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Morbus posted:Part of the reason sulfate aerosols are considered relatively benign is that they aren't a novel feature of the climate and there are empirical bounds on their effects. Obviously any kind of atmospheric geo-engineering can have unintended consequences, but I think the likelihood of sulfate injection taking us into uncharted and dangerous territory (to anywhere near the extent that GHGs already have) is low. Morbus posted:Well you conduct a controlled experiment where you dump a bunch of sulfates into the air and see what happens. Short of that you obviously aren't going to "prove" anything. But there are a lot of reasons why you can be reasonably certain about the broad scope and effects of sulfate geoengineering: You've never actually run an actual scientific experiment in your life, have you? Minge Binge posted:I'd be okay with geoengineering if it came after a complete restructuring of society that is built on sustainability and equality. But that's not going to happen. Correct, which is why geoengineering is a singularly bad idea. The argument that "humans have been geoengineering the planet since civilization started, therefore" is also bad and dumb. In The situation we're in is because in ~2000 years of recorded history and ~300 years of modern technological development, we've not stopped to actually reckon with what the hell we're doing to the planet, even just by passively existing. The last few years worth of revelations should reinforce the point that when it comes to Earth systems we're barely scratching the surface of understanding how the planet works and how bad things could get. Geoengineering on a scale that would make any sort of noticeable difference on a short time frame (5-10 years) would almost certainly either be 1) insufficient to stopping long term variation in climate or 2) go so wrong as to irrevocably gently caress up the climatic optimum and ecosystem balance that we rely on to survive. Seriously, it's a bad idea. And chances are in the next 10-15 years you're going to see some rich rear end in a top hat (my money would be on Thiel or Musk, personally), try to go ahead with it anyway. 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.
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Dec 15, 2016 04:58
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Morbus posted: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). Reducing consumption and moving wholesale to renewables is a complete fix, but it's a method of mitigation that we have much more control over and one that forestalls the issue of continued level of emissions. As you said, we have no idea what some natural sinks are capable of, or what will happen with the forcing of certain feedback mechanisms as global CO2 (ppm) rises, to say nothing of runaway methane emissions as tundra and other deposit-heavy biomes heat up. If we reduce consumption, that gives up more breathing room and flexibility than if we just rely on geoengineering without solving the problem of how society functions. There's a hard cap to what geoengineering can do, and if we're constantly trying to geoengineer our way of of climatic forcing then we'll never get around to dealing with the real issue: humans cannot and should not continue to function as a civilization reliant on hydrocarbons and severely imbalanced, not to mention unsustainable, levels of product production and consumption. Morbus posted: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. Artificial carbon sequestration is a thing, although it's also another tech fix that we shouldn't allow to be used as reasoning to forestall renewable development and consumption reduction. Morbus posted: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? I'm not, but we haven't even tried on any serious level. There sky is the limit for what we can do to shift and reduce consumption patterns in the developed world alone. A LOT can be done in 20 or 30 years. That we're seeing such drastic, terrifying feedback responses now should only be more motivation to doing what we can do now, and not kicking the can down the road. Morbus posted: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. I will agree that "some" geoengineering might be necessary, but again we should exhaust every other option (of which there are many) before we get there. Just saying that "oh we can geoengineer our way out of it" is not a reason to diminish the importance of vastly re-configuring the way that our society functions as a part and parcel of any climate change mitigation or adaptation strategy. TROIKA CURES GREEK posted: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. 1. The IPCC (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/may/09/ipcc-renewable-energy-power-world) and the Union of Concerned Scientists (http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/smart-energy-solutions/increase-renewables/renewable-energy-80-percent-us-electricity.html#.WFMvKuYrJhE) might disagree with you. Again, the emphasis is starting NOW, rather than waiting for some miraculous technological fix that might never appear. 2. Humans have never dealt with a literally planet-sized problem before, and as has been said in this thread before several times, it's entirely possible that those technological fixes might never appear, not be as efficient as we need, or have side effects that make the problem significantly worse. It's not about being luddites and denying the potential of technology. It's about utilizing all the tools we have at hand, and also making an effort to address the root problem, which is that human civilization as it is currently structured is unsustainable no matter how much we try to innovate our way around the consequences.
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Dec 16, 2016 01:06
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Veyrall posted:So, how do we convince Joe Average and Ndonwi Mecano and Cho Shi and every other regular human to act in a sustainable manner? Because, as much as we like to blame the big wigs, this is a human problem, and needs to be addressed at that level. That's a question that I don't have the answer to at the moment, although I'd like to point out that the problem isn't people in Africa or the Middle East or even the majority of people in Asia. It's us, the people in the developed world with the highest per capita energy use, waste, consumption and emission rates. You can convince people to reduce their consumption without putting a gun to their head, and most people would do so willingly and passively if presented the option in a way that didn't drastically diminish their quality of life, which is 100% possible. Most people wouldn't need a car if we had liveable cities and efficient mass transit, for one example. Convincing Americans to forego out obsession with meat, even if just by cutting it in half, and switching from a extremely harmful, pesticide & antibiotic reliant agriculture model to one of small, sustainable, mixed crop rotation would make a huge difference. A lot of politics in the western world comes down to virtue signalling, and all you have to do is create the options for people to do what they're already doing, but in a way that allows them to feel invested or morally right and they'll run towards it. All this rhetoric of "oh no one will ever go for that, might as well just hold out hope for a technological miracle" is amazingly myopic. There's a lot we can do right now and it doesn't take a benevolent dictatorship, just a bit of political will to move in a different direction. Edit: On a slightly different note. The New York Times posted:They do it because the rains have become so fickle, the days measurably hotter, the droughts more frequent and more fierce, making it impossible to grow enough food on their land. Some go to the cities first, only to find jobs are scarce. Some come from countries ruled by dictators, like Gambia, whose longtime ruler recently refused to accept the results of an election he lost. Others come from countries crawling with jihadists, like Mali. From here: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/12/15/world/africa/agadez-climate-change.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0 Mat Cauthon fucked around with this message at 03:04 on Dec 16, 2016 |
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Dec 16, 2016 02:46
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MaxxBot posted:I think you're gonna have a far easier time convincing Americans to buy electric cars than give up their cars entirely unless they both live and work in a city. No poo poo, hence why the vast majority of press goes to the newest Tesla model rather than making the case for moving away from a culture of individual vehicle ownership. Not saying that cars would go away forever; even if you gave every major city in the US an efficient, low-cost, robust public transit system, there'd still be a small need for shipping vehicles, as well as a consumer desire for vehicle ownership (albeit on a much smaller scale and something that could probably be met with carsharing systems). Given that the vast majority of people on this planet live in urban, high density environments, addressing the emission problem as vehicles pertain to it is still something that would provide a significant return on investment. The car culture we have now is the result of a very serious investment on the part of major car companies in the 40s and 50s to push the idea that cars = necessary. There's no reason we can't roll that back and invest in a different model. ChairMaster posted:You have to entirely rebuild so many of the largest cities in America to make them liveable without owning a car that it's ridiculous to even think that the will for it could be mustered in time to prevent catastrophe anyways. I shouldn't have implied that Americans (Not just Americans) are consuming an inordinate amount of resources just because they like to, it's due to a great deal of factors that make up not only their (our) culture, but the physical realities of the world in which we find ourselves. Logically speaking, yes, of course these issues could be solved, but who's going to do it? Who's going to give up all that money, and allow it to happen? There's more to the issue than just convincing people that we need to consume less, you need to undo the entire society that we live in from the ground up. Again, we have done this before. And we're currently rebuilding or remodeling several major cities (NYC, Miami, London, etc) to prepare for the effects of significant sea level rise, among other climate effects. Nothing I've proposed is beyond the ken of what humanity can accomplish. If we can rationalize that, then we should be able to rationalize taking action that would prevent further negative outcomesHell, a few pages back people were jerking off over Bill Gates giving up billions of dollars on tech that might never get out of R&D. We could take that and make a serious, quantifiable dent in emissions and energy right now. And this - " I shouldn't have implied that Americans (Not just Americans) are consuming an inordinate amount of resources just because they like to, it's due to a great deal of factors that make up not only their (our) culture, but the physical realities of the world in which we find ourselves." is demonstrably false. There's nothing inherently necessary about the way that our society operates from a viewpoint of energy production and consumption. The problem is not unsolvable, as much as it is seen as untenable at the current moment because we're not faced with tangible consequences. By the time that happens, it'll be too late. You can throw up your hands in the air and pray for some technological silver bullet, the rest of us will be over here fighting to use the time we have constructively. ChairMaster posted:I've tried to avoid this part of the issue because people tend to shut down immediately when you say the word capitalism and write you off as some rear end in a top hat who's still mad that Sanders isn't the president, but it's an unavoidable part of why the political issue cannot be fought. The whole world is set up against the idea of positive change, it doesn't matter what any of us or any other group of random jerks on an internet forum say. There is no enemy for us to fight, there's nobody for us to elect to fix this, there's no policy that can be implemented to change the world in such a way as is necessary to mean poo poo all in the end. See, here's where I agree with you (mostly). The root of the problem is the way that society is structured around capitalist ideas of production, consumption, and trade. Opposing that would provide more space, theoretically speaking, to address climate issues in a more direct manner. But I disagree that it's not possible to convince people of the necessity of that framework. Most people dislike the way that the economy works, that it rewards a few and punishes the rest, and would stand against it if given the opportunity. The enemy is right there. For you to continually tout geoengineering or any other moonshot tech as the answer is to do the work of the opposition for them, by rationalizing the mindset that humanity can gently caress up, infinitely, and never suffer the consequences, because someone, somehow, will save us and therefore the status quo can go unchanged. If you're so assured that we're hosed and it's going to be every man for himself, why are you posting here? Shouldn't you be trading survival tips in TFR? Anyway. Alex Steffan wrote a good thing and y'all should read it: [quote="Alex Steffan" post="https://medium.com/@AlexSteffen/trump-putin-and-the-pipelines-to-nowhere-742d745ce8fd#.b4dlfu6kp"] In case you’re just joining us here on Earth, we’re making the planet hotter. The science is incontrovertible that by burning fossil fuels, we’re changing the planet’s climate. Because the consequences worsen dramatically as we emit more climate pollution and the planet gets hotter, every nation on Earth agreed last year in Paris to hold that temperature rise to two degrees Celsius (2ºC). This means we must limit the total amount of CO2 and other greenhouse pollution we put into the sky: we have to meet a “carbon budget.” To do meet that budget, we have to radically cut greenhouse gas emissions — burning way less oil, coal and gas — in the next two decades, and set the global economy on a steep path to zero emissions. Again, the American media has failed to convey the magnitude of the costs of unchecked global warming. Those costs are profound already, today, as the Arctic heatwave, Syrian civil war, bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef, worsening storms, droughts, wildfires and freak weather events all show. Those costs will only grow, and they will grow more dire, more quickly as the planet heats. At the same time, the innovations we need to create zero-carbon prosperity are already here. From plummeting costs for solar, wind, electric vehicles and green buildings to better approaches to urban planning, agriculture and forestry, we already have the tools we need to start building a much more prosperous world, producing hosts of new companies and millions of jobs. Indeed, a giant building boom is what successful climate action looks like. Because we have no real choice but to act — and, in fact, climate action will make most people not only safer, but better off — big changes are coming, far sooner than most Americans understand. [/quote]
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Dec 16, 2016 05:58
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I think we're just going to have to agree to disagree on the small details of what solutions are worth pursuing versus which are futile. FWIW, I don't think reducing emissions will get us below 400 ppm (or even 350 ppm), I just think that it's worth pursuing to prevent warming beyond what's already loaded into the chute and it's somewhat disingenuous (and I would argue dangerous) to even consider such effects as a rationale for the emissions reduction argument, either for or against. We have to deal with the world that we have now. To that end, I do agree that we're running out of time, even quite possibly already irrevocably hosed. Anyway. More good news!  "The arctic has now become a net source of heat trapping pollution". Such a mundane assortment of words with such a significant implication. From here: http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/38752-latest-climate-report-the-arctic-is-unravelling
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Dec 16, 2016 18:43
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For anyone under ~40 or so posting in this thread, "retirement" as a concept will probably not exist. I can't knock people for foregoing a 401k or any sort of other retirement plan in the context of what will most certainly be a very unpleasant future, especially after watching what the financial crisis did to most of them in 2009. It's just more money taken from you and put in the pockets of rich assholes.
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Dec 19, 2016 03:48
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TildeATH posted:No there aren't you're being a dummy. The people of Flint, Michigan might like a word with you on that point. Or any sufficiently abandoned, deindustrialized city. Or any native American reservation. Or.... You get the idea.
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Apr 12, 2017 05:00
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I thought we had at least a decade or more before the momentum really started to affect things that your average person in a developed nation would care about, but when those positive feedback loops get going they really get going. I've been involved in environmental activism for a minute but it really feels like nowhere near enough is being done on a fast enough time scale, despite all the time and energy poured into this. Time to start convincing my relatives that live on the eastern seaboard to join me in the midwest, I guess.
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Apr 21, 2017 04:40
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Forever_Peace posted:That's certainly fair! This is a useful and informative post, however I have to point out that the authors are both wonks with strong ties to the CIA and/or deep state adjacent think tanks. If you read the book (I have) their bias is all over it. That the Arab Spring isn't included isn't an accident. Nonviolent protest can work but the parameters are so narrow as to be mostly unrealistic unless there's strong influence or support by an outside third party. Most of what your average American knows about protest is basically upside down from actual history when it comes to our own country and closer to fairy tales than truth of any sort for other nations. Read "This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed" or "At the Dark End of the Street" or "Hammer and Hoe" or any book really about organizing and protest in the pre-CRM era. People are deeply resistant to changing the status quo, even if the status quo is strangling them by inches. You can't change that with nice peaceful marches and Facebook posts.
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Apr 24, 2017 13:40
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Forever_Peace posted:You'll understand if I'm a little skeptical about the implication that this research is part of a CIA conspiracy to encourage complacency, but it sounds like we have the same disappointment about the limitations of the dataset. I'd love to see a more recent or complete source of data on resistance outcomes if you happen to know one! It's not exactly  territory to acknowledge the fact that the US govt, military, and intelligence community have a vested interest in pushing the "peaceful protest equals peaceful regime change (brokered with power players that can be leaned on) equals peaceful transition of power (with zero change to the status quo besides a new coat of paint) is best for everyone" narrative. But yes, disappointment is a good way to phrase my sentiments towards the book. I did come across a pretty interesting review of the book with some complementary data sources a while back, I'll see if I can dig it up.
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Apr 24, 2017 19:48
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Nice piece of fish posted:Heheeeeey, let's have some more great news But wait there's more! https://twitter.com/emorwee/status/869941131030790144 We had a good run.
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May 31, 2017 17:18
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Can someone explain why certain climate people have a hard on for self driving (ostensibly electric) cars? Yeah, ideally it'll reduce human error and maybe reduce emissions but if it doesn't change consumption patterns or shift transportation design towards mass transit then what's the loving point? To say nothing of the economic disruption when a poo poo ton of people lose their (already lovely) jobs.
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Jul 6, 2017 19:17
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StabbinHobo posted:camera footage of like an entire village of dead bodies from a heat wave might be the kind of visual that finally makes things real to people bad at abstract concepts Not unless those corpses are white people from a first world nation. And even then I'd put it at like 50/50 odds.
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Aug 4, 2017 14:58
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I generally try to keep an optimistic outlook, but holy poo poo what can you even do in the face of something like that? Imagine what we're still not aware of, and what will be overlooked or missed as resources are siphoned away from the scientists doing the depressing work of trying to keep track of how fast we're setting ourselves up for catastrophe on a global level. The EPA is being gutted and sold to the highest bidder, China is by all accounts fudging their numbers, India is raring up to drill baby drill, the Amazon is being clear cut, oceanic dead zones, dying coral reefs, collapsing food chains, widespread death & devastation in Africa and the Middle East exacerbated by climate damage...I just don't know. Mat Cauthon fucked around with this message at 00:03 on Aug 24, 2017 |
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Aug 24, 2017 00:01
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actionjackson posted:How high up is that? Most traffic lights are about 20-25 ft high (6.5-8 meters, I guess). Houston is a swamp that was dredged out to build a city. IIRC, it is only about 13m above sea level on average. Some of the outlying areas are higher, but not high enough for it to matter with the amount of water that is being dropped on them. The NOAA had to reconfigure their scales because the ones they usually used were outclassed by the first 1-2 days of rain, and there are 4-5 more days of rain predicted: https://twitter.com/LonestarTallBoi/status/901873801532760064 Like someone else said, this is the 3rd 500 year flood that has hit Houston in the past 3 years. And it's only going to get worse, because the local govt refuses to do anything to create more drainage or take climate change seriously.
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Aug 28, 2017 22:13
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Politico posted:What Loladze found is that scientists simply didn’t know. It was already well documented that CO2levels were rising in the atmosphere, but he was astonished at how little research had been done on how it affected the quality of the plants we eat. For the next 17 years, as he pursued his math career, Loladze scoured the scientific literature for any studies and data he could find. The results, as he collected them, all seemed to point in the same direction: The junk-food effect he had learned about in that Arizona lab also appeared to be occurring in fields and forests around the world. “Every leaf and every grass blade on earth makes more and more sugars as CO2 levels keep rising,” Loladze said. “We are witnessing the greatest injection of carbohydrates into the biosphere in human history―[an] injection that dilutes other nutrients in our food supply.” Politico posted:These experiments and others like them have shown scientists that plants change in important ways when they’re grown at elevated CO2 levels. Within the category of plants known as “C3”―which includes approximately 95 percent of plant species on earth, including ones we eat like wheat, rice, barley and potatoes―elevated CO2 has been shown to drive down important minerals like calcium, potassium, zinc and iron. The data we have, which look at how plants would respond to the kind of CO2 concentrations we may see in our lifetimes, show these important minerals drop by 8 percent, on average. The same conditions have been shown to drive down the protein content of C3 crops, in some cases significantly, with wheat and rice dropping 6 percent and 8 percent, respectively. Politico posted:Goldenrod, a wildflower many consider a weed, is extremely important to bees. It flowers late in the season, and its pollen provides an important source of protein for bees as they head into the harshness of winter. Since goldenrod is wild and humans haven’t bred it into new strains, it hasn’t changed over time as much as, say, corn or wheat. And the Smithsonian Institution also happens to have hundreds of samples of goldenrod, dating back to 1842, in its massive historical archive—which gave Ziska and his colleagues a chance to figure out how one plant has changed over time. More good news: http://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/09/13/food-nutrients-carbon-dioxide-000511?lo=ap_a1
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Sep 14, 2017 20:22
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VideoGameVet posted:China is a Kleptocracy. And the United States isn't?
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Oct 21, 2017 00:50
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Conspiratiorist posted:
This is sad on such an existential level that I don't really know how to process it. Age of poisoned thought indeed.
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Oct 25, 2017 03:34
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sitchensis posted:Matt Christman from Chapo Trap House: I can't believe I agree with someone from CTH. ALthough I guess their DSA Medicare for all guy is consistently on point too. Broken clocks and all that.
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Oct 28, 2017 19:13
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A really long and well-research article on carbon capture that makes it seem even less feasible as a viable solution, or even stop-gap, than it already is: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/20/can-carbon-dioxide-removal-save-the-world?reload=true
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Dec 6, 2017 21:05
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VideoGameVet posted:Rex asked Trump to stay in the Paris Climate Agreement. Because leaving it made his job as Secretary of State harder, not because he cares. The dude spent the last thirty years denying climate change, burying evidence of it, and funding climate change denial science.
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Mar 15, 2018 18:02
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davebo posted:I thought millenials don't care about car ownership so the American Car Penis will just fall off with old age. Millennials can't afford cars without going into massive amounts of debt, which is why the current car market is gonna go off a cliff soon. I know plenty of Millennials who have a huge boner for electric cars, both of out their supposed environmental benefits and because they (like most Americans) live in a place with piss poor public transit and therefore need a car to function independently.
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Apr 10, 2018 17:31
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El Grillo posted:I haven't followed any developments in the science for the past few years. Is he right to say that if we stopped all fossil fuel emissions right now, we're still screwed? That seems like a pretty bold claim given it seems we're pretty bad at predicting how the multifarious feedback loops, carbon sinks etc actually work? There's enough frontloaded co2 in the atmosphere, oceans, etc that even if we went zero emissions globally the moment I finish this post, we're still locked in to AT LEAST 2°C of warming globally. The ice caps will still melt (and probably distort oceanic currents), reefs will still die, marine ecosystems will still go haywire. Etc etc. Yeah we're bad at modelling but the way we're bad at it means that almost all of the predictions have underestimated the effects of climate change. We don't know enough to get a really accurate picture, just enough to know that we're hosed and wholely unprepared or unwilling to do anything about it.
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Apr 26, 2018 14:32
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Rip Testes posted:I have to be honest knowing that life is short and all this is in the pipe I am considering accelerating my personal timelines. Not coming from a climate news standpoint, my wife the other day was mentioning moving back to her homeland with what we have which would be enough to retire with given the circumstances of her place of origin. I've been reticent to fully consider it due to the lack of healthcare there, but maybe that's less an issue. Retire to the boondock mountains of a foreign land away from this thread, the news and a large part of modern technological life. My mentality may improve, have more time with family, definitely have less of a carbon footprint and there could be a chance that the vicissitudes of climate change in that region and personal health work out in the long run. Go for it but make sure your kid knows how to fend for themselves (live off the land, basic medicine, etc) and use guns. I'm not joking. It sounds like a bad joke about baby boomer preppers but honestly if poo poo goes sideways then they'll need it. Saxophone posted:So do we have any ways of reversing any of this? Even if we're a ways out? No. All the CCS tech is decades away from being viable (which is to say, able to dump more carbon than the process produces), and that's without going into the various issues of land use and as yet unknown side effects. Any sort of geoengineering will have a 99% chance of backfiring or causing some sort of add-on effect that will gently caress things up even more. We cannot magic lamp our way out of this. Even if the tech somehow magically worked tomorrow or someone invented cold fusion or whatever, we're still frontloaded with enough CO2 to get us to 1.5 degrees celsius. It's an impossibly deep hole to dig out of and most of the world is committed to going in the opposite direction because FYGM. I stopped reading this thread a while back because the constant cycle of topics (extinction, collapse, random shitposters making specious claims) got boring and damaging to my mental state. Sucks that what brings me back is basically a confirmation of what every professor I ever had who studied climate has worried about for decades. The IPCC put conservative estimates and rosy projections in the reports for the last decade and half in an attempt to placate politicians and prod them towards proactive measures, now they're ringing the alarm at the worst possible time. Honestly the only outcome of this report that I can see being feasible is the current US government doubles down on the "Fortress America" crap and things get worse for everyone, everywhere.
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Oct 9, 2018 03:42
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