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Good news everyonequote:Imagine a wonderful world, a planet on which there was no threat of climate breakdown, no loss of freshwater, no antibiotic resistance, no obesity crisis, no terrorism, no war. Surely, then, we would be out of major danger? Sorry. Even if everything else were miraculously fixed, we’re finished if we don’t address an issue considered so marginal and irrelevant that you can go for months without seeing it in a newspaper. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/25/treating-soil-like-dirt-fatal-mistake-human-life
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Nov 25, 2016 19:26
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Deadly Ham Sandwich posted:I know TED talks can be a lot of dumb bullshit to make people feel better, but how is this dudes idea? Basically using grazing animals for land management to reverse desertification of grasslands; the new fauna and top soil should absorb a lot of carbon. Is this dumb bull poo poo? Check out this sweet statistic from that video: Every year, burning grasslands in Africa gives off more and more damaging pollutants than 6 trillion cars. [statistic linked in the video below] Yeah, I think I might not trust his judgment. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI&t=651s
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Dec 3, 2016 14:51
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GlyphGryph posted:i cant actually find the thing you seem to be talking about in the video so im just gonna respond based on guesses and sssumption... I linked the video at the start of his claim (10:51): "burning one hectare of grassland gives off more and more damaging pollutants than 6,000 cars, and we are burning in Africa - every single year - more than one bilion hectares" First off, what does the first half of that claim even mean? It's a non-scientific and functionally meaningless measure (6,000 average cars driven in an average way in an average year?), designed only to present a large number that people who don't like pollution will be dismayed by. The second half of the claim - 1 billion hectares are burned in Africa per year - is grossly implausible, given that Africa has a total area of 3 billion hectares. If we generously assume that there are 1.5 billion hectares of grassland in Africa (not being able to find a figure more precise than "nearly half of Africa is grassland", which includes savanna that may be highly wooded), then it is impossible to burn 1 billion hectares per year if at least half does not regrow over the following year and the other half over the following year. How can this grassland (or any) regrow if not by absorbing roughly the same CO2 that it emitted when it was burned? Edit: forgot to add this. Burning/burned grassland may not significantly increase GHG emissions from that area. "Results indicate that fire did not increase post-burning soil GHG emissions in this tropical grasslands characterized by acidic, well drained and nutrient-poor soil." http://www.biogeosciences.net/7/3459/2010/bg-7-3459-2010.pdf
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Dec 3, 2016 18:02
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blowfish posted:What I meant to say is that Ted talk guy needs to get basic science facts right. Which is why the TED talk is dumb and we should not promote turning Africa's grasslands into cattle ranches.
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Dec 3, 2016 19:32
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Squalid posted:Most of Africa's grasslands are already cattle ranches That depends on the density of cattle needed to call an area a "ranch" and how many trees per hectare it takes to distinguish savanna grassland from wooded savanna; if "most of Africa's grasslands are already cattle ranches", the guy in the TED talk is using bogus figures to promote the creation of a situation that already exists. Another thing to note is that raising cattle for food is different from allowing an equal mass of wild animals to browse the same area, as the fertility is taken from the farmed area and ends up in cities and then the sea when the area is farmed, while the fertility is cycled with lesser losses in the natural state; turning [the remaining] grasslands into ranches will deplete the soil eventually.
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Dec 3, 2016 23:33
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I stumbled upon an interesting perspective on the developing cataclysm. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/dec/07/the-holocene-hangover-it-is-time-for-humanity-to-make-fundamental-changes
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Dec 7, 2016 20:21
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SpaceCadetBob posted:Alternatively, have kids. They will not only give your life a sense of purpose and happiness, but you can also raise them to be good stewards of their surrounding and maybe, just maybe they will help the next civilization not make the same mistakes we did. We've been through this several times in this thread: having children can never result in "good stewards of their surroundings"; the best they can do is be less terrible ravagers of the environment than their peers. Having children is categorically a bad thing for the world. The "next civilization" can't make the same mistakes that we did, since the resources required to create a destructive civilization like ours will not exist.
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Dec 18, 2016 21:35
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SpaceCadetBob posted:However it reeks of naivety to say other people shouldn't have kids because; as you put it "they can't assure their happiness or success." That's an ethical position, not an environmental position. Having kids is bad for the environment - this is the subject in question in "Climate Change: What is to be Done?", not whether it's bad for children to be born into a worsening world. GlyphGryph posted:Because a number of posters have given up not just on fighting climate change but on the future in general, and they feel the need to convince others to give up on the future as well at every opportunity (while ignoring the logical conclusions of their own arguments because it would personally inconvenience them) Not having children because to have children is bad for the environment is NOT "giving up" on fighting climate change or on the future in general; the idea is to benefit those living today and the unborn children of other people who don't care or don't understand the consequences of their decisions. Fangz posted:I would kinda point out that it's decidedly unstrategic, giving how we know children inherit their parents' viewpoints, to have all the dickhead selfish morons continue to breed while everyone who gives a poo poo removes themselves from the genepool. Purely thinking in terms of 'hey a future human will emit more than the lack of a human' is rather reductive. Maybe your child will persuade 100 others to reduce their emissions. Maybe your child will invent tech that will very literally save the world. The chance that YOUR child will cause a greater reduction in environmental and resource degradation than that generated by 100 others is extremely remote, and any number less than 1% is a net negative. If you think that a person is able to do such a thing, why can't it be you or one of the other 7 billion people already alive? Who in the world is already causing/influencing a net reduction in emissions that outweighs their own? (very, very few people, and why can't that be you?) How will a child born in nine months be able to "invent tech that will very literally save the world" when we need that now, not in 20+ years? Since modern science and tech is collaborative, the chance that an individual will "invent" such fanciful "world saving" technology, rather than it being an inevitable consequence of cooperative work is another remote possibility.
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Dec 19, 2016 12:10
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Fangz posted:Actually I hope to think that my contribution as a scientist means that I am a net negative on global emissions over the course of my life. If you are already a scientist who appears to claim to be working to reduce global carbon emissions, and who claims that "statistically my offspring is dramatically more likely to do something about the future than the vast majority of humanity", and you use yourself as an example, you are ignoring the thousands of people ("the vast majority of humanity") for every one like you who are not in such a rare position; this is a bad way to rationalize the concept that a child might generate a net reduction of emissions. If you personally educate and control your child to steer them to achieve your aim, then that might happen, but this is not representative of over 99% of people. I did not claim that "per capita emissions can only increase", and the idea that "you not having a child would probably just increase the chance of someone else having a child" is laughable and the opposite of reality - the more people choose to have fewer children, the less stigmatized childlessness will be. It is because our choices are representative of a fraction of society - whether it's the number of children, or riding a bike instead of driving - that such superficially "basically about a 1/billion" numbers add up to percentages of world emissions; each of us represents a part of the entire society, and while we each make contributions in the tens of millionths to billionths scale, these contributions sum up (whether positive or negative) when we look at everyone in society who makes similar decisions - this is culture. Similarly, your vote is not worthless because it is only a ten or hundred millionth of the total vote, as your vote is representative of other people who think like you, and these votes add up to political change*. *Except in countries with backward political systems where one person does not equal one vote You should "particularly give a poo poo about the future of humanity" because you will still be in it for several decades, if not because you are a social being with human empathy. Nice piece of fish posted:Also, the no child policy bullshit is the worst derail. It's worse than tedious and probably the most unrealistic and ineffective way to combat climate change. Just give it a rest. Is there really a misconception among readers of this thread that people are promoting a "no child policy"? I am promoting that having children should not be promoted, but I have not advocated any policy to actively reduce childbirth. People need to understand that you can't claim to care about your emissions and pollution if you also decide to have children, because every child you have undoes any reduction in environmental degradation that your thoughtful choices may have made.
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Dec 19, 2016 15:31
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Fangz posted:This statement is inconsistent with how you began. The point is that individual situations and worldviews are different. There's no way you can make the blanket viewpoint that 'if you care about emissions, you can't decide to have a child'. It depends on your assumptions. You are not speaking to 'thousands of people' here, you're talking to individuals and it's an individual choice. If you care about emissions, you will know that to have a child will add about 50% of your emissions, and since you care about emissions, you will not want to make this decision. If your assumptions are different, you are wrong. As I said, each individual makes a variety of choices, and is representative of a fraction of the population. If you decide to bike to work instead of drive, you are representative of the 5% (made up number) of the population who have had that option and chosen to bike, as an example. When we promote cycling to work, the choices of individuals (thousands of them) will cause this number to increase as an aggregate and emissions will decrease. Most of human emissions result from the aggregate of individual choices; if people make better individual choices, emissions decrease. I don't want to "save human civilization" (and I did not make any such claim) - I just see that the choices I could make often have negative effects on other living beings, so I try not to choose such options when there are less damaging ones. This does not seem abstract to me, despite that I don't know the name of the person who will not become a climate refugee because I produced hundreds of tonnes less CO2e over my lifetime than the average Westerner. That's the same kind of abstraction that people fail to make when they handwave away their emissions because they are "just one person out of billions" - within the average person's lifetime, hundreds of millions or billions of people will suffer or even die because of the collective individual choices of average people today; will you be responsable for the death of 0.1 people or 10 because of your individual choices? (and I don't mean anyone reading this thread in particular, but "you" in general) If you want to "ensure the lives of your dependents" (I presume that you mean to ensure a better quality of life?), you must produce dependents, that's tautological. Unfortunately, if someone already has children, each extra that they produce will result in a degradation of the quality of life of their existing children, other people and their children. If someone does not have children, then they must degrade the quality of life of all people in order to produce a child...
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Dec 19, 2016 16:56
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Trabisnikof posted:Glass is really the most iffy to recycle. Since it is inert in the landfill and uses about the same energy to recycle or make from sand. It falls in some horrible "depends on how far 4 different trucks have to drive" and probably varies from a location to location basis. But from a public education and policy perspective, better to keep recycling glass just to instill the norm and keep the drat bottles off the street. My local authority sent around a leaflet about local waste disposal and it stated that putting glass in the "landfill" (incinerator) trash can is a net cost to them, but that recycling it earns them about the same as the cost would have been to dispose of it. Also there was a diagram that quoted a figure for how much less energy it takes to make glass from old glass than primary materials and it was much cheaper, though I forget the precise multiple. Pro tip: A former housemate worked in a glass factory and he said that you should not clean glass before you put in the recycling, as the less organic matter there is in the glass, the more flux (or whatever) they have to add. One of his colleagues made a mistake one time that resulted in potentially dangerous bottles and it cost the company millions in refunds. He got demoted. Funny/not funny story: I visited the incinerator and recycling center a couple of years back and the woman who did the tour told us that the number in the "recycling triangle" on plastic products represents how many times the plastic has been recycled. I told her that it actually represents the type of plastic, and how would you know how many times the molecules had been recycled anyway, but she insisted and I just let it drop.
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Dec 20, 2016 00:55
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GlyphGryph posted:The fairy tale is thinking you are ever going to convince people to reduce their quality of life. Start by doing what is necessary, then what is possible, and suddenly you are doing the impossible.
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Dec 20, 2016 15:56
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Nevvy Z posted:False Dichotomy. It's also a strawman, because nobody is telling people to become "ascetic monks".
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Jan 10, 2017 20:36
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Uranium Phoenix posted:Posts not about despair are met with "yeah, but it's not enough to make a difference." Well, of course it isn't, by itself. Climate change is a problem that needs a constant stream of small changes that begin to add up. There is no one solution. I think the thread reaction to "hey here's a thing I or some group did" should be celebrate and add to, not denigrate then shitpost. Seems like goons are too edgy for that, though. Uranium Phoenix posted:Individual actions, as long as you're not literally the chief executive of a county, are almost entirely meaningless.
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Jan 11, 2017 17:28
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ChairMaster posted:It's not a planetary crisis we're facing here, it's just a crisis with regards to the future of our own insignificant species. It's not "just a crisis with regards to the future of our own insignificant species", it's a crisis for the 7 billion PEOPLE already alive and the billions that will follow before an equilibrium is achieved in a few centuries. CyclicalAberration posted:There needs to be a carbon tax without exemptions A carbon tax without exemptions would either be too cheap to reduce the emissions of the rich, or too expensive for the poor to survive. What is needed is a rationing of energy, with everyone getting a small but adequate allowance, and energy use above that taxed on an aggressive ramping scale.
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Jan 20, 2017 11:36
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call to action posted:Also Rime is correct that humans aren't worth saving, I'd much rather preserve the Amazon than your lovely kid. That's an extravagantly melodramatic false dichotomy.
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Jan 25, 2017 15:32
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Strictly, if ice is lost from Greenland, the sea level in Antarctica will rise, ice shelves will break off more quickly and continental ice loss will accelerate, but the specific type of ice that we are discussing every week in the Arctic is sea ice, which does not directly infulence sea level.
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Feb 3, 2017 13:57
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Unormal posted:Living somewhere you can't have farm animals and fantasizing that you'll live. Farm animals require an enormous amount of land -- and, as we know from reading this thread -- they are a very inefficient way to produce nutrition for humans. If you have enough land to "have farm animals" and survive, you have enough land to produce a great excess of food for you and your community instead. Having conspicuous farm animals is going to be a great way to attract poachers and rustlers in the near future, when meat is a rarer commodity, by the way. Some fish and ducks in your ponds to eat mosquito larvae and slugs is a different matter, but you're not going to be living off them.
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Feb 23, 2017 09:30
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Unormal posted:I'm 100% certain you've never stepped foot on a farm. The upside of things like poultry is that they turn calories that you wouldn't otherwise consume into eggs (giving you proteins, fats and amino acids that might be hard to come by with whatever plants you can grow wherever) at a pretty good FCR (like less than 2 for poultry), including all kinds of waste, human-inedible plants and insects. You can have a flock of guinea fowl and they'll turn your field ticks into breakfast at a rate of 1+ egg per birdday; all this while consuming 0 arabale land (you can farm their forage land), and in fact removing insect pests from your acreage and playing guard-dog. Fuckers will eat your strawberries though. Yeah, apart from that I lived on a farm with sheep, ducks and chickens for years. Composting also turns inedible things into calories and there's nothing to catch diseases, give you diseases, be predated, be stolen, or make you a target. If you encourage wild birds and predatory insects, they will not only eat your ticks but they will digest them and deposit them back on your land in the form of fertilizer. Large farm animals (lambs and larger) require greatly more area to generate each calorie of human-edible food than just about any plants that you can grow. If you have several acres, then maybe you can sustain a few large animals and yourself, but you do so at much greater risk than by cultivating a large variety of plants with appropriate, helpful small animals.
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Feb 23, 2017 13:17
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Potentially interesting climate news just coming in:Independent posted:Chevron warns it could face climate change lawsuits with future oil drilling potentially ‘economically infeasible’ http://www.independent.co.uk/enviro...e-a7609411.html
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Mar 3, 2017 22:02
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I don't, but I will note that nobody should use any of the sea level rise simulators that you see linked now and then to determine if an area will be underwater at a given sea level rise, as they define the average sea level (i.e. at the average tide), so you need to at least add half of the tidal range at a given location to your chosen sea level rise to get a map of which areas will be flooded twice per day. The difference in flat regions can amount to several kilometers. And then if you don't want your house to be flooded once a year or so, you need to add another meter or more for tidal/storm surges.
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Mar 10, 2017 21:14
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enraged_camel posted:Sorry, but unless you have a significant amount of wealth you won't be able to: You can buy enough land to support a family for four digits; it's only when you want to add grazing animals that the land requirements shoot up. For a self-build house, tools, and outbuildings, add low five digits, and you're set. A lot of people reading this thread could buy the land and start building today, most could save enough in five years (barring economic collapse) and everyone could do so in ten years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2M1uMqRUabw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cY0h4IUfIxY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6kPzMSvdDA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jh1481J6qw etc Building a fortified village is the realm of prepper fantasies.
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Mar 25, 2017 14:30
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Bhodi posted:These are all really interesting, but something they all have in common is the realization that they aren't and aren't ever going to be completely self-sufficient. It's more about doing what you can afford to do based on time and effort and inclination. You can definitely get enough food to supplement survival but you aren't going to be able to get a bunch of land and some seed money and come out the other side of 5 years in a fully mature, self-supporting situation no matter how much work you put into it. The examples I posted are all low-acreage, producing excess food with low-medium time investment. If you want low acreage, med-high time investment, massive excess, high profit, sub-2 years, you can do that too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsNobM0K-HY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KpZ5wX47ok https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1BH0NkN6zHs
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Mar 25, 2017 19:05
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StabbinHobo posted:I just spent an hour on these, thank you. That first guy turns out to be an insane lolber nut, but hey w/e we've all got flaws. I don't know what a "lolber nut" is. He is a successful market gardener and has a ton of useful videos. Permaculture (as seen in the first batch of videos I linked) certainly has something to do with solving climate change, since it is actual, genuine carbon sequestration today that also produces lots of food per acre, with minimal external requirements, and can be implemented anywhere and adapt to changing conditions.
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Mar 26, 2017 01:36
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StabbinHobo posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_qt2TG6h_Y&t=210s We agree that sequestration of carbon is good an necessary, and the basis of permaculture is soil formation and (re)forestation, both of which are forms of carbon sequestration, while simultaneously providing food, employment, flood prevention, drought prevention, increased biodiversity and increased habitats for wildlife, all the while with minimal use of fossil fuels, fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. Widescale adoption of permaculture (i.e. government-led expansion) is one of the best paths toward a climate solution. StabbinHobo posted:maybe after 150 pages we could band together and craft some kind of effort post that somehow wraps peoples brains around the size of the problem, so they stop talking about their herb garden or bicyling to work like it matters. There are over 7 billion people on the planet, and everyone "having a herb garden and bicycling to work" really would matter. People all make individual contributions to climate change, ecological destruction and resource depletion, and the catastrophe that we see approaching is the sum of these individual contributions.
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Mar 26, 2017 13:51
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StabbinHobo posted:if X% of farming & agriculture was switched from the median carbon cost it has now to the median carbon cost of a well run permaculture farm over the course of say the next decade(s) what would the net carbon impact be? I did not claim that permaculture is the sole solution to climate change. Of course switching all current production to permaculture would not produce net carbon reduction, since that would still require the raising of billions of animals per year, still burping out gigatons of methane. The difference is that permaculture is carbon sequestration (the opposite of soil-destroying, forest-felling conventional agriculture) that also produces food and other agricultural products; current thinking on carbon sequestration is expending vast amounts of energy to reduce direct coal emissions, or expending vast amounts of energy and resources to precipitate CO2 from the atmosphere or ocean using magic. TheNakedFantastic posted:I never understood why people think this is a solution, especially when the first world already has negative population growth rates in almost every case (outside of large scale immigration to the US and a few Euro countries). If there are fewer people around then you've just delayed the inevitable for a while longer, the problem is the mode of energy and commodity production. This has no effect in the short to mid term (i.e. the most important timeframe) and is meaningless if the developing world just replicates first world industrialization, which has already happened so what is this supposed to do? So is it best to continue with current population growth or to halve population growth? Will it be better to have 10 billion people in 2050 or 9 billion? (example numbers) Do you want to be competing with another 43% of the current population, or would you be better off with just 28% more? Like permaculture, a goal of reduced population is not the sole solution, but it is a route to get to a solution faster and in a less calamitous fashion.
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Mar 26, 2017 17:15
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TheNakedFantastic posted:White (first world) population growth is already negative and quite close to 1 for many white ethnic groups so this has basically already happened. Yes it's "better" but it's also not a serious solution at all, if the world population is 5 billion in 2050 but energy and good production is the same then you haven't accomplished anything besides giving yourself another decade or two to accomplish these transformations. If the population is 10 billion in 2050 but these transformations have taken place then it's a much better scenario than the former. You did not account for the scenario of 5 billion population [i]and[i/] "these transformations" have been accomplished, which is twice as good as your 10 billion+transformations scenario. There is no either/or mutual exclusion. As I said, a goal of reduced population is not the sole solution, but it is a route to get to a solution faster and in a less calamitous fashion.
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Mar 26, 2017 17:38
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BattleMoose posted:I visited the reef 2 years ago. Its a must see. Do it if and while you can. Do recommend. No, don't fly halfway around the world, for any reason.
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Apr 11, 2017 00:21
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ChairMaster posted:Consume what you want, expand your carbon footprint as much as you need in order to get whatever you can out of whats left of the world before it's too late. The problem here is that some people have a "conscience", which causes them to not want to do things that they know will negatively affect other people, such as expanding their carbon footprint as much as they need in order to get whatever they can out of what's left of the world.
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Apr 21, 2017 23:34
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