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Trabisnikof posted:Also, the research is mixed on the impacts of climate change on economic growth in developed economies..... Research is "mixed" in that no one knows whether the economic effects are going to be just bad or outright catastrophic. There's no scenario where developed nations on the whole benefit, and just because Europe and North America probably aren't going to have literal sinking cities and famines doesn't mean that everything's going to be fine. What Radbot is saying is still pretty much nonsense, though. Hedging right now means saving more, not less. The only scenario where that's a bad idea is total economic collapse, which is something that isn't worth worrying about or preparing for. Even if you think you'll never be able to retire (probably a pretty legitimate concern for millennials, to be honest), having something on hand is the best way to weather economic downturns. And a lot of bad recessions and periods of stagnation are way more likely than some weird mad max scenario where money stops mattering.
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Jan 25, 2016 23:48
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Martian posted:Another thing I wondered about is that people in this thread have been saying that electric cars will not help against climate change as long as we still use fossil fuels to generate electricity. I don't think that that's entirely true. As I understand it big power plants are much more efficient than any small combustion engine. Also, electric cars mean you don't need to transport gasoline to thousands of gas stations. I mean, electric cars driving on electricity from fossil fuels are obviously still very bad and only a tiny step forward, but it's still better than cars with a combustion engine. Saying that something isn't good enough isn't the same as saying we shouldn't do it. Electric vehicles aren't nearly good enough without a massive overhaul of our energy infrastructure, and electric cars themselves can't be deployed on a meaningful scale without a massive overhaul of our transportation infrastructure. People are gloomy because we're starting to realize that we aren't dealing a problem that's fifty years out, we're dealing with a problem that's already happening. So electric cars are cool, and helpful, and will probably reduce emissions over the long run, but it's hard to be optimistic when you realize that the battle you thought you were fighting five or six years ago is already lost.
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Apr 15, 2016 20:13
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The point you're underselling here is that nuclear power isn't actually cost effective over the kind of time scales that investors generally care about. Yes it would be an effective solution and yes we could theoretically do it, but not without something akin to a completely nationalized power industry and significant amounts of control over the construction supply chain. This is more or less why China is able to go crazy building new reactors, but it's a near political impossibility here. The same reasons that people complain that our political and economic structures are badly equipped to deal with this crisis with regard to renewables hold true for nuclear power as well. Seriously, the problem isn't a vague and shadowy environmental lobby or NIMBY-ism. Americans generally favor nuclear power, so scientists don't need to convince anyone of anything. Public opinion isn't holding nuclear power back.
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Apr 18, 2016 19:33
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We're not going to go extinct, though. Wealthier nations (and the wealthier people in those nations) will weather the storm, so it's understandable that there's a lot of resistance to the kind of complete social upheaval that might be needed to effectively deal with this problem before people start dying.
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Apr 18, 2016 20:05
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oxsnard posted:That's my point; we've turned solar into the great green hope when its environmental cradle to grave cost is unclear at best and its ability to provide baseload power is a straight up fantasy. You're focusing on public perception for some reason, when the reality is that we get less than 3% of our total grid capacity from solar (and that's being exceptionally optimistic) while we get about 20% of it from nuclear, with plans for expansion. The public's attitude towards nuclear power may not be completely ideal, but it's not so terrible that it's stopping us from any expansion at all. The real problem is that we aren't currently doing anything at a scale or speed that's appropriate for the seriousness of the problem that we're facing. You might have a point if we were currently implementing or even seriously discussing something like a WPA-level initiative to transition to renewable power nationwide, but we're not. As it is, hydro and wind are the only two renewable sources that currently generate any sizable portion of power in the US, and combined they represent about half the total output of our nuclear fleet. I don't see any evidence that renewable initiatives are actually competing with nuclear power expansion.
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Apr 19, 2016 00:10
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Trabisnikof posted:Also, non-fuel products make up only 7% of crude oil consumed in the US (the largest oil producer in the world atm), a rather small chunk of total oil usage. Likewise, Industrial emissions make up only 15% of US co2 equiv. emissions. Yeah, this is the core issue. Transport and energy generation are the primary emissions culprits, with industry right behind transportation, and everything else being almost irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. People who say that transitioning to nuclear (or renewables) would completely solve the problem are right, especially since wide adoption of electric vehicles wouldn't be too far behind. Coincidentally, this is exactly why this is such a frustrating problem. Human greenhouse gas emissions come from a pretty wide range of sources that are too complex to do away with completely, but we don't have to. We have to stop burning fossil fuels in a really limited number of ways to at least get to a point where this stops being an urgent, almost existential issue. The problem is that we don't have the political capability to actually do what needs to be done, so instead we're dragging our feet and hoping for an engineering miracle that probably won't come.
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Apr 19, 2016 21:51
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For what it's worth, I was firmly in the "we'll figure something out, there has to be an engineering solution" camp seven or eight years ago. I've come around, though. Yeah, fully transitioning to nuclear power would work. It would have been awesome if we started building reactors two decades ago, but that ship has sailed. We could still do it, just like we could probably figure out a way to transition to renewables, but it's not going to happen because it isn't a solution that the market is capable of implementing on its own at the speed required. It'll definitely be interesting to see how China's initiative works out, but that kind of thing is impossible in the US because we aren't going to fully nationalize the power industry (even though we should at this point).
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Apr 19, 2016 22:11
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To be entirely fair, any kind of individual sacrifice in the face of climate change is basically just self-flagellation anyway. You can't make a difference by not flying places, because the plane is still going whether you buy that ticket or not. Any individual purchasing decisions you make (or don't make) are too small to matter. Your purchasing decisions won't influence enough people around you for it to be meaningful. Thinking that you can actually make a difference outside of actual advocacy work and/or supporting groups that do advocacy work is just another way of saying that we can consume our way out of this problem. It's pretty silly to complain about someone being a hypocrite if they aren't, like, chartering private flights or running around all weekend on their yacht.
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Apr 21, 2016 21:52
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You're missing my point by a pretty wide margin. You, as an individual living in a first world nation, likely have almost no personal responsibility for climate change. It doesn't matter what your carbon footprint is or how often you take part in high emissions activities like air travel. Your actual, real contribution to climate change is effectively nil, and the amount you can feasibly reduce that is even less. Take driving, for example. If you go out and buy a more fuel efficient car, you've reduced your carbon footprint. That's fine, whatever. You know what's infinitely better? Regulations requiring that cars meet certain fuel efficiency standards so that all new cars are more efficient. You know what's even better than that? Massively expanded public transport so that fewer people need to drive. Your individual contribution is meaningless in the face of the kind of sweeping changes that actually need to be made. Yeah, society is just a bunch of individuals. So what? If enough people were collectively making the right decisions then climate change wouldn't be an issue. If enough people were choosing not to fly, taking public transport or biking instead of driving, or just gave a gently caress at all then the political will to actually address this problem head on would exist and we wouldn't be having this discussion. It's stupidly counterproductive to berate people for flying when they go on vacation or whatever. If you want to poo poo on people for slacktivism, poo poo on them for not devoting their time and money to groups that are actually lobbying for societal change or politicians that recognize climate change for the looming crisis it actually is. Edit- And just to be exceptionally clear here, I'm not trying to be super pessimistic or say that nothing matters. You certainly can make a meaningful difference, it's just going to require a hell of a lot more than deciding to cancel a vacation or bike to work. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 23:20 on Apr 21, 2016 |
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Apr 21, 2016 23:05
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Trabisnikof posted:This ignores how individuals can show leadership that lifestyles etc are workable. Buying a high efficiency car or appliance now does actually make it easier to pass regulation mandating it. Both because you prove it is workable and because you're improving the statistics and consumer buyin in efficiency. I'm not so much as ignoring it as discounting it out of hand. I'm disagreeing with the assertion that consumers (even acting collectively) can make a serious dent in our emissions. It's not economically realistic for a large enough segment of people to actually go out and buy more fuel efficient cars on a timescale that matters, for example. Even if it was, personal transportation is only one segment of emissions from transportation, and transportation on the whole contributes less to global emissions than energy production. This is fundamentally a problem that exists at a scale too large for individual action to matter.
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Apr 21, 2016 23:34
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Trabisnikof posted:I think you underestimate the need for these proofs of concepts. Does a specific Tesla do poo poo for the climate? No. But would large scale battery production driving down battery costs have a positive impact on climate? Yes and you can't get the factory built without someone buying the (potentially lovely) cars first. The problem here is that EVs are generally a wash (or at worst, a negative) if we can't also clean up our grid. They're great in countries that already rely heavily on renewable or nuclear, but everywhere else they have a similar footprint to decent ICE vehicles. A 10-20% improvement in personal transportation emissions over the next few decades isn't even close to being enough. It's pretty much a prerequisite that we stop burning coal for EVs to be worthwhile, and if we can do that then we've already solved climate change. If anything, I'd argue EVs are a great example of why market/consumer solutions are destined to fail and have been failing for decades.
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Apr 22, 2016 00:20
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That was a surprisingly decent discussion, but it also kind of highlights the problem with a lot of these debates. On one side you have the people who think we're going to solve everything with no consumption changes by embracing nuclear and fracking and on the other you have the people who are essentially using the crisis to push a social agenda. It comes off as completely disingenuous when the guy beating the drums about cost won't acknowledge that moving to nuclear on a wide scale is incredibly costly before you even account for the damage that you'll cause to existing energy generation industries (not to mention the climate costs of expanded fracking and natural gas use). Meanwhile, everyone else is complaining about how dire the situation is while just outright ruling out a clean and largely effective component of the solution. I'm honestly very sympathetic to the views of people like Naomi Klein who see climate change as the perfect opportunity to push for social change, but sooner or later we're going to have to acknowledge how dishonest it is to scream about saving the world at any cost while shutting down effective options that we're ideologically opposed to. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 17:12 on Apr 26, 2016 |
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Apr 26, 2016 17:09
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Tree Bucket posted:I wish I could think of a more intelligent-sounding way to ask this, but are we all gonna die? If you live in a wealthy nation and aren't personally wealthy then the most likely worst case outcome for you and your children and is just a lot of ugly and painful economic and political effects. If you don't live in a wealthy nation then maybe. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 19:49 on May 29, 2016 |
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May 29, 2016 19:01
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computer parts posted:Maybe bad for whites in Europe. So being a refugee is awesome? I mean, the fact that it might be okay for them at some point in the future or for their children is great at all, but most people don't care about long-term trend lines when they're living in the bumpy part of the curve. Like, I don't know what you're trying to say here. There's no realistic climate change outcome that's a net positive. You don't have to be all doom and gloom about the end of the human race to acknowledge reality.
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May 29, 2016 20:01
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computer parts posted:If we're concerned about the happiness of people right now, we should give up on trying to leave fossil fuels because that is going to upset a lot of people. I don't even understand how this is a response to my post. You were implying that mass migration is primarily bad for "white people" in Europe. If mass migration happens, it's going to be bad for everyone involved in the short and probably medium term. It's also going to mean that previously inhabited parts of our planet are becoming uninhabitable, or that governments are collapsing because they're too poor to cope with climate driven changes. None of this is a good thing for anyone in any sense over any reasonable time scale.
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May 29, 2016 20:11
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G.C. Furr III posted:I don't know if calling this thread "what is to be done" was deliberately a reference to Vladimir Lenin's well known pamphlet "What is to be Done?" or just a fortuitous coincidence, but I used to be all doom and gloom about climate change until I discovered the science of Marxism-Leninism and that the solution to climate change is the same as the solution to capitalism as a whole, its total abolition and replacement with communism. I'm lefty as gently caress, but if I honestly believed that FULL SOCIALISM NOW was the only solution to climate change then I think I'd be way, way more doom 'n' gloom than I currently am. Because that's not happening. Not in our lifetimes, probably not ever. If we can't mitigate this within existing social and economic frameworks then we're going to be in for a world of hurt.
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Jul 27, 2016 21:11
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G.C. Furr III posted:Climate change, just like everything else about capitlaism drives the proletariat to overtrow the old order, to revolution. Do you believe a global revolution that overthrows the capitalist order is likely to happen within the next, say, five years? Because if not, holding out hope for socialism as a solution is a non-starter.
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Jul 27, 2016 22:35
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The biggest issue with natural gas at the moment is in methane leakage from extraction. Getting off of coal is great and admirable, but it's not going to solve (or even drastically mitigate) the problem if we can't deal with the life cycle emissions issues. And that's without even getting into the other environmental and land use issues that come up with extraction. It's still better than nothing, but it's flat out wrong to point to the death of coal and say "welp, problem solved" if we can't do better with our replacement.
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Jul 30, 2016 02:50
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Fluffy Chainsaw posted:According to academic literature, from a LCA perspective (and accounting for fugitive emissions), natural gas results in a GHG emissions rate that is 35% less than coal. No one is saying that we should stop using natural gas, it's just that right now it doesn't really represent a solution that can both replace coal and scale up to meet future power demands and emissions targets. Not without a ton more oversight to control life cycle emissions.
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Jul 31, 2016 07:42
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Fansy posted:I don't know much about global warming, but I assume many of you do. Should I push her into getting some therapy and a financial planner, or is she simply being realistic? Yeah, your friend's actions aren't the actions of a healthy individual thinking rationally. You should probably remind her that the only situation where saving money doesn't make sense is some kind of complete and total collapse of the monetary system, and that's not happening in any first world nation no matter how bad climate change gets. Like, even if everything goes to complete poo poo, she's still better off having savings than not. Making sound decisions now is probably the best thing she can do if she's actually worried about the future.
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Aug 28, 2016 00:31
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That actually depends a lot on where you live in the US. Like, Miami is probably legitimately in the trouble and there are parts of the US that will face real water shortage issues that are likely to have pretty major economic effects. Loss of water front property (or expensive programs to mitigate losses) is going to have a real and nontrivial impact on people too. We're not immune to the effects of climate change just because we're in a rich nation. The major difference is that we're more likely to be affected economically.
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Aug 29, 2016 14:45
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Forever_Peace posted:The 1st world will probably be relatively OK, but one big problem will be an infrastructure that was built for a different world than the one we will actually have. Water will stop being cheap, we will need to overhaul our shipping and farming industries entirely to move them away from fossil fuels (though will still have the costs of maintaining a monstrous road infrastructure), cities will have to retrofit a large number of buildings to cope with severe weather events, and megacities will have to expand for considerably more people than they currently have. Big social programs that aren't fully entrenched within the next 10-20 years or so (e.g. a national child care system) will probably just not happen once the monetary costs of climate change start kicking in. But in general, it will be livable here, for the most part. It's one of the great ironies of climate change: we who have been the most exploitative are currently best prepared to weather the storm. The issue I sometimes have with this thread (and with D&D's attitude towards climate change in general) is that weathering the storm doesn't mean that people who are alive and posting in this thread won't be meaningfully impacted and hurt by climate change. We almost certainly will be, and our kids will suffer even more. That's not being sadbrains about the problem or preaching doom and gloom, it's just acknowledging that we're likely beyond the point where mitigation without costly sacrifices is possible. And that's assuming that we start really tackling the issue on a wide scale, like, tomorrow. The southeast US, for example, is insanely vulnerable to issues stemming from climate change. It also happens to be home to both some of the poorest regions in the country and some of the fastest growing metropolitan areas. Guess who's going to get hosed when municipal and state governments realize how much money they have to spend on mitigation efforts in order to keep investment from fleeing to less risky regions? And that's without even addressing the fact that some areas will simply stop being tenable economic centers. Sure, it'll be fine in the sense economic and population migration to other areas will eventually balance things out, but it's going to be pretty terrible for the people who are directly affected in the mean time. Some of the responses to Fansy's post about their friend on the last page are a good example. The correct and honest response to that attitude isn't "stop being scared, everything is fine" so much as "stop panicking and acting irrationally just because you're scared." Being scared is totally the correct response no matter where you happen to live, but that doesn't mean you have to start feeling like the world is ending. Either acknowledge that you probably can't do much personally or find a way to turn your fear into constructive action. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 17:48 on Aug 30, 2016 |
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Aug 30, 2016 17:45
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Femur posted:Are there historical examples of any society seeing these type of events coming and protecting themselves? changing? There aren't any historical examples of global crises requiring global action at all. Climate change is a legitimately unique event in human history, even if it does essentially boil to a very large scale tragedy of the commons problem.
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Aug 31, 2016 04:29
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Trabisnikof posted:You seem to confuse competence for goodwill. Financial industries can be competent and hurt a lot of people. The actions by the financial industry in the lead up to the 2008 crisis weren't the result of competence or goodwill, though. They were the sum of the lot of independently made decisions that were correct only in a small scale, short term sense. I'm not really trying to make an argument for or against anything here, but the 2008 crisis absolutely was not the result of the cold and competent logic of greed. It was a lot of really shortsighted people taking advantage of conditions that had no hope of playing out to anyone's benefit over the long term.
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Aug 31, 2016 22:44
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computer parts posted:Sort of. Renewables are reaching a point where it's very economical to switch to them, so the prices can't rise too much. I'm open to being proven wrong, but I'm not sure that there's any evidence that renewables are having much of an impact on oil prices in general. There are a ton of fundamental reasons for the low prices like collapsing Chinese demand. US supply has also shot through the roof over the last few years and basically everyone is doing balls to the wall pumping. Meanwhile, coal is just being destroyed by another fossil fuel.
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Sep 1, 2016 04:24
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Trabisnikof posted:You can be dismissive, but that's both feasible and requisite. Whether or not we achieve net zero carbon emissions in a century is actually drastically less important than what we're able to achieve in the next couple of decades, at least for anyone who's concerned about themselves or their children. The one consistent trend in climate research is that our estimates are too conservative, and even then we're already being forced to admit that climate change is having real effects on the world right now. I remember that people in the USPol thread were quick to point out that the flooding in Louisiana was happening in a region that was prone to flooding anyway, but oops, turns out that floods of that magnitude in that area are more likely now than they were in the past. It's good to be optimistic, but not when it gets in the way of acknowledging reality. The reality is that the climate is changing faster than we anticipated, that our actions are accelerating that change faster than we thought they would, and that the real effects of that change are being felt right now. We're not going to get anywhere until the people making policy are willing to admit that things are actually pretty bad already. It's good that politicians are talking about it at all, but it's bad that the conversation is still about climate change as a future problem to be averted rather than an ongoing crisis.
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Sep 29, 2016 04:41
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TheBlackVegetable posted:3-5 C is an end of civilization scenario though, right? No, definitely not. There's no realistic scenario that's going to take out human civilization. In the 3-5C range you're mostly talking about severe economic effects in rich, developed nations and starvation and mass migration elsewhere. It wouldn't be a great time to be alive compared to right now, but we'd make it through.
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Sep 29, 2016 21:55
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TheNakedFantastic posted:Also as like humanity outside of marginal areas (low rainfall Equatorial areas) is probably not going to suffer mass starvation via climate change alone unless there's a general and severe breakdown in society. Famine is absolutely an issue that poorer parts of the world are likely to face, even with relatively conservative levels of warming. The problem isn't an absolute loss of farmland so much as a shift in fertile territory that occurs more quickly than governments and economies can adapt. There are plenty of areas in the world where a loss of local food production would be devastating, even if global production remains unchanged over the long term.
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Sep 30, 2016 02:18
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Trabisnikof posted:Or argicultural methods and diets will have to change That's the part about economies and governments failing to keep up, though.   It's extremely optimistic to assume that poor areas that already have relatively low food security will be able to adapt without serious social consequences.
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Sep 30, 2016 03:02
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Trabisnikof posted:* use my emperor powers to hire a bunch of the best artists of our time to make personal car ownership seem dirty and uncool It sure as hell isn't happening in my lifetime, but I'd love to see personal car ownership (at least for transportation on public roads) stigmatized in the same way as smoking.
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Sep 30, 2016 21:20
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GlyphGryph posted:So what I have gathered from this thread so far, geoengineering is literally the only possibility left at this point if we want to prevent substantial warming, and our options for accepting the warming and trying to deal with the consequences are all pretty terrible for anyone outside the first world or near the equator? I feel like a broken record for how often I post this, but climate change is going to be bad for people living in the developed world too. Some of the fastest growing and most economically active areas in the US are extremely vulnerable to the effects of climate change, and the movement of people and business away from those areas is going to be a long, slow, and painful process. The urban landscape and economic center of the US is likely to look a lot different fifty years from now. Things are going to be drastically worse for people living in poorer, more vulnerable regions, but we're well past the point where climate change is mostly an issue for the third world. This is a global problem that's going to affect everyone. We do have options beyond geoengineering, though. The reason geoengineering gets brought up so often is because a lot of geoengineering proposals are eleventh hour kind of things that might conceivably be funded by wealthier governments once they realize "oh gently caress, we're being economically trashed by this problem that we've been kicking down the road for decades." Most other mitigation efforts require major policy shifts yesterday, and there just doesn't seem to be the political will for it. Paradoxish fucked around with this message at 22:11 on Oct 3, 2016 |
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Oct 3, 2016 22:06
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Overall US emissions actually are down, but you can mostly blame the recession and slow recovery for that. The trend is basically level. The trend in global emissions is... not good.
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Oct 4, 2016 16:38
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I like how almost half of conservative republicans agree that climate scientists should have a major role in policy making, but less than 20% think that climate scientists understand whether climate change is occurring or what its causes are. Also 85% of those conservative republicans who want climate scientists to be involved in policy making also don't trust them to provide full and accurate information?
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Oct 4, 2016 17:59
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Large scale CCS isn't happening anytime soon and doubling down on it would be a terrible idea since it's expensive and not guaranteed to ever mature to a meaningful level. It's almost as much of a hail mary as just hoping that some magical geoengineering technology will come along. Our options to "solve" this problem in a way that will actually minimize damage (as opposed to simply salvage things so that we aren't also loving over the people of the next century) boil down to drastically reducing consumption in developed nations or somehow forcing developing nations to take one for the team that already hosed them over and curtail emissions. On the bright side, the former will probably happen over time anyway as the effects of climate change impede economic growth.
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Oct 16, 2016 21:54
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GlyphGryph posted:As far as I can tell, maybe I'm wrong but no one in this thread has indicated otherwise yet, so as far as I can tell there is no path to mitigation success without some sort of sequestration ability well beyond the natural level. It is at best a delaying tactic. We still need to pursue it, but without developing sequestration technology and application at least to a certain minimum level it is at best a bandaid. It is impossible to obtain our targets through emission reduction alone, and while emission reduction will ultimately be a key part of reducing total atmospheric carbon, it can never be anything but a part and ignoring that reality in favour of pursuing an emission-exclusive strategy is a bad thing. Just to be clear, I don't think anyone in this thread is saying that CCS is bad and shouldn't be pursued. The reason that we're skeptical is that wide scale adoption is perpetually ten years away, and at this point we really needed it to be a mature technology several decades ago. It's almost certainly going to need to be a core component of our future plans, but for now emissions reduction is absolutely necessary if we want to reduce the amount of harm that climate change will cause in the near term.
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Oct 17, 2016 05:12
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a whole buncha crows posted:We are past the point of no return i thought that was scientific fact at this point, if we stopped all emissions immediately we would still be in dire straights, sure meat consumption and the sexual commodification of meat products are important as livestock have a huge impact but its all pissing into the wind at this point unless a decade ago all emissions stopped. The amount of warming that we've already locked in is bad, but it can get much, much worse. This is a problem that's effectively unbounded in terms of how bad things can get if we just continue with business as usual indefinitely.
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Oct 17, 2016 14:37
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Nocturtle posted:I did admit that humanity probably needs to get lucky in some regards, positive feedback cycles need to be less severe than feared etc. Not to sound overly pessimistic or anything, but it's probably not a good idea to assume that this will actually be the case. Our models have consistently been too conservative and our predictions are almost universally revised up as more data is collected. Even our inventory of emissions has tended to be too conservative, sometimes by quite a bit. At this point, I think the only way to seriously talk about climate change and plans to mitigate it is to assume that the best case scenarios are 100% unrealistic.
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Oct 17, 2016 19:22
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The Groper posted:We'll live in brotherhood of steel-style bunkers eating vat-grown yeasts before accepting extinction. There's no reasonable scenario where this happens either. Worrying about the literal extinction of the human race is silly, because the negative effects of climate change on economic growth will drastically reduce our ability to dump carbon into the atmosphere whether we like it or not. It's a fairly morbid thing to say, but the 2008 recession and drastic run-up in oil prices that happened beforehand probably did more to mitigate emissions than just about anything else we've done so far. A lot of economic power is concentrated on coasts and/or in areas seriously vulnerable to either droughts or more severe weather events. Even countries like the US are going to have to endure a lot of pain as people and businesses migrate away from areas that are too expensive to save. Industrialized civilization won't collapse because there's just no scenario where business as usual (as defined here in 2016) remains an option past around 1.5-2C. (unless, of course, we trigger some positive feedback loop that we don't fully understand and kill everything)
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Oct 17, 2016 20:25
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Femur posted:If this is the reasonable outcome of climate change in a couple of decades, what is the harm? This is absolutely absurd. First of all, the developing world isn't going to be nearly as resistant to the effects of climate change as rich countries like the US. They can't just "build new cities" and mass migration is going to cause an incredible amount of political turmoil, both in the countries that are affected directly and the countries where migrants flee to. More to your point, it's not actually fine if everything works out in the end for those of us lucky enough to live in the US. Some of the most vulnerable areas in the US are simultaneously the fastest growing and poorest parts of the country. The effects of climate change on the southeast US (and probably the southwest too, although in a different way) will ruin lives. We aren't talking about cities suddenly sinking underwater, we're talking about decades of extreme weather bleeding affected areas to death. Like, yeah, I suppose if you want to solve racism and drastically increase safety nets in the US we can probably weather the worst of what's to come with a minimum of actual human suffering, but somehow that seems more pie-in-the-sky than actual climate change solutions. Nocturtle posted:It's probably not surprising that the largest historical decreases in carbon emissions were likely due to economic crashes. The worst was the Savings and Loan crisis, by a completely unscientific analysis it looks like prevented almost a billion tonnes of carbon emissions. The 2008 financial crisis is closer to ~350 million tonnes. Yep, part of this is probably related to the tendency for oil prices to go up shortly before or during the early stages of US recessions. It's not a perfect 1:1 relationship, but it happened during the recession in the early 90s and it happened in '08. There probably would have been longer term effects from the financial crisis, but oil prices cratered a few years ago. What's good for the US economy is bad for climate change.
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Oct 17, 2016 23:56
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NewForumSoftware posted:To stop the collapse of industrialized civilization? To stop 4C of warming? Nothing. The "collapse of industrialized civilization," unless you're using that phrase in an extremely strange way, is not something that's likely to happen even at 4C warming. Keep in mind that we aren't even talking about a predicted overall reduction in global food production until we hit somewhere in the neighborhood of 3C. Localized food production at lower and mid latitude, yes, but crop productivity at higher latitudes will increase. In other words, rich societies are still going to find a way to feed their population and industrial farming is probably going to be even more important than it is now. Poor societies, especially in the global south, are going to be completely hosed by this. Localized food production isn't going to be a solution because it'll actually be more difficult as we lose arable farmland. Your entire thesis seems to be predicated on the idea that everyone will be forced into subsistence farming just to stay alive and that will in turn lead to a collapse of industry, but there's absolutely no support for that and it's pretty much the complete opposite of what's likely to happen as areas that are now considered remote and unusable become viable for food production. Like, a huge part of the issue for poorer regions of the world is that localized food production will become nearly impossible.
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Oct 18, 2016 05:19
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