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Lead out in cuffs posted:As for whether we can support 7 (or 9) billion people sustainably, there's huge room for gain in food production by cutting meat consumption. The question is more whether that can be made socially palatable (to the relatively wealthy third or half of the world who will have the luxury of that choice). I think it would help if we didn't try to create alternatives to meat and rather just made food that is tasty but just happens to have no meat in it. If you want to sell soy tofu bacon or whatever don't call it bacon because it's a comparison you can never win unless it tastes exactly 100% like bacon which it doesn't because it's not bacon. Simultaniously making it low-fat is also not helpful when it's really difficult to emulate that taste and people really like it. I'm sure you could use mushrooms instead of chicken in a chicken nugget and it would still be delicous - but if you remove all the fat and call it vegan nuggets people will hate it no matter what.
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Apr 21, 2014 13:23
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ToxicSlurpee posted:I feel like a lot of people that think "plants use this so they obviously just need more of it to do better" have never grown anything in their lives. Plants need water and light. Obviously, but some plants just die and rot if you overwater them and there are some plants that grow best in the shade. Hell too much fertilizer can make a plant die. eh, lots of greeneries add CO2 for increased growth. If you look into hydro/aeroponics you'll see lots of gear for it. I don't really think it's a stupid assumption. In any event plants have developed to use the amount of CO2 available - there's no reason to think they won't eventually adjust to it or we can't engineer at least our crops for it.
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May 20, 2014 06:37
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The solar roadways thing seems hilariously over engineered. They want it to collect AND store energy, transmit electricity to cars passing on them, provide lighting, contain sensors to detect animals, provide heating to remove snow and also run transmission cables in a space under it. Right. These roads are going to be outdone in cost only by maglev but it does look very utopian sci fi future. Creating white asphalt would probably do more to mitigate climate change although I suppose that's not their primary purpose.
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May 27, 2014 09:16
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down with slavery posted:I'm not "contrarian" you just happen to have really dumb opinions (which for the record have already been stated and debunked multiple times in this thread alone). Nothing stopped you from coming in to this thread and being right. But please, I want to hear more about how the greens have stopped Nuclear power and why natural gas is the only "realistic" option Dad. So it's your position that the greens are completely ineffective at affecting public opinion or policy? Is it incompetence or are they just generally ineffectual?
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Jun 6, 2014 15:39
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Duck Rodgers posted:Is it your opinion that if greens accepted nuclear the coal and oil industries would be finished? Not really - my point is that if a group is fighting for the wrong cause it's not a very good defense of them to say they are not succeeding. Lack of success doesn't make your attempts at something bad acceptable – it just make you incompetent - and even though they didn't cause the bad thing to happen it's still their ultimate goal so they should be held morally accountable for it. I don't think it's as simple as "the greens did it" though. Things that can be framed as scary science is clearly something that hits a nerve with a lot of people and that has the power to affect public opinion or policy. The anti-vaxxers don't have a multi-billion dollar multinational behind them - on the contrary - but it's still something that has taken hold in some communities. Now many people are wary of nuclear power and the greens have certainly been hitting the scary-science nerve - personally I think it has had an impact in forming public opinion especially over time. Ultimately I suppose the responsibility lies with the government(s) if they don't counter mis-information and makes sure the populace is educated but much like the anti-vax thing it's apparently not a priority.
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Jun 6, 2014 16:41
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The UK is building a new kind of pumped heat energy storage facility to test it out. It looks kinda interesting. Of course companies regularly promote their pet pie-in-the-sky projects as the Next Big Thing to get research funding so who knows. They claim it's as efficient as pumped hydro with a round trip efficiency of 72-80%. I guess we won't know until a few years time when it's up and running but how significant would it be if it actually works as claimed? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sIxt6nMf-IQ http://www.isentropic.co.uk/ http://www.eti.co.uk/eti-invest-14m-in-energy-storage-breakthrough-with-isentropic/ edit vvv: I don't think it matters that much. Pumped hydro is by its nature limited in capacity and restricted to areas with valleys and rivers which means areas with fertile land and natural beauty. Even if this has a bit worse energy density than pumped hydro does it matter if some farmland or desert is converted to store hot rocks? I mean you can put this right in the city where it's needed. Bates fucked around with this message at 16:53 on Jun 16, 2014 |
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Jun 16, 2014 08:53
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Tight Booty Shorts posted:I'm only worried about people in developing countries, since countries like the USA are going to hae lots of money to spend to develop ways to protect their citizens. Pretty much this. Africa in contrast will be a pit of despair - the question is really only how many million we'll allow to starve to death.
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Aug 28, 2014 12:28
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The New Black posted:Again, this will still pale in comparison to the suffering unleashed on developing countries, that is still the major issue here, and I'm not predicting some kind of worldwide collapse any time soon, but I do think people are inclined to overlook some of the vulnerabilities of our systems. Immigration pressure will be an issue for the developed world but we're already building walls so... If food prices go up substantially it means the developed world spends a slightly larger fraction of income on food which will be annoying. In the rest of the world people will just die. 
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Aug 28, 2014 12:57
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GreyPowerVan posted:The thing that makes me the most mad is people that point to "OH IT WAS SNOWING IN NOVEMBER IN THIS PLACE THAT IT USUALLY DOESN'T SNOW IN NOVEMBER" to disprove Global Warming. Take a look at How to Argue with Assholes  Also while the author of the video is a science journalist, not an expert, he conveys information reasonably well and he sources his stuff so his videos are worth a look if you want to know more about arguments for or against climate change (and creationism). Climate change seriesBates fucked around with this message at 06:31 on Dec 1, 2014 |
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Dec 1, 2014 05:10
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Ratios and Tendency posted:New trees are free. And a temporary, short term solution.
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Dec 4, 2014 04:38
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Radbot posted:Who would you say is better off - a frontiersman with a large amount of free land given to him, yet no income as he is a subsistence farmer - or a part-time single mom working at McDonalds in 2014? Because the data clearly says the single mom earns way, way more. Progress! Given that subsistence farming is back breaking labor and subject to drought and pests that can randomly plunge you into starvation I'm gonna go ahead and say the McD worker is better off.
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Dec 23, 2014 19:38
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peter banana posted:ehhhhhh, not sure about that. Building a sustainable homestead takes time and effort but it is possible to have a high quality of life, even without electricity. Additionally, residential PV cells and batteries are becoming much more accessible and it's becoming easier than ever to go "off-grid." Frontiersmen and photovoltaics are from different periods in time though.
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Dec 23, 2014 20:31
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Radbot posted:Are you aware of what irony is? I meant my post very unironically. It is extremely amazing to me how this group of people have been completely unable to affect change in literally any area, EXCEPT for nuclear, which they stopped single-handedly and against the cries of the majority of the country. Depletion of the ozone layer has been halted through the banning of CFCs, fishing quotas has been instated in most developed countries, renewable energy is growing in large part thanks to government subsidies and even in cases where it makes no sense such as solar in Germany, endangered species are protected on a government level, whaling is banned except for in a few odd countries, nature preserves exist even when corporate interests could profit from them not being there and people buy more and more organic food under the assumption that it's better for themselves and the environment and so on. I always thought the green movement helped all of that along but I suppose some things just happen.
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Feb 17, 2015 09:48
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logosanatic posted:it just means we need to accept that predictions/possibilities were made by scientists. They were wrong. the ones we have now are probably wrong too regarding time frame. But the events themselves will most likely happen...eventually. And it will be bad Well no, there's the consensus in an area of science and then there's "some studies" that might predict another scenario which may be useful for a politician to push his or her agenda. Of course drawing attention to climate change is a good thing but cherry picking data or studies for sensationalism/alarmism leads the whole movement to lose credibility because the focus shifts to debunking those claims instead of addressing the actual issue. It may not have been deliberate and we shouldn't really care what Gore has to say about climate change anyway but... unfortunately people do.
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Feb 26, 2015 22:10
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logosanatic posted:So the moral of the Al gore story is that using worst case scenarios to grab the publics attention is bad? Because I disagree. Considering the size and seriousness of the problem. The publics apathy. I support all gores movie approach. It certainly left an impression on me. By the time I learned that it probably wont be that bad I had learned enough to fear the problem anyways. If the movie had pulled its punches perhaps I wouldnt have gone to see it...or taken the issue as seriously. Well we can't know if he could have made a movie that was more factual while still having a big impact. However, after the presidential campaign and the way he lost it he was arguably one of the most respected and prolific political figures around and he was probably the first of that standing to focus so singularly on climate change. It was bound to get attention and the movie would have made a splash either way. I'd argue it was less the content of the movie and more that it was someone very respected and famous that drew attention to a subject that was previously mostly the domain of the occasional expert talking head TV.
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Feb 27, 2015 00:12
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On March 20th Germany will have a partial solar eclipse which will first reduce energy output from their PV and then sharply increase it afterwards. If it's a sunny day it will be an exciting time to play extreme peaker planting.
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Mar 13, 2015 00:04
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Hiro Protagonist posted:So...are humans about to go extinct? I'm 22 now, and I have trouble with this, and the realization that my life may end with intense starvation and thirst experienced by all other humans on the planet. I read reports on how we're doomed, no one is going to acknowledge it, and within this century we'll just die out. Are these just from the pessimists, and there is real reason for hope and belief that, while things will be bad, humanity will survive, or am I just fooling myself and it would be better to just die? Humanity will not go extinct by the end of the century. Whether you will starve depends entirely on where you live but that's been true for a few hundred years now.
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Mar 18, 2015 02:15
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Blue Star posted:Hasn't solar energy been getting a lot cheaper recently? And no signs of slowing down? Of course solar isn't enough but it's still encouraging, right? What you should be looking at is electricity storage costs. Solar/wind could be half the price of natgas but it will still never be more than a supplement until we can store it.
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Apr 17, 2015 04:55
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Bizarro Watt posted:That said, I've never really used it as an argument for climate change, mainly because it's simply evidence that fossil fuel burning is impacting the environment in some capacity, but doesn't really go beyond that (like, it's negative environmental effects), so climate change deniers wouldn't find it worth listening to. It is cool, though. Well it adresses arguments to the effect of "CO2 is natural" and "Volcanoes release x times more CO2 than humans".
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Apr 18, 2015 04:01
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Arkane posted:can you walk me through this...what exactly would I need to get installed to power a solar system from an AGM standpoint to match the Tesla product? How bulky would it be, and how much would it cost? Finding it a bit hard to believe that they are making a big fanfare out of a poo poo product. People made a big deal of photovoltaic glass roads and that was just a couple of insane hippies.
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May 2, 2015 19:57
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Arkane posted:Say what now? The Gigafactory that is going to mass produce batteries isn't going to be online until 2016, and the plan to build a mass market electric vehicle has always been 2017. And there's a waiting list for all Tesla models. It's a niche market and there's a long way to go before it moves beyond that but there's no reason why they can't start a similar niche market in batteries.
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May 6, 2015 22:09
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Series DD Funding posted:What happens when you live in a suburb where it's 5 miles to everything and riding a bike means you have a death wish? Millions of people can't make small changes because they live in an environment that was designed around cheap oil from top to bottom. It's neither here nor there but unless you live on a mountain top in bear country cycling 5 miles is trivial. If it really is a problem just get an electric bike or a moped.
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May 26, 2015 17:53
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ToxicSlurpee posted:It isn't the distance that's the problem. Biking 5 miles on heavily trafficked suburban roads with no sidewalks that are specifically designed to be as unfriendly to going somewhere without a car as possible is tempting death. Fair enough - can't really relate to that style of urban planning.
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May 26, 2015 18:31
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blowfish posted:You say that like it is a good thing, but that is precisely the problem. "Oh we got a reasonable amount of energy, with power output over time ranging from 1% to 99% of nameplate capacity for an average of 35%" is what actually makes a mainly renewable grid hard to build. Which, as he said, is why we need storage.
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May 30, 2015 11:37
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Rap Record Hoarder posted:Even assuming that you have no delays on your jolly bike ride to work, you're still going to have to change clothes and possibly shower when you get there. So that's extra time to get ready for work, on top of the time you give up by leaving earlier. Time for the poor is at a dire premium. On top of that, very few retail and/or service jobs offer facilities. It's not uncommon for workers to get sent home for poor hygiene or get fired on the spot. There's many valid reasons why someone couldn't use a bike - distance, climate, geography etc - but to pretend using a bike will always leave you drenched in sweat is just silly. Your heart rate and energy expenditure doesn't need to be more than if you are walking. If you arrive sweaty you either live in a place where you just can't do that or you are doing it wrong.
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Jun 1, 2015 01:11
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BougieBitch posted:Let's start with heavy snow and icy roads, then add in rain, and them add in 80 degree temperatures. Once you cross out every day that has one of the three, you are left with like one week in March and two in April for 2015 so far in the northeast. I guess using a bike in the northeast is impossible and I'm sorry to hear that. What does this have to do with automatically sweating when you get on a bike?
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Jun 1, 2015 02:59
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EB Nulshit posted:So if the world is ending with almost every in the US going to be underwater or a horrible dying desert, where would you actually want to live in thirty years? It won't be quite that bad in 30 years but longer term the northern hemisphere is where its at. Canada, Norway, Sweden or possibly Russia if you like a challenge.
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Jul 11, 2015 16:49
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MixMasterMalaria posted:Even the Chinese government cut back on their plans after Fukushima. The public at large views them as very risky and NIMBY stuff makes safe disposal such a pain that hazardous material just sits around at the point of generation. Just anecdotally, I got shouted down as a paid industry rube when I called into a local radio show where one of the guests was an activist insisting we should shut down all reactors immediately and switch to wind. Apparently killing birds is a big no-no when it comes to fighting malaria (i.e. Carson's Silent Spring and the banning of DDT) but it's just fine when it comes to generating good ol' natural energy. The bird thing is a very bad argument - cats, windows and cars individually kill orders of magnitude more. Letting your cat roam has no societal benefits unless you hate wildlife, unlike wind turbines. Onshore wind is competitive and not a bad source of energy - there's just not that much of it and it's intermittent which further limits it. vvv sorry was factchecking and didn't update the thread before posting Bates fucked around with this message at 03:24 on Jul 17, 2015 |
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Jul 17, 2015 02:53
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Placid Marmot posted:People in poorer countries have more children both by choice, as insurance against child mortality (to pass on their genes), and once they have as many children as they want, because non-free contraception methods are unreliable. Children are a burden on a family for many years before they can even approach the point of a cost/benefit break-even point, and every child that cares for other children is a child that is uneducated and less able to provide for the family in future, and every day that a woman must spend caring for children is a day with less potential for productive work. With improved provision of medicine, women have more surviving children than they need to ensure that their genes survive, which results in a larger burden on both the family in question and their local society. And urbanization. More hands on a farm is useful... less so in a city.
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Jul 17, 2015 15:05
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down with slavery posted:alright so that explains why you'd have children at all but it doesn't really explain why you'd have 10 kids "for the labor" Ok it's not specifically for the labor. However you can put a 6 year old in charge of looking after a herd of goats or milk a cow or whatever. More children won't necesarrily be a drain on you. In the city the dynamic is different - you can dump them in a sweatshop assuming someone will have them but most likely you'll struggle to find something for them to do beyond begging. I'll concede that the real reason urbanites have fewer children is that birth control and family planning is more readily available.
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Jul 17, 2015 16:58
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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? Sure it's possible. We're restricted exclusively by our willingness to pay for it. We could technically power everything with nuclear or with renewables or a mix of it - modern living would just be more expensive. If you want to make a difference take lessons in public speaking, establish a global fanatical anti-coal cult and then lead your followers into glorious battle as you usher in the Flood of Blood and Capitalist Tears. However, first you should get some LED lightbulbs and ask for likes on Facebook.
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Jul 28, 2015 04:05
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Salt Fish posted:I agree that carbon sequestration is a copout. It fails to get at the heart of whats happening. Energy use has been growing at an insane pace for 150 years and our entire economic system is based on its continued growth. A stop to economic growth is viewed as a complete disaster and a completely unacceptable scenario; but growth can't continue forever. Really at this point the question is not if we'll have to revise our economic system, its how much damage will be done before we're forced to. Energy and growth has been decoupled for a while now - US and EU energy use is less now than it was 10 years ago. Increasing energy production mainly comes from China which is incidentally also building a bunch of nuke and renewable energy. They just can't build it fast enough.
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Aug 1, 2015 11:50
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ToxicSlurpee posted:Europe has far better systemic support for child care last I heard. Parental leave, free/cheap child care services, and so forth. In America having a child and keeping your career as a woman may very well be cost prohibitive. Now consider that nothing is free here, many couples can't afford to have one person or the other quit working, and that taking time off to care for a baby means a break in your career, which may very possibly ruin it. America also values success and wealth more than absolutely anything else so the choice between "have baby" and "keep job" can be a very, very hard one. Babies also lead to medical costs which one again is something not everybody can actually afford. On top of that you have many women buried under a gigantic mountain of student debt they're trying to pay off. Having a baby is really guaranteed to slow that down. This is one of those times when "Europe" is not a useful term.
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Aug 3, 2015 18:36
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Stockholm Syndrome posted:And the guy he's interviewing is supposed to be ex-NASA scientist. How the gently caress is he saying climate change isn't happening because of the human impact? I don't get it... The guy obviously is intelligent, yet from that video I'd say he's an idiot. According to his Wiki article he actually hits all of the main denialist points: "Catastrophic manmade global warming is not occurring" -> Depending on your subjective definition of catastrophic. "The medieval warm period existed" -> It did, it sucked a lot and we're about to bring about another, bigger warm period. ""Earth and its ecosystems – created by God's intelligent design and infinite power and sustained by His faithful providence – are robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting"" -> The Medieval Warm Period and various ice ages clearly show that it's not. The clip does get a few things right though. The media sometimes attributes a weather event to global warming which is very silly.
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Aug 10, 2015 07:54
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ToxicSlurpee posted:I actually got repeatedly accused of buying all the pumpkin myself to sell on eBay. People "just knew" that we were hoarding it to sell it for a bigger markup. Well, hope you were super-friendly and full of unhelpful advice, like using canned beets as a substitute. Retail sucks but you gotta make the most of it.
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Oct 21, 2015 03:50
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Space research good - space cities bad.
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Oct 23, 2015 15:02
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Freezer posted:Hurricane Paulina wrecked the state of guerrero several years ago, so yeah it does happen. But this is the strongest hurricane ever recorded in the northern hemisphere, and people are rightly scared. The governement is now evacuating some zones and getting peple to shelter in others, activating all emergency protocols along the path. Well, a prediction of climate change is fewer but more powerfull hurricanes. It is a glimpse of our future, possibly including flying cars.
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Oct 23, 2015 15:23
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Radbot posted:About as much of a stretch as projecting infinite technological growth into the future. In a retrospective, historical sense, that's been a pretty bad prediction. Most technology is derived from something else. So you think tech in 1995 is more similar to today, than 1975?  I hear that a lot. We invented nukes and space rockets and disco and then we just stopped. Where's my flying car? Thing is, humans do not have an infinite number of basic needs to address so there's not an infinite number of inventions to address those needs. We can't invent something that saves as much labour as a washing machine, every 10 years. We have automated most things we need to do - you can buy all your food processed if you want, you don't need to sow your own clothes, we have machines that wash your clothes and dishes and your car and even robots that can vacuum your floors. There's not that many basic needs that we haven't addressed yet. From here on out it's going to be mostly about luxuries until we have actual robot butlers. This doesn't mean tech advancement has stopped or slowed down - just that we have it pretty good.
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Oct 23, 2015 16:55
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Batham posted:Because everything else on and about earth is unquestionably hosed dead in a couple of hundred thousand years if nothing gets off this rock. And if you don't care about that, then yeah, stop posting dumb crap or just off your selfish rear end already. If the human species have to survive in a pressure chamber with an artificial ecology, it might as well be on Earth.
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Oct 24, 2015 22:55
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Arglebargle III posted:Are we screwed again it is the thread on another one of its "it's not so bad get out and fix it goon" kicks? No, all hope is lost so we took a sharp right straight into space colonization.
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Oct 25, 2015 19:04
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