blowfish posted:

The issue is that a lot of environmentalists don't operate under a framework of seeking pragmatic solutions to environmental problems no matter what the solution looks like. Historically, environmentalism has often involved fighting the ~system~ or picketing corporations and economic development has obviously caused quite some damage to ecosystems so just developing in a different direction or throwing energy at problems to make them go away is quite a radical way to go about things. In addition, you get a lot of people who generally want a more ~connected~ society (everyone should grow their own food or at least know their farmer and produce electricity locallly, so decentralisation is a goal in and of itself), have an issue with the concept of a corporation itself and/or need a clear villain (Monsanto is a special kind of evil, not just a generic uncaring business), have an idealised view of nature and ~natural~ things vs. technology, and what have you. Centralised big nuclear power stations powering dense cities and factory farms are thus anathema, even if some ivory tower scientists paid shills say they're sustainable.

The people worth targeting most are those who just adopted these positions by cultural osmosis and are sufficiently lukewarm about them to be convinced to follow different approaches.

blowfish posted:

And that won't get better - rainforests become more vulnerable after initial disturbance because they need quite a while to rebuild the dense vegetation that maintains high humidity and thereby lowers fire risk, so regrowth forests (and newly-exposed forest edges) will be more easily burned.

Placid Marmot posted:

You are very clearly not a member of the green movement and, given your posts in this thread, you clearly know next to nothing about climate change. I have nothing more to add; your posts just annoy me greatly.

Rime posted:

quote:

Sea levels could rise far more rapidly than expected in coming decades, according to new research that reveals Antarctica’s vast ice cap is less stable than previously thought.

The UN’s climate science body had predicted up to a metre of sea level rise this century - but it did not anticipate any significant contribution from Antarctica, where increasing snowfall was expected to keep the ice sheet in balance.

According a study, published in the journal Nature, collapsing Antarctic ice sheets are expected to double sea-level rise to two metres by 2100, if carbon emissions are not cut.

Previously, only the passive melting of Antarctic ice by warmer air and seawater was considered but the new work added active processes, such as the disintegration of huge ice cliffs.

“This [doubling] could spell disaster for many low-lying cities,” said Prof Robert DeConto, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who led the work. He said that if global warming was not halted, the rate of sea-level rise would change from millimetres per year to centimetres a year. “At that point it becomes about retreat [from cities], not engineering of defences.”

As well as rising seas, climate change is also causing storms to become fiercer, forming a highly destructive combination for low-lying cities like New York, Mumbai and Guangzhou. Many coastal cities are growing fast as populations rise and analysis by World Bank and OECD staff has shown that global flood damage could cost them $1tn a year by 2050 unless action is taken.

The cities most at risk in richer nations include Miami, Boston and Nagoya, while cities in China, Vietnam, Bangladesh and Ivory Coast are among those most in danger in less wealthy countries.

The new research follows other recent studies warning of the possibility of ice sheet collapse in Antarctica and suggesting huge sea-level rises. But the new work suggests that major rises are possible within the lifetimes of today’s children, not over centuries.

...

Overflight posted:

My first niece was born today.

...how the hell am I supposed to react to this?

quote:

US and China lead push to bring Paris climate deal into force early

The US and China are leading a push to bring the Paris climate accord into force much faster than even the most optimistic projections – aided by a typographical glitch in the text of the agreement.

More than 150 governments, including 40 heads of state, are expected at a symbolic signing ceremony for the agreement at the United Nations on 22 April, which is Earth Day.

It’s the largest one-day signing of any international agreement, according to the UN.

But leaders will really be looking to see which countries go beyond mere ceremony and legally join the agreement, which would bind them to the promises made in Paris last December to keep warming below the agreed target of 2C.

So far, the US, China, Canada and a host of other countries have promised to join this year - boosting the hopes of bringing the Paris deal into force before the initial target date of 2020 – possibly as early as 2016 or 2017, according to officials and analysts.

That is well before the timeline originally envisaged at Paris. Environment ministers attending the World Bank spring meetings this week said the faster pace indicated serious commitment to dealing with the global challenge.

The accelerated timeline would have one obvious advantage for Barack Obama. The standard withdrawal clause on any such agreement would force a future Republican president to wait four years before quitting Paris, according to legal experts.

An earlier start date could also turbo-charge the agreement, providing momentum for deeper emissions cuts.

It could also help efforts to attain the more ambitious goal of limiting warming to 1.5C – which would give a better chance of survival to small islands and other countries on the frontlines of climate change.

Christiana Figueres, who heads the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, has said global emissions need to peak by 2020 to have any chance of limiting warming to 1.5C. There has already been about 1C warming above pre-industrial levels.

“Early entry into force – we are very committed to making that happen,” Catherine McKenna, Canada’s environment and climate change minister, told a panel at the World Bank last week. “We can’t just now rest on our laurels and have a nice signing on Earth Day, and then we all go home.”

She told The Guardian Canada was committed to signing the agreement this year.

The push to bring the climate agreement into force quickly is in sharp contrast to the earlier international efforts to fight climate change through the Kyoto Protocol, which did not take effect for four years.

Eliza Northrop, an analyst at the World Resources Institute, said there was growing momentum behind an early approval of the agreement.

“It’s likely it could come into effect in 2017. It could even happen this year,” she said.

Governments at the Paris climate meeting had initially set the start date of the agreement in 2020 – with intense discussion over whether that start date should be at the start or end of the year, according to diplomats.

The 2020 date remained in the negotiating drafts almost until the very end, the diplomats said. But unaccountably the final draft prepared by France left out the entire clause. By that point, after a few late-night negotiating sessions, a number of countries did not notice the omission.

The agreement, the first time all countries agreed to emissions cuts and other actions to fight climate change, aims to limit warming to below 2C and move towards a zero-carbon economy by the end of the century.

But it’s a tall order. The agreement needs to be approved by 55 countries accounting for at least 55% of global greenhouse gas emissions to come into force.


The US and China committed to join the agreement this year – but that still leaves a gap of more than 15% of global emissions.

A number of countries, including India and Japan, require their parliaments to approve the Paris agreement – a process which could take time.

The European Union will need agreement from its 28 member states before it can join the agreement – which makes it highly unlikely to be in a position to join early on.

“The assumption is that you have to do this without the EU to get to that 55% hurdle, if you want to see that in the next year or so,” said Alden Meyer, strategy director for the Union of Concerned Scientists.

That will force governments to cobble together a coalition of smaller countries if they hope to reach the 55% emissions threshold.

Possible contenders include India, Mexico, the Philippines and Australia.

So far, about 10 countries have said they would join the agreement this year.

On Wednesday, Román Macaya, Costa Rica’s ambassador to Washington, said his country would join the agreement in 2016. Palau, Switzerland, Fiji and the Marshall Islands have also said they will approve the agreement this year.

Placid Marmot posted:

No, this is incorrect. If individuals opt not to fly or to eat meat or whatever, then demand is reduced and the service or product will be less profitable; YOUR single influence, as one person, is negligible, but the behavior of a population that is made of individuals does influence outcomes. If you hadn't noticed, all of the individuals in the world make up such a population, so the decisions of individuals in the world do have a cumulative effect on outcomes.
If everyone were to listen to your advice that "you can't make a difference by not X", then we would see an even worse level of excessive consumption than we already have. By saying that an individual can have no effect, you are pushing responsibility for that individual's polluting onto other people.
Not flying (for example) will not reduce the level of CO2 and other pollutants in the atmosphere, but it will prevent the release of pollutants that the average Westerner would produce in your place. It is certainly hypocritical to bemoan the effects of CO2 while being in the top few percent of the world's producers of CO2 because of your decisions.

Placid Marmot posted:

You work in climate advocacy yet you still fly around the world and think that not having a child offsets your own emissions* - yeah, that's hypocrisy and ignorance all smashed together. You must feel dizzy from the cognitive dissonance.

*So we don't need to have this argument again, the decision to have a child results in a massive increase in the emissions that you are responsible for, while the decision to not have a child is carbon neutral.

quote:

http://gizmodo.com/extreme-heat-will-make-parts-of-the-middle-east-and-afr-1774311994

Extreme Heat Will Make Parts of the Middle East and Africa Uninhabitable by 2050

New research shows that temperatures are set to skyrocket in parts of the Middle East and Africa, making human habitation next to impossible. In a region that’s home to 500 million people, that could trigger a climate-exodus of epic proportions.

These new climate projections, compiled by researchers from the Max Planck Institute, tell an incredibly scary story—like, apocalyptic Mad Max scary. According to Johannes Lelieveld and colleagues, even if Earth’s average temperature were to increase by two degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial times, the summer temperature in these regions would still increase more than twofold by the midpoint of the century. Combined with prolonged heat waves, decades-long megadroughts, and windblown desert dust, these environmental conditions would be intolerable for humans, forcing many to migrate.

By 2050, summer temperatures in parts of the Middle East and North Africa would stay above 86ºF (30ºC) at night. During the day, temperatures during the hot seasons are predicted to rise to 114ºF (46ºC). By the end of the century, midday temperatures would reach 122ºF (50ºC). By comparison, the average maximum summer temperature in Eastern California’s Death Valley is 115ºF (46ºC).

Heat waves will likely occur ten times more frequently than they do now, and they’ll last much longer. Prior to 2005, there were about 16 excruciatingly hot days per year on average. According to the new models, it will be unusually hot for about 80 days per year—a figure that will jump to 118 days by the end of the century.

And if all this wasn’t bad enough, the researchers also found that desert dust in the atmosphere is increasing over Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Syria. They’re attributing this to an increase of sand storms as a result of protracted droughts. Climate change will exacerbate this even further.

Needless to say, this will have a dramatic effect on people who live in these areas.

“Climate change will significantly worsen the living conditions in the Middle East and in North Africa,” noted Lelieveld in a statement. “Prolonged heat waves and desert dust storms can render some regions uninhabitable, which will surely contribute to the pressure to migrate.”

For the study, the researchers based their calculations on two scenarios, one in which global emissions of greenhouse gases start decreasing by 2040 (i.e. we succeed at meeting the climate target set at the recent UN Climate Summit in Paris), the other based on the assumption that greenhouse gases will continue to increase unabated (usually referred to as the “business-as-usual scenario.”). In the latter scenario, the mean surface temperature of our planet will increase by more than 4ºC compared to pre-industrial times.

Unfortunately, both scenarios yielded dramatic temperature rises in these desert regions, particularly during the summer months when it’s already very hot. Parched desert surfaces cannot cool by the evaporation of groundwater, and since the balance of surface energy is controlled by heat radiation, this makes the greenhouse gas effect even worse.

Nocturtle posted:

In this regard it's fortunate that Miami is built on top of the geological equivalent of swiss cheese. It's imminent flooding might provide the shock needed to overcome political resistance to addressing climate change. Unlike the flooding of New Orleans it can't be blamed on a single levee breaking.

BattleMoose posted:

Yeah, how about no. For the past 10 years or so I have been that annoying little poo poo trying to educate people on climate change. I have faith in the great ocean that separates my country from the others. When it comes to it, Ill be looking out for me and my own.

Conspiratiorist posted:

Sounds like typical non-scientific goon connect-the-dots.

ChairMaster posted:

That's happened like 3 times before, in a few million years it'll be back to normal.

call to action posted:

You can rip open an abdomen to get to the heart, ask me how I know (former EMT in SD, CA). If you've got any more medical questions maybe keep them out of the thread tho

A Buttery Pastry posted:

Going against milk products is a direct attack on populations along genetic lines, and completely unacceptable.

A Buttery Pastry posted:

https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1006944673976512512

Last chance to visit Miami cats.

Burt Buckle posted:

Sometimes I get this feeling that you guys enjoy seeing articles that suggest things are worse than previously thought.