforming mars, I think we're better off talking about this than that.
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Jul 5, 2013 00:21
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Rosscifer posted:Controversy spurs discussion, for better or worse, it's the way forums work. What I'd like to know is what is the horse in your opinion? There are plenty of solutions, but what is the vehicle to make people care? Well, unfortunately to be honest I think the vehicle to make people care is the degradation in living standards that climate change brings. A lot have argued and I'd tend to agree that we're at a point where not only are we unable to stop climate change but are already feeling its effects. So in my opinion action will end up coming from hard pragmatism rather than a more idealistic stance. I think you might be overestimating just how sexy science can be made, look at the space program for example, that was built as the ultimate example of American national ingenuity and exploration of the unknown, it had great enthusiasm with the public initially, but we haven't been back to the moon in forty years despite the best efforts of many scientists to encourage a new program and NASA is often targeted for financial evisceration which most people don't really care about. The environmental movement has had similar problems I think, just think about how the environmental movement branded itself over the 2000s, generally trying to be trendy and non-intrusive, you could save the planet by buying the right ligtbulbs or turning off the TV, taking a walk to work and buying local foods. It was effective to a point, i.e British Petroleum trying the brand itself as "beyond Petroleum" and paying lip-service to going green. And there was a serious attempt to make the basic science accessible and interesting through people like Al Gore with an Inconvenient truth or Leonardo DiCaprio and the 11th hour. But how effective was it really? BP didn't change its spots, the U.S still produces vast amounts of CO2 and world pollution has only risen. Tar sands is a big industry in somewhere as socially progressive as Canada, Fracking is all the rage and passing carbon taxes in places like Australia was... difficult (Australia still has stupid high per capita emissions). Effective action is going to have to come from necessity in the end, the science is well known, not even the deniers have any rounds left and when I talk to people there is an understanding that a problem exists, but not much has stirred over the last five years even after Obama set his sights on it during his inauguration, it will have to take obvious and serious repercussions for people to open up to just how real the problem actually is. khwarezm fucked around with this message at 13:59 on Jul 5, 2013 |
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Jul 5, 2013 03:30
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Why is the whole 'ah but we live in a first world country so it won't be too bad' always such a given anyway? If you live in, say, Florida or the Netherlands then global warming is going to have pretty obvious and expensive affects through sea level rise alone. And that's not even mentioning its affects on agriculture or water scarcity and the general lifestyle changes we'll have to get used to so we can deal with the situation. I mean yeah, less people will die in America than in Bangladesh but that's not really something that I'm getting much comfort out of!
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Apr 7, 2014 03:42
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Inglonias posted:We really need to change the title of this thread to something more general about the environment. I think that could be worth a whole thread in itself really.
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Sep 30, 2014 20:14
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computer parts posted:And don't forget about banning GMOs. Wow, you really got him by the balls there. Fojar38 posted:The "turn back the clock and revert to a premodern state" solutions that people in this thread utter without irony also contribute to why climate activism is such a joke. Note, he didn't actually say that, but now I am curious about what solutions you would book or at least consider reasonable so we can rise this discussion above the 'HIPPIES!' bs.
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Oct 1, 2014 23:02
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Radbot posted:Please fill us in on these totally-going-to-work geoengineering schemes. If we get to the point that we have to try something like Iron seeding, do we know what kind of effects that could have on the oceans ecosystem? 'Cause I understand that algal blooms are often a bad thing.
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Oct 1, 2014 23:10
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katlington posted:I don't understand this post. Who are these people and what exactly are they unhappy about? Yeah, also when you say 'land use change' what, exactly, do you mean, and why is it so bad? Do you think that the worlds current use of land is optimal for long term food production? I was recently in Australia and I can tell you that there's large places where that's just not true! (Also, I meant solutions to climate change).
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Oct 2, 2014 00:09
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Trabisnikof posted:
I'm feeling a bit slow so bear with me. Are you trying to argue that the time to do anything to even slow climate change or even just prevent general environmental damage is past us and we should just  and put stock in geo-engineering and, uh, 'Adaption'? Business as usual with technology to the rescue?In any event that dirty word 'solutions' would involve dealing with the effects of Climate Change as best as we can so I don't really know whats not to get. Whether or not we like it might mean having to abandon large aspects of the Capitalist and Consumerist culture we have. khwarezm fucked around with this message at 02:19 on Oct 2, 2014 |
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Oct 2, 2014 02:05
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Trabisnikof posted:I'm arguing nothing we can do will make global warming go away. Of course mitigation is an important step, but we have to use adaptation. I also don't know why you put adaptation in scare quotes, it's one of the core pathways to reducing the negative impacts of climate change and is well adopted as a term by the IPCC. Adaptation is not business as usual. The thing is though when you say Adaption (sans scare quotes this time) its a term that's pretty drat vague, if you have a large population of squirrels, take away their single most important food source then the squirrels will have probably adapted to the new situation with a massive die-off in their numbers until stability re-emerges. There's lots of kinds of adaption some much worse than others, you seem to have some faith in technology to help, tell me more. I did not argue that Climate Change was something you could just magic away, but that doesn't mean that there were no solutions to mitigate damage and slow the process. I was specifically asking Fojar what he thinks should be done. And I have to fundamentally disagree with you on the last point, for one 'destroy the world economy' or more likely 'seriously damage the world economy especially the poorest, most vulnerable parts of it' might be something climate change does by itself if the worst come to the worst, second, do you really think that curbing the most rampant consumerist tendencies of the first world will cause the world economy to actually collapse? God, we have to pull back on our waste, pollution and food wastage at some point, I would assume anybody who's had the most passing interest in the environment in the last few decades would see that. Finally, call me a big fat lefty or whatever, but it would seem to me that most of our current crisis has a lot to do with unchecked Capitalism. I don't see how that system can get us out of this mire(if anything seeing the last two decades of attempts to get some kind of 'Green Capitalism' going and its pretty obvious failure says it all too me), at the very least to initiate major geo-engineering projects and force industry to comply to new or old regulations you'd have to significantly expand the state. I'll guess I'll plug Naomi Klein here.
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Oct 2, 2014 03:07
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crazypenguin posted:Climate change pessimists are a plague. Don't worry too much about the Eeyores. A plague? Look I was pretty optimistic a few years ago but I can't say that recent efforts have filled me with hope. I often see worrying stuff like this and it makes me suspect that the real efforts to combat it will only come when it starts to clearly pinch most of the world's population. Besides its not really the doomsday scenarios that get to me so much as the thought that we're degrading the earth's awesome biosphere and likely letting an awful lot of people hang out to dry, I don't really want a situation where I'll be explaining to my children that X animal was pretty awesome but, welp, its dead now, or the Maldives were once a fascinating place to visit, but, welp its drowned now and its inhabitants aren't going to ever get home. khwarezm fucked around with this message at 22:30 on Oct 8, 2014 |
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Oct 8, 2014 22:27
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computer parts posted:It is extremely likely that any species that goes extinct will not be something you heard of or something you will find interesting if you did. Nope, This is a Baiji its a large intelligent animal that has not been seen since 2007 and even if there are a few left is very unlikely to have enough individuals for a viable population. This is a Javan Rhino, a large impressive animal of which high estimates of the amount of individuals around are a whole 40 individuals, again its questionable that this is a viable population even if nothing more happens to them. This a Vaquita a cute intelligent porpoise from the California Gulf that is under serious pressure and is continually dropping numbers, now below 100 individuals and I think it would take some sort of miracle at this point to keep it alive. This was a Gastric-brooding frog A frog that cared for its young by swallowing its eggs and using its stomach as a makeshift womb, not eating for weeks until mini-frogs hopped out of its mouth, that's pretty loving interesting, but I had to write that sentence in the past tense because its went extinct in the 80s, and many more amphibians have followed it since! The problem is that for tons of creatures you can't just leave some of them in a zoo and the species will at least survive even if it goes extinct in the wild, some are really elusive or are so rare that they are already at death's door, breeding in captivity is often difficult and lots of creatures, especially Cetaceans are really, really difficult to keep in a captive setting. However if you read the Gastric-brooding frog article it does give me some hope we might be able to clone some species in the future, but that probably won't be much good if their habitat is already destroyed. khwarezm fucked around with this message at 22:59 on Oct 8, 2014 |
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Oct 8, 2014 22:56
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crazypenguin posted:Believing you're powerless isn't sense, it's just depression. Well the usual stuff really, support Nuclear, try to live somewhat sustainably (cut down on meat, stop driving, stop using so much power that sort of thing), convince others that its an issue (re: gruelingly long and stupid conversations with my dad) I mean I'm not a slave to total depression and inaction and I really do recognize that that's nothing but self defeating but, well... as you can see from my above post I'm pretty enthusiastic about the natural world and I've studied marine biology and really things sort of suck in that regard in way I think a lot of people are unaware of and that gets to me. And add to that the fact that it really seems very difficult to prevent a lot of people from suffering at this point and its... daunting to say the least. khwarezm fucked around with this message at 23:22 on Oct 8, 2014 |
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Oct 8, 2014 23:20
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Trabisnikof posted:Few of these things would actually do anything to help mitigation or adaptation besides convincing the ignorant. Only concerted effort from powerful actors will work now. That means organizing and political action. The "everybody do their small part" is an engagement myth. Well sure, but the thing is this doesn't gel well with what crazypenguin and many others have been saying about the little efforts that add up to make to make a difference. And political action is tough, the opposing side has powerful resources as Duck Monster has just reminded us and, from the link I posted earlier, its proving difficult to mobilize people on this particular issue.
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Oct 8, 2014 23:45
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Trabisnikof posted:I'm just saying giving up air travel will do more than giving up meat or angrily shaking your fist at grid planners ever will. Sorry, did somebody desperately defend air-travel here? I thought that would be a given that that's a pretty impactful mode of transport so anybody with the least bit of Cognitive Consonance would cross this off their list pretty quick.
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Oct 9, 2014 00:49
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CommieGIR posted:At the end of the day, overfishing is nothing next to the acidification of the ocean waters. That'll knock most if not all of the major ocean species in one fell swoop poo poo, our deepening marine fiasco is almost worth a thread in itself.
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Jan 4, 2015 20:25
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Can I ask, do people envision some kind of fascist policy to rip out women's wombs at gunpoint and burn the third child every family has for fuel? Can we go further with this kind of insanity:Series DD Funding posted:By that logic we should all kill ourselves or move to the third world. Batham posted:If you go that extreme as to put in 'don't reproduce', why don't you also add 'kill yourself preferably by jumping off a cliff or another less polluting way'. Depending on your current job or influence you're allowed to postpone it until you retire! and come to the conclusion that the worldwide drop in fertility
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Mar 19, 2015 18:48
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enraged_camel posted:Actually, the single biggest thing you can do to reduce your carbon footprint is to commit suicide: it reduces it to zero! Bah, you're rotting corpse will still be giving off Methane!
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Mar 20, 2015 18:20
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Zombie #246 posted:Probably the best choice would be to stop eating as much meat. Hoh man, I remember somebody mentioned that we should probably reduce our meat consumption in this thread and it led to afuriously angry discussion very similar to this birth control poo poo, you just can't win! khwarezm fucked around with this message at 00:03 on Mar 21, 2015 |
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Mar 20, 2015 23:25
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tsa posted:
I hate the way this stupid poo poo always somehow gets back to Malthus. In any event this is factually wrong, we didn't 'do nothing', many of the technological forces were mobilized with the specific and clear goals of meeting the population problem, have a look, they didn't just happen because of the glorious free market or some such poo poo. Of course our ever deteriorating Biosphere and the short time frame since the earth's population went from one and a half billion to seven billion combined with the obvious threat of global warming would make me think writing off some of the concerns that overpopulation pose is a really, really bad idea.
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Apr 22, 2015 22:20
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Phew, thank god for the job creators without them we'd be in a real pickle.
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Apr 22, 2015 22:50
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Does anyone know much about Roger Pielke Jr?
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Apr 25, 2015 08:24
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I really hate when Malthus crops up here. Malthus brought particular 18th century prejudices to the issues of population that led him to terrible conclusions, i.e., being a clergyman and everything, he did not support contraception which put him in an awkward position on how to control the population at all without tons of people dying, while his middle class disdain for the poor made him think that they didn't have the self control to restrict their own population. Thus as far as he saw it a horrific mass die off was the ugly but inevitable outcome. That doesn't mean everything he said is total nonsense and overpopulation can't possibly be a problem. Like it or not, population control has been a distinct policy with or without Malthus, from America to China to Iran , usually when it's actually effective it doesn't involve stabbing people in the womb but instead making contraceptive and abortion available, educating women, allowing them to enter the workplace and increasing general prosperity, truly what awful outcomes. Besides the whole assurance that everything Malthus ever said has been proven wrong because the craziest Ehrlich doomsday predictions haven't come to pass strikes me as absurdly myopic, we've spent barely two centuries with a population beyond a billion, with the earth's biosphere going through extreme and increasing stress everywhere and we're going to just go, 'yep, it'll be fine'? khwarezm fucked around with this message at 18:57 on May 16, 2015 |
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May 16, 2015 18:51
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Trabisnikof posted:And besides Arkane, who is exactly saying we should do nothing? Well, besides the people twiddling their thumbs till socialism saves us all. Evidently we should be twiddling our thumbs until the rich save us all. khwarezm fucked around with this message at 20:13 on May 16, 2015 |
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May 16, 2015 20:06
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What happens in Africa(/India/China/Bangledesh/Pakistan/Mexico/ect) stays in Africa. We in the west can build a giant wall or something and secure ourselves with minimal problems. Except in California, Spain, Australia, Florida, Italy, Greece and the Netherlands, but... you know.
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May 17, 2015 00:38
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computer parts posted:And separated from anyone else by thousands of miles of desert and ocean. Do you really loving believe this? considering that hundreds of people have died attempting to cross the Mediterranean(or get to Australia) in the last year do you think that the millions afflicted by Climate Change will politely stay put and die? Look forward to extreme right-wing anti-immigration groups getting even more powerful in future guys.
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May 17, 2015 22:48
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computer parts posted:Are you a believer in Mao Third Worldism? No, and why?
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May 17, 2015 23:01
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Trabisnikof posted:The best part about "not having kids" as climate policy is you get to smugly pretend that non-existant emissions were offset and thus pretend that you're helping while actually doing nothing to change the status quo. Thats a moronic strawman and you know it. You can as easily say "The best part about "not using a car/eating meat/flying" as climate policy is you get to smugly pretend that non-existant emissions were offset and thus pretend that you're helping while actually doing nothing to change the status quo.", making an effort to reduce your own emissions does not preclude agitating for wider structural changes.
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Jul 9, 2015 21:49
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down with slavery posted:Making an effort to reduce your own emissions and using that to justify your superiority is dumb though because making an effort to reduce your own emissions is pointless. The only thing that matters is the wider structural changes and if you think otherwise you are in denial. If somebody does use that to prove their supposed superiority then their an idiot, just like they would be for anything else if their aim was justifying their superiority. I'm making the point that there is no dichotomy between wider structural changes and stuff you can do yourself, but too many people act like one precludes the other.
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Jul 9, 2015 21:56
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down with slavery posted:What exactly do you think people are doing when they drone on about overpopulation. I think people are worried and trying to seek any solution that might work. Overpopulation can be attractive because it based off a pretty simple concept (more people need more stuff to consume), has been a noted concern for a long time considering humanity's rapid population growth over the last two centuries and looks like an issue that can be solved with limited hardship since it usually entails things like 'educating women, providing easy access to contraception and improving people's economic position' that have been fairly successfully applied around the world and not the 'stick bayonets into people's wombs' that often seems to be what certain people think must happen. Obviously its not the whole story and per-capita consumption is much more important and still overlooked, but overpopulation isn't something to just throw out entirely.
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Jul 9, 2015 22:07
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