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No, they've picked up something fierce. Asia-Pacific is one big ball of "burn all the loving trees to the ground. ALL THE TREES. BURN THEM."
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# ¿ Dec 15, 2015 16:10 |
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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 20:22 |
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Nationalize the existing reactors and then build everything under the control of a federal utility, like a modern and civilized country. Since the mandate is to cover operating and upgrade costs, rather than a profit motive, power costs to consumers drop through the floor. Private ownership of power generation is loving dumb, what is this, 1889?
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# ¿ Dec 16, 2015 01:41 |
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computer parts posted:Though to be fair in Germany the only effect that seems to have is making it more likely that all the nuclear plants get shut down in favor of coal. Canadian provinces are busy selling off our multi-billion dollar profitable hydro utilities to private operators, for pennies, so I guess I'm not really one to talk. Not that I agree with it, it's pretty much an act of treason IMO.
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# ¿ Dec 16, 2015 16:03 |
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The best hope for pioneering nuclear technology is almost certainly China, IMO. Largely because they have the greatest need to switch their baseline to something else ASAP, and their space program has demonstrated they have no qualms with accidents wiping out small cities in the name of advancement.
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# ¿ Dec 17, 2015 21:34 |
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Batham posted:People complaining about GMO's in general need to do some serious fact checking by taking a good look at food production over the last 50 years. Is it all good? Of course not, nothing is. But the amount of good GMO's have done cannot be denied. If it weren't for them, we'd be facing really big problems already. Whether or not this is true hinges on the assumption that allowing hundreds of millions (billions?) of people to subsist in abject lifelong poverty is an objective "good", compared to them never existing due to a lack of carrying capacity in the food supply. Personally I consider Norman Borlaug to be in the top five creators of human misery in the history of our species, and a fine example of the road to hell being paved with good intentions.
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# ¿ Jan 2, 2016 20:46 |
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computer parts posted:There's too many people living on earth, but truly it's the poor people who are at fault for existing. I was pretty clear that it's Norman Borlaugs fault, and he wasn't very poor. The poor can't help being born into irreversible poverty and dying young after knowing nothing except misery and toil, but it's possible to prevent that from happening to billions in the first place. Borlaug hosed up big time. He introduced agricultural practices which allowed for a population boom in undeveloped nations with no ability to support those people economically, and which utilized farming methods which have proved ruinous to the environment as the decades have worn on (rendering it increasingly difficult to grow enough food to support these subsisting masses of humanity). You'd have to be morally and ethically bankrupt to see any of this as a good thing. Rime fucked around with this message at 23:57 on Jan 2, 2016 |
# ¿ Jan 2, 2016 23:51 |
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Squalid posted: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. The green revolution and widespread use of inorganic fertilizers did nothing to alleviate poverty or squalor, it simply added exponentially more bodies to the pile. Where once you had extremely poor people making do with subsistence farming, and dying of starvation, now you have double or triple the number of extremely poor people growing poorer to buy the specialized materials required to produce their crops and dying of starvation in unprecedented numbers. Materials which have quite literally salted the earth they are being used on, and are rendering it unable to produce crops due to a build up of salts and contaminants. This doesn't even take into account the famine events sparked by decade-long droughts or disastrous monsoon seasons brought on by global warming, these deaths rest purely on the few who continue to believe this course of action was in any way wise. If saving a few million lives yesterday to instead watch hundreds of millions die in coming decades isn't sociopathic (or at the very least, criminally short sighted), then frankly I do not know what is. In any case, that genie has long escaped the bottle and there is little we can do to change the tragedy already underway in the developing world.
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# ¿ Jan 3, 2016 01:26 |
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CommieGIR posted:.....I'm a little confused here. I understand the issues environmentally that you are addressing, but how does increased crop yields and decreased need to use pesticide and herbicide use that coincides with GMOs mean his advances are a bad thing? Population booms don't trickle off as the food supply does, and Borlaug dropped the biggest crop yield advancements since the industrial revolution on the world and then peace'd out. These crop yields dramatically increased population growth in undeveloped nations, because god forbid any government anywhere take steps to stop humans breeding like vermin (see reactions in this thread), population growth which continues to this day. Unfortunately, these agricultural practices have a creeping destructive effect on the growing medium, thus reducing crop yields in the long-term. This would have been disastrous on its own, but now climate change is amplifying the effects with things like decade-long droughts. From the man himself: Norman Borlaug posted:"Africa, the former Soviet republics, and the cerrado are the last frontiers. After they are in use, the world will have no additional sizable blocks of arable land left to put into production, unless you are willing to level whole forests, which you should not do. So, future food-production increases will have to come from higher yields. And though I have no doubt yields will keep going up, whether they can go up enough to feed the population monster is another matter. So what did he do? Tossed his miracle out there and just prayed that somebody pulled something better out of their hat down the road, lest hundreds of millions of people starve to death. He knew what would happen without population control measures. He knew it would do nothing except increase the number of people living in squalor and "knowing the physical sensation of hunger". He knew he was kicking the can down the road and consigning masses to misery and death in the future. gently caress that guy.
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# ¿ Jan 3, 2016 01:52 |
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Oh, of course, it's extremely racist to think that hundreds of millions of people, of any nationality, dying of starvation in abject squalor is loving horrifying and should have been avoided at all costs.
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# ¿ Jan 3, 2016 02:05 |
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blowfish posted:Most population growth will happen in Africa (+3 billion or so) and Asia (+1 billion-ish). Africa especially is being farmed by subsistence farmers with badly domesticated perennial crops in many regions. Some proper irrigation, fertiliser use and targeted breeding/GM on the crops to bring their resource allocation in line with annual and therefore better domesticated crops and to have less famines etc. due to bad weather would go a long way. We'd first have to stop local governments from expropriating farms from experienced owners, deporting them, and handing the land to government lackies with zero farming experience. Compare domestic food security in Africa pre and post the 1980's (I'm looking at you, Zimbabwe).
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# ¿ Jan 9, 2016 02:22 |
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Freakazoid_ posted:West coast starfish are dying. Biggest wildlife die-off ever recorded. It was only 2-3 years ago that they were commonplace in the puget sound, but they've been so thoroughly devastated by sea star wasting disease, it's likely these starfish will become endangered species. It enrages me that every time this gets brought up, a stagnant tidal pool of ignorant fucktards appears and tries to blame it on Fukushima. The timing for that meltdown could not possibly have been worse.
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# ¿ Jan 21, 2016 13:20 |
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What they really want to say is: " The question is no longer whether the climate is changing, but how we can best monetize that change for profit."
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# ¿ Feb 9, 2016 08:54 |
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Edit: It's 4am and climate change is not the climbing thread.
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# ¿ Feb 13, 2016 12:59 |
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Overflight posted:tl;dr If things are so bad WHAT IS THE GODDAMNED POINT IN ANYTHING? I'm going to tell you a story, Overflight, stay a while and listen. A thousand years ago in eastern Anatolia, there was a marvelous city called Ani: capital of the Armenian empire. In the 9th century this city shone brighter than Constantinople in wealth and power, "the city of 1001 churches" they called it. Stunning feats of architecture were performed, the crumbled remnants of which can still be seen to this day. It was one of the greatest cities of the medieval world. Was. You see, at the turn of the Millennium, fate turned on Ani. The Seljuks invaded and massacred over half the population, burned it to the ground, and took 50,000 citizens as slaves. It recovered, slightly, and then in 1226 Ghengis Khan and his Mongols rode through and left it as a pile of corpses. The following centuries were the same: Turks, Safavids, Tamerlane; they all pushed it down the road to ruin. All that is left today is a vast plain of grass that some old guys herd cows through, dotted with a half-dozen shattered carcasses of monolithic cathedrals. What's the point of this story? Ever heard of this place before? No? Why Not? We don't know the names of the architects who designed the few standing monuments there. We don't know the names of the millions who lived and died there for centuries, what their hopes and dreams were, what works they might have made in their free time. Who were their great artists? Their famous philosophers? Their scientists or merchant lords? What passions and sorrows cast light upon the lives which lived and died behind those crumbling walls? We do not know. We don't know, because ultimately your entire loving life is externally pointless unless you achieve something so earth shatteringly unique that it escapes the inevitable entropy of history. Unless you plan to kill a non-trivial percentage of total humans like Tamerlane, or discover / invent something that fundamentally alters our society like Ford, you're poo poo out of luck and nobody will even know you existed in about 200 years after you die (give or take). So spend less time worrying about the future: the only "point" to your life is the one you decide on and make for yourself. quote:"And on the pedestal these words appear:
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# ¿ Mar 20, 2016 01:41 |
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You guys are funny. The impact on the first world isn't just going to be high food prices, it's going to be war and social shocks the likes of which we haven't seen in centuries. The hell going down in the middle east? That didn't start due to a sudden pressing need for Democratic revolution, it started because the worst drought in a thousand years has been ravaging the region since the late 1990s and that caused an explosion of radicalism. Sudan? Darfur? Look at all that drought. You think weather patterns disrupting fragile crops are just going to drive the cauliflower prices up? No, it's going to cause unprecedented mass migrations, like the one currently going down in Europe. It's going to cause clashes of culture that flare into violence, like Europe. You think we won't see the bad effects of climate collapse in our lifetimes? We already are, go read the news, it's only a matter of time before that shitshow comes to every shore.
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# ¿ Mar 22, 2016 20:26 |
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Wanderer posted:
Well, since carbon nanotubes have been shown to act identically to asbestos when they contact cells, it could be an easy fix for that overpopulation issue.
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# ¿ Mar 22, 2016 22:48 |
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People don't get how deep of a pit we're in, period, and they won't until they can no longer buy almonds and their leisure pursuits are entirely disrupted.
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# ¿ Mar 28, 2016 20:33 |
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Climate models have underestimated Earth’s sensitivity to CO2 changes, study findsquote:A Yale University study says global climate models have significantly underestimated how much the Earth’s surface temperature will rise if greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase as expected. I can't wait to experience the end-permian extinction, without the hassle of building a time machine.
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# ¿ Apr 7, 2016 22:20 |
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It's kind of disturbing how common the refrain of "well, Some humans will survive, somehow, maybe" is becoming, as if this somehow excuses the complete destruction of our biosphere and extinction of most species on earth. Like, what the poo poo is wrong with people?
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# ¿ Apr 8, 2016 00:45 |
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Grouchio posted:So there's literally no good news to be had anymore? Isn't the US making progress in cutting carbon emissions, for example? And the rise of electric cars? https://youtu.be/XM0uZ9mfOUI At this point I suspect we're so far gone that most governments have taken the same stance as they would towards an imminent asteroid strike, or the eruption of yellowstone: we can't stop what's coming, we can only mitigate the panic by playing down the severity of things for as long as possible. Like, gently caress me, there won't be coral reefs anywhere on earth inside of ten years. You think we can reverse that with some carbon tax rebates?
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# ¿ Apr 8, 2016 03:21 |
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Global warming, El Nino leave 36 per cent of coral reefs on death watch. By July, that number could rise to 60 per cent quote:About 36 per cent of the world's coral reefs — 72 per cent of the U.S. reefs — are in such warm water they are under official death watch, and that could rise to up to 60 per cent of the world's coral by July, said Mark Eakin, the coral reef watch coordinator for the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Eakin said Kiritimati was the worst he's seen, with American Samoa a close second.
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# ¿ Apr 8, 2016 03:42 |
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Take risks, enjoy life to the fullest, accept that within 30 years or so its all going to come crashing to a halt. Love your friends, make few enemies, cherish every dewy morning and warm sunset as if it were your last. Don't set aside today thinking it will pay off tomorrow or further down the road. We are not our parents generation, there is no hope for us worth saving for.
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# ¿ Apr 8, 2016 07:05 |
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Prolonged Priapism posted:You're not off base about the difficulty of the transition. And certainly the political landscape is going to change over our lives. But I think you're sort of over-emphasizing what it means for a civilization to fall. I don't know all that much about history, but wouldn't the two most recent examples be the fall of the Soviet Union and the dissolving of the colonial empires (mainly Britain)? Sure, the political structure of the world changed a lot (and maybe some people that wouldn't normally get invaded or have a famine did), but for most people in most places not that much changed. Flags changed, prices went up or down, more or less foreigners would come by your town. For the heads of state and the capital city I'm sure it felt like the world was ending, but what about farmers in the fields a hundred or thousand miles away? The poo poo is this? If you know nothing about history, why are you spitballing about events in complete ignorance? "Not much changed for people", are you crazy? The fall of the USSR was loving horrific, not just in Russia but in all of the eastern bloc states as well. It lead to twenty years of civil wars and genocides. Millions of people starved, or were murdered when their neighbours decided to dredge up a pre-soviet blood feud. Half a continent went from a very high standard of living and technology on par with the west, to (using an example from Vanadzor in Armenia) using advanced crystal-growth boxes to cultivate potatoes to survive. The Soviet farming system ceased to exist during privatization. Farmers one week were begging on the streets homeless the next, their career sold to gangster who liquidated the assets for scrap. Like, holy loving poo poo, I know westerners are ignorant when it comes to all things Soviet, but to say that implosion was just a "changing of flags" for the people living there is beyond idiotic.
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# ¿ Apr 9, 2016 23:08 |
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Prolonged Priapism posted:Fair enough. You're right that I'm not really knowledgeable about the human cost of the Soviet collapse. No. This is all so, so, so wrong that I do not even know where to start. Should I talk about the destruction of Assyria, where Greeks camping beneath the shattered walls of Nineveh two centuries later didn't even know who built that city which once housed half a million people? Where the now-tribal survivors of Assyria didn't know who they were? Should I talk about the predations of ilk like Ghengis Khan and Tamerlame, who functionally destroyed civilization in asia, levelling cities and slaughtering percentages of the human species? Should I address the fall of eastern Rome, where cities and villages were sacked en-masse by Germanic tribes, who then set themselves up as petty dictators paying taxes to Byzantium by bleeding Roman peasants? Speak of the immediate decline in living standards across Italy during that period? The collapse of the public works networks, failure of sanitation, complete depopulation of major metropolitan centres like Rome due to plague and starvation? The fleeing of peasants from the hinterlands, as brigands raided their holdings to rape and pillage? The destruction of trade and implosion of classical culture? Should I talk about how all that affected the common person in a single lifetime? Should I talk about how we didn't even know almost all of our own ancient history up until the 20th century? Hell, we don't even need to go back centuries to find a good example. I brought up Syria several pages ago. Two decades of a drought worse than any in the past thousand years caused that country to fall into war and anarchy. By any stretch of the imagination, civilization has "collapsed" in Syria right now. That took less than five years to happen. Yeah, sure, people live on. That doesn't mean it was pretty or easy for anyone involved. Rime fucked around with this message at 02:47 on Apr 10, 2016 |
# ¿ Apr 10, 2016 02:44 |
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And you just explained why that money is being spent where it is, rather than on Nuclear.
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# ¿ Apr 19, 2016 03:19 |
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The best part about discussing alternative energy sources is how it reveals the lack of grasp people have on infrastructure. Switching to nuclear, that's great. Dismantling the petrochemical industry? You can't. You cannot, unless you propose we kill billions and permanently reduce our tech level to that of the Amish. From plastics to petrochemical fertilizers, to literally the grease our civilization needs to keep spinning, you can't kill off fossil fuels and expect things to be fine and dandy. Furthermore, if we simply stop using oil and gas derived fuels? They go back to being waste products. What do you plan to do with billions of litres of wasted hydrocarbons that are now a byproduct of producing everything else which we require for our civilization to function? Gas will just go back to being burnt at the well if there's no market, which hardly solves the carbon footprint. Like, it's nice that you all think of the big fancy picture of powering cars and houses, but you don't know or care about the several hundred barrels of lubricant a single small scale factory will require in a single year, and the monstrously polluting oil cracking plant required to create that lube. Stop looking at the machine and focus on the cogs that make it function, that's where the horror sets in. All that plastic, those fertilizers, the complex gasses used for welding, grease, all of that is only cheap and accessible because they are byproducts of the existing fossil fuels process. Remove that subsidization and poo poo gets wierd. Rime fucked around with this message at 19:27 on Apr 19, 2016 |
# ¿ Apr 19, 2016 19:21 |
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Being anxious about a worldwide phenomenon driven by billions of lives over which you have no control, is a problem. One day things might go to poo poo for you, if you have kids they're probably going to die horribly, but this is the case for the vast majority of the human race right now and always has been. The only difference when it comes to climate change is that it will drag the western world back into suffering it hasn't known for generations and has forgotten how to deal with. You're anxious because your mind knows one day you or your children might be living like the Sudanese do now, today, and that is uncomfortable. poo poo sucks, eh? What are you gonna do about it? Sit there and tremble and let it ruin the good times while they last? Right now you're one of the luckiest humans who has ever lived, since this species was formed. Do something with your loving lives.
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# ¿ Apr 23, 2016 21:06 |
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Eh? I don't care. Row row fight the power by getting high and waving some signs, climb all 14 8k'ers solo, build a backyard nuclear reactor and become an urban terrorist, assasinate a president. Do Something. Every moment you waste on SA complaining about being paralyzed by existential dread is a moment spent burning such privilege as kings and emperors of old never knew, that wealth of opportunity you have today is rapidly draining away as things accelerate, and you sure as poo poo won't be able to go dive the barrier reef in 2030. You'll be too busy remembering what almonds tasted like, the last time you saw one, ten years prior. No goon can individually stop global climate change, that ship sailed before I was even fuckin' born. So, what, you're going to waste your time today worrying about it and then have done nothing when it does arrive? Even if Wanderers (rather optimistic) scenario is the future, you'll regret having squandered your time now. At least Caro did something more interesting than bitch and moan. This applies to life outside of the context of impending apocalypse, btw. Now, meanwhile in Nicaragua: quote:The drastic reduction or disappearance of 34 rivers, the near-complete evaporation of at least four lakes, the loss of nearly 6,000 hectares (14,815 acres) of pine forest, reduced rainfall and the advance of the agricultural frontier are some of the challenges Nicaragua faces, the NGOs said in their "Nicaraguan Socio-Environmental Crisis: Post-2016 Drought" report. Rime fucked around with this message at 05:00 on Apr 24, 2016 |
# ¿ Apr 24, 2016 04:25 |
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The idea that your children will have decent rail service, let alone fast, is also pretty hilarious unless you live in Europe, China, or Japan.
Rime fucked around with this message at 14:39 on Apr 24, 2016 |
# ¿ Apr 24, 2016 14:36 |
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Some of the happiest people I have met in my entire life were living on $150 USD a month in a technical war zone. They were all university educated, some of them really quite successful in the structure of the former USSR. Hell one dude worked on the Soviet moonshot FFS, now he's a part time taxi driver. An old platinum investor from Fresno that I met there put it to me succinctly: quote:"I had a great gig in California, made bank, had women. It got boring, what was the point? So I gave it all up and came here to fight in the war, but I was too old and the war was over. Rime fucked around with this message at 13:12 on Apr 27, 2016 |
# ¿ Apr 27, 2016 07:06 |
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Wasting time responding to Arkane is a fools errand, just put him on ignore and move along. We have bigger things to worry about, like Falling oceanic oxygen levels. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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# ¿ Apr 28, 2016 14:28 |
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I experienced 50 degrees Celsius last year in southeastern Turkey. It's hard to put that kind of heat into words: the air hurts to breathe, it's hard to stay conscious in the shade, entering the sun for just a minute is like stepping into the flame of a BBQ. You can't even swim in rivers, because the water acts as a magnifying glass and cooks you. By 8am it was over 30 degrees, and it was still over 22 at midnight. I saw grass spontaneously combust twice in the same day. Maybe there was glass or something nearby to cause it, but it just went poof. I drank 8L of water and was still dehydrated. You can't comprehend that suffering until you've felt it. Civilization won't survive that if it spreads. Rime fucked around with this message at 03:14 on May 3, 2016 |
# ¿ May 3, 2016 02:58 |
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Oh wierd, we either just missed each other or might have crossed paths somewhere. Southern Armenia was insane in June, I can't even imagine it in August. The locals were really worried about the water shortages last summer, said it's been getting steadily worse since the 80's but without the USSR to geoengineer they see the south losing a lot of people soon. The bowl of Yerevan must have been hell. There was heat lightning every night when I left. Then you look at these desertified hellscapes and realize 500 years ago they were the heart of civilization in the caucasus, massive ruined cities everywhere that go back 8000 years. Ani just across the border eclipsed Constantinople ffs, and now it's too hot to breathe there in the summer let alone grow crops sufficient to sustain a city of a quarter million. Hell, even 30 years ago Armenia was one of the most productive agricultural regions in the USSR. Makes you think. Rime fucked around with this message at 07:48 on May 3, 2016 |
# ¿ May 3, 2016 07:19 |
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Weather stations present an aggregate measurement across large regions which does not account for localized outliers. The thermometers I observed in Hasenkeyf read 50-51 degrees while I was there.
Rime fucked around with this message at 20:18 on May 3, 2016 |
# ¿ May 3, 2016 20:15 |
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sitchensis posted:Luckily we can look to Fort McMurray in northern Alberta, Canada for an instructive example. Exceptionally dry conditions and high temperatures have caused an out of control wildfire that has since forced the evacuation of the entire city. It is unprecedented. I was quite literally writing a post around this picture when I refreshed just in case. A great example of a decade of warming allowing invasive pests to decimate the boreal forest, leaving it a pile of tinder for uncommonly hot temperatures.
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# ¿ May 4, 2016 04:56 |
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That was awesome and a quality post, thanks for taking the time to do that.
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# ¿ May 5, 2016 02:06 |
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Turkey. Turkey is a pot getting ready to boil over due to the stresses of climate change. For decades it's just been the Kurds fighting against the Turks, but as soon as the Turks turn against their own government, it's all going to implode.
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# ¿ May 6, 2016 21:10 |
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Unfortunately, if the change over takes 30 years, it will kill our civilization just as nicely as it not happening at all.
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# ¿ May 20, 2016 01:30 |
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Trabisnikof posted:That's not really right on a number of levels. First, we don't actually need to stop all petrochemical use, we just need to stop using it for energy. It is ok for the climate to keep using oil for plastics. Second, a 30 year timeframe to 0 petroleum fuels would be absolutely huge. That's a large chunk of total emissions. That plus actions like the Clean Power Plan would be most of what the developed world needs to do (plus fund things). It's really cool that you are a cornucopian idealist and all, but it's as tiresome and annoying a schtick as Arkane. Please tell Syrians or Venezuelans about how civilization hasn't collapsed for them due to the knock on effects of climate change (drought, and drought), and then tell us how that won't similarly impact the west in under 30 years. The west, which relies on a vast network of imported goods from impoverished and borderline unstable nations in order to keep its entire economy functioning. The west, which faces increasing food insecurity of its own in major producing areas due to sustained drought. The west: which has demonstrated inherent systemic inflexibility in the face of minor domestic or international concerns such as poverty reduction or medical insurance, let alone a mind bogglingly complex threat which threatens to destabilize our entire biosphere in a generation and which will almost certainly require the death of consumerism (and thus our economy) to even begin to mitigate. Bonus points: explain how the infrastructure for extraction and rendering of hydrocarbons into industrial purposes such as plastics or lubricants can be carbon neutral. You've never seen a cracking plant, have you. Sure, yeah, we've got 30 years: to make peace with the inevitable. Rime fucked around with this message at 07:23 on May 20, 2016 |
# ¿ May 20, 2016 07:20 |
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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 20:22 |
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freezepops posted:I'm pretty sure climate change wasn't the root cause of either crisis. The Syrian conflict is far more complicated than some people no longer had access to food and water and I'm pretty sure you have zero evidence the issues Venezuela faces are primely caused by drought. About 5% of Venezuela's economic output was agriculture. Venezuela has collapsed because a severe and unprecedented drought reduced their hydroelectric production to zero, which nuked an already struggling economy. Syria has been suffering an increasingly harsh drought since the 1990s, which caused unprecedented migration by impoverished rural populations, who ultimately turned into radicalized rebels out of desperation in the face of an incompassionate government. Tl;dr: You're wrong.
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# ¿ May 20, 2016 14:57 |