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Sierra Club does a lot of good work in the realm of protecting endangered species, and they've been instrumental in lot of important campaigns like those against the xl pipeline. Which of course is why it's so frustrating seeing them take counter-productive positions on issues like nuclear power 
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Nov 8, 2015 19:52
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Inglonias posted:As for what I am doing to help, 350.org is holding an event in DC at the end of November. I will be there. I'm phoneposting so I can't do links (I tried really hard for the link to that article above!), but I assume that people here can google. Googled this, didn't find anything. Their website isn't very intuitive... What's the date/subject?
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Nov 10, 2015 00:57
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blowfish posted:Conservation-wise I sometimes look at coastal rainforest fragments on the map and ask myself if it's even worth preserving them since many are too small to function as a rainforest ecosystem Depending on exactly what fragments you're talking about a few corridors might be enough to sustain populations of apes and big cats! Not much you can do for the super picky birds that won't go within 100 m of a break in the canopy.
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Nov 12, 2015 00:25
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smoke sumthin bitch posted:You folks are so brainwashed you are litteraly begging your globalist overlords to force you to reduce your living standards and tax you into oblivion. Its disgusting how the radical far left has hijacked the green movement to push their sick and twisted authoritarian communist anti human agenda. Please tell me all about our radical far left globalist overlords 
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Dec 14, 2015 02:01
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Verge posted:Interesting. Are there any viable resolutions to this? Methane emissions are dependent on numerous factors, for example that article indicates the reservoir in the study was receiving high nutrient inputs, stimulating emissions. Depth and temperature are also important. So part of it is just picking good locations; more methane is going to escape from a warm, shallow reservoir than from one that is cold and deep. Better managing agricultural runoff from the surrounding area should also reduce emissions. It's not a problem you can eliminate, but certain practices can minimize harm. This also means in some circumstances hydropower just isn't a good solution, which sucks but what can you do.
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Dec 15, 2015 20:36
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I haven't read about the subject in several years but the way some reservoirs rapidly fluctuate in depth (filling in the wet season, draining in the dry) can have an effect on emissions. Also the process of creating a reservoir can emit a huge amount of carbon, first through the clearing of trees and later through the release of soil carbon in the new lake bed.
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Dec 15, 2015 21:04
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blowfish posted:The thing is even with fish passes for dams the only thing you do is make them less terrible for a very limited subset of species. Basically fish that migrate into the upper reaches of the river and know how to cope with very strong flow will get through and little else. All ecological damage done by introducing water stratification to a river ecosystem continues and most species (except flying insects with aquatic larvae) that need to disperse along the river but not as far as the uppermost reaches are still in serious trouble. So is anything dependent on a particular floodplain water regime that now has to survive in a permanent swamp with irregular changes in water level. Yeah messing with dynamic systems like rivers can have weird and unexpected consequences. I worked in a stream in which a dam had actually blocked fish passage to tributaries downstream from the reservoir. Because the dam blocked the flow of sediments that would ordinarily be deposited on the stream bed, the stream started cutting deeper. Cataracts became taller, and fish could no longer pass them.
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Dec 16, 2015 21:10
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Radbot posted:Well when that "nonzero influence" amounts to a dozen smelly people nobody listens to, compared to lovely MSM journalism about the NUCLEAR DISASTER IN FUKUSHIMA!!, the comparison is in bad faith at least. I hate to join this horrible argument but in the United States Environmental Nonprofits easily mobilize 10,000s of people funded by hundreds of millions of dollars and while they may not have a huge role in setting national energy policy they are definitely important at local scales.
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Dec 18, 2015 22:20
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Why would I provide evidence for something I didn't say or even imply?
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Dec 25, 2015 19:14
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Rime posted:I was pretty clear that it's Norman Borlaugs fault, and he wasn't very poor. Ah yes. If only we'd allowed millions to die in squalor and poverty we could have saved millions from squalor and poverty. This is either a twisted form of utilitarian logic rampaging beyond the bounds of all reason or the shallow rationalizations of a sociopath.
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Jan 3, 2016 01:10
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Marijuana Nihilist posted:humans are a blight on this planet hth Note that Rime did not actually suggest humanity could have avoided hunger today or in the future through some alternative to the Green Revolution. Rather he argued that if we had kept the poor in a perpetual famine by limiting the food supply, we could have controlled aggregate suffering. In this formula, famine is the solution to future famines. Now if we want to limit the future suffering of poor populations, why stop at restricting the food supply? Mass immunization has made billions suffer the agony of life, better to die quick of smallpox than slowly and agonizingly from hunger and malnutrition. Of course there's one major difference between death by hunger and death by disease: Only the poor starve, but disease is not so discriminate. Yet why stop at half measures? Even in a perfect world millions will continue to suffer depression and misery, the best way to prevent future suffering is to fire the missiles and embrace the nuclear holocaust, think of the billions we could save from existence! doverhog posted:If the new farming methods first increase crop yields a lot and then a while later cause the land to become barren they are obviously bad and lead to increased suffering on the whole. The Green Revolution didn't start this process. Pre-modern people frequently lowered their water tables, built up surface salts, and clear-cut forests whose transpiration was necessary to maintain precipitation. Today many people who practice traditional swidden gardening will tell you straight up they're ruining the soil. However without modern fertilizers they have no choice. Rime would rather let them die than give them the tools to survive.
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Jan 3, 2016 19:43
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Salt Fish posted:Right now IMO the major 2 reasons that GMO food is bad: GMOs specifically are not the cause of this problem, the same issue occurs with the large scale dissemination of any commercially produced strain. It is just that GMOs are now the most popularly produced varieties.
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Jan 4, 2016 02:27
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Salt Fish posted:That's a little bit weird to say because although that can happen without GMOs the technology is specifically designed to propel a strain to dominance over all other strains. I'm not sure what you mean, aren't all commercial crops designed to be better than all others? What else are you designing for? Anyway by the sixties the majority of corn planted in the U.S. was mass produced hybrid strains designed for consistency. These pre-GMO hybrids were specifically designed to have very low genetic diversity, so that every plant would reliably have the same characteristics. GMOs are simply better versions of the same varieties.
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Jan 4, 2016 04:54
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Salt Fish posted:That's like saying fracking isn't a problem for global warming because people could drill for oil before it was innovated. We're talking about a powerful tool that accelerates the issue. Fracking could accelerate global warming because it allows previously unavailable stocks of fossil fuel to be exploited. However I'm not sure through what mechanism GMOs are supposed to accelerate the loss of crop diversity, which others have pointed out is caused by the spread of monoculture and industrial agriculture through the increasing use of commercially produced seed. Low diversity hybrids started replacing traditional varieties long before GMOs were on the field. When you say they accelerate the issue I assume you mean increase the incentives for switching to an intensive monoculture, and maybe they do. However making the issue about GMOs is a distraction, one could ban all GMOs and still lose 95% of crop diversity (whereas banning fracking would definitely limit total possible carbon emissions). If you want to protect crop diversity you should actually focus on what's causing the losses, rather than make the issue about something only tangentially related.
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Jan 4, 2016 07:31
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Trabisnikof posted:Although there is a strong case to be made that fracing has actually helped the climate by replacing coal plants with gas plants. It also has done a lot more to keep oil sands in the ground compared to anything else. True at least for the short term. But I'm trying to make a point about corn here, not quibble over analogies 
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Jan 4, 2016 07:48
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blowfish posted:Are you trolling or just a colossal retard? This is an important point, the vast majority of land capable of supporting large scale agriculture is already under cultivation. The majority of land that isn't is either arid pasture land that can't sustain cereal crops or tropical forests currently sequestering billions and billions of tons of carbon. As the population grows in size and wealth over the next century people are going to need much more food than we have today. In the last century humanity put millions of additional acres of cropland into production, doing that today will necessarily come at the cost of carbon emissions of a catastrophic scale. In order to preempt the loss of the world's forests, humanity must massively increase the productivity of existing cropland while reigning in population growth. One way of increasing the efficiency of existing agricultural production is to turn fewer of our cereal crops into animal protein. In 2013 roughly 36% of U.S. corn production was used as animal feed. Depending on the animal, grain is converted to meat and dairy at an efficiency of between 3-40%, a highly inefficient system that doesn't so much meet the nutritional needs of the population as satisfy a desire for luxury items. Red meat like beef is most sustainable when feed on natural fodder on range land too dry or steep for intensive farming, and agricultural policy should reflect that.
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Jan 8, 2016 21:16
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computer parts posted:US isn't the world, and world population is expected to peak by mid century, if not decline by the end of it. The problem is not solely population growth, but also income growth. As people become richer, they want to eat more, and they especially want to eat more animal protein. This means that even as population growth plateaus policy makers must anticipate continued growth in demand. For the most part this is good, we want the global poor to eat better. However we want the growth in meat consumption to be more chicken and tilapia and less beef. Decreasing consumption of animal protein in the United States and parts of Europe would probably be good for health and the environment, and agricultural policy should reflect that. Palm oil is horrible for the environment. But people need to eat. Best to meet that demand by producing more with the land we already use, rather clearing more forests and wasting what we do produce in feed lots. Squalid fucked around with this message at 00:29 on Jan 9, 2016 |
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Jan 8, 2016 22:10
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Land reform can have big payoffs - Redistributing the property of the old aristocratic classes was a really effective development tool in post-war Japan for example. African states haven't uh... managed the process very well.
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Jan 9, 2016 04:09
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Woah woah guys let's not jump to conclusions here. I'm sure we'd all love for Arkane to come in here and tell us what this means for the well established Warming Pause, that definitely wasn't just an artifact of a short interval, and definitely hasn't been revised out of existence.
Squalid fucked around with this message at 05:17 on Jan 21, 2016 |
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Jan 20, 2016 19:04
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http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/mystery-beneath-ice.html A good episode of NOVA aired today about Krill. It's about research of Krill in the Southern Oceans, which have declined by at least 50% over the last several decades. Turns out the declining sea ice produced by global warming is likely responsible.
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Jan 21, 2016 06:32
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LookingGodIntheEye posted:Do climate models have any problems grappling with the Ludic Fallacy? I'm not too familiar with this concept, but I'm inclined to say it's not really a problem, at least not if you use the models for their intended purpose. So reading that article, it would appear that the ludic fallacy, applied to climate change, would be assuming that we can predict the future climate simply by extrapolating the trend from the last 100 years of surface temperature data into the future. This would be foolish because small errors in our observations would compound over time, and because our interval would be too small to capture events very significant to the climate like large volcanic eruptions, nuclear wars, or meteor strikes that would drastically change our predicted outcomes. I believe climate science doesn't suffer as much as other efforts to make predictions (for example in the stock market) from the lack of perfect data because it has a solid theoretical base in physics, as well as empirical observation. It's predictions are based as much on our theoretical understanding of the atmosphere as on our empirical observations of how it's past behavior. Climate scientists work with both much better models and a far greater awareness of uncertainty than the bond traders in 2007. That IPCC estimates of the future climate don't account for the probability of a thermonuclear war killing hundreds of millions of people and instigating a nuclear winter may make them less accurate by Taleb's standards, and if such an eventuality were to occur our predictions for the climate would prove very wrong. However the models aren't supposed to account for that risk. Climate scientists aren't trying to account for when the Yellowstone super-volcano will erupt, although such an eventuality would strongly effect the accuracy of their predictions. Rather than being an effort to accurately account for all risks, the models solely tell us that, given our current circumstances, This is what we can expect. The fact is if a ten kilometer wide meteor strikes the earth tomorrow nobody will care what the climate is doing, we'll be too busy dying horribly. We aren't modeling the climate to assess these kinds of risk, but only so we understand what is currently happening. If some state tomorrow starts a trillion dollar geoengineering campaign, our current models will also be wrong. Which is fine, because they aren't supposed to account for that possibility. Most of the uncertainty in climate modeling is of the kind Taleb explicitly excluded from this fallacy, i.e. the uncertainty of chaotic nonlinear systems. Although it's not that clear from the wikipedia page, at times it seems to conflate this fallacy with sensitivity to initial conditions, so sort of hard to address that point. There are a lot of non-linear processes in the climate which have big impacts, but of course everyone knows that and tries to incorporate it sensibly into our predictions. tl;dr: Models have a good theoretical basis and in any case aren't supposed to predict all possibilities, but only to describe present ongoing processes.
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Jan 22, 2016 19:15
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tmfool posted:So, obviously this is *not good* but I'm a bit simple and need a little clarification on all of this. I thought hitting the 2C mark was something we all figured we'd be blowing past in the coming decades, not...now? Does this mean we're all staring down the barrel of hopelessness in the next 10-20 years or something? And if so, how does one not feel suicidal? Calm down, it's the 2c above the yearly average which is the mark you're thinking of, not the daily average. An extreme one day value does not mean we've blown past the predictions. It's still loving hot not but not out of order in an El Niño year
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Mar 6, 2016 03:14
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overflight stop fantasizing about killing yourself.
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Apr 10, 2016 01:56
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If /r/collapse is a bunch of survivalists fantasizing about the road warrior style post-apocalypse this thread is a bunch of depressives dreaming about how they and everyone else will finally be able to die
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Apr 10, 2016 03:47
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Your fears and anxieties are derived from a chemical imbalance in your brain and have merely fixated upon climate change as a justification for feelings that exist independent of any circumstance. Your worries about fighting off raiders and subsistence farming indicate your specific fears are more directly tied to the tropes of fantasy film and literature than anything indicated by real research on the climate and economy. Here's a wikipedia article covering serious research into the actual impact which should, unless you live in Bangladesh, assuage your fear of impending disaster, if not perhaps your fears for your friend's children. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_impacts_of_climate_change#Distribution_of_impacts
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Apr 10, 2016 21:49
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Hello Arkane. What is your opinion on the revision to the RSS temperature dataset that eliminated the so called pause?
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Apr 28, 2016 03:39
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Rime posted:Wasting time responding to Arkane is a fools errand, just put him on ignore and move along. I'm not sure why you think we have anything better to do, when he's not here the thread just get's stuck on the same boring loops endlessly rehashing the same arguments over personal responsibility, nuclear energy, and apocalypse prep. Arkane is not wrong when he points out the absurdity of many doomsayers here, whose fantasies are as divorced from an empirical understanding of the climate and economy as the worst climate skeptics. There is a tendency to take every new grim prediction as an iron prophecy, which leads to ridiculous cases like the guy asking why governments weren't erecting mass euthanasia clinics for the inevitable climate apocalypse. Maybe the one thing that is certain is that there's a lot we aren't sure of, knowledge that is both fearful but also a source of hope when facing the most dire predictions. I'm interested we're still going on about the hiatus. Wasn't that old canard put to bed by the recent recalibration of the sea surface temperature (SST) observations? http://science.sciencemag.org/content/348/6242/1469.full quote:Newly corrected and updated global surface temperature data from NOAA’s NCEI do not support the notion of a global warming “hiatus.” As shown in Fig. 1, there is no discernable (statistical or otherwise) decrease in the rate of warming between the second half of the 20th century and the first 15 years of the 21st century. Our new analysis now shows that the trend over the period 1950–1999, a time widely agreed as having significant anthropogenic global warming (1), is 0.113°C decade−1, which is virtually indistinguishable from the trend over the period 2000–2014 (0.116°C decade−1). Even starting a trend calculation with 1998, the extremely warm El Niño year that is often used as the beginning of the “hiatus,” our global temperature trend (1998–2014) is 0.106°C decade−1—and we know that is an underestimate because of incomplete coverage over the Arctic. Indeed, according to our new analysis, the IPCC’s (1) statement of 2 years ago—that the global surface temperature “has shown a much smaller increasing linear trend over the past 15 years than over the past 30 to 60 years”—is no longer valid. Kind of lame repeating the same outdated research based on biased observations.
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May 3, 2016 04:21
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May 20, 2016 07:30
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CommieGIR posted:Most doomsayers are basing their claims off theology. Climate change is based off evidence. Deranged prognostications about the collapse of the global economy are not. Climates and economies and geopolitics are chaotic systems that are inherently unpredictable, and anyone who actually believes they can make specific predictions like Rime's that civilization will collapse in 30 years is full of poo poo. The terrifying truth is that we don't know what's going to happen. Sweeping prophecies of doom are as fanciful as the most optimistic futures offered by deniers. edit: Your effort is appreciated but remember Rime is the guy who literally argued the Green Revolution was one of the world's greatest tragedy because it meant millions of people lived and raised families instead of starving to death as they ought have. The death of consumerism he envisions is the literal death of the consumers. Squalid fucked around with this message at 19:41 on May 20, 2016 |
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May 20, 2016 19:20
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Given that El nino occurs roughly every two-seven years it's hard to justify calling this year's temperatures an outlier, especially given that most estimates attribute about 10% of above average warming to El nino last year, and likely will contribute about 25% of warming for 2016
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May 26, 2016 03:15
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Hey in good news the hole in the ozone layer is shrinking! Although carbon emissions and global warming are much more challenging problems to face, at least we know the world is at least theoretically capable of coming together and effecting solutions, even if we may not see ultimate success for another 50+ years.
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Jul 1, 2016 01:33
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Trabisnikof posted:Reduced water consumption will be a massive part of shifts in agriculture. Also likely shifting where we grow to follow the rain. ummm... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_gazelle just sayin. While climate change might not have been the driver in this case if climate change does cause "food pressure," or reductions in the productivity of agricultural it will almost certainly drive extinction by encouraging the conversion of natural or semi-natural land to intensive agriculture. I don't know if that will actually bear out but even local food crises can often lead to local extirpations or extinctions, as has happened in South Sudan and Cambodia. Another reason your repeated insistence that population growth isn't a significant driver of climate change is so strange, the necessity of putting ever increasing acreages under production is a major source of emissions and there is no conceivable way of avoiding that necessity in high population growth scenarios (population growth is a major variable in all IPCC emission scenarios, btw).
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Sep 30, 2016 04:56
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I can't parse your first paragraph so I'm not exactly sure how to address your point but humans are today overeating many wild species and it is contributing to extinction. Human food systems don't have to collapse to increase extinction rates, a simple decline (or in the case of rising population, even stagnation or only modest increase) in production per hectare is going to necessitate an increase in total farming area, which will almost inevitably cause extinction. I believe predictions for the effect of global warming on agricultural productivity are mixed so hopefully there won't be significant declines in productivity. On population control, do you think China's one-child policy had any effect on the current emissions total? Yes, we need to cut emissions now, but we also need to reduce future emissions. You have pitched a false dichotomy, a society can both work developing a carbon neutral economy AND reducing population growth, in fact all evidence suggests these are synergistic goals. Note I'm not really advocating any specific policy. If you check my post history my first few post itt are telling someone who was calling for killing all the blecks that they were an idiot. And if you were trying to make a point about policy why were your posts addressing the wisdom of individual choices?
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Sep 30, 2016 06:26
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TildeATH posted:It's too late for any population limiting policies to have any effect, either. The real answer is that we're well and truly on greased skids toward massive climate change and it's going to cause untold suffering to billions. Nothing Exxon or Chinese parents can do can change that now. Population control policies would have made a difference, back when anything could have made a difference, as would... Nah There's a big difference between a 600-700 and 1200 ppm world and our action now could be the difference.
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Oct 1, 2016 20:16
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I'm not sure why so many people seem to think any kind of collective action on climate change is simply an impossible pipe dream. It's like they heard the parable of the tragedy of the commons one time and decided the problem was literally insurmountable.
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Oct 16, 2016 05:56
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Penisaurus Sex posted:Forgive me because I'm not a climatologist, but I thought the reason 2C was chosen as a watershed moment was once we pass 2C, we may lose control of the entire warming process due to positive feedback loops? If that's the case, then a treaty that still gets us over 2C, while being a positive in absolute terms, isn't a very effective treaty Not to dismiss this possibility which is real and frightening, but last time I checked there was a lot of uncertainty regarding climate feedback loops. The truth is we don't really know exactly how the climate will react, which is one reason why it's so important to keep carbon concentrations as low as possible, we don't really know where the limit is before something catastrophic happens. I've noticed Arkane uses a very interesting approach to his climate denialism that I never see used anywhere else, where he systematically understates the uncertainty in our understanding of the climate-in his world trends were linear, accurately measured and clearly predictable. The truth is there are terrible risks that we cannot afford to gamble on, and we frequently find serious problems in the science that we had failed to account for. The kind of errors in our understanding of the climate that necessitated the revisions this year of sea-surface and some satellite temperature records are not accounted for in this mindset, at great risk to the environment and even civilization. However there exists among many in the climate activist community an opposite personality, who systematically over estimates the risks of climate catastrophes. Every new threat is treated as a certainty, regardless of how preliminary the data or limited our understanding. All the risks have to be addressed yes, but we should understand that even in worse case scenarios not every calamity must come to pass.
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Oct 17, 2016 01:07
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BattleMoose posted:[quote="GlyphGryph" post="465419277"] Reducing emissions is a moral hazzard? You guys should stop and listen to yourselves for a second, you aren't making any drat sense.
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Oct 17, 2016 01:12
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shrike82 posted:Look up-thread at folks who talk big about climate activism but go denialist when faced with the statement that not having children is the biggest singular thing they can achieve in their lifetimes to reduce their carbon footprint. Or at a societal level for a polity to impose restrictions on reproductive rights. The one child policy in China, now dead, is probably the single government policy that has had the most impact on climate change. It's kind of weird how you appear to be using the word denialist like a slur. Trabisnikof hasn't made any statements remotely reminiscent of climate denialism, even if I still think his position regarding the effect of personal family planning is false. What's your deal anyway. You haven't really made any coherent arguments in this thread, you're just kind of flailing angrily about without any discernible purpose
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Oct 17, 2016 01:18
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Forever_Peace posted:Cool. I literally just posted a paper from Science that discusses the moral hazard of Carbon capture reliance on exhaustive detail. But hey, maybe they'd be interested in hearing your Nooo don't leave me with them... At least the suicidally depressed guy seems to have left or at least stopped posting his fantasies about self-euthanization clinics
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Oct 17, 2016 01:21
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What Of all the things to call Trabisnikof want to call him pro-coal? 
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Oct 17, 2016 01:24
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