Liberal_L33t posted:

In any case, I can understand geoengineering being scary and it should be practiced as cautiously as possible. But the alternative - that is, asking humanity to abandon an industrialized lifestyle and go back to the hellish nightmare of non-mechanized subsistence agriculture - is a complete non-starter. A hypothetical 2500 C.E. which looks like the historical 1500 C.E. is equally undesirable to a 2500 C.E. where humanity is extinct.

Claverjoe posted:

We still have a window of "nuclear reactors & reprocessing" option open to us.

Cnidaria posted:

Also even at current rates of consumption it will take a really long time to exhaust non-renewable energy resources. If you include nuclear reactors in that we will have energy for millions of years. Also we will probably have fusion reactors in a few centuries or millennium depending on how long it takes society to recover. Geothermal is another option as well.

As for food production we will probably have to heavily adapt our farming techniques. Also insects are an essentially limitless supply of food that are easy to grow. We can also currently grow artificial meat in labs and the process will likely become more efficient and cheaper in the future
The big issue with global warming is not mainly going to be survival after society stabilizes, it's the chaotic transition period as famines, sea level rise, political instability, extreme weather, and other factors kill and displace massive amounts of people. Developing countries will be the most vulnerable while developed countries will probably be able to maintain some stability depending their access to clean water and food. Eastern United States and Canada are especially lucky since they have massive amounts of clean water.

Basically if nukes aren't launched developed countries will be able to adapt and stabilize once the initial chaos calms down. The sad part is by that point a lot of people will be dead.

computer parts posted:

Fertilizers from alternative sources are much more attractive with cheap and readily available power.

khwarezm posted:

No offense to the good people of the Philippines, but everything I've heard about this guy makes it sound like he's a preview for Trump in America if he gets elected, is that a fair comparison?

Wasn't there something about him telling people to go out and beat up junkies?

TildeATH posted:

For those of you who are actually in the trenches, at what point did/do you just throw your hands up and accept that the tragedy of the commons is unavoidable?

BRAKE FOR MOOSE posted:

Okay, kids, let loose — let's hear your Effective Climate Change Final Solutions that instantly fail on ethical grounds.

TheBlackVegetable posted:

3-5 C is an end of civilization scenario though, right?

TheNakedFantastic posted:

Earth has been much hotter than +6C supporting huge amounts of biodiversity.

Trabisnikof posted:

Why would that end industrial civilization? Why would we turn away from electricity etc?

Mozi posted:

Life will continue in many forms so you might as well not make it as terrible for the next few dozen millennia as you can possibly imagine.

a whole buncha crows posted:

anyone wanna be an adult and debate

NewForumSoftware posted:

I've gone down the path of attempting to go off grid and all I can say is that going without industrial civilization is much harder than most give it credit for. There's a reason you don't meet many second generation homesteaders. There are some things that are easy to give up, but there are others (medical care, internet, the rule of law) that I seriously doubt most people building "replacements for society" have put much thought into.

NewForumSoftware posted:

Also just throwing out there again that collapsing civilization (what's going to happen if everyone stops having as many kids) is just going to warm the Earth, so there's no real gain to be had there.

Nice piece of fish posted:

Absolutely. If we can preserve industrial civilization and scientific progress of some form (which I assume is more likely in developed nations than elsewhere), humanity will quite possibly persevere, though with a much reduced capacity for... everything. It means the death of most of us, though.

At least the global nuclear war that will inevitably happen with mass displacement, instability and resource wars as the post-global-warming world contracts into insular and hostile groups will solve that whole global warming thing, though. Nuclear winter and regrowth of abandoned areas will likely sequester incredible amounts of carbon dioxide.

Or hell, maybe we can just try and avoid that at any - any - cost? Just throwing that out there.

For instance, do we know that carbon sequestration technology - if we can get a handle on mitigation - can't be vastly improved or efficiencies increased? It makes sense to me when the resource crunch starts happening, that we would explore nuclear fission and fusion alternatives to produce incredible amounts of power, the surplus of which to be used at great carbon sequestration plants. I mean, it seems fairly obvious to me that there aren't very many other ways of doing it, since it will take more than the energy produced by the carbon emissions in the first place to sequester that carbon anew, doesn't it? Any physicists itt?

NewForumSoftware posted:

To be honest the only people here who think we are doomed are the people calling for voluntary depopulation. Saying human existence is the problem is such a depressing position it's hard to take seriously.

NewForumSoftware posted:

I guess, I see people calling for less children as blaming human existence. Reducing ourselves down to "well the average human uses X carbon a year so if you don't have a child you're preventing that" is such bullshit I can't even take it seriously as an argument, and yet it's being posted by multiple people in this thread, usually couched with terms about bunkers and rape that have more place in a Tom clancy novel than a discussion of climate change.

NewForumSoftware posted:

It's not based on my emotional response, it's based on the logical conclusion of that strategy. An all-electric vehicle push is a good thing and should be taken seriously. A push towards depopulation is a bad thing. Taking it seriously is the least of our problems. If you can't work through the logical conclusion of the western world deciding that population control is an acceptable method to deal with Climate Change you are more naive than I thought.

NewForumSoftware posted:

Who is going to enact this international effort? What makes you think it's even remotely possible? How many people do you plan to relocate? How do you decide who to relocate? What if the climate isn't stable enough at the northern latitudes to provide enough food for all those people? Given that birth rates go down with simply educating women and providing birth control why don't we start there?

Put it this way, the amount of coordination and effort required to enact and enforce a 1-2 child policy around the globe is so great that if we could possibly muster that kind of coordination there would be 10 things to try first, like widescale carbon sequestration, geoengineering, carbon taxes, etc.

GlyphGryph posted:

Advocating a policy of having 1-2 children isn't advocating a policy of having no children, so you're moving the goalposts quite a bit here. On top of that, reducing the population just spreads out the timescale over which warming occurs, and barely even does that when measured in human lifespans, at best, so it's not a particularly good strategy, since most of the things you would need to do to change that outcome require an effective industrial base with lots of surplus labour and economic activity you can siphon off.

Here, let me try and create an analogy.

Imagine we are on a asteroid. We are currently racing across the vast blackness of space, on a direct collision course with the sun a few years from now. The reason we're on this collision course is because we have strapped several thousand rockets to the back of our asteroid, and those rockets are pushing us straight for the sun.

Population control is akin to advocating that we should remove these rockets and toss them off into space, because clearly the rockets are the reason we are on this collision course. And they are, that's true, but removing all the rockets from the asteroids, or any rockets really, is not a solution. The scenario still ends with us crashing into the sun. Our course is already set. Removing them a couple hundred years ago and preventing anyone from building more might have done it, but like many other attempts it is now too little, too late.

Any viable plan for avoiding our crashing into the sun at this point in time absolutely requires a massive amount of rockets. Enough rockets that we can use them to change the course we're on. That has to be the goal - not to get rid of as many rockets as possible, but to point as many of those rockets in possible in a different, better direction, one that changes the course of our asteroid and doesn't end with us getting burned to death.

Now, seem people in this thread have advocated the belief that these rockets can not be redirected. In that case nothing, including getting rid of rockets, matters - we're toast. So no matter which side you fall on regarding whether or not redirecting rockets is possible, randomly getting rid of them still isn't a helpful or even coherent plan.

Also the rockets are people and no one is ever going to agree to get rid of a significant number of rockets.

GlyphGryph posted:

If we can replace our power supply with a carbon neutral or minimal carbon alternatives, then we only have to spend roughly the equivalent of global military spending to bring us into the realms of negative per capita emissions (using only currently existing carbon sequestration technology). Which we are obviously technically capable of doing.

The miracles there are more political than technological. Technology would mostly serve to make the political miracles less miraculous.

It's not a likely outcome, no, specially considering the track record for political solutions, but it's the only outcome that doesn't end on "runaway global warming leads to the extinction or near extinction of the human race" so it's also the only outcome worth pursuing.

Intentional depopulation is not only not pursuing that outcome (and thus pointless), it is, in fact, injurious to it, and thus not really worth considering.

If you want to argue for relaxing and enjoying the ride into the sun, that's one thing, the argument that throwing away rockets would somehow help is the problematic on.

Mozi posted:

SelfOM posted:

I'm

Baronjutter posted:

Do people like that actually believe climate change is some hoax or over-blown alarmism, or are they just full out horrible evil captain planet villains trying to get them and their supporters as much hay while the sun shines as possible? I imagine a ton of rich and powerful people just want to stock up on as much wealth as they possibly can so they can survive the coming doom of their own making. Then again I've known plenty of rich people that are absolutely stupid so I could totally believe either being true.

Star Man posted:

I majored in English and focused on rhetoric and composition. I'm loving useless in fighting this poo poo off, aren't I?

Conspiratiorist posted:

The current state of the world is the answer to the Fermi paradox.

Paradoxish posted:

I'm not sure how comforting that really is. This storm is looking like it has the potential to absolutely devastate the pack that exists right now and help to drive more ice out of the arctic. Obviously it'd be a lot worse if we were having these storms constantly, but badly timed freak events like this ratchet things down into a new normal.

Potato Salad posted:

Well, there's the full-bore "join a commune" post.

maskenfreiheit posted:

Thought experiment:

The bootstraps type love to plug the "just move!1!1!" meme.

So let's say you've been offered a high paying, 100% remote job.

Where in the United States would you choose to set down roots, taking into account the changes that will be happening in the next 10,20,50 years?
(Let's assume you're not going to go full granola and live off the land - you'll need internet access and an airport within driving distance)

I've been looking around a bit... cities like Pittsburgh, Indianapolis, Denver, etc that are far from the coast, close to land that can grow food all seem like decent picks. I suspect Vegas might do better than you'd expect since an artificial city in the desert is probably mindful of how be sustainable and plan for the long term.

OTOH, I'd probably avoid big coast cities like SF, NYC, DC, Boston.

Thoughts?

TildeATH posted:

Thunder Bay and Traverse City sound a little too Mad Max for my tastes.

AceOfFlames posted:

So someone please tell me again why I should not purposely avoid all emotional investment in people and achievements so I am fully ready to die when the time comes?

To be more precise, is there a completely reason based argument for living in a situation where things are certain to get worse?

Mercrom posted:

Hello. I'd like to join this doomsday circlejerk, but I'm still optimistic that we can contain the coming disaster. What exactly are the reasons to believe we are all hosed? Non-seismic natural disasters and droughts will get worse for sure, but the mitigation of those things has also improved with time and I see no reason to believe that won't continue. What we can't mitigate will cause instability and maybe war, but it's not like war is a new thing. What is the historical link between war and natural disasters/droughts?

smoke sumthin bitch posted:

i follow and read a lot of alarmist literature and they all say weve passed the point of no return. I know and it has been proven again and again that a lot of these reports are fake science or based on rigged parameters and models. were either 100% doomed or this is all natural and the earth has mechanisms to balance its temperature out or maybe it doesn't and were still doomed. either way dont tread on me

Conspiratiorist posted:

Pray tell, what is your case for human extinction being the better outcome?

The Snoo posted:

I keep telling myself that governments and leaders wouldn't be stupid enough to use nuclear weapons because it would pretty much be the end of everything, but deep down I know they would.

A Buttery Pastry posted:

It's actually possible to colonize the entire galaxy, "all" you need is self-replicating machines capable of interstellar travel. Exponential growth will also make it a surprisingly fast process. Probably not a big help for people though.

smoke sumthin bitch posted:

aka agenda 21 aka agenda 2030 aka eco-authoritarianism in general

davebo posted:

You know it's not like those Floridians just sink into the sea one day. Most of them will see the change coming and move ahead of time. This tragedy just means more Floridians moving into non-Florida states. It's the worst possible outcome.

LionArcher posted:

So if I'm 30, running my own business what are the best places to invest in land wise in the USA? I'm thinking Oregon (Southern and middle) and Washington right? Long term those areas (minus fires) wouldn't be deeply effected by flooding right? And living in LA (Pasadena area) is a bad idea right?