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HighClassSwankyTime posted:Arglebargle III, you're a loving idiot. Are you seriously proposing posting a thread to discuss whether violence (murder, arson, terrorism?) is a valid method to achieve your desired society? Hey, now, we can have a civilised discussion over everything  .
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Jul 23, 2013 09:29
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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Barnsy posted:I mean it's a tiny problem because it's so frustratingly simple to fix (you fish less). Hey now, those fishing subsidies might be marginally lower than for stock that is less overfished 
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Aug 31, 2013 12:03
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Fagtastic posted:I want to know about the potential for nuclear energy to mitigate global warming disaster. I am approaching this issue as a scientist (neither nuclear nor climate specialised) and find the media entirely untrustworthy on this issue. I want informed, referenced, non-loving-newsmedia sources on the potential of nuclear power to avert catastrophic global warming. Particularly interested in calculations of carbon emission relating to mining and transporting nuclear fuel compared to comparable costs in other energy industries i.e. mining and transporting coal / industrial carbon costs of modern solar. This information is for a more important cause than my own personal peace of mind. http://bravenewclimate.com/ Climate scientist on nuclear power and his favourite reactor type.
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Sep 12, 2013 07:03
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deptstoremook posted:SInce the nuclear chat is still going on, I want to thank Squalid for bringing this series of articles to my attention. It's not a quick read, but it very clearly and deliberately lays out the misinformation and wishful thinking that permeates pro-nuclear advocates, and I was especially happy that he dedicated so much time to the often-overlooked issue of mining fissile material, particularly in the quantities and consistency needed for long-term sustenance and growth of nuclear as a power source. I always felt that I lacked the evidence to argue convincingly against nuclear as a worthwhile replacement for fossil fuels, but Cellier makes a pretty convincing case that we at least need to be honest with ourselves about (a) the feasibility of uranium mining, (b) the construction and regulatory delays for new reactors, and (c) the problems with banking on "future technology." And, an interesting point, even if all electric energy were supplied by nuclear tomorrow, that would still only account for a relatively small portion of our consumption. * We can build Integral Fast Reactors (the Uranium fueled equivalent of LFTR, can burn nuclear waste so well that it's less radioactive than natural uranium ore in 300 years rather than in a couple ten thousand years  ). In fact, the UK is considering one to burn nuclear waste left over from weapons production. Almost everything necessary to run one has already been run in Argonne National Lab like thirty years ago - not exactly future tech* We need a few times (2-3 if I recall correctly) the electricity to actually run transportation on electricity instead of oil. That's a tall order if you want to ditch both coal and nuclear. When choosing between those two, nuclear power wins hands down. * Philosophically speaking / how do I want the world to look like: I am arguing with the assumption that globalisation is awesome, cheap transportation is great and the ability to casually use or even waste electricity is not bad in and of itself, especially when there's few consequences like with nuclear power. I am also not assuming best case scenarios for population growth (stable population soon, maybe even decline to less unsustainable levels), but continued growth for the foreseable future. Do I want us to live wholesome lives on green farms or communes in harmony with nature? gently caress no. Man (as in mankind, not men specifically) invented machines, antibiotics and the kitchen sink because living a natural life, whichever past age of humanity you consider to be natural, sucks balls (Exhibit A: child mortality then and now). Also, to help third world countries - keeping in mind my previous statement - I will absolutely prefer a solution that enables a standard of living in the general ball park of current first world countries rather then being stingy with resources and dragging both into some southernmost-landlocked-Chinese-province standard of living (I've been there and, uh, gently caress no). Maintaining transportation at a level not too far from the current one will require lots of energy. More people will require more energy. Helping third world countries attain first world-ish standards of living will mean they'll consume a hell lot of energy more than they do now. Now how can we make available a hell lot of energy without destroying the planet? Hint: It starts with 'n' and ends with 'uclear'. You see, the nice thing about plopping down three times the capacity in nuclear power for every coal plant we shut down as opposed to putting up a square mile of solar panels (preferably in Northern Europe where the sun don't shine  ) is that, in addition to not loving up the climate, they let us focus efforts on reducing land use (think vertical farming, because who cares whether it consumes lots of electricity if using electricity is still cheap and doesn't gently caress up the planet) and all the other problems (also mostly related to farming) which are loving up ecosystems and associated ecosystem services well and proper on their own. Read: going nuclear means we don't have to worry about climate change (any more than we'd have to when going all-renewable) and we retain the ability to throw cheap electricity at problems while we're at it.e: regarding societal changes: I wish we would do this along the lines of "nuclear reactors for the people, comrade" rather then pure pork politics: nucular edition, but even the latter would be a step forward. suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 21:51 on Sep 13, 2013 |
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Sep 13, 2013 21:47
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baka kaba posted:A lot of things would be a hell of a lot easier within a more socialist society, since these issues require national and global planning and investment. If our goals were about solving problems and putting people and resources to use where they'd be the most helpful, for the wider social good, we'd be able to make a hell of a lot more progress in evaluating new technologies and fixing the whole loving problem (as well as all the other problems that tend to fall hardest on the developing world). I completely agree. However, I worry that changing society for the better would take so much time that it amounts to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic unless we can stop ourselves from running poo poo into the ground with hilariously unsustainable energy sources and excessive land use first. Which might be easier if we lived in a more socialist society, but here we are 
suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 10:35 on Sep 14, 2013 |
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Sep 14, 2013 10:33
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The Erland posted:I think electric cars are an interesting case that illustrates one of the most important choices in environmental policy and activism. I live in Norway, which is the country in the world with largest electric car use per capita. There are three reasons for this: Gas is still bad. As in, still terribly bad because we don't need to cut CO2 emissions by like 50%, but by like 90%. Of course, if you're using carbon neutral electricity to get Hydrogen or whatever, it's fine. I'd even argue it's superior to battery powered electric cars because rare earths are, uh, rare and you probably won't be able to power all the world's cars and ships with lithium ion batteries for long. With regards to getting on the green track... cutting CO2 emissions as quickly as possible is what we should be focusing on. If we manage to do that, a large part of our sustainability problems is taken care of for the foreseeable future (i.e. centuries) and we have breathing room to worry about (and spend money on) everything else. e: Regarding electric car subsidies: we'll have to do it one way or the other soon (via better batteries or via electricity->fuel conversion), so while it's not exactly low hanging fruit I'm cautiously pro-subsidies and would generally support funding R&D for both options though I think it's going to be the latter. Also, "green" living at a standard of living close to current first world levels will probably be more energy intensive rather than less so since that would mean replacing lots of area intensive low energy farming with energy intensive low area farming (i.e. vertical farming) and replacing fossil fuels with electricity or synthetic fuel (with substantial losses of energy when converting water to hydrogen/CO2 to fuel, since thermodynamics is a bitch). suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 16:19 on Sep 14, 2013 |
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Sep 14, 2013 16:04
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Paper Mac posted:Or, you know, sails. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkySails Obviously you still need a regular screw propeller backup to maintain consistent shipping times if there's little wind for a couple of days in any case. suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 18:33 on Sep 14, 2013 |
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Sep 14, 2013 18:28
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computer parts posted:Energy efficiency has been a primary concern for quite a few years now; per-capita rates are going *down*. However, we still run into the problem that electrically powering even a reduced amount of transportation would still require substantially more power plants because we have to make our own energy dense fuel, regardless of whether energy is stored as batteries or chemically and can't just burn pre-made oil which essentially just needs to be pumped from an oilfield into an engine (with various steps of refinement in between, but still).
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Sep 15, 2013 22:12
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computer parts posted:Then I'm confused as to why we would need substantially more power plants to make batteries. Unless you have an article saying otherwise, battery creation is probably not any more energy intensive than what we already do to survey for oil, and what we do for uranium mining is probably far below that and even below coal mining. Because gas/oil comes pre-made and is energy dense so we don't have to have (electrical) power plants to fuel our cars with. If we stop using fossil fuels and have electric cars or hydrogen cars or whatever, we need to fuel the cars with electricity instead (directly or via a proxy like hydrogen) which is electricity we didn't previously need to produce. By the way, when making hydrogen with electricity and burning it in an engine, you've got an amazing energy efficiency of like 30% which can't be improved very much because physics says so. Therefore, we need more powerplants once electric transportation really takes off and way more powerplants if it's going to be hydrogen/synthetic gasoline etc cars. e: language e2: "Uranium mining + battery making < coal mining + oil surveying+making" is probably true, but it's actually "Uranium mining + battery making + extra electricity generation for the oil we're not burning > coal mining + oil surveying+making" suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 06:11 on Sep 16, 2013 |
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Sep 16, 2013 06:05
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The New Black posted:So, how are we going to be implementing this stopgap rapid global shift to nuclear power? Quite frankly, when looking at the rate we'd need to build nuclear power plants at to actually meet a 2°C warming target (more than one per week), the only thing I think is "not going to happen". However, building sufficient quantities of solar panels or wind turbines or whatnot is an even larger investment because we would need to build even more of them using several times the resources and land area, which isn't going to be affordable either. However, keeping in mind the above, building as many nuclear plants as possible (constrained by politics or budget) has a higher chance of improving our situation from "completely hosed" to "only mostly hosed". suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 15:28 on Sep 16, 2013 |
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Sep 16, 2013 15:26
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Paul MaudDib posted:I don't disagree that slowing population growth will hopefully eventually level off the growth of energy usage. My point is that it's really important that it actually level off eventually. It's going to take a long time for rural Africa and China to industrialize, and then slow their population growth. Let's call it a minimum of 50 years to industrialize to a reasonable standard and then another generation or two for population to fully level off. You can't just extrapolate exponential growth into the far future. Also we can in principle allow first world energy usage to increase further, since there is only so many people on the planet. Having 3 times or 10 times the worldwide energy consumption of today isn't even remotely close to "we're literally cooking the planet with waste heat alone". effectual posted:Sorry to interrupt another nuclear circular argument, but my local rag (seattletimes.com) is running stories this week about ocean acidification. Should help raise awareness a bit. Yes, climate change will completely gently caress us in a wide variety of interesting ways. Also, a good proportion of corals, foraminiferans etc 
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Sep 22, 2013 11:55
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Paul MaudDib posted:Citation needed. Actually, it's like 0.05 percent of the effect of doubling atmospheric CO2, or 0.1% if the world turns into 'merica. Obviously not good, but nowhere near catastrophic or even at the level of suck facing us with current best case climate change scenarios. e: 0.1% of current climate change effects amounts to "problem basically solved", so... I can't really bring myself to worry about that problem. Also see baka kaba's post. suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 16:58 on Sep 23, 2013 |
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Sep 23, 2013 16:42
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Paul MaudDib posted:This article actually agrees with me. You've also done some math wrong or seriously misread something, because he calculates the impact at 1/40th the impact (2.5%) of atmospheric carbon. You're off on the low end by like an order of magnitude and change. And that's not even beginning to factor in other greenhouse gasses or albedo or anything else that is encompassed in "climate change". Looks like I misread a thing  Yeah, at this level it is more of a thing we should look out for. Considering considering that increasing the per capita energy consumption to ten times that of loving America still would stay in the ballpark of a quarter of our current effect, we should make sure to not consume ridiculous amounts of energy, but there is room for a gentle easing off instead of needing to do something yesterday.
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Sep 25, 2013 06:44
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TehSaurus posted:I'm having trouble reconciling some of the things that Klein is talking about in that excerpt with some of my preexisting knowledge. Specifically the incompatibility of GDP growth with climate mitigation. What about the Zero Carbon Australia plan? http://bze.org.au/zero-carbon-australia-2020 That's a ten year plan I believe, so you should be able to figure a 10 percent per year reduction in emissions. That plan also seems to promote GDP growth to me rather than hinder it. http://bravenewclimate.com/2010/08/12/zca2020-critique/ http://bravenewclimate.com/2010/09/09/trainer-zca-2020-critique/ The zero carbon plan relies on a number of rather heroic assumptions being correct, which I think makes it less than realistic.
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Dec 3, 2013 10:58
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Paper Mac posted:I think his math, whatever it is (I don't think he's presented any modelling or calculations with respect to the near term extinction hypothesis), is probably flawed if the way he treats data is any indication. I'm looking at his litany of citations in support of the extinction story here:  That looks like a growth curve fitted by a buttcoiner. It is a well known fact that exponential  Paper Mac posted:His solution, apparently, was to go back to the land. He says they 'work very hard' to avoid using grocery stores, whatever that means, but dude's in Arizona, so I sincerely doubt he's anything like self-reliant. Well, works for some, I suppose. Because trying to bring back 7+ billion people to living a natural(tm) life as hunters, gatherers, or subsistence farmers is definitely the way to go and won't cause hilarious increases in land use. e: I also love the web 2.0 German flag coloured background of that graph
suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 22:32 on Dec 10, 2013 |
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Dec 10, 2013 22:23
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Job Truniht posted:You can start with the fact that desalination requires enormous amounts of energy. It's going to be environmentally destructive on one scale or another. If only we had a bunch of Fast Reactors burning up reprocessed nuclear waste, supplying us with free waste heat to run a big rear end desalination plant 
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Dec 14, 2013 11:07
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Paul MaudDib posted:Even if your energy generation is practically free, you're still discharging warm, highly saline water, which does affect the local area's water. True, just like with any other form of desalination. If we have to do desalination, by the way, I would advocate doing it in a highly localised/centralised fashion. Better to create a small dead zone than to gently caress up large swathes of coastal habitat slightly less. e: also large mats of funky extremophile bacteria/archaea 
suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 18:23 on Dec 14, 2013 |
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Dec 14, 2013 18:20
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Nevvy Z posted:I'm pretty sure it's not an issue that it's changing, it's an issue of rate and degree. Then if they seem to understand the concept you could explain things like extinction events and mass die offs, which aren't going to be fun for us to deal with when trying to feed our world population. Basically: Now there's man made global warming on top of natural climate change. If we emit sufficient green house gases to warm the Earth substantially, we will shift the range within which the global mean temperature is changing upwards by several degrees. Having to deal with a change of, say, +5°C is going to suck much more than having to deal with, say, +1.5°C.
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Dec 15, 2013 00:36
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duck monster posted:But the government in power has just sacked the entire climate commission, is pulling all the funding out of climate change mitigation, is cancelling the carbon tariff scheme, and is being cheered on by the Murdoch press which owns 70% of newspapers here. The old man will make more money and won't run out of nicer places to go before he dies? 
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Dec 16, 2013 13:25
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Did anyone order some positive feedback loops with a side order of "oh gently caress"?quote:The Cambridge research, led by Dr Andrew Friend from the University’s Department of Geography, is part of the ‘Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project’ (ISI-MIP) - a unique community-driven effort to bring research on climate change impacts to a new level, with the first wave of research published today in a special issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. e: beaten
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Dec 17, 2013 22:50
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satan!!! posted:Even if a worst-case scenario eventuates, there are realistic geo-engineering schemes that could be deployed to mitigate it, obviously with pretty severe side effects. There's still no reason to think that the humans of 2100 will be worse off than those alive today, it's pretty certain the opposite will be the case. Except geoengineering costs money which could be spent on better things, right now, before the world economy shits a brick.
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Dec 17, 2013 23:14
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Inglonias posted:I'm sort of in the same emotional boat right now, actually. Hence why I've been posting. * support nuclear power or whatever else that pops up and seems both largely carbon neutral while not ruinously expensive * don't support "biofuels" as they are now (yay we're chopping down old growth forests that take centuries to regenerate so we can put some oil crops in there - but at least it doesn't involve evil ATOMS or GENES )* support technological advances in agriculture because healthy ecosystems benefit more from not being converted into/polluted by additional farm land than from self described environmentalists decrying the evils of GMOs or intensive agriculture on principle * try not to waste large amounts of fuel, electricity or meat. This doesn't mean you have to live off the grid or refuse to use any vehicle with an internal combustion engine, it's just that waste is, well, unnecessary. Paper Mac posted:Here's an idea: if your happiness requires incredibly brutal and exploitative social forms and a technological base that is literally destroying the preconditions for life on earth, maybe it's better you stay depressed But it doesn't require that to happen, it's just that burning fossil fuels was more convenient and we haven't bothered to use a better energy source yet. suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 10:14 on Dec 18, 2013 |
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Dec 18, 2013 10:11
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a lovely poster posted:I realize it's bad, but that's not equal to "most higher-order life" What's the definition of most higher order life and do you really think we're facing the extinction of 50%+ of those species in the next 50 years? If an important part low in the food chain disappears, everything above it is hosed.
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Dec 19, 2013 23:56
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a lovely poster posted:Yes, I realize how food chains work. I am questioning the magnitude and speed of such a change. http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Phytoplankton/page5.php We don't appear to know quite enough to accurately predict the level of damage yet, but what we know currently warrants worry. Also keep in mind that, for instance, diatoms are typically two thirds of phytoplancton biomass. e: the link says quote:Continued warming due to the build up of carbon dioxide is predicted to reduce the amounts of larger phytoplankton such as diatoms), compared to smaller types, like cyanobacteria. Shifts in the relative abundance of larger versus smaller species of phytoplankton have been observed already in places around the world, but whether it will change overall productivity remains uncertain. This is definitely going to do something to the food web - planctic consumers are adapted to filter food particles of a certain size from the water so a shift to smaller algae will favour different species (obvious group where this will and on a smaller scale has happened: small crustaceans). These species may or may not be a well-suited food source for fish spawn etc., so a number of larger species (eg fish) would be expected to strongly shift in abundance. suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 00:30 on Dec 20, 2013 |
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Dec 20, 2013 00:21
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tmfool posted:Also stumbled upon this while coming across that link from above. Curious to see what people have to say about this since, gently caress. I don't know. Polynomial curve fitting means "find an equation ax^n + bx^(n-1) + ... + constant that happens to go through all those points", e.g. a quadratic or a cubic one you might see in high school calculus; the operative part being "that happens to go through all those points". Since your curve is only fitted to existing data and probably doesn't have anything to do with the underlying mechanisms, extrapolating it beyond your dataset makes no sense at all (case in point: polynomials will trend towards infinity or negative infinity, which is complete and utter bullshit in any real context). suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 13:12 on Dec 20, 2013 |
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Dec 20, 2013 13:09
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im gay posted:I'm curious as to whether there are any examples of developing countries that will be affected by rising waters, drought, etc, taking active roles through policy to address climate change? The Maldives, and if I recall correctly, also some other island nations. Perhaps you might count Chinese/Indian nuclear power, though the glut number of coal power plants needs to go away for that to work.
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Jan 7, 2014 02:00
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Inglonias posted:poo poo just keeps getting worse on this front, doesn't it? But global warming is just a hoax, it's cold outside
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Jan 14, 2014 22:27
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Nevvy Z posted:If this were true how do we imagine they are going to be powering all their toys? I'll give you a hint, it's going to produce even more CO2. It's going to require more energy, which we can in principle supply without producing vast amounts of CO2.
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Jan 22, 2014 16:31
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computer parts posted:So if the collapse of civilization is going to happen no matter what, why should I care? We are only somewhat hosed, maybe we should try not to replace that with "completely hosed"? It's worth keeping in mind that +4°C would have kicked us halfway out of the last ice age and we really don't want to deal with that much change if it can be helped.
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Feb 16, 2014 17:49
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Yiggy posted:The irony of all of this after you saying how we can and should have cheap factory farmed meat for the entire planet is just too much for me. Not emptyquoting  Note that even after reducing meat consumption, we shouldn't just let untold millions of cows (down from 1.3 billion cows  ) graze every unforested piece of grassland into poo poo. Any number of cattle large enough to be interesting for agribusinesses tends to be large enough to gently caress up all but the hardiest open habitats (see: Africa, any cow pasture you drive past except for some traditional alpine stuff).
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Mar 6, 2014 21:51
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FADEtoBLACK posted:So this http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v506/n7488/full/nature13008.html science journal is just hype or what? Technically energy output exceeded energy input. However, energy input is defined as "energy absorbed by our fuel" and not "energy we used". If you look at the latter (less relevant for a physicist, but more relevant if you want to build a power plant), then energy out is like 1% of energy in. suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 10:12 on Mar 11, 2014 |
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Mar 11, 2014 10:09
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Ddraig posted:I too have a plan to get to Mars.  Yeah, if we wanted to do a Mars mission with the budget constraint of "whatever it takes", we could get people on Mars in 20 years. Then again, if we had an unlimited budget to mitigate climate change the whole CO2 emissions thing would be moot in 20 years as well. Too bad we don't have an unlimited budget
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Mar 11, 2014 21:40
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Jazu posted:The only way space will help climate change is if they crash the price of rare earths from mining asteroids, which might help, or they can somehow make orbital solar affordable, which would definitely help. Which even optimistically is several decades away at least, so it really only is viable for a post-nuclear (read: post-coal  ) expansion of renewables, i.e. after we've passed the existing waste stockpile through breeders.
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Mar 12, 2014 00:03
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enbot posted:The rate is slowing, sure, never said it wasn't. We are still growing though and will probably hit 8 billion in another decade.  Xoidanor posted:Germany as a political entity has proven time and time again that they don't do long term planning. I'm almost certain it's not in the german vocabulary at this point. The optimal result of German politics is "it didn't get worse (while I was in office)". It has only just started to get worse, therefore this still counts as sound German policy. In addition, nuclear is a hot-button issue for a notable proportion of voters, and no party wants to be the crackpot party advocating more nuclear power plants before elections (which is basically all the time, if you count state elections) von Wehrden et al 2012 (paper should be free) quote:Debates about the safety of nuclear energy have followed different trajectories in different parts of the world (Eiser et al. 1990), but a common feature is that debates are strongly emotional. One key reason for this is that conventional risk management frameworks are difficult to apply to the issue of nuclear energy, leaving policy makers with few objective criteria to work through a very challenging set of issues. Accidents are extremely rare and the occurrence of a particular accident cannot be predicted with a meaningful probability; yet, when an accident does occur, it has extremely high health, social, economic, and environmental costs. Although numerous scientific studies were initiated following the Chernobyl accident and these studies have provided valuable insights, our review showed that these studies cannot fully clarify its actual consequences—especially regarding longer time scales and long-distance effects. What would be needed in response to such disasters is a more comprehensively, systematic, and coordinated research effort to gather data across a range of spatial and temporal scales and from the genetic to the ecosystem level to unravel the effects of nuclear disasters on the environment. However, judging such changes in a normative sense is an ethical problem rather a scientific one; we can, therefore, expect ongoing debates about nuclear energy to remain controversial. e: reminder that Merkel actually blurted out a statement saying (paraphrased) "it's hard to say that today, but German nuclear power is safe" directly after Fukushima, followed by her quickly shutting up and doing a 180° turn when she remembered the whole getting reelected thing. suck my woke dick fucked around with this message at 20:13 on Mar 18, 2014 |
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Mar 18, 2014 20:10
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FAUXTON posted:There was that one time they were operating on a thousand-year timetable... Am deutschen Wesen soll die Welt genesen! Ahem. Let's just start invading Poland so nobody notices we're going broke. No way that will go wrong, no sir, especially if we add some oppression to the mix 
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Mar 18, 2014 20:38
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GulMadred posted:They've noticed that the gas is a problem (moreso "gas is expensive" rather than "geopolitics is icky") and so they're scaling it back. Unfortunately, this leaves a gap and the renewables aren't ramping up fast enough. Therefore coal. Including brown coal (lignite), which is a rather dirty fuel. A further success for the Energiewende. Yay us, reversing our previous trend of CO2 emission reductions.
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Mar 18, 2014 20:40
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We are certainly going to experience climate change related problems. The earlier we start doing something about greenhouse gas emissions, the smaller said problems will end up becoming. If we miss a target of, say, 2°C, we should try not to miss the next one rather than just throwing up our hands in despair.
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Mar 20, 2014 11:00
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Dusz posted:To me, Nafeez Ahmed seems intelligent and well-read, with a good command of the facts. However, I have to say I'm turned off by eco-millenarian attitudes, as well as the language he seems to break into whenever he is in eco-messiah mode. Here's a good sample of what I'm talking about, from another Guardian article: The brave new social order will be free of the constraints of materialism and any adherents of such outdated ideology will be banished from our more perfect union! In reality, after (somehow) successfully fighting it out with The Establishment, everyone would probably take a breath and then shuffle around nervously as they notice the "save planet from climate change" and "death to KKKapitalism" steps were done in the wrong order.
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Mar 20, 2014 21:05
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sadus posted:Does turning the ocean into a soup of plastic and trash count as climate change? http://m.vice.com/toxic/toxic-garbage-island-1-of-3 Nope, just plain old-fashioned pollution. We are loving up ecosystems in multiple ways 
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Mar 27, 2014 20:08
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Arkane posted:A reduction of the subset of possible outcomes, caused by lowered ECS & TCR estimates, is indeed a questioning the of projections. The high end projections, the ones most often cited ("as much as X" by 2100) would be thrown out the window were it agreed that ECS & TCR are far lower than estimated. quote:I think both sides politicize. Aside from the climate debate, the left is generally about larger government and the right is generally about smaller government. Likewise, larger government could be achieved by tackling climate change with a top-down approach and smaller government could be achieved by either not tackling climate change or betting on technological advances (bottom up approach). The left/right debate also tends to look at humanity's advancements differently. I've heard ~decentralisation~ and ~bottom up solutions~ coming from a wide range of backgrounds from raging neoliberals to walking stereotypes of lefty hippies (the same idiocy is widespread across the political spectrum, everyone act surprised, wait, Arkane actually is surprised!). I simply don't get why people fetishize that bullshit. There's a good reason people live in or near centralised cities in countries with a central government and work for corporations with a CEO and a board of directors rather than in a commune. Bottom up works for widespread small scale stuff with lots of different variations like stocking supermarket shelves with consumer goods (which is where command economies run into the brick wall of reality). However, once you get to infrastructure and utilities where everyone needs essentially the same base level of stuff (everyone needs access to clean water, electricity, roads, whatever), you can easily build a few large and more effective central providers offering these goods to a large number of people. Anyone who seriously thinks making people provide their own electricity needs in a completely unorganised fashion or that gardening will provide a meaningful fraction of food for cities because ~bottom up solutions~ when I could be doing useful or fun things instead can get hosed. On that note, anyone who thinks that an effective monopoly on the electricity grid hardware (therefore we need multiple alternative sets of power lines or something because competition and free markets, I've literally heard people advocate this) can also get hosed.
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May 17, 2014 10:41
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