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Banana Man posted:We should try everything that doesn't infringe on some basic human right, the resources are certainly available And if it can't be done without infringing on rights? Do we just let ourselves commit climate suicide? I'm hoping for a better answer then "of course we have the resources to do it without infringing on rights" (because if we believe really really really hard.....)
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Oct 17, 2016 02:43
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IronClaymore posted:As for coal mining, gently caress THAT! I wouldn't force Mao himself to work in a coal mine! Much less wage-slave people. Anyone forced out of that job should recognise their new lease on life. And besides, copper is making a comeback, thanks to expensive electric cars, learn to diversify mining dudes! (Also welcome to the dole queue get in line.) Do you think people mine for coal with pickaxes or something? A coal mine job is an extremely good job for someone without a degree. Probably one of the best blue collar jobs available in those areas.
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Nov 20, 2016 00:18
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Mustached Demon posted:It's also incredibly dangerous. So dangerous the DoL made its own safety agency completely separate from OSHA. Yes. So is railroading for example, which is what I do now, and which also has its own agency. I was just slackjawed at the idea that someone in this thread thinks American coal mining is a wage slave job. You have to know a few things about something before you argue against it or nobody will pay attention to you.
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Nov 20, 2016 02:19
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FourLeaf posted:This paper is what I've based this belief on: http://www.ippnw.org/pdf/nuclear-famine-two-billion-at-risk-2013.pdf Several hundred nuclear weapons have been detonated is tests over the last 60 years. The Russian Tsar Bomba alone was as powerful as a good chunk of Pakistans arsenal put together. A few dozen mid sized nukes, of the several hundred kiloton to the 5 to 15 megaton range, does not spell global destruction. Here is what an all out nuclear war between India and Pakistan would look like. 1. India and Pakistan major cities destroyed of course. Several million dead in the major cites. Several million dying later from starvation and lack of clean water as society breaks down. Hundreds of thousands of people in small somewhat independent villages would be unhurt by the blasts and continue on with their civilization, although at a lower level. Lifespans in those towns would be 10-20 years lower because of an increase in cancers and such. 2. Chaos in the middle east as millions of starving refugees try to enter. Stronger countries that can control their borders, like China, would probably machine gun refugees on the border to prevent the overwhelming of their own societies. 3. The bombs and the burning of cities would cause a local nuclear winter. For about a decade the temp would be lower and crop production would be lower in Asia, the equilvent of a large volcano and nothing the world hasn't seen dozens of times before. 4. increased instances of cancer in Asia and Europe. Again nothing we haven't seen before. Concerns over the few hundred nukes set off during decades of testing is what led to the testing ban. 5. Hundreds of millions of people in North America would see almost no physical effects from the war. 6. A worldwide depression would follow the removal of India and Pakistan from the world economy. Basically, even if a major disaster obliterates a whole region, the other regions of the earth contain large chunks of industry and several hundred million people who will go on with civilization. Even a worst case climate change scenario that saw the tropics become a desert and the middle east become a mad max wasteland would still have tens of millions of people continuing modern civilization in Canada, Siberia, and Northern Europe. I don't mean to be flippant here. We should fight as hard as we can for a better world, and any realigning of our civilization would result in millions killed in upheaval, but we would still adapt and survive. Short of a worst case Venus scenario, or complete ocean death causing oxygen content in the atmosphere to drop, or an asteroid strike by a dinosaur killer, I don't think humans can be wiped out. In 300 years, it may very well be that the tropics are uninhabited, and the poles ice free, and several island nations submerged, and the coastlines rearranged, but life, even something resembling the comfort of the modern 1st world, would go on in the northern latitudes. So fight as hard as you can but remember that defeatism is bad. If you sent a space colony ship out into the galaxy and found an uninhabited planet that looked like earth 200 years from now in a worst case scenario, it would still be a good place to set down and colonize. The biggest killer from climate change isn't going to be climate change itself, its going to be the societal upheaval as we fail to adapt. Even if it gets to the point that warming can't be stopped we could still work to adapt. WorldsStongestNerd fucked around with this message at 05:23 on Jan 8, 2017 |
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Jan 8, 2017 05:11
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Electric Owl posted:Maybe climate change will be a good thing? CO2 is not the limiting factor for plants. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is already rich enough, adding more only provides a small bump in productivity. Also the plants can't take advantage of increased CO2 if they don't have water because of droughts. In any case, photosynthesis stops at 104 degrees fahrenheit. If you walk outside and the temp is above 104, the plants aren't absorbing energy or growing. They are waiting it out until the temp drops in the afternoon. If we went back to the farming techniques of even the 1950's, the world would face starvation. We squeeze the maximum productivity out of our crops, and part of that is having good topsoil. You can't grow good crops in clay or dirt, even with fertilizers, because their are many qualities to good soil besides just how much nutrients are in it. Parts of the USA midwest and the mississippi river deltas have topsoil 20 feet deep. In Canada you have bedrock close to the surface . You don't thaw out the Canadian tundra or Russian siberia and suddenly have good crop land. Also, Canada won't be selling poo poo. If things get that bad the USA will be taking it. WorldsStongestNerd fucked around with this message at 05:40 on Jan 15, 2017 |
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Jan 15, 2017 05:37
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That chunk off of pine island glacier is land ice correct? It wasn't already floating on the water?
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Feb 20, 2017 00:32
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Notorious R.I.M. posted:Every time you want to try the "Lol everyone should just die" answer to global warming remember that womens' rights to bodily autonomy as well as good efforts to make sex education and contraceptives available will drastically lower the human population growth rate! Now instead of being a whiny nihilist you can bring something productive to the table!! This makes no sense. Everything you listed lowers the growth rate, not the overall population. The population will still grow, just at a lower rate. Thanks to the things you listed, the world pop in 2050 will be 9 billion instead of 30 billion, but that is still too much. There is no way to get that number down without oppressive government intervention.
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May 5, 2017 17:36
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The Belgian posted:Sure, but how is this going to result in theor governments using nuclear weapons? Climate change might increasy internal dissent, trigger civil war,. destabilize the government as it's doing in the Middle East & Africa. But why would this result in the use of nuclear weapons? They nuke their own people to achieve?? Wars over resources. For example, India and Pakistan, being neighbors, would have joint control over the rivers and lakes between their borders. Same thing for fishing rights and things like that. I don't know the actual geography of the the area, but imagine that India dams up a river to make a reservoir to feed their drought stricken cities. Now Pakistani farmers downstream have no water and dying crops. Imagine India and Pakistan have a treaty to only pump a certain amount of water from an underground aquifer that sits under both countries, and India decides to ignore the treaty and pump all they can since their farmland in dying. Imagine Pakistan sends fishing fleets into India's coastal waters because they are desperate for food. Water and fish resources are two things that cross international borders so you often have joint control, they are two things that billions of people rely on to survive, and they are two things that will be hosed over by climate change. Imagine a best case scenario, where say India is pumping a shared aquifer dry, so Pakistan decides to build a desalination plant. Pakistani citizens would still be livid about having to spend the money to do that. Little fights are going to escalate into wars as things get worse. Please note that I have no Idea if India and Pakistan share any rivers or aquifers, its just an example.
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Jun 1, 2017 00:50
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Burt Buckle posted:So when we pull carbon from the atmosphere, what is it exactly? What does it's solid form look like? Can we use this to make a massive, massive statue of a guy with his shoulders shrugged in an 'oops' position as a warning to future generations about the dangers of fossil fuels? Ideal pie in the sky situation would be to pull carbon from the atmosphere, turn it in to diamond, and use that to pave roads and make cinderblocks for houses, or powdered for sheet rock. All in a process powered by electricity generated from nuke or solar plants.
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Jul 28, 2017 00:05
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Ive got it people. Wooden roads for carbon storage. Not joking look up "plank roads". A coast to coast wooden highway with wooden bridges....... In all seriousness i wonder how much carbon in locked in railroad crossties. They have a 30 -50 year life.
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Sep 27, 2017 14:26
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Mozi posted:Not to even get into the many reasons why the plank road boom turned to bust, if you put the wood down on the surface of the earth it's just going to rot and give up its CO2 anyways. Hmmm really? You don't say?
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Sep 27, 2017 18:25
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Nice piece of fish posted:Why, exactly. I mean, I can see your general point about islands in the path of terrible storms, but how exactly is Puerto Rico in particular boned, and how soon? I'm asking, because over here media isn't really covering the situation and the internet gets more useless for non-opinionated news every day. An enormous amount of money and work needs to be put into Puerto rico infrastructure and housing to make structures that can weather these storms. We don't want to spend that money. The damage from this year will not be repaired by the time another storm hits in a few years. One step forward, two steps back over and over, each time more people leaving and the island getting poorer after each hit. Since Puerto ricans are americans, they can come to the mainland and we kinda have to at least pretend to help. The real fun begins when an island nation state starts its death spiral. BTW, when the Puerto rican refugee crisis gets in full swing here in a month or two, look for Trump to try to limit access off the island. As they are citizens it would be an act of naked fascism.
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Sep 29, 2017 18:31
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enraged_camel posted:Every time someone says it is too cost ineffective to recycle plastics, I'm reminded of this image of a bird corpse found at Midway Atoll, over 3000 miles away from mainland US. That has nothing to do with recycling. That bird would also still be alive if that plastic was properly buried in a landfill.
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Oct 5, 2017 16:15
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Conspiratiorist posted:Unless you're 50 and/or die early, you're going to be alive to see the death of the ocean and the collapse of the Western Antarctic Ice Sheet. Have no worries about that. I hope I'm young enough to be part of the new greatest generation after fighting WWIII in the ice free arctic circle to wrest the oil reserves away from Russia. Maybe I can get a war bride from occupied Canada.
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Oct 28, 2017 03:24
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So I assume that during the next strong El Nino year the gulf coast is going to be wiped from the face of the earth.
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Nov 5, 2017 03:03
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Assume that moderate global warming is locked in now no matter what we do. It seems like human nature and the way our society is structured is just a big a problem as the warming itself. Theoretically, we could start a decades long slow evacuation of the smaller coastal towns, harden and build seawalls around the big coastal cities and ports, start switching over to nuclear power, encourage more local agriculture and drought resistant crops, (for example in the American south where I am, buy local tunip greens instead of avacodos and bananas from far away), move toward more chicken and insect protein, and start an intiative to educate women worldwide, raising standards and lowering birthrates. Humanity getting its poo poo together and doing all of this is possible, and we could enjoy a reasonable standard of living even in a moderate warming situation. We just are not going to. We arn't unified enough and don't have the will. Suppose that you went into space and found an exo planet that resembled earth in a moderate warming situation. Bad storms on the coasts. Occasional severe droughts, limited ocean life resources. Everything else being equal, it would still be a great planet to settle. We could easily live in such a place. It would just require a different way of organizing our society and we are not going to change until it's too late to try.
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Dec 21, 2017 22:42
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TheBlackVegetable posted:About the only way to take enough beef out of the food-chain (within an effective timeframe) would be through a virus engineered and released to kill off all cattle. Ah, but now back to the collective action problem. In the USA at least, this problem could be solved by simply ending government subsidies to cattle farmers. But then that makes imported argentianan beef more attractive, so you have to ban beef imports too I guess.
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Dec 25, 2017 04:47
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Do we even need to have this argument? Fixing our social issues with abortion and birth control so we don't have unwanted pregnancy may be enough. Out of everyone i know, only one couple actually sat down and decided they wanted kids. Everyone else had a "surprise" they felt pressured to keep.
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Apr 8, 2018 16:38
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Cingulate posted:What's your socio-economic context? Everyone I know knows how to use condoms Poor to lower middle class in the American south. Almost nobody I know with children planned for them, and they all seem to be really poor and unhappy about having them. I guess my point is lets worry about that first because its a much less controverial argument. Lets get to the point where only happy stable couples are having children. Then if the population is still rising too fast we can go from there. WorldsStongestNerd fucked around with this message at 05:16 on Apr 9, 2018 |
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Apr 9, 2018 05:13
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Thug Lessons posted:Welcome to arguing with people. Sometimes people will characterize your argument in ways you wouldn't have yourself. Anyway I stand by that statement; solar and wind growth rates would really have to go off a cliff to reach the low numbers you're predicting. I read this thread a lot and read the arguments the posters make. When i debate someone, i don't hear them say things they didn't say like you do all the time. That would be an auditory hallucination and a sign of mental illness. Whats especially odd is that you somehow do it in this text based format where you can double check exactly what was said. The fact you think your style is normal arguing is telling.
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May 18, 2018 14:48
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If you take a hand full of robot parts and computer chips and throw them up into the air, then one time out of a hundred billion they will fall to the ground in such a way that it assembles a robot A.I. capable of thinking. That robot will then think that it was intelligently designed and that its life must have some kind of meaning. The world is the way it is because none of the other random combinations that occured produced life to ask questions about it. I don't think that is misanthropic because although nothing we do has value in a cosmic sense, it does have value due to our evolution. I care about other people because that is something that I and most other humans have evolved to do. I care about the suffering global warming will cause because I evolved to have empathy. Humans have evolved to think that rare things are valuable, and nothing is more rare than the life forms that have evolved on earth. I like to create things and seeing things needlessly destroyed makes me sad, so I am an environmentalist. No "why" is needed beyond that's how I and most other humans are wired. Humans are tribal and we sometimes have difficulty solving problems because we can't get everyone to see that all humans are part of one big tribe. Appealing to things like the inherent value of nature or the purpose of life seems like a way to try to get around that problem by inventing a rallying point we can all get around. WorldsStongestNerd fucked around with this message at 04:43 on Jun 7, 2018 |
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Jun 7, 2018 04:36
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Captain Fargle posted:What are the most effective forms of carbon sequestration now anyway? Would global reforestation projects have a noticeable effect for example? No. Every atom of carbon that goes into a tree is released when that tree dies and decomposes. Reforestation will help somewhat up until the point where all the land that can be reforested is reforested. It's a onetime deal where once a tract of land has locked in all the carbon it can, ie it has all the trees that can live on it, there is no further effect. The young trees sucking up carbon is offset by the old trees dying. To create a meaningful long term effect you have to cut down the trees and do something to stop them decomposing.
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Jul 27, 2018 06:03
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Captain Fargle posted:So what gets left behind as soil/mulch? Are you saying none of that is carbon? Your are right that rotting trees decompose into carbon rich soil. If you sterilzed that soil and stored it somewhere where nothing would grow in it then that might work. Keep in mind however that it takes decades to build up even a few inches of topsoil. To Shibawanko, I think that even old construction wood in a landfill will decompose in a few decades, not enough to help us. But now you have me thinking of heart pine and ironwood and other super dense trees that are resistant to rotting. ironwood trunks dropped into a large lake would stay there for well over 100 years. WorldsStongestNerd fucked around with this message at 04:27 on Jul 28, 2018 |
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Jul 28, 2018 04:22
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One day I plan on making an effort thread on the realities of future space travel. Let me kill some time by laying a few things out here. Escaping to space is often laid out as a solution to our problems. Perhaps we can terraform mars or the moon, or maybe place habitats in orbit so we have a second home in case we gently caress up earth. It would relieve population pressure, and we don't want to keep all our eggs in one basket just in case a giant asteroid ever strikes the earth again. This will never happen because living in space is always the harder and less economical option, because humans are custom made to live on earth. If you have the tech, money, and time to terraform mars or the moon, then it would be easier to take that tech and reverse global warming on earth. If 10000 years from now an alien race came to our system and had the choice between terraforming mars or terraforming the global warming ruined earth, the earth would be the easier option. Unlike mars it already has liquid water, an atmosphere, and a magnetosphere to repel the radiation that bombards mars. If you have the tech, money, and time to place giant orbiting self contained habitats in orbit around the earth or moon, it would be cheaper and easier to build self contained habitats on the ground on earth, where you don't have to create artifical gravity or have raw materials lifted up to you. You can't live long term on the surface of the moon or mars, because those bodies don't have a magnetosphere like earth does, and the radiation that pervades space will kill you. Even the steel of a orbital habitat won't stop it. Cities on the moon or mars would have to be built underground. If a giant asteroid was going to hit the earth, and you had the tech and money to build giant cities underground on the moon or mars to house the people that are the last hope of humanity, it would be cheaper and easier to instead build giant cities under the ocean or a mile under the rocky mountains where even a dinosaur killer could be rode out for a few decades until the dust cleared. The only time fleeing to space makes sense is if an asteroid big enough to crack the planet is coming. But in that case an early warning system would be better. If you have the tech and money to colonize mars, then building an asteroid deflection system should be easy as long as you have a few years notice before it hits. Even if a 200 mile wide belt around the equater becomes a barren desert, the ice caps melt and flood he coasts, and most of the life in the ocean dies, fixing that gently caress up would be easier than terraforming the moon or mars. Even in a venus hothouse scenorio where every living thing on this earth dies and a few thousand survivors flee to underground habitats, fixing the earth would still be easier then terraforming mars, because at least the earth has a magnetosphere. If we break the pieces that make up our ecosystem, maybe we can but them back together. The other celestial bodies don't even have the pieces available in the first place. poo poo is WEIRD in space. For example the very dust on the ground on the moon is razor sharp because there is no water cycle to cause weathering. There are a million other things to consider besides just finding water and being able to react oxygen from the rocks. We are not going to be able run from this. But suppose we did manage to colonize other planets, what then? I'm lumping a lot of things together in this post besides just global warming, such as resource depletion and over population. Suppose we refused to face the music here on earth and just left. Somehow sent millions of people to the moon and mars. How long until we hosed those planets up like we've hosed the earth? How long until Mars is over populated as well? The UNICEF estimates that an average of 353,000 babies are born each day around the world. Even if we could terraform the moon, we would still have to get a handle on things here on earth, unless we had enough ships to blast off almost half a million people every day to the colonies. I firmly believe in space exploration. I would like to see a permanet observatory on the moon, and maybe even on mars, but that is as far as we are going to go. Again, even if the tech was there, even if we could live on the moon or mars, it would make more sense to use that tech on earth. I hope this pointless space derail has provided you a brief respite from the horror that is coming in your lifetime.
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Aug 13, 2018 04:04
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:This idea that the human race consistently allocates resources from easiest to hardest in order seems really counter factual. Lining up all the possible actions the human race could do and tackling them first to last seems like maybe something the machine emperor would do once he seized leadership of every country on earth, but it's pretty much never ever been the way anything in human history has ever been done. "X would be cheaper than Y" is a rational reason X should be done before Y but we live in a world that spent almost a billion dollar making hobbit movies no one liked while people lack health care or food to live. People don't operate collectively like that to globally sort what to do in what order. It's long been known that just out right buying entire houses would be cheaper for society than the cost of homelessness, but we apparently have like 500 million other things we are doing before we implement that plan. We have basically never ever operated in ideal order, rarely even in any top down enforced order at all. I don't really understand what the movie example has to do with what we are talking about but I'll take a stab at it. The problem with your example here is that terraforming a planet would be society as a unified entity striving for an agreed upon goal, whereas the example you gave is not. The people making Hobbit movies and the people worried about lack of health care and food are two different people, its not like the people fighting poverty decided to spend that money making movies. Our society values making movies more than poor people having food and allocated resources appropraitly. The people who make movies spent their money in the way that seemed best, and the people concerned about poverty spent their money in the way that seemed best. Your example of fixing homelessness by buying houses as opposed to our current methods is more interesting. Operating shelters is cheaper in the short term, while buying houses is cheaper in the long term. The problem there is a lack of long term thinking. I would argue that terraforming the moon or mars would be more expensive in both the long and short term than fixing our problems here on earth, and thus it will not be done. I don't see how your point about how society doesn't operate in any top down enforced order has anything to do with what I posted, except to unwittingly confirm my point. Terraforming the moon or tackling global warming would both require a top down enforced order, and in that case the people in charge would absolutly be making rational cost assesments.
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Aug 13, 2018 04:37
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The thread the last few pages is on the money. So many people out there think that some new carbon capture tech is going to save us from having to radically alter our society, when in reality we have to decarbonize to survive, then maybe if we are lucky we can undo some damage with capture tech.
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Sep 2, 2018 02:13
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Burt Buckle posted:International transport and travel is I think one of the biggest things that there isn’t a decarbonizing alternative to. Things like food and electricity all have zero emission alternatives that would leave people with the same quality of life, but I don’t known of a carbon free way to travel to Europe or get goods from China, things like that. That's where carbon capture can come in. We will never have enough carbon capture to offset our entire economy, but we could offset air travel as long as cost is factored in. For example, if a jet traveling to Europe emits x tons or carbon, then the cost of capturing x tons of carbon should be included in the price of the tickets instead of treated as an externality. As for the container ships to china, those are big enough to be nuclear like the larger millitary ships like carriers. Now of course all this means that air travel would be more expensive, and you might want govt owned and run shipping companies instead of letting private industry have nuclear cargo ships, but there are ways to do it.
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Sep 2, 2018 16:39
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qkkl posted:Wouldn't more rain offset global warming via evaporative cooling? Seems like the Earth will simply "sweat" to cool itself. When people refer to the earth, they are talking about the seas and the atmosphere too, the whole thing together is the system we call earth. Moving heat from one part of the earth to another, like from the atmosphere to the sea via rain, doesn't help. The total heat in the system stays the same. You fool. You absolute gibbering moron.
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Sep 4, 2018 16:01
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Individual action has to happen before collective action. Recycling, changing your diet, flying less, ect will all have only a small impact on emissions, but all of that primes people into the mindset of struggling to make changes. Before the public will accept the big changes of restructuring the transportation grid and cities, building nuclear, and revamping industrial farming, the culture has to change. You change the culture by focusing on individual actions. Again, while the small changes don't meaningfully impact emissions, they change the culture by getting people into the mindset of caring.
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Oct 21, 2018 02:00
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:I feel really unclear what the goon approved apocolypse fanfiction even is on this one. Pakistan is having a water crisis that is going to get way worse but like, is the idea they are going to nuke then occupy india? Are they going to get real poor then india is going to nuke them? Is the idea just they are both savage animal countries so if things go vaguely wrong they will just mash their face into the nuke buttons? Owl, I know you're being stupid on purpose because that's how you have fun, but the meaning of the post you quoted is that India and Pakistan should use their nuclear material in reactors to power desalination plants instead of making war, but they probably won't because of the pitfalls of human nature.
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Nov 9, 2018 16:02
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Conspiratiorist posted:No, not quite, since we cannot literally stop the bulk of our emissions overnight - save by say a devastating global thermonuclear war, which would actually have the very fun effect of causing a short nuclear winter prior to the rapid temperature rise, just for that extra dose of gently caress you. So over the span of the first few decades that we start making serious changes, its going to appear to the uneducated public that no progress is being made as temps continue to rise.
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Nov 16, 2018 03:23
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