Climate Change: Post up your Phd. dissertation, coward

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Climate Change: Post up your Phd. dissertation, coward

TROIKA CURES GREEK: Jun 30, 2015; by R. Guyovich

Verge posted:

Maybe you misunderstand me. I'm not saying burn less coal (although that's a compromise I'll take!) I'm saying reduce energy demand to a point where solar, wind, hydroelectric and the up-and-coming green energies can keep up with the new low demand. Be realistic, do you think a green energy array would be feasible for cities like Portland or Chicago? Of course, we could use nuclear where necessary but we'd still want to severely reduce energy usage in smaller towns since we don't want a nuclear reactor every 100 miles.

Demand is going nowhere, and that's a good thing considering energy is probably the most important component in increasing standards of living for poor people across the globe, or even poor/middle class people in developed countries.

We need to stop jerking around about all these pie in the sky solutions and just build some loving nuke plants. Because it will be a hell of a lot easier to do that (politically and otherwise) than to have solar and wind supply baseline power.

TROIKA CURES GREEK fucked around with this message at 00:15 on Dec 16, 2015

# ¿ Dec 16, 2015 00:13

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# ¿ May 7, 2024 01:11

TROIKA CURES GREEK: Jun 30, 2015; by R. Guyovich

The continued insistence that the green party has no effect whatsoever on Nuclear power is bewildering, there's all sorts of examples to show why they are a significant contributor to more plants not being built. Germany is the obvious example but it happens everywhere. gently caress the greens, their supporters are worthless morons on nearly every issue.

achillesforever6 posted:

Because don't you care about coal miners, they obviously are too stupid to do anything else other than mine coal

It's actually very difficult to switch over a workforce that big and completely reform an economy. What other industry are they going to move on to in coal country, exactly? What are their skills transferable to? Sorry, but this isn't civ 5- you don't just flip a switch and all your coal miners become nuclear engineers; in the real world you actually have to think a little bit.

# ¿ Dec 26, 2015 20:58

TROIKA CURES GREEK: Jun 30, 2015; by R. Guyovich

Captain Scandinaiva posted:

True, but we kinda need to decrease energy consumption a lot, along with building sustainable energy. And it's a lot more effective to, for example, have people using public transit and bikes rather than private cars, instead of waiting for the rather slow technological advances that create more effective combustion engines. Even though public transit and bikes cost a lot less per capita and thus create less economic growth. Like I wrote earlier, 2015 may have been a year where there was global economic growth without growing CO2-emissions, but that'd be the first time ever. I think it's at least sound to put our actual needs first and economic growth last instead of the other way around, even though "our needs" may end up causing economic growth.

And that's ignoring the myriad of other environmental issues caused by consumption. Maybe we will reach this total service economy, but I'm having a hard time picturing that. So far, when people have made the switch from consuming goods to consuming services, a thing that is happening, those services have often ended up being tourism, traveling all over the world. Which has a lot of positive effects but the way we do it today isn't good for the climate at all. And not allowing or taxing the flight industry would make those services prohibitively expensive instead.

Decreasing energy consumption means lots of poor people around the world stay poor and die very young, energy consumption has a both an extremely strong correlative and causative relationship on increasing lifespans and general quality of life. But besides that decreasing energy consumption is simply not a realistic thing to think about, might as well hope unicorns save the earth with their anti-co2 farts.

Potato Salad posted:

With respect to economic growth and sustainable lifestyles, is there space in the discussion for universal population control?

We may burn fuel more efficiently, build more apartement buildings in cities, slowly put more busses and trains down, but what is the point if all that can do is barely keep up with demand? Cap the population and every advancement in efficiency, every public works / geoengineering projected , every breakthrough policy actually goes to a larger resource bank for us all as opposed to simply keeping up with a +1+1+1+1 game.

You are correct in the sense that there is a malthusian element to climate change- we simply require a lot more energy now than the 20s in part because there's just a lot more people and it's an open question if/how long the earth can sustain 8-10 billion people. I imagine much how we solved the problem of feeding everyone with advancements in technology, at this point it is quite clear the solutions to the problems of climate change are going to come from science rather than avoiding the problem in the first place. This is nothing new, using science and innovation to solve the problems we created have always been the reason humans are on top-preemption really isn't in our nature.

We also consume more energy on a per-person basis, which a huge reason why quality of life and life expectancy are higher today for the average person in the poorest countries when compared with the average person in the richest countries in the 1800s.

As others have said, however, whatcha going to do about it, population control doesn't work.

TROIKA CURES GREEK fucked around with this message at 17:08 on Mar 21, 2016

# ¿ Mar 21, 2016 16:54

TROIKA CURES GREEK: Jun 30, 2015; by R. Guyovich

khwarezm posted:

When their living standards are directly, negatively afflicted by the results of use of cheap fossil fuels what do you do then? This is exceptionally short sighted thinking.

What's shortsighted is to ignore the pressures governments feel to quickly improve the lives of millions to billions of people living in complete poverty and cheap energy being literally the only proven way to do so.

I guess you can go to china and india and tell them how short-sighted they are being, that sounds like it will work.

DesperateDan posted:

There's a lot of "what's" that can be looked into as mitigation or slight reduction for the loving the planet shall receive.

I think the far more pertinent question is how to force these methods through when so much of the systems and threads of society are governed and reliant on what boils down to sheer human greed.

It's really easy to call it greed when you are a comfortable westerner in the top global income quintiles, less so when you live in rural india.

e: keep in mind china's economic boom is quickly reversing, so there aint a chance in hell they have the money for clean tech. Better hope the west hands it to them cause otherwise they are going to burn a shitfuckton of coal in the next decades.

TROIKA CURES GREEK fucked around with this message at 20:22 on May 27, 2016

# ¿ May 27, 2016 20:20

TROIKA CURES GREEK: Jun 30, 2015; by R. Guyovich

Rap Record Hoarder posted:

We already have the answers for averting the crisis (reduce consumption, ramp up renewables, transition away from emission heavy tech, etc), we just lack the political will to realize them. Focus on that instead of pie in the sky technological fixes that will almost certainly make the problem worse.

Reducing consumption isn't even remotely plausible. Not even in the same universe as plausible. You can't power the world with renewables,either. Even if you could, It also would take a lot of time- time scientists say we don't have.

The hate for geo engineering is really weird given the reacting to problems and solving them with technology is literally the story of the human race. It hopefully will work because there's no other options (reducing consumption isn't one).

Morbus posted:

Yes...I have run actual scientific experiments. More importantly, so have plenty of actual climate scientists who think geoengineering is worthy of discussion, and they've written papers you can go read. I guess if you don't like them you can ask those people if they've ever run an actual scientific experiment in their life? This isn't (primarily..) some pipe dream of idiot SV billionaires trying to technomagic their way out of a societal problem, its a topic that has been seriously broached by climate scientists primarily out of concern that we may not be able to escape unacceptable changes to the climate even if we halt GHG emissions quickly and completely. You can disagree, and its obviously a topic that merits argument and discussion, but you can't just flippantly dismiss anyone who talks about it without looking like a jackass.

Honestly I probably agree with you about most of this so I'll just ask this: You say we can already avert a crisis by reducing emissions (by reducing consumption, switching to renewables, phasing out high emission technology, whatever). This is by no means a certainty and is increasingly unclear among climate scientists. The only scenarios in either AR4 or AR5 with even remotely good confidence of staying below 2C warming by 2100 are those that require CO2 concentrations to start declining sometime around 2040, with no overshoot of ~500 or so ppm. There is a growing psuedo-consensus that 350 ppm might be what is ultimately needed. To reach 350ppm by 2100, the CO2 concentration needs to stabilize (i.e. net zero emissions) soon, and then start dropping, faster than what natural sinks are generally thought to be capable of (and that's assuming deforestation, ocean acidification, etc. don't completely gently caress those sinks worse than they already are). Thus, such scenarios explicitly require some kind of negative emissions at some point, in addition to radical emission reductions by more than half within a couple decades. And even then, 350ppm might be too much. After all, the pre-industrial atmosphere only had 280ppm, so that's the only number we really know to be safe (and it seems every 5 years the scientific consensus on a safe upper limit drops by 50ppm or so).

On top of all this, there is an ever-increasing likelihood that certain positive feedbacks may be occurring more severely than we would have liked. What if arctic sea ice continues to plummet at its current rate? What if methane from thawing tundra become significant? What if, god-forbid, clathrates from seabed permafrost start venting? What if ocean acidification dramatically reduces the ocean's ability to sink carbon--something that is relatively poorly understood? If some of these runaway processes really get going even Bond-villian scale geoengineering may be useless, and as of now we may not be able to identify with certainty the emergence of such processes before it's too late.

So, how certain are you that we can reduce emissions as radically as we need to in 20 years? How certain are you that, on top of that, we can sink the poo poo we've already put into the atmosphere as fast as we need to, either through extremely aggressive reforestation or technological means? How certain are you that we won't reach a catastrophic tipping point somewhere on our 30 (fat chance) to 100 year journey to 350ppm? Arctic feedbacks are already scaring the poo poo out of people today. Even if things don't get worse at all over the next 20 years before they start improving, how certain are you that another 20 years of what we've already got doesn't lead to a really bad equilibrium?

If your answer to all of these is "reasonably certain", congratulations you must sleep better than I do. But if not, you need to balance these uncertainties and their consequences with the uncertainties of various geoengineering proposals. And then you must acknowledge the very real possibility that some time in the near future, some sort of geoengineering might be required simply to buy us time and stabilize dangerous feedback processes while we work towards the radical emission reductions that are needed. There is even a (weaker) argument to be made that geoengineering is needed now, in conjunction with radical emissions reduction, in order to e.g. begin refreezing arctic sea ice.

Nobody in their right mind thinks geoengineering is a "good" idea, only that it might be or become a necessary idea. And given that, it's important to seriously consider it now, to the extent possible, so that we have at least some clue what we are doing if it turns out that we cant fix this mess just by reducing emissions.

Great post, a lot of people here just don't get the scale of the problem.

# ¿ Dec 15, 2016 20:00

TROIKA CURES GREEK: Jun 30, 2015; by R. Guyovich

Rich westerners going vegan isn't going to amount to jack poo poo when meat consumption continues to skyrocket in countries like China, India, and other developing countries. The issue with the massive increase in the standards of living across the globe is that those people then want to consume like westerners and that cancels whatever meager gains you got by increasing car fuel efficiency by 25% or installing some solar panels and windmills or whatever.

peter banana posted:

Climate Change: What is to be Done? Apparently nothing, so no need to try.

Basically, yes. The international cooperation required to make the necessary changes in the timeframe required is not there. Geo-engineering solutions as the primary solution are inevitable at this point.

# ¿ Jan 4, 2017 06:22

TROIKA CURES GREEK: Jun 30, 2015; by R. Guyovich

Forever_Peace posted:

. And it's almost certainly significant in a frequentist sense (any t-statistic over 3 is almost definitely significant given the sample size we're working with).

This is terrible reasoning fyi. Guessing you aren't a statistician?

# ¿ Apr 23, 2017 17:51

TROIKA CURES GREEK: Jun 30, 2015; by R. Guyovich

Jimbot posted:

I don't know what the gently caress I'm talking about.

That's obvious.

Rime posted:

Did this get brought up in today's well of bad news?

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/mass-extinction-humans-causing-earth-deaths-end-times-warning-a7765856.html

I really cannot understand how people can view most other life on Earth as holding less inherent value than cramming another 4 Billion human lives into squalor and horror.

This world has gone mad.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IM1-DQ2Wo_w

# ¿ Jun 1, 2017 01:13

TROIKA CURES GREEK: Jun 30, 2015; by R. Guyovich

Salt Fish posted:

He's right though. The space colonization myth is rooted in ignorance. The distances involved, the basic limitations of physics, the frailty of the human body, our inability to plan scientifically, and our rejection or any kind of social organization not based on individualistic consumerism ; these will all prevent us from leaving earth in any meaningful way, and in tandem make it an impossible fiction.

We take the earth for granted ; because of our evolutionary history it's the perfect place for us to live, and there is nothing better than it within any humans lifespan at any fraction of the speed of light.

And clueless people said this about the oceans too lol

Or is not knowing what the gently caress you are talking about just the threads gimmick? It's funny, for a thread obsessed with expert consensus -- where does all this doom predictions cone from? Not backed up by evidence or expert opinion in the slightest.

Honestly these past couple pages have basically just been get_therapy.txt , it's sad to read : [

Oxxidation posted:

It is not possible. You're an imbecile for even bringing it up.

Haha yes, despite people saying this and being wrong again and again and again and again, this time is different, end of history mother fuckers!!!!

You probably haven't when opened a science book in the last 10 years lol but go ahead and lecture us on poo poo you don't understand in the slightest.

# ¿ Jun 30, 2017 17:35

TROIKA CURES GREEK: Jun 30, 2015; by R. Guyovich

Conspiratiorist posted:

Ever heard of civil defense?

Stockpiling ammo is the loving opposite of building community resilience - as Katrina will show, the first thing the National Guard does is take guns away from the dumbshit "my house is my castle and my flooded lawn is my new moat" types.

Counterpoint: the bundy gang. They still seem to be kicking despite how many armed standoffs at this point? Clearly this is more complicated than you are making it out to be.

I mean we don't have to guess, there are countless historical examples where poo poo hit the fan and it always turned out pretty loving poorly for the people who just decided to rely on community support. Katrina is a perfect example actually, but i think the tribal warfare in early America is a better example of how things would actually function in the hypothetical doomsday scenarios people are talking about.

But really though? The life of most 1st worlders living today isn't going to be affected much by climate change unless something really bonkers happens and it hits much harder and faster than the models are predicting. The disdain shown towards technologies that will mitigate cc or reverse it is nutty, unfounded, and frankly anti - intellectual. It's like the people 20 years ago who said competitive green energy was impossible-- actually you just have to put the time and research in.

# ¿ Jul 12, 2017 22:59

TROIKA CURES GREEK: Jun 30, 2015; by R. Guyovich

Squalid posted:

I go on and off meat, imo the trick is just easing into the diet and not sweating the odd roast served by grandma.

Reduce animal protein consumption in phases so there's no dramatic break that could push you to relapse. So start by eliminating meat at breakfast and lunch, for example by replacing a ham sandwich with peanut butter and jelly or red bean vegetarian chili. Instead of milk with cereal try oatmeal or grits with water and a spot of butter.

Once you've done that start introducing vegetable entrees into dinner once a week, and then increase their frequency as it begins to feel more natural. So try making tacos but use black beans instead of beef, or experiment with other dishes with which you are already familiar. The key to making good vegetarian dishes is getting them really savory, so season generously with soy sauce, bouillon or stock. If you like vegetables try incorporating those with naturally high umami like mushrooms and eggplant into your dishes.

Chicken is actually a lot better for the environment than a lot of the things you mentioned. If people just reduced beef and lamb consumption you'd be 90 percent of the way there, and additionally chicken is an incredibly efficient protein that can be made nearly anywhere and requires very little land use.

Another thing that people forget is that the carbon footprints of things are variable. If everyone switched to only eating soybeans tomorrow, the per calorie carbon footprint of it would increase by a significant amount for a variety of reasons, one of the major ones being that you would have to vastly increase the amount of crops and arable land is a location specific and limited resource. Increasing the use of sub optimal farmland for a crop inevitably leads to higher carbon use. But besides that chicken wings are delicious.

# ¿ Jul 12, 2017 23:13

TROIKA CURES GREEK: Jun 30, 2015; by R. Guyovich

Lol at calling consumerism a 'western ' thing.

# ¿ Jul 17, 2017 13:07

TROIKA CURES GREEK: Jun 30, 2015; by R. Guyovich

Conspiratiorist posted:

They'll probably understand our current era much the way we understand the Bronze Age Collapse and the Early Medieval Period.

That is, very little and colored by centuries of ideology and poorly researched popular fiction.

Nah.

# ¿ Jul 17, 2017 13:08

TROIKA CURES GREEK: Jun 30, 2015; by R. Guyovich

MiddleOne posted:

Maybe, just maybe, there's a fundamental contradiction between basing society around GDP-growth and trying to fight a crisis that is brought on by consumption.

Nah it's mostly population. Even if we assumed switching the US to socialism tomorrow would reduce emissions by half (it wouldn't) we'd still be much better off just turning the population clock by 50-80 years with current per capita consumption levels. It's honestly quite strange how people ignore this and pretend that we live in some uniquely wasteful and ignorant time instead, when the reality is that for 99.99999999% of humanity there were 7 billion less people on the planet.

And all we need to do is look at mid late 2000's venezuala or other similar examples and see that a non-market economy doesn't really lower consumption and emissions much at all, certainly not on the levels that people here are thinking. People like to buy poo poo; there is no way in hell you are going to stop the billions of people in india / china from trying to achieve a western level lifestyle.

enraged_camel posted:

Counterpoint: most downtown areas are not affordable by regular middle class folks

Well that's just wrong, unless you are using some really weird definition of middle class.

# ¿ Aug 31, 2017 23:20

TROIKA CURES GREEK: Jun 30, 2015; by R. Guyovich

Owlofcreamcheese posted:

You also have a finite life span and are not going to live eternal ever after to watch them sink into the ocean.

This is absolutely not a proclamation that everything is going to be okay, it's the hard truth that unless you slid out of a womb onto this webpage right this morning the time line of events doesn't really line up to get you a cool seat to watch and it's really your children and their children that are going to face this as corporeal threat to their body instead of economic drag on their lifestyle. Like when you look at 2075 and see the graph of how horrifying it's gonna be, you, specifically, personally are going to have died by then, just anyway. Probably.

lmao

It's sadly not a shock that all the people who actually know what the gently caress they are talking about w.r.t c.c. have stopped posting i.t.t.

# ¿ Feb 20, 2018 17:49

TROIKA CURES GREEK: Jun 30, 2015; by R. Guyovich

Ah yes lets hear some hot takes on roofs from people who know literally nothing about them.

# ¿ Jul 23, 2018 17:52

TROIKA CURES GREEK: Jun 30, 2015; by R. Guyovich

Thug Lessons posted:

Instead of comparing climate change to the abolition movement and the American Civil War, you should compare it to previous environmental movements, like banning of DDT or the emissions of ozone-depleting chemicals. And what you see, time and again, is that these were not solved by individual actions like refusal to buy DDT-sprayed crops or refrigerators, but by coordinated international action by governments, nonprofits and business leaders. That's certainly not to say that environmental movements are useless, but rather that this "by cutting back we'll inspire others and this will snowball into a solution" narrative is wishful thinking that doesn't take the problem seriously.

They were also only solved as reactions to events, GCC is a unique problem without precedent really in all of humankind. It makes things like ddt or ozone depletion or hell ww2 look like friday at the office by comparison.

Potato Salad posted:

chlorocarbon regulation followed a popular movement

no it didn't it followed direct and incontrovertible evidence that there were major problems and had a direct, obvious, and easy solution.

Humans went 99.9999999% of their existence without really having a way to make any sort of reasonable predictions of the future beyond a couple days or weeks; we were simply not built to handle a problem like GCC to be perfectly honest -- we are fundamentally a reactionary species that solves problems with tools and technological solutions.

TROIKA CURES GREEK fucked around with this message at 21:01 on Jul 28, 2018

# ¿ Jul 28, 2018 20:54

TROIKA CURES GREEK: Jun 30, 2015; by R. Guyovich

Rime posted:

The best personal thing you can do is be a much more prolific, strategic, and less mentally ill version of Ted Kaczynski and start offing the .01% until they poo poo the bed when it creaks in the night.

lol

Yes, they totally don't have security details :rolleyes:

Trainee PornStar posted:

I had a smart meter fitted today, I was pretty happy looking at it & it was about 80p of electric used over about 4 hours..... I thought not bad considering all the crap the kids have running.

Then I found the Co2 used bit.... apparently those 4 hours produced 2.19Kg of Co2... that took the smile off my face a bit.

we are so hosed if we carry on like this.

Haha if you think that's a lot, an airplane trip is on the order of .15 kg PER person PER mile, so flying for 4 hours means each person on the plane is responsible for about 240 kg

# ¿ Aug 3, 2018 17:11

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# ¿ May 7, 2024 01:11

TROIKA CURES GREEK: Jun 30, 2015; by R. Guyovich

Paradoxish posted:

This thread or maybe some other D&D thread has seemed really, really aggressively anti-garden, with the arguments generally being more about the practical time commitment required. I'm with you, though. My girlfriend and I decided to start gardening a few years ago and... it's not actually a lot of work? At this point we grow a sizable portion of the produce we eat and I'd be hard pressed to say that we average even a combined two hours per week on gardening work. And that's including the larger amounts of time spent planting and harvesting. For most of the season there's hardly anything to do at all.

Like community gardens are fine, it's just that they produce a marginal amount of food (particularly from a calorie perspective) for a fuckton of effort. I wouldn't be surprised if many people end up burning more calories from the gardening than they actually get out. Producing a lot of stuff for little effort is just not a normal thing in gardening, so you are experiencing a combination of a huge amount of luck (no disease / bugs), live in a climate conducive to it (most people don't), have a good amount of space (most people don't), a large amount of planning and knowledge, and are greatly underestimating the amount of work involved (people do this for hobbies they enjoy). You also have a partner that enjoys it, which makes the overall activity much more enjoyable and a lot easier. Basically it's a nice hobby for middle/upper class people, I don't think many people working 3 jobs are thrilled by the concept, and can easily have their entire effort wasted because they just got too busy to water everything one day or deal with an insect invasion.

Climate change makes it all worse, of course, because you need to deal with huge swings in temperature and things like frosts in the middle of summer following by 110 degree heat waves. Or additional pests and disease.

How are u posted:

There's some small satisfaction in being right, and to the absurdity that's put us into this situation. Also, humans have always been drawn to apocalyptic poo poo.

What put us into this situation is just massive population growth, a literal seven fold increase in the timeframe .00000001% of humans existence, full stop. The absurdity is in the idea that this is some easy problem to solve when in reality the complexities involved make this problem orders of magnitude more complicated than literally any other issues humanity has faced. Like picture a thousand d-days and you'll have something approaching the complexity and international coordination required in stopping CC.

It's like a train. Just because you can see the problem, that a car is stuck on the tracks miles ahead, does not mean that you can stop the train in time. What most people suggest here as the "fix" would require someone to have levels of dictatorial control over the entire planet that exceeds what the most powerful people in history had. It would make Stalins look like Jimmy Carter. Or rather John Taylor.

# ¿ Aug 31, 2018 17:35

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Climate Change: Post up your Phd. dissertation, coward