|
Is anyone at all annoyed that ExxonMobile's internal scientists predicted 3 degrees Centigrade of warming in 1978, before the company launched a media machine designed to deny climate change? Internal memos said something like "If the average person doesn't know what to think about warming, that's a victory." link
|
#
¿
Nov 9, 2015 15:49
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 06:45 |
|
|
The coming damage is so bad people don't believe you when you say things like "we'll have to build walls around New York and London to keep the sea out" or "we don't know if fish will survive in numbers large enough to support a fishing industry" so I wonder how to get through to people. It seems like nobody can believe what's happening in California even as it happens. They'll happily tell you about growing wineries in Vermont, Wisconsin and Minnesota but the obvious corollaries just run into a mental wall. You get no reaction.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 9, 2015 15:59
|
|
|
Didn't that used to be a thread title?
|
|
#
¿
Nov 23, 2015 22:13
|
|
|
What do you think science teachers in middle and high schools should be telling students about climate change?
|
|
#
¿
Nov 10, 2016 23:54
|
|
|
What was the trigger for this thread to go into full meltdown mode? I thought that "no sea ice" map was just some guy without a degree?
|
|
#
¿
Nov 15, 2016 02:39
|
|
|
When the West Antarctic ice sheet goes in 20 or 50 or 80 years and Manhattan is submerged up to midtown, will they still say it's a one-time freak event?
|
|
#
¿
Nov 29, 2016 04:45
|
|
|
It will be a very small comfort that Wall Street will flood if West Antarctica falls into the sea.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 29, 2016 05:08
|
|
|
Woah uh you weren't kidding about Miami. With 10ft sea level rise pretty much south Florida is gone.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 29, 2016 05:21
|
|
|
The Earth shall have its revenge on the Florida voters.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 29, 2016 05:56
|
|
|
Hollismason posted:Anti-natalism works from a philosophical standpoint that we may destroy all life on the planet and it would be better if some species survived over the human race. This is a really bad idea because we're in the last 500 million years of complex life on Earth and civilization has arisen only once in the last 3.5 billion years. Most people are aware of the 5 billion year life left on the sun but many are not aware that increasing solar brightness will put Earth outside the habitable zone within 500 million years. Like nowhere on the surface lower than the boiling point of water dead.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 30, 2016 03:16
|
|
|
It's reasonable to assume that this is the best shot at a more advanced civilization than our own that the Earth will ever get, for two reasons. First, the easiest way to get past where we are is to start where we are. Starting from nothing will be much harder. Second, birds and whales have been around for a very long time and they've never written anything down much less launched a rocket. In the very long run, it's reasonable to assume that if Earth life wants to be more than a mote that eventually dies out, we're its best shot. That may seem a ridiculously long term point of view but happily it squares with not ruining everything we like in the short term either.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 30, 2016 03:50
|
|
|
Is there any serious evidence that wealthy states at high latitudes won't survive rising sea levels, droughts, and high temperatures? Surely North America has a huge cushion of natural resources? The population of Mexico could move into the US and we'd still have much lower population densities than Eurasia. I think you guys are underestimating the resiliency of states and society. Closed borders really mean closed borders, rationing really means rationing. States don't collapse immediately in these circumstances, if they collapse at all. States survive megadeath events all the time. Standard of living doesn't have to keep going up. Democracy doesn't have to survive. You're also underestimating the capacity of states to shoot people when things get rough. There's a whole range of possible outcomes between carbon-neutral liberal democracy and total collapse of society. Stop watching apocalypse fiction and go out there and join political organizations and even take them over if you can. I dunno, advocate violence if you think it will help. Building a walled compound in Minnesota just takes you out of the equation.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 10, 2016 07:48
|
|
|
Seriously though in the 20th century we've seen states survive seven figure deaths in their own populations and keep going for 50 years. The PRC is still chugging along after a 30 megadeath event. The Soviet Union survived a 30 megadeath event followed shortly after by a 7 megadeath event. Climate change will surely bring about death and misery on a scale not seen since the world wars, but states are fairly resilient to that sort of stress. Look at Syria for example, the country is going through a civil war and depopulated but the state looks like its going to survive. It usually takes weakened institutions and protracted civil war to bring a state down into lawlessness and warlordism a la Mad Max in the modern period. Modern firepower is a real thing to consider in societal collapse; it's not as easy as it used to be to bring down centralized authority. As it gets harder for the people to overturn the state, insider coups look like the most realistic way to effect large political change, but insider coups virtually ensure continuity of law and order. Before you accuse me of not taking this seriously enough, the world I'm describing is no fun. Governments machine-gunning their people and putting refugees in camps to eke out a miserable existence or die as the climate death toll creeps up into the eight digits is not a fun scenario. But it's way more likely than this idea that agriculture and transport will collapse in the 1st world and it's going to be just like all those zombie apocalypse movies you saw. To the guy who's full of despair, the world of 100 years from now with resource wars, refugee crises and state crackdowns is still a world that will need people to fight for what's right. If the carrying capacity of the Earth contracts significantly over the next few hundred years, we'll still need political leadership that recognizes that fact and acts accordingly. You are needed now, you're needed 20 years from now, you'll be needed when you're old. There's no way out; we're in this for the long haul. Stop flying though. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 17:05 on Dec 10, 2016 |
|
#
¿
Dec 10, 2016 17:02
|
|
|
Fortunately, artificial reef habitat seems to be okay for a lot of fish species, and artificial reef construction is cheap. I don't think phytoplankton collapse in the next 100 years is reasonable and anyway if it is going to happen soon that means it can't be stopped anyway and we really are dead. Unless we can develop terraforming technology really fast to use on our own planet instead of Mars or whatever. Oxygen the element is really plentiful in the earth's crust, but liberating it industrially on the scale the earth's oceans currently provide for free would be... expensive.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 11, 2016 06:20
|
|
|
Water conservation has a lot of head room - the world outside desert areas hasn't really even begun to make water conservation a priority. There's a lot of room to reduce water use in industry, residential, and agriculture that hasn't even begun to be implemented in countries like China. These efficiency gains are not very expensive to implement either, and the enforcement mechanism of metering is already in place. It may mean switching to more environmentally damaging ways of washing coal industrially, for example, but when it becomes economical to use less water I expect people will use less water instead of collapsing to sharp shocks.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 11, 2016 06:41
|
|
|
Honj Steak posted:How badly will central Europe be hit? You know how central Europe has seen heat waves, flooding and snowstorms? Expect more of that. As an outside case, if the atlantic currents shift Europe could see its climate get much colder, like Canada. Also bigger refugee crises as drought becomes pervasive in the middle east.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 11, 2016 06:56
|
|
|
The bears are attacking!
|
|
#
¿
Dec 11, 2016 18:39
|
|
|
icantfindaname posted:Well, the sulfate geoengineering thing can potentially stave off surface temperature heating for decades but does nothing for ocean acidification which will kill all the fish, so this is a pretty likely outcome Do you have a source for ocean acidification killing all fish?
|
|
#
¿
Dec 11, 2016 18:40
|
|
|
AceOfFlames posted:I'm in aerospace >.< I dont even like it that much but now I am stuck (my degree was more like a bunch of intro classes of various engineering branches strung together with a joke of a thesis at the end). What I would really like to do is software but at 29 it might be way too late. 29 is not too late for an interdisciplinary engineering major with software skills. What the hell.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 12, 2016 04:49
|
|
|
Morbus posted:The arctic amplification we've been seeing is pretty clearly more severe than a lot of the more conservative estimates that had been made. Expansion of agriculture in the tropics looks like the culprit. If the methane clathrates start to go though that's probably the signal to start buying land and guns.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 13, 2016 04:57
|
|
|
I gotta say, I'm not happy about all these climate changes.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 14, 2016 19:42
|
|
|
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. It's going to be capitalism's last gasp of air. Desperately trying to survive. And maybe it'll be successful for some time, but it never addresses the root problem. The infrastructure maintaining a complicated geoengineering project will start to fail, and the cooling will come to an abrupt end. That could trigger an extinction level event far worse than the slow death we're currently facing. This is a really dumb opinion! (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
|
|
#
¿
Dec 15, 2016 04:33
|
|
|
Neuromancer was too optimistic goddamn.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 15, 2016 20:05
|
|
|
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. You could be like literally every other country in the world. The GOP is the last major political party in the world that denies climate change.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 16, 2016 06:30
|
|
|
nessin posted:The Carbon Bubble argument is very misleading. Right now if the "Carbon Bubble" pops, we die. Not humanity as a whole, but a huge chunk of it. There isn't enough power sources available without burning fossil fuels at the rate we do currently to support the resources that keep even huge chunks of third world populations alive (let alone first). Therefore if it ever reaches the point where the bubble pops, at least not without decades of action taken to mitigate the problem (at which point we'd still probably have to burn fossil fuels for transportation), it's just going to be entirely propped up or fully taken over by Governments until we reach the point where it's too late and humanity is actually in a extinction event. I find this to be a really poor rebuttal. What evidence do you have that fossil fuels can't be replaced by solar in the 3rd world -- especially since there's very little installed infrastructure? Show me that Nigeria, an extremely sun-rich country with low installed base of coal and oil power generation, cannot shift to solar for new power installs. (Pumping it out of the ground is not the same as having refined oil and the infrastructure to use it.) The thesis of the article is that wealthy oil and coal concerns derive their financial value from expected future earnings. This is true of assets that have returns generally, so it's certainly true of oil and coal assets. You really haven't addressed that point at all much less refuted it. Your analysis of "governments" doesn't say much. Which governments will subsidize fossil fuel companies? Maybe Brazil, Canada, Russia, the US? There aren't even that many nations that have extensive oil and gas reserves? What makes you think there will be public appetite for bailouts of Exxon Mobil in response to climate action laws? Doesn't that sound mutually exclusive? So, in your scenario, governments are both taking drastic action to cut carbon worldwide, and bailing out beleaguered oil companies when their stock prices plummet? In order to keep the oil flowing, which they just passed laws to stop from flowing? Governments both heavily taxing and heavily subsidizing fossil fuels? Because of third world countries? Which countries? Why isn't solar competitive in these countries over the next few decades? I'm on the side of financial markets caring about future returns.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 18, 2016 01:42
|
|
|
Hey here's a thought: how come we can't get all this CO2 gunk out of the air?
|
|
#
¿
Dec 20, 2016 06:28
|
|
|
BattleMoose posted:Because its stupidly expensive and as long as we are emitting co2, it will always be more cost effective to emit less than try to take it out of the atmosphere. Taking c02 out of the atmosphere is so unviable its not even discussed as an option. For all intents and purposes, once emitted it will persist for thousands of years. Lame! You'd think if they've got oxygen concentrators in nursing homes and whatnot that trap O2 in a solid matrix under certain pressure conditions you'd be able to do something similar with CO2. Especially since it's got that equilibrium in water thing to play around with.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 21, 2016 10:05
|
|
|
Maybe we could paint everything white. Like even the whales. Then they would capsize and sink all of our ships, causing a global economic collapse and thereby fixing climate change.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 29, 2016 09:39
|
|
|
Personally, I'm opposed to climate change.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 8, 2017 08:20
|
|
|
Accretionist posted:
Can we get a graph that expresses the acceleration in the rate of loss?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 14, 2017 22:39
|
|
|
While you guys were going around in circles again the Heritage Foundation budget blueprint for the Trump administration got out. All the EPA departments concerning climate change are supposed to be eliminated, along with the DoE's energy efficiency and renewables departments. http://thehill.com/policy/finance/314991-trump-team-prepares-dramatic-cuts
|
|
#
¿
Jan 20, 2017 21:18
|
|
|
That graph is hard to parse.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 1, 2017 20:40
|
|
|
But it does influence the rate at which Earth absorbs heat from the sun.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 3, 2017 19:39
|
|
|
It's going to be hard to explain to people that a long essay on software version control and organizational politics that they will never read is not the smoking gun that the Daily Mail has made it out to be.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 7, 2017 21:29
|
|
|
Unormal posted:Honestly coming from city life when I finally realized how goddamn amazing farm animals were I was pretty gasp-out-loud shocked. Who was it just a minute ago predicting that these prepper guys were city slickers who got really excited about trips to the country?
|
|
#
¿
Feb 23, 2017 22:54
|
|
|
The website is still up.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 12, 2017 07:15
|
|
|
Once again I'd like to remind everyone of the power of states to simply machine-gun desperate people. There will be no Mad Max collapse in our lifetime.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 24, 2017 23:23
|
|
|
It's fine to live a low-carbon lifestyle but for every person in America who cuts from 3 tons to 1 ton there are literally eight people in India and China who are increasing their emissions year on year. It's good to cut your emissions. It's better to find a political solution, but that is very difficult. Honestly I have not heard a solution to climate change that is not the liberal internationalist solution that we see failing right now. I'm even skeptical about political violence, which would work on a large enough scale but doesn't have the constituency to be effective. The state capitalist system will keep chugging into the next century and will find it more expedient to let people die from the effects of climate change or kill them when those people find neglect intolerable than to cut below 8° C. If the methane clathrate gun hypothesis is right then nothing short of a peaceful political movement or political violence on a massive scale will save >90% of the human race and that simply won't happen in developed countries. So yeah people are feeling a little fatalistic.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 26, 2017 17:26
|
|
|
Yeah death comes for us all but especially over the next thousand years.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 30, 2017 00:48
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 29, 2024 06:45 |
|
|
Crazycryodude posted:So I just discovered the thread and am catching up, but what's the general opinion? Are we pretty irrevocably hosed? Because to me it looks like we're pretty irrevocably hosed, but I'm a layman and maybe you people know something I don't. It's pretty bad. It's going to keep getting worse for the next three thousand years or so, possibly ten thousand years. The question now is whether things will get much worse within our lifetimes. The last time this much carbon got into the atmosphere it took the Earth a few million years to recover. Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 04:53 on Apr 1, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Apr 1, 2017 04:50
|
|