The Money Mustache Community
Other => Off Topic => Topic started by: Aelias on January 05, 2018, 06:44:18 AM
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To start--I know this has been a contentious topic on the forum. I'm starting from the premise that climate change is real and caused by human activity. If you don't believe that, ok. This isn't the thread for you.
Anyhow . . .
By any measure, there have been a lot of intense weather events in the US, particularly hurricanes and wildfires. I'm absolutely convinced climate change is playing a role.
But seeing the flooding from this storm surge in my town--in neighborhoods I know well and love--really brought it home.
https://slate.com/business/2018/01/bomb-cyclone-brings-record-flooding-to-boston.html
Damn. I know being a coastal city sometimes means coastal floods. And I knew, eventually, rising sea levels would make flooding a big problem for us. But seeing these images, the same thought kept running through my mind-- "I thought we had more time."
We don't. We don't have more time. This is happening.
Stay safe, friends.
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And 2017 is the hottest year on record without an El niño. Probably 2nd hottest overall. A few years ago I thought most people would really want to take action once weather anomalies started to pile up. I was wrong.
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Yep. And there will people denying this to the bitter end, even as their own houses go underwater.
Sigh.
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Yes, those videos are distressing. I lived in Boston for years and never thought about flooding . . . but it makes sense.
My other half wants to return to the beach some day (teenage years were at the coast.) My response: "Okay, that sounds fun, but we are definitely renting, not buying!"
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Yes, those videos are distressing. I lived in Boston for years and never thought about flooding . . . but it makes sense.
My other half wants to return to the beach some day (teenage years were at the coast.) My response: "Okay, that sounds fun, but we are definitely renting, not buying!"
My husband and I have been planning to RE somewhere warm and out of the country. We'd been talking about the Caribbean, but with the effects of climate change now? No way. Especially not an island.
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Yep. And there will people denying this to the bitter end, even as their own houses go underwater.
Sigh.
Yep- we had SoCal family who were side-eyeing our move to the midwest. I said I thought it would be the easiest place to actually settle our family for the next 50 years, with the least amount of potential disruption.
They came to stay with us for a week when the Lilac fire threatened their home. They are now talking about buying property in Florida and they still think we are nuts for relocating to Ohio (we had a choice of SoCal, Wales or Ohio based on job prospects.)
They legitimately do not believe in climate change.
As a former inhabitant of the Boston area (Brighton and Somerville, FTW) the social media from my friends is really freaking me out. Hope you are okay OP!
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There are many who think climate change = global warming = increased temperatures. This week's bombogenesis brings out claims that "Hey it's mega colling. What global warming?"
They don't understand that change means temperature swings, can be either low or high outside the norm. The earth has always had long-term heating and cooling periods, but these are slow over thousands of years. People fail to admit that it is the effects of human behavior that is accelerating these changes.
2017 was the hot as hell in FL, we didn't even get our regular "winter" thanks to a weak La Nina system. http://www.mypalmbeachpost.com/weather/first-four-months-2017-hottest-record-for-florida/PEgPQsUGjxSxM8v1ZcGJnL/
I lived a year in the Boston suburbs/exurbs (if you can call Sharon that). I feel safer about flooding and storms in Tampa Bay, relatively speaking. Storms of rain and snow and wind ain't no joke no matter where you are.
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There are many who think climate change = global warming = increased temperatures. This week's bombogenesis brings out claims that "Hey it's mega colling. What global warming?"
They don't understand that change means temperature swings, can be either low or high outside the norm. The earth has always had long-term heating and cooling periods, but these are slow over thousands of years. People fail to admit that it is the effects of human behavior that is accelerating these changes.
2017 was the hot as hell in FL, we didn't even get our regular "winter" thanks to a weak La Nina system. http://www.mypalmbeachpost.com/weather/first-four-months-2017-hottest-record-for-florida/PEgPQsUGjxSxM8v1ZcGJnL/
I lived a year in the Boston suburbs/exurbs (if you can call Sharon that). I feel safer about flooding and storms in Tampa Bay, relatively speaking. Storms of rain and snow and wind ain't no joke no matter where you are.
Those people also don't understand that mainland USA is about 2% of the earth's surface. 2017 also saw periods of harsh winter conditions in parts of Europe, and was still one of the hottest years on record.
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I am a complete pessimist about human nature, and I have a strong suspicion that as climate change effects become more dangerous and more evident, the topic will actually create less political consensus about action (though possibly not whether it exists) rather than more. Look at how political refugees have caused increase in political polarization in Europe. And that was small scale and not climate related. It's water shortages that concern me most, in terms of long term geopolitical stability.
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https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/67/12/1026/4605229
On the twenty-fifth anniversary of their call, we look back at their warning and evaluate the human response by exploring available time-series data. Since 1992, with the exception of stabilizing the stratospheric ozone layer, humanity has failed to make sufficient progress in generally solving these foreseen environmental challenges, and alarmingly, most of them are getting far worse
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I am a complete pessimist about human nature, and I have a strong suspicion that as climate change effects become more dangerous and more evident, the topic will actually create less political consensus about action (though possibly not whether it exists) rather than more. Look at how political refugees have caused increase in political polarization in Europe. And that was small scale and not climate related. It's water shortages that concern me most, in terms of long term geopolitical stability.
It's starting. Cape Town is running out of water. Possibly in the next four months.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/27/travel/water-crisis-cape-town-travelers.html
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Thanks for all the supportive comments. We're hanging in there. Took a first crack at shoveling out my car which is in 2-4 feet thanks to drifting--made it about a third of the way through. Life has mostly returned to normal--the T is up and running, which is a good proxy for how functional the city is.
@StarBright – those folks from SoCal who want to move to Florida decidedly do not get it. You could not pay me enough money to own property in Florida right now. It’s only a matter of time. Don’t listen to them—I grew up in Ohio, and it has a lot of really lovely spots. And with ample water and arable land, they’ll be in decent shape going forward.
@Zamboni and @Kris and others—Yeah, the coast is amazing. But as a long term place to live? No thanks. We’re actually building into our FIRE plan a modest homestead in Vermont a la Frugalwoods. We’re serious gardeners and food preservers, and would love a place with enough space for some fruit and nut trees, a subsistence garden, a water source, and some woods to heat the place. We usually talk about it as a “vacation place”, but really, it’s an escape hatch.
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This has been more top-of-mind for me since Harvey even though the people I know in Houston lucked out relatively speaking (their house didn't flood, plus they were renting anyway, and their cars were fine).
It is here. It's happening. And it will only get worse. Massive change has to happen in order to slow it; impossibly massive change has to happen in order to stop or reverse it.
Humanity will adapt, but it won't be pretty.
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People on this thread might be interested in watching Planet Earth II (on Netflix).
The cinematography is amazing!!! But it also speaks to climate change. It said that the deserts of the world keep expanding year upon year.
It seems like parts of the world are getting drier (we didn't have rain for 2 1/2 months last summer - I can't remember it ever being that dry) while other parts of the world are getting deluged with rain that causes a ton of damage.
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This is freaking me out, too. The California fires have been really scary this year. For Christmas we were in Sonoma county where it is usually rainy and green, and it was still late-summer dry conditions. In San Diego we are already into January and still waiting for winter to start. I'm wondering if spring is going to start (which it usually does in late Feb./early Mar.) before we even get a winter. It has only rained once this winter season, and it was very light and brief. Everything is sad and yellow/brown right now.
Humanity will adapt, but it won't be pretty.
This is a good way to put it.
I try to have a "focus on what you can control" mentality--if I can't control it, there is absolutely no point in worrying about it. I'll do what I can to reduce my impact and talk to people around me/elected officials but beyond that, it's out of my hands. I also think about how lucky all of us with FIRE plans are. If things get bad where we are, we can move. We'll have the financial independence to make choices that a lot of other people won't. This added to the fact that technology is improving at exponential rates right now--so fast that laws and our brains can't keep up, and I don't think it is totally irrational to hold some optimism on this front. Solar power is reducing in cost dramatically and the technologies needed to clean up the environmental messes we have made are also increasing dramatically. It's very possible that ten years from now we'll laugh at how everything used to be powered with fossil fuels. At least I hope so!
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Living as far inland as I do, as well as above the 47th parallel, neither flooding nor water shortages have been an issue. The issues driving home climate change around here are fire seasons and tree migration.
Our fire seasons have been severe historically -- some is natural and some is due to poor forestry management practices in the first half of last. The part with climate change is the severity, intensity, and length of the fire season is increasing every year -- keeping perfect pace with the climate change models. Hotter, longer summer paired with lower annual snow fall is the culprit.
Then, we have plant migration. I personally noticed it two years ago. The larches in our nearby woods began to die out and new ones didn't grow in. Went a little north (less than 50 miles) and they were still thriving. This summer, I had to drive almost to the Canadian border to find healthy stands of larch. Asked a ranger about it, since I assumed it was disease or pest problems. Was informed that the forestry peeps had been tracking the northward migration of the larches for some years. As overall temperature increases and the length of our summer increases, the larches die out. Seeds carried northward by birds, etc, are germinating and thriving further north than they ever have. For those Tolkien fans, it makes me think of the Ents looking for the Ent-wives. I'm afraid climate change will wipe out the Ent-Wives before the Ents find them....
This changes the make-up of the forests, possibly even making them more prone to devastating fires because there is more dead wood and less green wood to replace it. And then there are no trees to grow back, since they can no longer survive in the changing climate.
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https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2016/10/17/13190036/global-climate-change-facts-effects-cartoon
This is quite startling.
Look, our governments have proven they don't care and will likely fail at this, despite the Paris Accord. It's not enough.
We ALL have to do our part - that's recycling, composting, investing in solar if financially possible, etc.
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Agree w dark and stormy above. We got solar panels this past fall! Looking into a hybrid or electric vehicle in the future, too.
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I am a complete pessimist about human nature, and I have a strong suspicion that as climate change effects become more dangerous and more evident, the topic will actually create less political consensus about action (though possibly not whether it exists) rather than more. Look at how political refugees have caused increase in political polarization in Europe. And that was small scale and not climate related. It's water shortages that concern me most, in terms of long term geopolitical stability.
It's starting. Cape Town is running out of water. Possibly in the next four months.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/27/travel/water-crisis-cape-town-travelers.html
That was the same in Dec 2005 when I was there with ze wife.
I'm from East Africa. Water shortages are as common as blue skies.
East coasters: We don't have enough bottled water for the hurricane.
Africans: We don't have enough water, forget if it's drinkable. Need access to tap (faucet).
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I'm originally from CA and spent the last two weeks there on vacation. CA's ability to manage its resources has always been laughable, and the drought of the last few years was but the latest example. Not only has there been a storage shortage since I was a kid in the early 80s, but they've never had enough money saved up for infrastructure upgrades and maintenance. The state didn't declare it an emergency until the final year of the multi-year drought and even then it was "pretty please don't waste water." My in-laws were close to being washed out when the nearby dam started to fall apart (engineering defects were revealed to have been known for years at the state level). Now that the state survived the drought and the dam (almost) collapse, folks are seeing their water bills skyrocketing since the powers-that-be are finally understanding their systemic weaknesses. They don't understand that the state has been deferring infrastructure investment for decades. I get a good laugh whenever I drive south on I-5 through the valley and every couple miles is a sign on the side of the road saying "Growing food isn't stealing water!" While I agree that growing food is a better use of water than other things, these signs are not placed on the north-bound side for the people coming out of LA County. Their gas prices are already high due to state-mandated restrictions and those prices are going to continue to climb. While I feel that as a nation we underpay for gasoline, I have no faith that CA's gas tax increases will go towards what they need to.
What does all of that have to do with climate change? Resources are already at risk due to simple population growth. Expert management is required for us to preserve our resources against growth, pollution, and soon disappearance due to climate change. Some places just don't have it together.
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I am a complete pessimist about human nature, and I have a strong suspicion that as climate change effects become more dangerous and more evident, the topic will actually create less political consensus about action (though possibly not whether it exists) rather than more. Look at how political refugees have caused increase in political polarization in Europe. And that was small scale and not climate related. It's water shortages that concern me most, in terms of long term geopolitical stability.
On of the factors behind the Syrian refugee crisis probably was linked to climate change: https://newint.org/blog/2016/06/10/climate-change-and-the-syria-crisis
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Before you all start with the beating of chests, rending of clothes, and wailing, I suggest you read this blog post from Granola Shotgun: https://granolashotgun.com/2017/01/16/king-tide/
In particular, this passage:
10,000 years ago San Francisco Bay was a dry grassy valley populated by elephants, zebras, and camels. The planet was significantly cooler and dryer back then. Sea level was lower since glaciers in the north pulled water out of the oceans. The bay isn’t that deep so a relatively small change in sea level pushed the coastline out by twelve miles from its present location. Further back in pre-history when the earth was warmer than today sea level was higher. The hills of San Francisco were small islands off the coast of ancient California. These cycles play out on a scale we humans can’t perceive in our daily lives. You can think of this process as a larger version of the tides that play out over thousands of years instead of twice a day. There’s absolutely no need to debate human induced climate change. The climate changes all the time with or without us. The real question is how we will adapt over time.
The reality is that climate change has been occurring since the planet was formed, and on a geologic time scale, it happens very rapidly. Are humans affecting the current rate of change? Probably. Are they affecting the direction? Climate change happens constantly, so the jury is out on that one.
We will need to adapt to whatever change happens. However, governments aren't going to do a whole lot about what their countries are doing, except for reducing some pollutants that are inconveniently killing off their populations. If the human species is still around when the hilltops of San Francisco are next islands in the Pacific ocean, we will have succeeded at adapting. Otherwise, some other form of life will dominate the planet.
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Before you all start with the beating of chests, rending of clothes, and wailing, I suggest you read this blog post from Granola Shotgun:
This is gross misinformation, AR. The current scale and pace of climate change are unlike anything ever seen in the geologic record (that wasn't accompanied by a mass extinction event).
You don't have to worry if you don't want to. That's your right, and probably better for your mental health. But neither should you lie to other people when you clearly don't understand what you're talking about.
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The reality is that climate change has been occurring since the planet was formed, and on a geologic time scale, it happens very rapidly. Are humans affecting the current rate of change? Probably. Are they affecting the direction? Climate change happens constantly, so the jury is out on that one.
Most scientists in the field and most scientific organizations agree it is mostly humans affecting it.
I know it's YouTube, but it's a graph provided by NASA showing all the known effects on the climate up to about 2005. The NASA Climate Change site is a good reference. So is Skeptical Science.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gHUHoqBn-Y
As Sol mentioned, this is happening much more rapidly than previous changes. Orders of magnitude higher than any speed human civilizations have seen.
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There are many who think climate change = global warming = increased temperatures. This week's bombogenesis brings out claims that "Hey it's mega colling. What global warming?"
Not to mention the acidification of the ocean, or the coral reefs bleaching more and more because the oceans are heating up. Some think added CO2 just means warmer air. It means much more than that.
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Before you all start with the beating of chests, rending of clothes, and wailing, I suggest you read this blog post from Granola Shotgun:
This is gross misinformation, AR. The current scale and pace of climate change are unlike anything ever seen in the geologic record (that wasn't accompanied by a mass extinction event).
You don't have to worry if you don't want to. That's your right, and probably better for your mental health. But neither should you lie to other people when you clearly don't understand what you're talking about.
Sol, you are a scientist, the analytic type of person, but I hear emotion in your tone. What lie did I tell? I'm not disputing that the climate is changing. I said climate change happens, we are probably affecting the rate, and whether this was the underlying direction when we started affecting it is not clear. We will have to adapt, self interested governments won't do anything, and we will have to live with the consequences. Where is the lie?
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There are many who think climate change = global warming = increased temperatures. This week's bombogenesis brings out claims that "Hey it's mega colling. What global warming?"
Not to mention the acidification of the ocean, or the coral reefs bleaching more and more because the oceans are heating up. Some think added CO2 just means warmer air. It means much more than that.
I am also very worried about the climate change. I think the changes will lead to water shortages, failed harvests due to too little rain or too much rain, extreme weather in many ways, mass migrations and maybe war. And the oceans are to cry about. They are getting warmer, more acidic and full of micro plastic. Now also a lot of radium under the arctic ice. And we are making a veey large part of all species in the world extinct.
I am happy that I didn't put children on this planet, because I don't think they would have a nice life during all of their life. I even think it won't last my own lifetime.
For FIRE I wonder which financial consequences it will have. Will it be expensive for the countries to set up protection against the bad weather and will they have to increase taxes big time? Will the atock market take a big and permanent crash? I try not to think too hard about it, as it makes me very depressed they we humans are destroying our planet in so many way.
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Before you all start with the beating of chests, rending of clothes, and wailing, I suggest you read this blog post from Granola Shotgun:
This is gross misinformation, AR. The current scale and pace of climate change are unlike anything ever seen in the geologic record (that wasn't accompanied by a mass extinction event).
You don't have to worry if you don't want to. That's your right, and probably better for your mental health. But neither should you lie to other people when you clearly don't understand what you're talking about.
Sol, you are a scientist, the analytic type of person, but I hear emotion in your tone. What lie did I tell? I'm not disputing that the climate is changing. I said climate change happens, we are probably affecting the rate, and whether this was the underlying direction when we started affecting it is not clear. We will have to adapt, self interested governments won't do anything, and we will have to live with the consequences. Where is the lie?
(https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/earth_temperature_timeline.png)
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I don't think most governments are going to do anywhere near enough about climate change, resource depletion, and other intersecting problems - even the ones that have signed up to the Paris Accords. I concluded a couple of years ago that the only solution was to take steps to increase my personal resilience to climate change, and that of my local community.
How to do this? Well, for a start, take a look at where your house is. If it's coastal and near sea level, or in the flood plain of a river, or along a coast that usually gets hurricanes, or in an area plagued by drought, well: it's probably not going to get better from here. Move to somewhere uphill from the flooding/a place that gets more rain/etc, or make peace with the fact that your house will probably be destroyed in a natural disaster at some point.
Then, look at the areas of your personal life in which you depend on fossil fuels, environmentally unsound practices, and anything else you think might be a problem when climate change and resource depletion has progressed a bit more. Learn some more eco-friendly ways of getting those things. Even if you don't put them all into practice now, make sure you have the knowledge to, say, cook if the power's out for a few weeks/get some food even if global food supply chains break down/etc. Learn the plants, animals, and cycles that can be found in your home area. Figure out how easy it is to travel to nearby places without a car, and what your effective range will be in one day/one week/etc of foot travel or bike travel. Integrate yourself with the local community, so that people see you as a friend/someone to help rather than as a stranger/someone to steal resources from. FI is about financial resilience. To have the best chance of surviving future climate turmoil, you need resilience in your lifestyle and skillset, too.
Also, you can help your community as a whole by setting up sustainable systems in public areas. You won't be able to convince everyone to help combat climate change, but you can certainly plant a few things/figure out how to get water sustainably/improve the local soil quality, so that your area will support a higher number of people or a higher quality of life in the future. You could even try going into politics, if you have the personality for it.
Whatever you do, don't rely on governments or corporations to do anything about it. It's definitely an issue. Climate change is here. The ship for preventing it has long sailed, and the only thing left to do is ride out the storm.
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It's not all doom and gloom. The world did band together and fix the ozone problem by banning CFCs.
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/04/130416-ozone-layer-aerosol-environment-science-montreal-protocol/
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It's not all doom and gloom. The world did band together and fix the ozone problem by banning CFCs.
And acid rain, too. But those were both "fixed" by economic incentives, by offering profit-seeking corporations more money to pollute less. Carbon emissions are much harder to fix this way.
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It's a balmy 40C+ here in South Eastern Australia.
When I was a kid we used to have one of these days in Sydney once every couple of years.
Now we have 10-12 days of it every summer.
The tropics are moving further south too... a lot more tropical afternoon storms being experienced these days.
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I don't think most governments are going to do anywhere near enough about climate change, resource depletion, and other intersecting problems - even the ones that have signed up to the Paris Accords. I concluded a couple of years ago that the only solution was to take steps to increase my personal resilience to climate change, and that of my local community.
How to do this? Well, for a start, take a look at where your house is. If it's coastal and near sea level, or in the flood plain of a river, or along a coast that usually gets hurricanes, or in an area plagued by drought, well: it's probably not going to get better from here. Move to somewhere uphill from the flooding/a place that gets more rain/etc, or make peace with the fact that your house will probably be destroyed in a natural disaster at some point.
Then, look at the areas of your personal life in which you depend on fossil fuels, environmentally unsound practices, and anything else you think might be a problem when climate change and resource depletion has progressed a bit more. Learn some more eco-friendly ways of getting those things. Even if you don't put them all into practice now, make sure you have the knowledge to, say, cook if the power's out for a few weeks/get some food even if global food supply chains break down/etc. Learn the plants, animals, and cycles that can be found in your home area. Figure out how easy it is to travel to nearby places without a car, and what your effective range will be in one day/one week/etc of foot travel or bike travel. Integrate yourself with the local community, so that people see you as a friend/someone to help rather than as a stranger/someone to steal resources from. FI is about financial resilience. To have the best chance of surviving future climate turmoil, you need resilience in your lifestyle and skillset, too.
Also, you can help your community as a whole by setting up sustainable systems in public areas. You won't be able to convince everyone to help combat climate change, but you can certainly plant a few things/figure out how to get water sustainably/improve the local soil quality, so that your area will support a higher number of people or a higher quality of life in the future. You could even try going into politics, if you have the personality for it.
Whatever you do, don't rely on governments or corporations to do anything about it. It's definitely an issue. Climate change is here. The ship for preventing it has long sailed, and the only thing left to do is ride out the storm.
I agree with this big time. We took these things into consideration when my DH took his (likely for the rest of his life) job. Family thought we were nutty but I'd be lying if I said I didn't factor in that this is a place where my children can live out their lifetimes.
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A couple thoughts:
1) On the one hand I want to stay in California, but on the other hand think that at least the southern part will turn into a Mad-Max wasteland in our lifetimes. One thing I've thought of is having a water distillation system to treat seawater. We would really only need to distill the drinking, cooking and clothes-washing water.
2) They need to stop growing those damn almonds. Lowest taste to water use ratio of anything ever.
3) Coastal areas - if you build on the water, it just makes sense to not have your living space on the ground level. Almost every society that traditionally built on or near the water built their houses on stilts of some kind.
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Thanks, ketchup. I was thinking I would have to go find that XKCD and post it here -- its a really lovely way to present the data. (I forwarded it to my kid's middle-school science teacher, and he printed the whole thing out and laminated it so he could hang it vertically. It's 8 feet high!)
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I also get that sick feeling in the pit of my stomach from time to time. I love threads like this, because it means I'm not the only one, but that's the only good thing.
When I'm feeling particularly morose about it, I read the climate predictions for various regions, and none of it is any good. Where I am in Texas feels particularly un-sustainable, primarily due to water. But the whole problem is that no place is left untouched.
10,000 years ago San Francisco Bay was a dry grassy valley populated by elephants, zebras, and camels.
I shouldn't engage, but as a biologist, I can't help it. Anyone who claims zebras have ever lived in San Francisco is, to put it politely, not a reliable resource.
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It's not all doom and gloom. The world did band together and fix the ozone problem by banning CFCs.
And acid rain, too. But those were both "fixed" by economic incentives, by offering profit-seeking corporations more money to pollute less. Carbon emissions are much harder to fix this way.
Revenue neutral carbon tax! It garnered 42% in WA and probably would've passed if the eco groups weren't so pissy about it (it didn't go far enough; it was flawed; etc.) It's only a matter of time. (Libertarians should be all over this plan but, alas, most are philosophically challenged.)
Besides, look at the deniers' arguments over the past 20 years.
First, "GW isn't happening!"
Then, "GW may be happening but it's from solar flares and definitely isn't caused by human activity."
Now, AGW is possible but "the science is undecided."
Finally, more people live in coastal elite cities; any doubters there will lose their skepticism as these "once every hundred year" events occur once every 10 years and then once every 5 years. In other words, NYC can outvote the rest of their state.
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It's not all doom and gloom. The world did band together and fix the ozone problem by banning CFCs.
And acid rain, too. But those were both "fixed" by economic incentives, by offering profit-seeking corporations more money to pollute less. Carbon emissions are much harder to fix this way.
Revenue neutral carbon tax! It garnered 42% in WA and probably would've passed if the eco groups weren't so pissy about it (it didn't go far enough; it was flawed; etc.) It's only a matter of time. (Libertarians should be all over this plan but, alas, most are philosophically challenged.)
Yup, it's actually a rather elegant solution if anyone could manage to implement it, particularly since a lot of the best variants of a revenue neutral carbon tax can also start to serve as an (extremely small) minimum basis income.
First, "GW isn't happening!"
Then, "GW may be happening but it's from solar flares and definitely isn't caused by human activity."
Now, AGW is possible but "the science is undecided."
This is a pretty universal government or organizational response when a committee or large group of people is faced with hard and unpopular choices. I think Yes, Minister captured it best:
"Standard response in a time of crisis.
In stage one we say nothing is going to happen.
Stage two, we say something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it.
In stage three, we say that maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we *can* do.
Stage four, we say maybe there was something we could have done, but it's too late now."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HSD1d-6P6qI&t=8
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The way humans live today, the planet is above carrying capacity at 7 billion plus of them. The usual population controls for overpopulated species of war, famine, and pestilence aren't working right now. We have minimized famine and pestilence for the time being and there haven't been any wars large enough to impact human population for awhile. At some point, something will fail and the population will be reduced by one or more of the big three. Or maybe a large asteroid will collide with the planet and we will have another mass extinction event.
Who knows how and when this will happen? No one. However, in 5,000 years, the planet will look different than it does today. People as a species may have disappeared or at least be a much smaller part of the life here. Get used to change. It's going to happen.
BookLoverL has got it right, although the time frame may extend beyond our lives. With respect to today's problems, governments will posture and do nothing. Make your decisions accordingly.
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Thanks, ketchup. I was thinking I would have to go find that XKCD and post it here -- its a really lovely way to present the data. (I forwarded it to my kid's middle-school science teacher, and he printed the whole thing out and laminated it so he could hang it vertically. It's 8 feet high!)
Yes! I teach about climate change to middle schoolers, and I'm going to print the thing out too. Although my students are all entirely convinced by climate change science, and quite concerned.
Not much to add here that hasn't been said, but as I get ready to head outside into some of the coldest temps ever in my NE region, this has been on my mind too. When I'm teaching, I try to emphasize how dire the situation is while also reinforcing that my students' generation has the ability/responsibility to make a change. But in reality, we've passed a tipping point. Now we have to adapt to a new climate and try to prevent the situation from getting much much worse that it will already be.
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It's not all doom and gloom. The world did band together and fix the ozone problem by banning CFCs.
And acid rain, too. But those were both "fixed" by economic incentives, by offering profit-seeking corporations more money to pollute less. Carbon emissions are much harder to fix this way.
Revenue neutral carbon tax! It garnered 42% in WA and probably would've passed if the eco groups weren't so pissy about it (it didn't go far enough; it was flawed; etc.) It's only a matter of time. (Libertarians should be all over this plan but, alas, most are philosophically challenged.)
Besides, look at the deniers' arguments over the past 20 years.
First, "GW isn't happening!"
Then, "GW may be happening but it's from solar flares and definitely isn't caused by human activity."
Now, AGW is possible but "the science is undecided."
Finally, more people live in coastal elite cities; any doubters there will lose their skepticism as these "once every hundred year" events occur once every 10 years and then once every 5 years. In other words, NYC can outvote the rest of their state.
The ozone and acid rain stuff is good progress, but, like I said, not nearly far enough towards transforming society into something sustainable. Carbon taxes and pollution taxes are definitely a good idea. Alas, I don't feel like there's the political will for it - most people seem to be more concerned with the economy, healthcare, or social issues, and miss the big picture. If taxes come in, even in small areas, I'll be pleased, though.
The way humans live today, the planet is above carrying capacity at 7 billion plus of them. The usual population controls for overpopulated species of war, famine, and pestilence aren't working right now. We have minimized famine and pestilence for the time being and there haven't been any wars large enough to impact human population for awhile. At some point, something will fail and the population will be reduced by one or more of the big three. Or maybe a large asteroid will collide with the planet and we will have another mass extinction event.
I completely agree with this comment on population. Right now, we're able to support this many people because soil fertility kept up by repeated application of fertilisers derived from - you guessed it - fossil fuels. At some point, climate disaster, war, famine, and pestilence are going to come right back and start shrinking the population to a sustainable level. I personally feel like the current problems in various parts of the Middle East may be the start of that. And watch out for antibiotic-resistant bacteria, too.
It's entirely possible that any of us in the younger generation (I'm 24) could have our lives upheaved by climate change. Be prepared.
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I'm a big fan of Per Espen Stoknes. He is a behavioural economist, who specialises in how to get us to deal with climate change. This TED talk is quite good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5h6ynoq8uM
This short animated video explains his ideas in a short and easy way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovfOURebDjc
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Another thing is the fact that fertilizer is made from phosphor that is not very abundant. I think we won't be able to produce as much food without fertilizer. Ecological agriculture takes up much more space than modern agriculture. I think we will have to accept more genetically modified food in the future, like rice being able to stand in water without drowning, other plant species resiliant against fungi and pests. I recently saw a TED talk about the world food crisis being there already in 10 years.
Let's also not forget the bees that are dying out. I can recommand the book"The history of Bees. A Novel", which describes the dying of the bees and a possible future without bees, in the form of a novel.
It is comforting to see in this thread that so many more people are concerned about this. People in my surroundings, like my colleagues, think I am a doom thinker and that things aren't quite as bad. But every time I listen to a climate expert, I hear that things are really bad. I thing the rest of the population is in denial. Goverments are uasullt chosen for only 4 years. They don't dare to make too unpopular choices, like make air traffic very expensive or telling people to reduce their energy use with 50%, because they might not get reelected.
In the valley below I live we also have had several 200 year floods in the last couple of years. I am lickybthat I live high up the hill. I also plan to buy a FIRE house that is safe for floods and mud slides. Norway will become a lot wetter in the future. And if the gulf stream ever stops flowing here, it will become very cold. I also plan to plant veggies in the garden.
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Another thing is the fact that fertilizer is made from phosphor that is not very abundant. I think we won't be able to produce as much food without fertilizer. Ecological agriculture takes up much more space than modern agriculture. I think we will have to accept more genetically modified food in the future, like rice being able to stand in water without drowning, other plant species resiliant against fungi and pests. I recently saw a TED talk about the world food crisis being there already in 10 years.
The current estimate is that known reserves of phosphate rock will last about 200 years at the rates they are currently being mined out for use in fertilizer. On the scale of a human lifetime, that seems like a lot (and enough to get us to a point where a lot of the other problems people are talking about in this thread are likely to hit us first). On the scale of human civilization's history to date, 200 years seems like the blink of an eye.
Random bit of trivia: the proportion of all known phosphate rock reserves in the world located in Morocco is roughly equal to the proportion of all known oil reserves controlled by all the members of OPEC combined.
Of the major nutrients in most fertilizers: N, P, and K, phosphorous probably has the hardest limit. Mineral reserves of potassium (K) are enough to last thousands if not tens of thousands of years. Ammonia (N) is currently produced using natural gas and air, but with cheap electricity for solar, wind, or nuclear power it can be synthesized just as easily from water and air in a carbon neutral fashion.*
*All you need to make ammonia is nitrogen (present in the air all around us in huge amounts) and hydrogen. Right now hydrogen from natural gas is cheaper than hydrogen from electrolysis of water.
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I've seen the high level statistics about atmospheric carbon. It seems to me this type of statistic isn't actually measuring climate change, it's measuring, well, atmospheric carbon levels.
What are scientists using as statistics to measure these climate change events? Has anyone seen a good methodology to capture statistics on tropical storms (such as the ones in the gulf last year), wild fires (California) and other such events related to climate change?
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I've seen the high level statistics about atmospheric carbon. It seems to me this type of statistic isn't actually measuring climate change, it's measuring, well, atmospheric carbon levels.
What are scientists using as statistics to measure these climate change events? Has anyone seen a good methodology to capture statistics on tropical storms (such as the ones in the gulf last year), wild fires (California) and other such events related to climate change?
There are numerous peer-reviewed studies about the warming effect on storms that can be found via google. A good start is NASA and NOAA. The relevant question is: will you ignore the many peer-reviewed studies and rely on wattsupwiththat instead?
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For example NASA https://www.nap.edu/read/21852/chapter/6#91 (https://www.nap.edu/read/21852/chapter/6#91) has a good graph of European temperature statistics:
(https://www.nap.edu/openbook/21852/xhtml/images/img-111.jpg)
And then MTBS has a nice visualization for wildfires (althought it doesn't seem to be very current) here:
https://www.mtbs.gov/viewer/index.html (https://www.mtbs.gov/viewer/index.html)
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I've seen the high level statistics about atmospheric carbon. It seems to me this type of statistic isn't actually measuring climate change, it's measuring, well, atmospheric carbon levels.
What are scientists using as statistics to measure these climate change events? Has anyone seen a good methodology to capture statistics on tropical storms (such as the ones in the gulf last year), wild fires (California) and other such events related to climate change?
There are numerous peer-reviewed studies about the warming effect on storms that can be found via google. A good start is NASA and NOAA. The relevant question is: will you ignore the many peer-reviewed studies and rely on wattsupwiththat instead?
Heh, I put more faith in the climate scientists than Anthony Watts any day.
I've always been a bit skeptical of the accuracy of climate models because climate science has to do things in such an open loop manner. I thought open sourcing climate models was a huge step forward.
Statistical evidence demonstrating climate change would be another huge step forward. It's pretty hard to deny actual facts (i.e. statistical evidence) around climate change. The next step is hopefully to go back and figure out what parts of the models are predicting with a usable accuracy.
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I'm a big fan of Per Espen Stoknes. He is a behavioural economist, who specialises in how to get us to deal with climate change. This TED talk is quite good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5h6ynoq8uM
This short animated video explains his ideas in a short and easy way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovfOURebDjc
Thanks for posting these. Very interesting.
It always makes a person feel better when they know they can do something to improve the situation. These videos talk about at least three things:
1) Don't drive
2) Don't fly
3) Eat a plant based diet
I already do two of the three. So now I can work on the third.
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I'm a big fan of Per Espen Stoknes. He is a behavioural economist, who specialises in how to get us to deal with climate change. This TED talk is quite good: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5h6ynoq8uM
This short animated video explains his ideas in a short and easy way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ovfOURebDjc
Thanks for posting these. Very interesting.
It always makes a person feel better when they know they can do something to improve the situation. These videos talk about at least three things:
1) Don't drive
2) Don't fly
3) Eat a plant based diet
I already do two of the three. So now I can work on the third.
Not only feel better, but more likely to do something about it. Hidden Brain or Freakonomics had a podcast about this the other day, where someone talked about how fear was an efficient way to stop people from doing stuff, like stop smoking. But if you want them to start doing something, you need to frame it in a more positive way, preferrably in the form of a story.
I don't quite agree with him on your third point, since that would mean more import of fruit and veg to the far north. Wild game and grazing farm animals are a good protein source in areas where edible plants are hard to grow. But we do need to reduce our meat consumption, and eat all parts of the animal rather than just the nice cuts. (That reminds me, I need to get the blood out of the freezer so the kids can have blood pancakes tomorrow). But since his audience are mainly consumers of industrial meat, and consuming less meat is easy to do in the western world, he is probably right to frame it like that.
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Thanks for all the youtube videos and ted talks that were linked! I'm interested to watch them.
DH is convinced most of Colorado is going to be without water by the time our kids are adults, and we're trying to decide where to move (soon-ish) that will better support a lifestyle with a lot of gardening and possibly livestock/hunting and some water rights. However, I'm interested in what we can do right now to help the issue. We compost, recycle, bike, keep our house cold/hot depending on the outside temperature, cloth diaper, wash our clothes (except for said diapers) on cold, buy local meat, try to remember our reusable bags, etc, and I know that if EVERYONE did these things it would help, but it all seems slightly trivial.
Is there anything, I don't know, BIGGER that we can do as individuals? Our utility company offers electricity from renewable sources for an extra fee ( ~ 2 cents/ kWh), but I don't even know how much that helps, especially when trying to minimize personal costs.
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Thanks for all the youtube videos and ted talks that were linked! I'm interested to watch them.
DH is convinced most of Colorado is going to be without water by the time our kids are adults, and we're trying to decide where to move (soon-ish) that will better support a lifestyle with a lot of gardening and possibly livestock/hunting and some water rights. However, I'm interested in what we can do right now to help the issue. We compost, recycle, bike, keep our house cold/hot depending on the outside temperature, cloth diaper, wash our clothes (except for said diapers) on cold, buy local meat, try to remember our reusable bags, etc, and I know that if EVERYONE did these things it would help, but it all seems slightly trivial.
Is there anything, I don't know, BIGGER that we can do as individuals? Our utility company offers electricity from renewable sources for an extra fee ( ~ 2 cents/ kWh), but I don't even know how much that helps, especially when trying to minimize personal costs.
Individual action is cool and all, but the biggest wins for emission reduction are on the industrial scale, and that is difficult to make happen without government action. So as an individual, the best thing you can do is be a thorn in the side of every official that represents you. Call them, every day if you can manage, and remind them that climate change is real and they need to be pursuing solutions to reduce carbon emissions. Remind them that your vote depends on it. Don't just call your national officials. Call your state officials, your city officials, and the local school board, literally everyone. If calling doesn't work for you, write emails, letters, send faxes. Whatever gets the job done. I like Resistbot for contacting national officials, and many state and local officials should have phone numbers and email addresses available with minimal digging. And when you've got your groove going, start talking to your friends and neighbors about also contacting their reps.
My city utility also has a renewable energy program that sounds similar to yours, though it sounds like ours is a bit cheaper. I'm bringing in enough and think climate change is a big enough issue that I'm happy to pay the extra 3/4 of a penny per KWH for wind power.
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Thanks for all the youtube videos and ted talks that were linked! I'm interested to watch them.
DH is convinced most of Colorado is going to be without water by the time our kids are adults, and we're trying to decide where to move (soon-ish) that will better support a lifestyle with a lot of gardening and possibly livestock/hunting and some water rights. However, I'm interested in what we can do right now to help the issue. We compost, recycle, bike, keep our house cold/hot depending on the outside temperature, cloth diaper, wash our clothes (except for said diapers) on cold, buy local meat, try to remember our reusable bags, etc, and I know that if EVERYONE did these things it would help, but it all seems slightly trivial.
Is there anything, I don't know, BIGGER that we can do as individuals? Our utility company offers electricity from renewable sources for an extra fee ( ~ 2 cents/ kWh), but I don't even know how much that helps, especially when trying to minimize personal costs.
Individual action is cool and all, but the biggest wins for emission reduction are on the industrial scale, and that is difficult to make happen without government action. So as an individual, the best thing you can do is be a thorn in the side of every official that represents you. Call them, every day if you can manage, and remind them that climate change is real and they need to be pursuing solutions to reduce carbon emissions. Remind them that your vote depends on it. Don't just call your national officials. Call your state officials, your city officials, and the local school board, literally everyone. If calling doesn't work for you, write emails, letters, send faxes. Whatever gets the job done. I like Resistbot for contacting national officials, and many state and local officials should have phone numbers and email addresses available with minimal digging. And when you've got your groove going, start talking to your friends and neighbors about also contacting their reps.
My city utility also has a renewable energy program that sounds similar to yours, though it sounds like ours is a bit cheaper. I'm bringing in enough and think climate change is a big enough issue that I'm happy to pay the extra 3/4 of a penny per KWH for wind power.
Nagging the businesses directly might also help; write letters to transport companies with copies to their largest customers, where you ask what they have done to limit their environmental footprint, or suggest they look into biogas as a fuel. Contact hotels and shops and say you are considering becoming a customer, but it would be easier if they had good parking for bikes and/or charging stations for electric cars. Write positive comments on facebook pages of companies when they do good stuff, and negative at the largest polluters.
"Public opinion" is important for both politicians and private companies, but it is a fickle thing to measure. Those who bother to voice their opinion, are disproportionatly heard. This is why letired's suggestions really do work. To increase the chance of influence, you can also take a lesson from the major lobbyists: Don't just say you disagree with something - make an alternative suggestion. If the zoning regulation in your city says each appartment needs two parking places; write a short and concrete suggestion that a politician can present as a suggestion, and a text that a bureaucrate can copy paste directly into a document/law.
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Another thing is the fact that fertilizer is made from phosphor that is not very abundant. I think we won't be able to produce as much food without fertilizer. Ecological agriculture takes up much more space than modern agriculture. I think we will have to accept more genetically modified food in the future, like rice being able to stand in water without drowning, other plant species resiliant against fungi and pests. I recently saw a TED talk about the world food crisis being there already in 10 years.
Let's also not forget the bees that are dying out. I can recommand the book"The history of Bees. A Novel", which describes the dying of the bees and a possible future without bees, in the form of a novel.
Sources of the bolded? Becuase in my knowledge Organic Agriculture in rain fed system has higher yield per hectare while protecting soil and insects than traditional agriculture. Source: the FAO itseld:
"In rain-fed systems, organic agriculture has demonstrated to outperform conventional agricultural systems under environmental stress conditions"
http://www.fao.org/organicag/oa-faq/oa-faq7/en/
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I don't mean to promote selfishness and cynicism, but my guess is that many on this forum do not yet have enough free time to devote to climate change advocacy.
Even if we all did - The people in power who need to hear the science and how various emission levels over the coming years will likely play out have probably already heard and are either not convinced or not incentivized enough to do something about it.
It's very possible the best thing we can realistically do is to live our own lives with the smallest footprint possible, and also prepare ourselves and our families for the consequences that climate change will bring about. Whether that means we move and divest of all coastal property, learn to how to grow our own food in a variety of conditions, investing in real estate in relatively stable regions that could potentially be used later on to house climate refugees, investing in water filtration/grey water use capabilities, solar panels as others have mentioned etc.
I know most here don't lean in the doomsday prepper direction and I don't either, but it does seem like some very bad effects of climate change will begin to unfold in our children's lifetimes and a big part of me wants to do my best to ensure they'll have the best resources available to them to thrive and help others.
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The world is changing, but that's nothing new. People already live in scalding deserts, and in flooded cities, and in places buried in snow and in places with no glaciers or ice caps. We are a supremely adaptable species.
It's the rest of the ecosystem that will suffer. We're going to lose a few million species that can't adapt or migrate fast enough. Some habitats will cease to exist. Most coral reefs are doomed, and changes to oceanic circulation patterns will drastically alter the average climate in some places. Mass migrations of humans are probably inevitable, but will take generations to play out and we can deal with it. Mass migrations of ecosystems will not go so smoothly.
Oregon turning into socal isn't that big of a deal. Canada will benefit. The Maldives are royally screwed. Yes there will be dramatic changes to natural cycles, but these days prosperous nations are pretty well insulated from natural cycles. America's just don't die of heat stroke the way people do in poorer countries, because we can all find AC at the mall.
Manhattan isn't going anywhere. We'll happily spend billions to protect real estate worth trillions. Try to not stress too much.
Now if you live in Bangladesh or Sudan, yea you probably need to gtfo. But then you already knew that before climate change started piling on to your problems.
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Another thing is the fact that fertilizer is made from phosphor that is not very abundant. I think we won't be able to produce as much food without fertilizer. Ecological agriculture takes up much more space than modern agriculture. I think we will have to accept more genetically modified food in the future, like rice being able to stand in water without drowning, other plant species resiliant against fungi and pests. I recently saw a TED talk about the world food crisis being there already in 10 years.
Let's also not forget the bees that are dying out. I can recommand the book"The history of Bees. A Novel", which describes the dying of the bees and a possible future without bees, in the form of a novel.
Sources of the bolded? Becuase in my knowledge Organic Agriculture in rain fed system has higher yield per hectare while protecting soil and insects than traditional agriculture. Source: the FAO itseld:
"In rain-fed systems, organic agriculture has demonstrated to outperform conventional agricultural systems under environmental stress conditions"
http://www.fao.org/organicag/oa-faq/oa-faq7/en/
I either read it somewhere or saw it in a TV documentary.
Here I find a website that describes it, although it was not my original source.
https://www.acsh.org/news/2017/05/26/organic-farms-use-more-land-and-dont-decrease-carbon-footprint-11338
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I still recommend to watch this documentary, winner of the cesar 2016:
https://www.demain-lefilm.com/en
Sent from my YD201 using Tapatalk
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I am of the mind that nothing will begin to change until it affects someone's profits. I also believer that nothing we already do will change very fast b/c someone powerful is making a big profit off of the status quo.
My fear though is that change will not happen b/c of profits until it is too late to easily recover or adapt to the environmental changes.
I think what we can be doing is voting with our dollars - buy efficiency, consider personal solar/wind/EVs, shop local, live where you can bicycle, etc.
Also for those of us with children, learn and teach how to take care of yourself. Learn to repair things, learn to build things, learn to grow things. By day you might be a desk bound professional but by night, you might be a welder/mechanic/farmer with the means and space to do these sorts of tasks. You have a home shop capable of supporting your little piece of land and all that your try to do there.
I want to make sustainable choices so if the retail mechanism breaks - can't get parts - I can keep my home going and I can pedal to the markets to trade my skills for their food if necessary.
I have almost no hope in the government - especially the current one. We need long term planning by very smart people who are experts in their specialties and the current administration seems to be chasing them away.
In the meantime DW and family will continue to save and learn and hope we are making the right choices. I don't want to leave the USA but we would if it became evident that our gov't had its priorities completely wrong.
I think there would be a quickly evident if we put as much effort and money into building a modern and sustainable country as we do in having history's largest and most lethal military. And it seems our gov't tries to find opportunities for it to be used to justify its existence.
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I still recommend to watch this documentary, winner of the cesar 2016:
https://www.demain-lefilm.com/en
Sent from my YD201 using Tapatalk
So we got on a plane and set out... ;)
That was one of the things that stuck with me from Al Gore's movie years ago. Pollution is a problem but in order to make this movie, I made alot of pollution to make my point. ;)
That said - I really want to see this movie now.
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+1 to climate resilience. Advocacy is essential and we all need to be doing as much of it as we can. But, even best case scenario, many people will start seeing more severe weather conditions. At this point, just avoiding catastrophe* would be a huge accomplishment.
*meaning human catastrophe. @sol is right - other species are fucked.
So, in order of increasing level of difficulty/expense, here are the things we're doing to build resilience:
-Priority of transit: walk, public transit, cars (1 EV, 1 plug-in hybrid). Flying limited to business or crossing a continent or ocean.
-Keep preparedness basics onhand (hand crank radio, first aid kit, water (bottled in old 2L bottles from a friend with a Dr. Pepper habit), shelf stable food)
-Gardening. Like, a lot of gardening. Including fruit trees and vines. We currently grow from plants, but would like to move toward saving and sprouting seeds.
-Have plenty of food that can be stored without electricity. We've got a bunch of stuff canned from our garden. Looking into a dehydrator and trash can root cellar.
-Diversify home energy consumption. We currently have grid-tied solar that meets all our current consumption including cars. I'd love to install a "switch" of some kind that would take us off-grid. We're also looking at a fireplace insert or woodstove and possibly a gas generator.
-Save for second property with more land and good water supply
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I thought it was all part of Trump's plan to Make Antarctica Warm Again? #MAWA. Time to buy up property near the poles... /s
Honestly, this is one of the biggest issues that makes me love Elon Musk so much. I think the electric semis are a good start and would love to see them eventually make public transit that is 100% electric. Once companies and governments see that forward thinking can *save* them money, in addition to the environmental benefits, they'll come around. It's just a matter of surviving until then. And, maybe saving enough money to afford a trip to Mars whenever that happens...
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I feel like the biggest mistake that's been made regarding climate change (well, other than everything we've done to cause it) was when Al Gore became a "spokesperson." I have no feelings one way or another about Al Gore, but I think it was a huge mistake for the movement to select a politician as its voice/face, or however that went down. In a nanosecond, it went from science to politics, and half of America instantly didn't believe a word of it. It became an uphill battle, the opposite of what was intended.
Maybe my memory isn't all that accurate about this, but I know in my own circle, even the republican scientists don't buy a word of "that global warming crap" (their words, not mine).
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Honestly, this is one of the biggest issues that makes me love Elon Musk so much. I think the electric semis are a good start and would love to see them eventually make public transit that is 100% electric. Once companies and governments see that forward thinking can *save* them money, in addition to the environmental benefits, they'll come around. It's just a matter of surviving until then. And, maybe saving enough money to afford a trip to Mars whenever that happens...
Recently the Netherlands ordered a windmill park and put it out on a public competition. It turned out to cost much less than they expected. That means windmills are becoming more competitive. I also have the impression that some states in the US have figured out that solar energy is to be more profitable than charcoal, despite Trump policies. But we could improve the world so much better if government policies in every country were pointing in the same direction.
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The world is changing, but that's nothing new. People already live in scalding deserts, and in flooded cities, and in places buried in snow and in places with no glaciers or ice caps. We are a supremely adaptable species.
It's the rest of the ecosystem that will suffer. We're going to lose a few million species that can't adapt or migrate fast enough. Some habitats will cease to exist. Most coral reefs are doomed, and changes to oceanic circulation patterns will drastically alter the average climate in some places. Mass migrations of humans are probably inevitable, but will take generations to play out and we can deal with it. Mass migrations of ecosystems will not go so smoothly.
Oregon turning into socal isn't that big of a deal. Canada will benefit. The Maldives are royally screwed. Yes there will be dramatic changes to natural cycles, but these days prosperous nations are pretty well insulated from natural cycles. America's just don't die of heat stroke the way people do in poorer countries, because we can all find AC at the mall.
Manhattan isn't going anywhere. We'll happily spend billions to protect real estate worth trillions. Try to not stress too much.
Now if you live in Bangladesh or Sudan, yea you probably need to gtfo. But then you already knew that before climate change started piling on to your problems.
Well said. As we are looking to move to the SE for our permanent retirement home, I would of never thought of these being something I would need to take into consideration. We have decided that we dont want to be closer than 50 miles to the Ocean and even look at Elevations. I am not a doomsdayer but no one can deny things are changing.
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10,000 years ago San Francisco Bay was a dry grassy valley populated by elephants, zebras, and camels.
I shouldn't engage, but as a biologist, I can't help it. Anyone who claims zebras have ever lived in San Francisco is, to put it politely, not a reliable resource.
You, my friend, displayed some commendable restraint right there.
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I'm just working on accepting the fact that as a species, humans are proving to be no more intelligent than a colony of bacteria.
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lol what?
https://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/climatic-phenomena-pages/extreme-weather-page/
You may not like the site but the data is from USGS
BTW, the religion of anthropomorphic climate change consensus is showing cracks
http://notrickszone.com/2018/01/04/485-scientific-papers-published-in-2017-support-a-skeptical-position-on-climate-alarm/#sthash.F3SfohQO.3TqpYy74.dpbs
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An interesting development over the last year or so is that the CW denial movement has begun morphing its message from "It's a hoax!" to "It's real, but the things we would have to do to prevent disaster are a wet dream for the Left, therefore we are against action!"
The effect we are seeing is due to unmoderated extraction & consumption of millions of years of fossil fuel. It's a one-time shot for the human race that has so far created massive wealth and (unevenly) improved the lives of billions of humans. But to sustain that prosperity for future generations we cannot continue in the same manner, and it is this reality that is too horrible for many to accept.
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10,000 years ago San Francisco Bay was a dry grassy valley populated by elephants, zebras, and camels.
I shouldn't engage, but as a biologist, I can't help it. Anyone who claims zebras have ever lived in San Francisco is, to put it politely, not a reliable resource.
You, my friend, displayed some commendable restraint right there.
Make sure you get the quote correct, because I did not say that. I quoted someone else to make a point.
It doesn't matter what lived in the Bay Area 15,000 years ago. The sea level has varied significantly over time, relatively short periods of time from the geological perspective. Climate change has been going on since the planet was formed and will go on long after our species disappears. At some point, the existing life will disappear, and unless conditions are not hospitable, some other forms of life will appear.
We may have changed the trend or accelerated the existing direction. Get over yourselves and realize there is not a whole lot you can do about it. All the walking, cycling, and turning off the AC isn't going to accomplish a damn thing. Unless governments see the threat, which they rarely do, especially when it threatens their interests, we are stuck with the trend.
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10,000 years ago San Francisco Bay was a dry grassy valley populated by elephants, zebras, and camels.
I shouldn't engage, but as a biologist, I can't help it. Anyone who claims zebras have ever lived in San Francisco is, to put it politely, not a reliable resource.
You, my friend, displayed some commendable restraint right there.
Make sure you get the quote correct, because I did not say that. I quoted someone else to make a point.
It doesn't matter what lived in the Bay Area 15,000 years ago. The sea level has varied significantly over time, relatively short periods of time from the geological perspective. Climate change has been going on since the planet was formed and will go on long after our species disappears. At some point, the existing life will disappear, and unless conditions are not hospitable, some other forms of life will appear.
We may have changed the trend or accelerated the existing direction. Get over yourselves and realize there is not a whole lot you can do about it. All the walking, cycling, and turning off the AC isn't going to accomplish a damn thing. Unless governments see the threat, which they rarely do, especially when it threatens their interests, we are stuck with the trend.
yup!
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We may have changed the trend or accelerated the existing direction. Get over yourselves and realize there is not a whole lot you can do about it. All the walking, cycling, and turning off the AC isn't going to accomplish a damn thing. Unless governments see the threat, which they rarely do, especially when it threatens their interests, we are stuck with the trend.
Eh, we created the problem. We can solve the problem.
Individual actions do influence others. Influencing others sways voters, which sways politicians. Natural events will also sway voters (Miami is flooding AGAIN?!?).
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It doesn't matter what lived in the Bay Area 15,000 years ago. The sea level has varied significantly over time, relatively short periods of time from the geological perspective. Climate change has been going on since the planet was formed and will go on long after our species disappears. At some point, the existing life will disappear, and unless conditions are not hospitable, some other forms of life will appear.
We may have changed the trend or accelerated the existing direction. Get over yourselves and realize there is not a whole lot you can do about it. All the walking, cycling, and turning off the AC isn't going to accomplish a damn thing. Unless governments see the threat, which they rarely do, especially when it threatens their interests, we are stuck with the trend.
EVERY little thing counts, just like every little dollar counts towards achieving FI. Now I do understand that if our actions made a small enough difference it would be futile, but when the human race is the thing that is causing the damage it is not beyond our scope to make a change. Will it happen? Unfortunately I'm not optimistic but attitudes like yours are part of the reason why.
Regarding the bolded, yes, sea levels have changed over relatively short periods of time from the geological perspective. But now they are changing over extremely short periods of time.
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I'm just working on accepting the fact that as a species, humans are proving to be no more intelligent than a colony of bacteria.
We are more bacteria than human after all.
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BTW, the religion of anthropomorphic climate change consensus is showing cracks
http://notrickszone.com/2018/01/04/485-scientific-papers-published-in-2017-support-a-skeptical-position-on-climate-alarm/#sthash.F3SfohQO.3TqpYy74.dpbs
I don't think anyone ever thought carbon dioxide was *the* giant control knob!
485 scientific papers have been published that cast doubt on the position that anthropogenic CO2 emissions function as the climate’s fundamental control knob
Non-linear systems are pretty hard to predict. Little bit of fake news in the teaser, wot?
The whole point of this process is to speculate about which climate models work, gather evidence, correct course, gather more evidence, and so on until we have more understanding of what works in the models and what doesn't. It's perfectly normal to find some evidence that disagrees with the earlier studies.
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BTW, the religion of anthropomorphic climate change consensus is showing cracks
http://notrickszone.com/2018/01/04/485-scientific-papers-published-in-2017-support-a-skeptical-position-on-climate-alarm/#sthash.F3SfohQO.3TqpYy74.dpbs
I don't think anyone ever thought carbon dioxide was *the* giant control knob!
485 scientific papers have been published that cast doubt on the position that anthropogenic CO2 emissions function as the climate’s fundamental control knob
Non-linear systems are pretty hard to predict. Little bit of fake news in the teaser, wot?
The whole point of this process is to speculate about which climate models work, gather evidence, correct course, gather more evidence, and so on until we have more understanding of what works in the models and what doesn't. It's perfectly normal to find some evidence that disagrees with the earlier studies.
It's completely fake news.
https://www.snopes.com/400-papers-published-in-2017-prove-that-global-warming-is-myth/
The first time that Breitbart ran a NTZ based-story, numerous scientists listed in the report pointed out their their graphs had been digitally altered by NTZ to omit data....
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Some people would do well to suspend their disbelief about what the Bay Area looked like at the end of the Pleistocene period, 15000-10000 years ago. That was during the last major ice age. The sea level was about 400 feet lower because of all the water locked up in the glaciers. The the coastline was anywhere from 12 to 27 miles further west. There was no San Francisco Bay. There was a canyon cutting across what is now the bay, through the Golden Gate, draining the river that ran through the valleys. The Farallon islands were hills. There are no fossil relics of zebras, but there are fossils from mammoths, mastadons, camels, lions, sabertooths, and many other animals more reminiscent of the African Savannah than of San Francisco today.
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It doesn't matter what lived in the Bay Area 15,000 years ago. The sea level has varied significantly over time, relatively short periods of time from the geological perspective. Climate change has been going on since the planet was formed and will go on long after our species disappears. At some point, the existing life will disappear, and unless conditions are not hospitable, some other forms of life will appear.
We may have changed the trend or accelerated the existing direction. Get over yourselves and realize there is not a whole lot you can do about it. All the walking, cycling, and turning off the AC isn't going to accomplish a damn thing. Unless governments see the threat, which they rarely do, especially when it threatens their interests, we are stuck with the trend.
EVERY little thing counts, just like every little dollar counts towards achieving FI. Now I do understand that if our actions made a small enough difference it would be futile, but when the human race is the thing that is causing the damage it is not beyond our scope to make a change. Will it happen? Unfortunately I'm not optimistic but attitudes like yours are part of the reason why.
Regarding the bolded, yes, sea levels have changed over relatively short periods of time from the geological perspective. But now they are changing over extremely short periods of time.
You do not think anything in the past could have triggered sea level or climate change in extremely short periods of time? What about the Younger Dryas period? What caused that?
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10,000 years ago San Francisco Bay was a dry grassy valley populated by elephants, zebras, and camels.
I shouldn't engage, but as a biologist, I can't help it. Anyone who claims zebras have ever lived in San Francisco is, to put it politely, not a reliable resource.
You, my friend, displayed some commendable restraint right there.
Make sure you get the quote correct, because I did not say that. I quoted someone else to make a point.
It doesn't matter what lived in the Bay Area 15,000 years ago. The sea level has varied significantly over time, relatively short periods of time from the geological perspective. Climate change has been going on since the planet was formed and will go on long after our species disappears. At some point, the existing life will disappear, and unless conditions are not hospitable, some other forms of life will appear.
We may have changed the trend or accelerated the existing direction. Get over yourselves and realize there is not a whole lot you can do about it. All the walking, cycling, and turning off the AC isn't going to accomplish a damn thing. Unless governments see the threat, which they rarely do, especially when it threatens their interests, we are stuck with the trend.
I don't find the distinction between exactly who said it to be a meaningful one. By quoting such an unreliable source, it throws doubt on your other statements for me.
I'm glad you recognize the seriousness of climate change. I believe I mentioned upthread that the most impactful thing an individual could do is to use their voice to influence politicians and large businesses to reduce their carbon emissions.
I agree that life as it exists on earth will eventually disappear. Per se, I don't really think that the extinction of humanity is a big deal. However, I don't find it unreasonable to attempt to postpone that, both from a selfish perspective (I'm not that old, and am not excited about dealing with the repercussions of climate change over my lifetime), out of affection for the young children in my life, and out of an ethical sense that I should endeavor to reduce overall suffering during my lifetime. If you have a different perspective, that's your prerogative, though I'm not sure why you are contributing to this thread, given it started with:
To start--I know this has been a contentious topic on the forum. I'm starting from the premise that climate change is real and caused by human activity. If you don't believe that, ok. This isn't the thread for you.
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The way humans live today, the planet is above carrying capacity at 7 billion plus of them. The usual population controls for overpopulated species of war, famine, and pestilence aren't working right now. We have minimized famine and pestilence for the time being and there haven't been any wars large enough to impact human population for awhile. At some point, something will fail and the population will be reduced by one or more of the big three. Or maybe a large asteroid will collide with the planet and we will have another mass extinction event.
I completely agree with this comment on population. Right now, we're able to support this many people because soil fertility kept up by repeated application of fertilisers derived from - you guessed it - fossil fuels. At some point, climate disaster, war, famine, and pestilence are going to come right back and start shrinking the population to a sustainable level. I personally feel like the current problems in various parts of the Middle East may be the start of that. And watch out for antibiotic-resistant bacteria, too.
It's entirely possible that any of us in the younger generation (I'm 24) could have our lives upheaved by climate change. Be prepared.
If the carrying capacity of Earth isn't >=7 billion, then what is it?
Bonus questions: what was the carrying capacity of the Earth 15,000 years ago?
Remember to show your work.
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Well this went downhill in a hurry. Apparently we have five strong climate deniers on the forum, and they're ALL in this thread.
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10,000 years ago San Francisco Bay was a dry grassy valley populated by elephants, zebras, and camels.
I shouldn't engage, but as a biologist, I can't help it. Anyone who claims zebras have ever lived in San Francisco is, to put it politely, not a reliable resource.
You, my friend, displayed some commendable restraint right there.
Make sure you get the quote correct, because I did not say that. I quoted someone else to make a point.
It doesn't matter what lived in the Bay Area 15,000 years ago. The sea level has varied significantly over time, relatively short periods of time from the geological perspective. Climate change has been going on since the planet was formed and will go on long after our species disappears. At some point, the existing life will disappear, and unless conditions are not hospitable, some other forms of life will appear.
We may have changed the trend or accelerated the existing direction. Get over yourselves and realize there is not a whole lot you can do about it. All the walking, cycling, and turning off the AC isn't going to accomplish a damn thing. Unless governments see the threat, which they rarely do, especially when it threatens their interests, we are stuck with the trend.
I don't find the distinction between exactly who said it to be a meaningful one. By quoting such an unreliable source, it throws doubt on your other statements for me.
I'm glad you recognize the seriousness of climate change. I believe I mentioned upthread that the most impactful thing an individual could do is to use their voice to influence politicians and large businesses to reduce their carbon emissions.
I agree that life as it exists on earth will eventually disappear. Per se, I don't really think that the extinction of humanity is a big deal. However, I don't find it unreasonable to attempt to postpone that, both from a selfish perspective (I'm not that old, and am not excited about dealing with the repercussions of climate change over my lifetime), out of affection for the young children in my life, and out of an ethical sense that I should endeavor to reduce overall suffering during my lifetime. If you have a different perspective, that's your prerogative, though I'm not sure why you are contributing to this thread, given it started with:
To start--I know this has been a contentious topic on the forum. I'm starting from the premise that climate change is real and caused by human activity. If you don't believe that, ok. This isn't the thread for you.
The facts are that 15,000 years ago, the sea level was 400 feet lower because of the ice age and all that water frozen in glaciers. That's generally accepted as scientific fact. Lots of animals, including camels but maybe not zebras (no zebra fossil relics) lived here. I was not quoting this article because of zebras. I was quoting it to put what's happening now in perspective.
In all probability, there will be major changes due to accelerated global warming. Like Sol said, if you live in Bangladesh, which is routinely inundated by tropical cyclones anyway, it's probably time to gtfo if you can. Don't think the government of Bangladesh is going to be able to do a lot about the problem. For first world folks that are generally better positioned to survive, well, it's going to be an interesting hundred years.
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The way humans live today, the planet is above carrying capacity at 7 billion plus of them. The usual population controls for overpopulated species of war, famine, and pestilence aren't working right now. We have minimized famine and pestilence for the time being and there haven't been any wars large enough to impact human population for awhile. At some point, something will fail and the population will be reduced by one or more of the big three. Or maybe a large asteroid will collide with the planet and we will have another mass extinction event.
I completely agree with this comment on population. Right now, we're able to support this many people because soil fertility kept up by repeated application of fertilisers derived from - you guessed it - fossil fuels. At some point, climate disaster, war, famine, and pestilence are going to come right back and start shrinking the population to a sustainable level. I personally feel like the current problems in various parts of the Middle East may be the start of that. And watch out for antibiotic-resistant bacteria, too.
It's entirely possible that any of us in the younger generation (I'm 24) could have our lives upheaved by climate change. Be prepared.
If the carrying capacity of Earth isn't >=7 billion, then what is it?
Bonus questions: what was the carrying capacity of the Earth 15,000 years ago?
Remember to show your work.
There is evidence we are over carrying capacity in what you folks are talking about - global warming. Going to be tough to sustain seven billion people if we eliminate a lot of what makes current food production and delivery possible. Even tougher if/when we hit 11 billion. The problem is the target moves with each "advance" in technology and the supply chain.
When I was born, the population was about 2.7 billion. Not much global warming back then. Plenty of poverty and subsistence farming, though. Carrying capacity then certainly wasn't 7 billion.
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10,000 years ago San Francisco Bay was a dry grassy valley populated by elephants, zebras, and camels.
I shouldn't engage, but as a biologist, I can't help it. Anyone who claims zebras have ever lived in San Francisco is, to put it politely, not a reliable resource.
You, my friend, displayed some commendable restraint right there.
Make sure you get the quote correct, because I did not say that. I quoted someone else to make a point.
It doesn't matter what lived in the Bay Area 15,000 years ago. The sea level has varied significantly over time, relatively short periods of time from the geological perspective. Climate change has been going on since the planet was formed and will go on long after our species disappears. At some point, the existing life will disappear, and unless conditions are not hospitable, some other forms of life will appear.
We may have changed the trend or accelerated the existing direction. Get over yourselves and realize there is not a whole lot you can do about it. All the walking, cycling, and turning off the AC isn't going to accomplish a damn thing. Unless governments see the threat, which they rarely do, especially when it threatens their interests, we are stuck with the trend.
I don't find the distinction between exactly who said it to be a meaningful one. By quoting such an unreliable source, it throws doubt on your other statements for me.
I'm glad you recognize the seriousness of climate change. I believe I mentioned upthread that the most impactful thing an individual could do is to use their voice to influence politicians and large businesses to reduce their carbon emissions.
I agree that life as it exists on earth will eventually disappear. Per se, I don't really think that the extinction of humanity is a big deal. However, I don't find it unreasonable to attempt to postpone that, both from a selfish perspective (I'm not that old, and am not excited about dealing with the repercussions of climate change over my lifetime), out of affection for the young children in my life, and out of an ethical sense that I should endeavor to reduce overall suffering during my lifetime. If you have a different perspective, that's your prerogative, though I'm not sure why you are contributing to this thread, given it started with:
To start--I know this has been a contentious topic on the forum. I'm starting from the premise that climate change is real and caused by human activity. If you don't believe that, ok. This isn't the thread for you.
The facts are that 15,000 years ago, the sea level was 400 feet lower because of the ice age and all that water frozen in glaciers. That's generally accepted as scientific fact. Lots of animals, including camels but maybe not zebras (no zebra fossil relics) lived here. I was not quoting this article because of zebras. I was quoting it to put what's happening now in perspective.
In all probability, there will be major changes due to accelerated global warming. Like Sol said, if you live in Bangladesh, which is routinely inundated by tropical cyclones anyway, it's probably time to gtfo if you can. Don't think the government of Bangladesh is going to be able to do a lot about the problem. For first world folks that are generally better positioned to survive, well, it's going to be an interesting hundred years.
... yes, I know the planet has undergone significant changes in both temperature and ocean level? I did a whole degree about it? yes, we are in for an ugly next few decades as the rate of change in temperature, weather, and ocean level moves at a speed unprecedented in the geological record? I'm not sure why you think the first world is any better positioned to survive climate change than anyone else, but ok. Maybe you are trying to say that climate change isn't a big deal because the planet used to be colder and there were glaciers? In which case, again:
To start--I know this has been a contentious topic on the forum. I'm starting from the premise that climate change is real and caused by human activity. If you don't believe that, ok. This isn't the thread for you.
ok, I'm going to stop, because I literally have no idea what you are trying to communicate and I'm becoming very frustrated.
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PTF (please don't ban me)
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The way humans live today, the planet is above carrying capacity at 7 billion plus of them. The usual population controls for overpopulated species of war, famine, and pestilence aren't working right now. We have minimized famine and pestilence for the time being and there haven't been any wars large enough to impact human population for awhile. At some point, something will fail and the population will be reduced by one or more of the big three. Or maybe a large asteroid will collide with the planet and we will have another mass extinction event.
I completely agree with this comment on population. Right now, we're able to support this many people because soil fertility kept up by repeated application of fertilisers derived from - you guessed it - fossil fuels. At some point, climate disaster, war, famine, and pestilence are going to come right back and start shrinking the population to a sustainable level. I personally feel like the current problems in various parts of the Middle East may be the start of that. And watch out for antibiotic-resistant bacteria, too.
It's entirely possible that any of us in the younger generation (I'm 24) could have our lives upheaved by climate change. Be prepared.
If the carrying capacity of Earth isn't >=7 billion, then what is it?
Bonus questions: what was the carrying capacity of the Earth 15,000 years ago?
Remember to show your work.
There is evidence we are over carrying capacity in what you folks are talking about - global warming. Going to be tough to sustain seven billion people if we eliminate a lot of what makes current food production and delivery possible. Even tougher if/when we hit 11 billion. The problem is the target moves with each "advance" in technology and the supply chain.
When I was born, the population was about 2.7 billion. Not much global warming back then. Plenty of poverty and subsistence farming, though. Carrying capacity then certainly wasn't 7 billion.
I haven't calculated carrying capacity precisely, but it's obvious that we are significantly over it. Before the technological age and the industrial revolution, populations stayed relatively steady on average for centuries, suggesting that the population then was about what is sustainable for a low-tech agriculture-based model.
http://chartsbin.com/view/28k
is a chart of UK population since 43 AD. Notice how low it is compared to the present for most of the graph. Each of the exponential steps comes around when a new technology was discovered.
Sure, you could possibly TECHNICALLY fit more humans on the planet if you want Earth to resemble a cross between Coruscant and Tatooine, with most people packed in like sardines, living in poverty, just about being fed from artificial indoor gardens, deserts to be covered in solar panels, and there to be no wild species left anywhere. But I don't think that's a sustainable future either - building materials must also be sustainable for repairs over the long term. And it's certainly not a desirable future.
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Regarding carrying capacity, you might be interested in this article by Paul Chefurka, where he defines overshoot, carrying capacity and other ecological concepts. He then reviews 5 or so estimates of carrying capacity from various sources and discusses the relative merits of each:
http://www.paulchefurka.ca/Sustainability.html (http://www.paulchefurka.ca/Sustainability.html)
In this next article, Mr. Chefurka uses 2 billion as a place holder for carrying capacity in order to discuss the dynamics of overshoot. But as you see from the previous article, his subsequent conclusion is that CC is probably no more than 1 billion, and in all likelihood is a lot less. Anyway, this is an interesting read on overshoot:
http://www.paulchefurka.ca/CC_Overshoot.html (http://www.paulchefurka.ca/CC_Overshoot.html)
I found Paul Chefurka and Vaclav Smil - Professor Emeritus at U. of Manitoba (http://vaclavsmil.com) via Nate Hagens. To those on this thread who are no longer grasping for denial talking points, I urge you to watch Nate Hagen's talk 'Blindspots and Superheroes' (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUSpsT6Oqrg). The discussion of terrestrial vertebrate biomass is shocking. It starts about 19 minutes into his lecture, and is based off of data from Chefurka and Smil.
Relevant Smil publication (http://vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/uploads/PDR37-4.Smil_.pgs613-636.pdf).
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Regarding carrying capacity, you might be interested in this article by Paul Chefurka, where he defines overshoot, carrying capacity and other ecological concepts. He then reviews 5 or so estimates of carrying capacity from various sources and discusses the relative merits of each:
http://www.paulchefurka.ca/Sustainability.html (http://www.paulchefurka.ca/Sustainability.html)
In this next article, Mr. Chefurka uses 2 billion as a place holder for carrying capacity in order to discuss the dynamics of overshoot. But as you see from the previous article, his subsequent conclusion is that CC is probably no more than 1 billion, and in all likelihood is a lot less. Anyway, this is an interesting read on overshoot:
http://www.paulchefurka.ca/CC_Overshoot.html (http://www.paulchefurka.ca/CC_Overshoot.html)
I found Paul Chefurka and Vaclav Smil - Professor Emeritus at U. of Manitoba (http://vaclavsmil.com) via Nate Hagens. To those on this thread who are no longer grasping for denial talking points, I urge you to watch Nate Hagen's talk 'Blindspots and Superheroes' (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUSpsT6Oqrg). The discussion of terrestrial vertebrate biomass is shocking (It starts around 19 minutes into his lecture (https://youtu.be/YUSpsT6Oqrg?t=19m12s) and is based off of data from Chefurka and Smil).
Relevant Smil publication (http://vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/uploads/PDR37-4.Smil_.pgs613-636.pdf).
Excellent links, Malaysia41. If you want numbers, check out the Paul Chefurka article.
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Like Sol said, if you live in Bangladesh, which is routinely inundated by tropical cyclones anyway, it's probably time to gtfo if you can. Don't think the government of Bangladesh is going to be able to do a lot about the problem. For first world folks that are generally better positioned to survive, well, it's going to be an interesting hundred years.
Bangladesh has a population of 162 million (per capita income $4,000). Where do you think 162 million people are going to go? If they start buying ships and coming on to the shores of the USA in their tens of thousands are you going to man the machine guns?
I don't get this idea that the third world will suffer and die in place while the first world puts up a wall and lives happily behind it. I don't think it's like that any more - see recent and current migration from the middle east and Africa across the Mediterranean. Even oceans aren't enough insulation against billions of people whose lands are uninhabitable because of desertification and floods.
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10,000 years ago San Francisco Bay was a dry grassy valley populated by elephants, zebras, and camels.
I shouldn't engage, but as a biologist, I can't help it. Anyone who claims zebras have ever lived in San Francisco is, to put it politely, not a reliable resource.
You, my friend, displayed some commendable restraint right there.
Make sure you get the quote correct, because I did not say that. I quoted someone else to make a point.
It doesn't matter what lived in the Bay Area 15,000 years ago. The sea level has varied significantly over time, relatively short periods of time from the geological perspective. Climate change has been going on since the planet was formed and will go on long after our species disappears. At some point, the existing life will disappear, and unless conditions are not hospitable, some other forms of life will appear.
We may have changed the trend or accelerated the existing direction. Get over yourselves and realize there is not a whole lot you can do about it. All the walking, cycling, and turning off the AC isn't going to accomplish a damn thing. Unless governments see the threat, which they rarely do, especially when it threatens their interests, we are stuck with the trend.
I don't find the distinction between exactly who said it to be a meaningful one. By quoting such an unreliable source, it throws doubt on your other statements for me.
I'm glad you recognize the seriousness of climate change. I believe I mentioned upthread that the most impactful thing an individual could do is to use their voice to influence politicians and large businesses to reduce their carbon emissions.
I agree that life as it exists on earth will eventually disappear. Per se, I don't really think that the extinction of humanity is a big deal. However, I don't find it unreasonable to attempt to postpone that, both from a selfish perspective (I'm not that old, and am not excited about dealing with the repercussions of climate change over my lifetime), out of affection for the young children in my life, and out of an ethical sense that I should endeavor to reduce overall suffering during my lifetime. If you have a different perspective, that's your prerogative, though I'm not sure why you are contributing to this thread, given it started with:
To start--I know this has been a contentious topic on the forum. I'm starting from the premise that climate change is real and caused by human activity. If you don't believe that, ok. This isn't the thread for you.
The facts are that 15,000 years ago, the sea level was 400 feet lower because of the ice age and all that water frozen in glaciers. That's generally accepted as scientific fact. Lots of animals, including camels but maybe not zebras (no zebra fossil relics) lived here. I was not quoting this article because of zebras. I was quoting it to put what's happening now in perspective.
In all probability, there will be major changes due to accelerated global warming. Like Sol said, if you live in Bangladesh, which is routinely inundated by tropical cyclones anyway, it's probably time to gtfo if you can. Don't think the government of Bangladesh is going to be able to do a lot about the problem. For first world folks that are generally better positioned to survive, well, it's going to be an interesting hundred years.
... yes, I know the planet has undergone significant changes in both temperature and ocean level? I did a whole degree about it? yes, we are in for an ugly next few decades as the rate of change in temperature, weather, and ocean level moves at a speed unprecedented in the geological record? I'm not sure why you think the first world is any better positioned to survive climate change than anyone else, but ok. Maybe you are trying to say that climate change isn't a big deal because the planet used to be colder and there were glaciers? In which case, again:
To start--I know this has been a contentious topic on the forum. I'm starting from the premise that climate change is real and caused by human activity. If you don't believe that, ok. This isn't the thread for you.
ok, I'm going to stop, because I literally have no idea what you are trying to communicate and I'm becoming very frustrated.
I thought I was pretty clear. The climate will change. Whether it's this series of events or something else, we are well beyond carrying capacity. There is not enough interest by world governments to do anything. Humans in places like Bangladesh will be wiped out, because there is no money and no place to move them. Make your first world plans accordingly.
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It doesn't matter what lived in the Bay Area 15,000 years ago. The sea level has varied significantly over time, relatively short periods of time from the geological perspective. Climate change has been going on since the planet was formed and will go on long after our species disappears. At some point, the existing life will disappear, and unless conditions are not hospitable, some other forms of life will appear.
We may have changed the trend or accelerated the existing direction. Get over yourselves and realize there is not a whole lot you can do about it. All the walking, cycling, and turning off the AC isn't going to accomplish a damn thing. Unless governments see the threat, which they rarely do, especially when it threatens their interests, we are stuck with the trend.
EVERY little thing counts, just like every little dollar counts towards achieving FI. Now I do understand that if our actions made a small enough difference it would be futile, but when the human race is the thing that is causing the damage it is not beyond our scope to make a change. Will it happen? Unfortunately I'm not optimistic but attitudes like yours are part of the reason why.
Regarding the bolded, yes, sea levels have changed over relatively short periods of time from the geological perspective. But now they are changing over extremely short periods of time.
You do not think anything in the past could have triggered sea level or climate change in extremely short periods of time? What about the Younger Dryas period? What caused that?
I'm not very familiar with that but according to the timeline on the last page it may have been due to changes in ocean circulation caused by melting ice sheets in North America. I haven't looked into it in depth yet but it looks like this mostly affected the northern hemisphere and was more of a shift from one part of the world to another than a rapid global cooling, the global effect was ~.5C over 1,000 years. The timeline also mentions that spikes like the one at the beginning of the Younger Dryas period may have been smoothed out based on the data used. That being said I wasn't aware that these events had happened over such short time scales so if that is all you were pointing out then you're right.
But if we're talking about how that relates to today, it doesn't. We have no evidence for the drastic climate change we're seeing that compares with the evidence we have that it is caused by human activities. Just based on probabilities what's the chance earth is experiencing something that rare shortly after we begin using fossil fuels to run our lives coupled with the fact that we have evidence that CO2 and other gases are causing a greenhouse effect?
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Make sure you get the quote correct, because I did not say that. I quoted someone else to make a point.
It doesn't matter what lived in the Bay Area 15,000 years ago. The sea level has varied significantly over time, relatively short periods of time from the geological perspective. Climate change has been going on since the planet was formed and will go on long after our species disappears. At some point, the existing life will disappear, and unless conditions are not hospitable, some other forms of life will appear.
We may have changed the trend or accelerated the existing direction. Get over yourselves and realize there is not a whole lot you can do about it. All the walking, cycling, and turning off the AC isn't going to accomplish a damn thing. Unless governments see the threat, which they rarely do, especially when it threatens their interests, we are stuck with the trend.
I don't find the distinction between exactly who said it to be a meaningful one. By quoting such an unreliable source, it throws doubt on your other statements for me.
I'm glad you recognize the seriousness of climate change. I believe I mentioned upthread that the most impactful thing an individual could do is to use their voice to influence politicians and large businesses to reduce their carbon emissions.
I agree that life as it exists on earth will eventually disappear. Per se, I don't really think that the extinction of humanity is a big deal. However, I don't find it unreasonable to attempt to postpone that, both from a selfish perspective (I'm not that old, and am not excited about dealing with the repercussions of climate change over my lifetime), out of affection for the young children in my life, and out of an ethical sense that I should endeavor to reduce overall suffering during my lifetime. If you have a different perspective, that's your prerogative, though I'm not sure why you are contributing to this thread, given it started with:
To start--I know this has been a contentious topic on the forum. I'm starting from the premise that climate change is real and caused by human activity. If you don't believe that, ok. This isn't the thread for you.
The facts are that 15,000 years ago, the sea level was 400 feet lower because of the ice age and all that water frozen in glaciers. That's generally accepted as scientific fact. Lots of animals, including camels but maybe not zebras (no zebra fossil relics) lived here. I was not quoting this article because of zebras. I was quoting it to put what's happening now in perspective.
In all probability, there will be major changes due to accelerated global warming. Like Sol said, if you live in Bangladesh, which is routinely inundated by tropical cyclones anyway, it's probably time to gtfo if you can. Don't think the government of Bangladesh is going to be able to do a lot about the problem. For first world folks that are generally better positioned to survive, well, it's going to be an interesting hundred years.
... yes, I know the planet has undergone significant changes in both temperature and ocean level? I did a whole degree about it? yes, we are in for an ugly next few decades as the rate of change in temperature, weather, and ocean level moves at a speed unprecedented in the geological record? I'm not sure why you think the first world is any better positioned to survive climate change than anyone else, but ok. Maybe you are trying to say that climate change isn't a big deal because the planet used to be colder and there were glaciers? In which case, again:
To start--I know this has been a contentious topic on the forum. I'm starting from the premise that climate change is real and caused by human activity. If you don't believe that, ok. This isn't the thread for you.
ok, I'm going to stop, because I literally have no idea what you are trying to communicate and I'm becoming very frustrated.
I thought I was pretty clear. The climate will change. Whether it's this series of events or something else, we are well beyond carrying capacity. There is not enough interest by world governments to do anything. Humans in places like Bangladesh will be wiped out, because there is no money and no place to move them. Make your first world plans accordingly.
And don't forget your defeatist position of "there's nothing we can do about it so why bother"
Even if you've come to the conclusion that some bad things will happen regardless, do you also realize that after that things will continue to get worse? We talk about current coastal areas that will flood and islands that will be submerged but that's only because it is the most imminent threat.
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What about the Younger Dryas period? What caused that?
Do you really not know the answer to this question? Did you ask google? Google knows, because millions of scientists all agree on the obvious answer.
I wish climate deniers would do the bare minimum of fact checking before trying to use their own misunderstandings to convince people to believe in easily disproven theories. As it turns out, Earth's climate is not some incomprehensibly complex mystery machine. Greenhouse gas emissions really have changed the planet's energy balance. The oceans and the atmosphere really are connected. Temperatures really are rising at unprecedented rates.
Why do people keep arguing that we don't know things that we do know? Do they think it supports denialism to sow false doubt in the science? Because that seems like the weakest possible argument, in that every semi-literate person can refute it.
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What about the Younger Dryas period? What caused that?
Do you really not know the answer to this question? Did you ask google? Google knows, because millions of scientists all agree on the obvious answer.
I wish climate deniers would do the bare minimum of fact checking before trying to use their own misunderstandings to convince people to believe in easily disproven theories. As it turns out, Earth's climate is not some incomprehensibly complex mystery machine. Greenhouse gas emissions really have changed the planet's energy balance. The oceans and the atmosphere really are connected. Temperatures really are rising at unprecedented rates.
Why do people keep arguing that we don't know things that we do know? Do they think it supports denialism to sow false doubt in the science? Because that seems like the weakest possible argument, in that every semi-literate person can refute it.
I have noticed that many CD will, in fact, not use google or click through to their source. An example is above, with the Snopes link. Just reading the abstract to the first "anti-AGW" study would make one suspect that maybe the "notricks" site is trying to get clicks from their gullible readers.
I've seen it before, too, when people quote wattsup and the study is saying the opposite of what wattsup claims. As in, the scientist is not a CD and the study supports AGW.
I'm not sure if critical thinking is in short supply or if (lifestyle) change is too scary, causing blindness to reality.
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I see denialism as a kind of second-order problem. The deniers are in denial not of the fact of GW (or other issues) but resistant to the conclusions that follow from those facts.
Fact: Massive burning of fossil fuels (and use of refrigerants, industrial-scale cattle farming, et al) is impacting the climate in ways that will have drastic consequences that we can predict (in broad strokes) and do not prefer come to pass vs. other futures.
Conclusion: We should probably stop doing/change the way we do some of these things
Hence: People will have to change their habits, and may need to modify their lifestyle in response
Also: Deniers may need to admit they were wrong or may lose status, and that hurts
Similar reaction patterns emerge when discussing issues like income inequality, etc. If one intuits that their circumstances may need to change for the worse in response to a problem, it's understandable they will look for ways to deny the change.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. -- Upton Sinclair
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I have noticed that many CD will, in fact, not use google or click through to their source. An example is above, with the Snopes link. Just reading the abstract to the first "anti-AGW" study would make one suspect that maybe the "notricks" site is trying to get clicks from their gullible readers.
I've seen it before, too, when people quote wattsup and the study is saying the opposite of what wattsup claims. As in, the scientist is not a CD and the study supports AGW.
I'm not sure if critical thinking is in short supply or if (lifestyle) change is too scary, causing blindness to reality.
This isn't unique to the human drive climate change issue. I've gotten in debates (both on this forum and elsewhere) where it is clear people are just plugging phrases into google scholar and pasting 3-4 links into their post with a "see! peer reviewed science proves it" without actually reading the articles at all. And sometimes not even reading the abstracts. I've even been accused of clearly having suspect motives because I was willing to keep reading through the studies people were posting to figure out what the actual results and conclusions were.
In some ways I see it as a success that even folks firmly in the denialism camp on a wide range of issues clearly still understand and acknowledge how important concepts like peer review and scientific consensus are, since they put so much work into trying to create the impression that peer reviewed science supports their positions, and spend a lot of time trying to create the impression that there isn't scientific consensus on issues where there is.
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What about the Younger Dryas period? What caused that?
Do you really not know the answer to this question? Did you ask google? Google knows, because millions of scientists all agree on the obvious answer.
I wish climate deniers would do the bare minimum of fact checking before trying to use their own misunderstandings to convince people to believe in easily disproven theories. As it turns out, Earth's climate is not some incomprehensibly complex mystery machine. Greenhouse gas emissions really have changed the planet's energy balance. The oceans and the atmosphere really are connected. Temperatures really are rising at unprecedented rates.
Why do people keep arguing that we don't know things that we do know? Do they think it supports denialism to sow false doubt in the science? Because that seems like the weakest possible argument, in that every semi-literate person can refute it.
Actually I am not a CD, but you cannot state that climate has not change extremely rapidly in the past, it is not factually accurate.
Millions of scientists agree on the cause of the Younger Dryas? That would be news to me, as far as I understood it is still highly debated.
From NOAA:
Scientists have hypothesized that, just prior to the Younger Dryas, meltwater fluxes were rerouted from the Mississippi River to the St. Lawrence River. Geochemical evidence from ocean sediment cores supports this idea (Carlson et al. 2007 (link is external)),
From Columbia University:
This is a touchy subject that is currently the focus of much research. One explanation is the one involving a thermohaline circulation (THC) shutdown, triggered by a catastrophic discharge of freshwater from Lake Agassiz (figure 2). The consequence is a rapid reduction in northward ocean heat transports, leading to an abrupt cooling over Northern Europe and North America.
A problem with this hypothesis is the timing of meltwater pulses that are supposed to have triggered the THC shutdown: it was found that a second meltwater pulse, albeit slightly smaller than the first one, occurred at the end of the YD (Fairbanks, 1989): why didn't it also trigger a similar chain of consequences in the climate system?
An alternate explanation (Clement et al., 2001) invokes the abrupt cessation in the El Nino -Southern Oscillation in response to changes in the orbital parameters of the Earth, although how such a change would impact regions away from the Tropics remains to be explained.
The respective merits of both hypotheses have been laid out by Broecker (2003). The issue is far from being settled, and actively researched at Lamont and elsewhere.
Please tell me how millions of scientists agree on the "obvious" answer!
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I see denialism as a kind of second-order problem. The deniers are in denial not of the fact of GW (or other issues) but resistant to the conclusions that follow from those facts.
Fact: Massive burning of fossil fuels (and use of refrigerants, industrial-scale cattle farming, et al) is impacting the climate in ways that will have drastic consequences that we can predict (in broad strokes) and do not prefer come to pass vs. other futures.
Conclusion: We should probably stop doing/change the way we do some of these things
Hence: People will have to change their habits, and may need to modify their lifestyle in response
Also: Deniers may need to admit they were wrong or may lose status, and that hurts
Similar reaction patterns emerge when discussing issues like income inequality, etc. If one intuits that their circumstances may need to change for the worse in response to a problem, it's understandable they will look for ways to deny the change.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. -- Upton Sinclair
Well, I'm FIRE and my salary does not depend on any understanding. I'm not resistant to change, in fact, I'm fairly low on the consumption scale. I would not be on this site unless I thought there was a lot of silly, useless, and downright dangerous consumption out there. I'm older than most folks here, so I'm probably going to live out my life with minimal disruption and hardship, no matter what happens.
These are fine generalities you state. Seeing this is the MMM forum, which is not generally prone to exclusionary circle jerks, what are you going to do about the larger problems that really are outside your circle of control? What specific actions are you taking that will alter the ways in which seven billion people live to solve the problem? How are you going to FEED those 7 billion people without industrial scale agriculture?
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I see denialism as a kind of second-order problem. The deniers are in denial not of the fact of GW (or other issues) but resistant to the conclusions that follow from those facts.
Fact: Massive burning of fossil fuels (and use of refrigerants, industrial-scale cattle farming, et al) is impacting the climate in ways that will have drastic consequences that we can predict (in broad strokes) and do not prefer come to pass vs. other futures.
Conclusion: We should probably stop doing/change the way we do some of these things
Hence: People will have to change their habits, and may need to modify their lifestyle in response
Also: Deniers may need to admit they were wrong or may lose status, and that hurts
Similar reaction patterns emerge when discussing issues like income inequality, etc. If one intuits that their circumstances may need to change for the worse in response to a problem, it's understandable they will look for ways to deny the change.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. -- Upton Sinclair
Well, I'm FIRE and my salary does not depend on any understanding. I'm not resistant to change, in fact, I'm fairly low on the consumption scale. I would not be on this site unless I thought there was a lot of silly, useless, and downright dangerous consumption out there. I'm older than most folks here, so I'm probably going to live out my life with minimal disruption and hardship, no matter what happens.
These are fine generalities you state. Seeing this is the MMM forum, which is not generally prone to exclusionary circle jerks, what are you going to do about the larger problems that really are outside your circle of control? What specific actions are you taking that will alter the ways in which seven billion people live to solve the problem? How are you going to FEED those 7 billion people without industrial scale agriculture?
First, the quote literally says salary but it could also be applied to someone's consumption and travel habits, anything you don't want to give up. Is there something you don't want to give up that emits greenhouse gases? I would say there's at least a few things that fit this description for all of us.
Second, they may be generalities but they aren't pointing to anyone but those who are in denial because they are better off if the thing they deny isn't true. I think this makes perfect sense and isn't meant to exclude anyone.
The problems outside of our circle of control, I suppose we do nothing, if they truly are outside of it. But carbon emissions and other pollution is not outside of our control. It may feel that way because we a small and insignificant relative to the earth but if you believe you have no impact at all you're allowing your emotions (feelings of smallness) outweigh your critical thinking. Mathematically, your actions do matter.
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Please tell me how millions of scientists agree on the "obvious" answer!
You're quibbling over details as if they matter. One side says the scarecrow works because crows find human figures threatening, the other side says it works because of the wind motion and bright colors, and your take is that crows aren't a problem. You've completely subverted the honest debate in an attempt to support an unrelated point.
Yes, we can and should figure out how to build better scarecrows. It is disingenuous to suggest that this effort means we don't know anything about crows.
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Please tell me how millions of scientists agree on the "obvious" answer!
https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/
Multiple studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journals show that 97 percent or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree: Climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities. In addition, most of the leading scientific organizations worldwide have issued public statements endorsing this position. The following is a partial list of these organizations, along with links to their published statements and a selection of related resources.
97% of engineers agree: If you drive over that bridge it's likely going to collapse. Are you going to drive over it? Or is the warning not "obvious" enough for you?
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Please tell me how millions of scientists agree on the "obvious" answer!
You're quibbling over details as if they matter. One side says the scarecrow works because crows find human figures threatening, the other side says it works because of the wind motion and bright colors, and your take is that crows aren't a problem. You've completely subverted the honest debate in an attempt to support an unrelated point.
Yes, we can and should figure out how to build better scarecrows. It is disingenuous to suggest that this effort means we don't know anything about crows.
I like the analogy but I'm not sure it applies to zoltani in this case, does zoltani deny anthropogenic climate change?
I would agree that quibbling over details is often used as a way to undermine positions in these debates and whether that was the intent or not, at least now I know not to use that specific reasoning. There's plenty of other facts that clearly support human responsibility for climate change.
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It's not really an honest debate when someone states that the climate has never changed rapidly, when in fact it has. Tell me how that contributes to the "honest debate"?
As I said in another thread it doesn't matter to me if climate change is caused by humans or not, as I think that part of the debate gets in the way of action. The climate is changing and something needs to be done, it doesn't matter the cause, IMO. But to you that makes me a climate denier. Does that tactic often work for you?
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Please tell me how millions of scientists agree on the "obvious" answer!
https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/
Multiple studies published in peer-reviewed scientific journals show that 97 percent or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree: Climate-warming trends over the past century are extremely likely due to human activities. In addition, most of the leading scientific organizations worldwide have issued public statements endorsing this position. The following is a partial list of these organizations, along with links to their published statements and a selection of related resources.
97% of engineers agree: If you drive over that bridge it's likely going to collapse. Are you going to drive over it? Or is the warning not "obvious" enough for you?
No Shit. Try and follow the thread. I don't dispute climate change and I wasn't talking about climate change consensus in my post.
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It's not really an honest debate when someone states that the climate has never changed rapidly, when in fact it has. Tell me how that contributes to the "honest debate"?
As I said in another thread it doesn't matter to me if climate change is caused by humans or not, as I think that part of the debate gets in the way of action. The climate is changing and something needs to be done, it doesn't matter the cause, IMO. But to you that makes me a climate denier. Does that tactic often work for you?
This is true, I didn't know it had happened and now I do.
But to be fair it was in response to someone who was using uneducated generalizations of "temperature and sea level have changed in the past and therefore there's nothing we can do about it"
The order of posts made it seem as if you were defending his statements, but now we all know that you were not.
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Ah, I see, thanks for the clarification.
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It's not really an honest debate when someone states that the climate has never changed rapidly, when in fact it has. Tell me how that contributes to the "honest debate"?
We've already covered this in this thread but I'll repeat myself.
Past instances of climate change that have been anywhere near this fast have been accompanied by mass extinction events. Your suggestion that this is normal is wrong, and your implication that it is unavoidable is wrong. An honest debater would not say "this has happened before" without including that vital context.
Did someone here say "this has never happened before" or did you just throw that up as a strawman you could then try to discredit using incomplete and misleading arguments? Maybe don't accuse me of being dishonest when I repeatedly have to correct your (deliberate?) misinformation.
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It's not really an honest debate when someone states that the climate has never changed rapidly, when in fact it has. Tell me how that contributes to the "honest debate"?
We've already covered this in this thread but I'll repeat myself.
Past instances of climate change that have been anywhere near this fast have been accompanied by mass extinction events. Your suggestion that this is normal is wrong, and your implication that it is unavoidable is wrong. An honest debater would not say "this has happened before" without including that vital context.
Did someone here say "this has never happened before" or did you just throw that up as a strawman you could then try to discredit using incomplete and misleading arguments? Maybe don't accuse me of being dishonest when I repeatedly have to correct your (deliberate?) misinformation.
Well you are the one that quoted what I said, so surely you can re-read what transpired yourself. Of course, you cut my quote, but whatever.
What misinformation did I present exactly?
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Sol, your accusations of lying and deliberate misinformation are just not supportable. I'm really surprised by your less than professional scientist behavior in this thread. That's not what I have seen from you for the last five or six years.
I ask you, as I asked everyone else, to show us your list of actionable items that you will undertake that will actually change the tangent to the curve.
As to mass extinction events, I don't know if that's what will happen, but my conclusion is that we will reduce the human population by a billion or two over the next 100 years if your assumptions about the rate of change are correct. Not going to be pretty if that happens.
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Regarding carrying capacity, you might be interested in this article by Paul Chefurka, where he defines overshoot, carrying capacity and other ecological concepts. He then reviews 5 or so estimates of carrying capacity from various sources and discusses the relative merits of each:
http://www.paulchefurka.ca/Sustainability.html (http://www.paulchefurka.ca/Sustainability.html)
In this next article, Mr. Chefurka uses 2 billion as a place holder for carrying capacity in order to discuss the dynamics of overshoot. But as you see from the previous article, his subsequent conclusion is that CC is probably no more than 1 billion, and in all likelihood is a lot less. Anyway, this is an interesting read on overshoot:
http://www.paulchefurka.ca/CC_Overshoot.html (http://www.paulchefurka.ca/CC_Overshoot.html)
I found Paul Chefurka and Vaclav Smil - Professor Emeritus at U. of Manitoba (http://vaclavsmil.com) via Nate Hagens. To those on this thread who are no longer grasping for denial talking points, I urge you to watch Nate Hagen's talk 'Blindspots and Superheroes' (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUSpsT6Oqrg). The discussion of terrestrial vertebrate biomass is shocking (It starts around 19 minutes into his lecture (https://youtu.be/YUSpsT6Oqrg?t=19m12s) and is based off of data from Chefurka and Smil).
Relevant Smil publication (http://vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/uploads/PDR37-4.Smil_.pgs613-636.pdf).
Excellent links, Malaysia41. If you want numbers, check out the Paul Chefurka article.
Interesting links and it's nice that rather than arm-waving there is an attempt to arrive at well-defined ways of arriving at those numbers. While the impact of technology was briefly discussed by Chefurka, it is seemingly cast aside in favor of the "outside" and "objective" view of carrying capacity. That view appears to assume the only acceptable capacity calculations are those where one assumes (by the various measures) that humanity is necessarily in stasis and is in equilibrium with the environment.
There are two problems with that. First, taking the definition seriously, the "perpetual" carrying capacity of the Earth is zero. Unless action is taken, the sun's increasing luminosity will boil the oceans in a billion or two years. Second, the requirement that a sustainable population be able to survive in stasis is irrelevant under the condition that human knowledge and technology is rapidly growing. That growth in knowledge has already allowed for >2,000x increase in population from when 35 million "sustainably" lived. The notion of sustainability is only clear in a static society, which has not applied to humanity since the Scientific Revolution in the West and to much of the rest of the world since, perhaps, the 19th/20th centuries.
Sorry for off topic comment though. Someone posted a Vox article that approached the point I'm making: talking about overpopulation as a problem accomplishes nothing. Even if you believe there should be only 100 million or 2 billion people or whatever...well, here we are all the same.
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Well you are the one that quoted what I said, so surely you can re-read what transpired yourself. Of course, you cut my quote, but whatever.
Fine, you sucked me in. I went back and checked, and no one in this thread said that. You were apparently the first person to bring up the idea that this sort of change "has never happened before" so I think I can safely stand by my assertion that you only brought up because you thought you could refute it, instead of dealing with any of the actual criticisms in this thread. That was dishonest of you. I'm not sure where you're getting your talking points, but they're leading you astray. You're arguing with yourself, and for some reason I feel compelled to step in and correct you. Perhaps because your performative strawman argument wasn't a part of this thread, and you only started/ended it in order to spread your pre-existing ideas about the topic in an attempt to influence other people's opinions.
It's a dumb game. Can I start a thread refuting that Zoltani is a booger-eater? There's really no good evidence for Zoltani's booger eating, though there's clearly a compelling argument that says he eats boogers more often now than he used to. The jury's still out, I just wanted everyone to be aware of the disagreement about how often Zoltani eats boogers, because in reality it's probably not nearly as often as everyone says it is.
See? It's a dumb way to make your point. If you have something to say about something in the thread, then please address it directly. You don't need to make up new stuff just to inject you false ideas into the conversation.
What misinformation did I present exactly?
For the third time now...
Claiming that the current pace of warming is a common occurrence in Earth history, without catastrophic environmental consequences, was misinformation.
Claiming the cause of the Younger Dryas was unknown, and implying that this uncertainty discredits climate research, was misinformation.
Accusing me of dishonesty for pointing out your mistakes was also misinformation, but in the more general sense of being a jerk rather than in the more fraudulent sense of continuing to promote easily falsifiable ideas.
Claiming that you weren't "talking about consensus" when you ridiculed a post about consensus was misinformation, though of the purely nonsensical instead of the deliberately deceptive variety.
Were you also the person who posted about zebras in California? That was a good one.
I'm really surprised by your less than professional scientist behavior in this thread.
I'm rolling with the pigs here. The amount of underhanded trickery, deception, fraud, and lies around this topic is absolutely mind boggling. Notice that nobody beat Trump in the primary by taking the high road. I'm not afraid to get my hands dirty in order to play the game on the field where the game is being played. Welcome to the internet.
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Are you accusing me of trickery, deception, lies and fraud? I really take exception to that if you are. I have no dog in this fight and no motivation to do those things. It seems like the subject is a hot button for you, and your internet behavior deteriorates accordingly. You would be better served to engage people politely with your disagreements.
I'm still waiting for your list of actions you will take personally to change the outcome of this mess...
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There's no fossil evidence of zebras, so maybe that writer mis-remembered one species. However, it's accepted fact that there was no San Francisco Bay 15,000 years ago and the area was populated by species that are more reminiscent of the African Savannah than modern day California. Fossil evidence of lions, camels, etc. Do your homework - the evidence is there.
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Regarding carrying capacity, you might be interested in this article by Paul Chefurka, where he defines overshoot, carrying capacity and other ecological concepts. He then reviews 5 or so estimates of carrying capacity from various sources and discusses the relative merits of each:
http://www.paulchefurka.ca/Sustainability.html (http://www.paulchefurka.ca/Sustainability.html)
In this next article, Mr. Chefurka uses 2 billion as a place holder for carrying capacity in order to discuss the dynamics of overshoot. But as you see from the previous article, his subsequent conclusion is that CC is probably no more than 1 billion, and in all likelihood is a lot less. Anyway, this is an interesting read on overshoot:
http://www.paulchefurka.ca/CC_Overshoot.html (http://www.paulchefurka.ca/CC_Overshoot.html)
I found Paul Chefurka and Vaclav Smil - Professor Emeritus at U. of Manitoba (http://vaclavsmil.com) via Nate Hagens. To those on this thread who are no longer grasping for denial talking points, I urge you to watch Nate Hagen's talk 'Blindspots and Superheroes' (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUSpsT6Oqrg). The discussion of terrestrial vertebrate biomass is shocking (It starts around 19 minutes into his lecture (https://youtu.be/YUSpsT6Oqrg?t=19m12s) and is based off of data from Chefurka and Smil).
Relevant Smil publication (http://vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/uploads/PDR37-4.Smil_.pgs613-636.pdf).
Excellent links, Malaysia41. If you want numbers, check out the Paul Chefurka article.
Interesting links and it's nice that rather than arm-waving there is an attempt to arrive at well-defined ways of arriving at those numbers. While the impact of technology was briefly discussed by Chefurka, it is seemingly cast aside in favor of the "outside" and "objective" view of carrying capacity. That view appears to assume the only acceptable capacity calculations are those where one assumes (by the various measures) that humanity is necessarily in stasis and is in equilibrium with the environment.
There are two problems with that. First, taking the definition seriously, the "perpetual" carrying capacity of the Earth is zero. Unless action is taken, the sun's increasing luminosity will boil the oceans in a billion or two years. Second, the requirement that a sustainable population be able to survive in stasis is irrelevant under the condition that human knowledge and technology is rapidly growing. That growth in knowledge has already allowed for >2,000x increase in population from when 35 million "sustainably" lived. The notion of sustainability is only clear in a static society, which has not applied to humanity since the Scientific Revolution in the West and to much of the rest of the world since, perhaps, the 19th/20th centuries.
Sorry for off topic comment though. Someone posted a Vox article that approached the point I'm making: talking about overpopulation as a problem accomplishes nothing. Even if you believe there should be only 100 million or 2 billion people or whatever...well, here we are all the same.
Well, obviously when the sun eventually expands into a red giant, neither we nor any other life as we know it will be able to live on Earth. Since that's millions of years away, it's somewhat less relevant, though. ;)
It's true that technology and knowledge is still growing, but I think it's dangerous to believe it will continue growing at the pace it has been. I think it's more likely that after all the low-hanging discovery fruit have been picked, it'll take more and more effort to make smaller and smaller gains. Consider the iPhone: the first few models advanced quite a lot between them, but what extra functionality does the latest one give you over the one before it?
John Michael Greer wrote quite a bit about the law of diminishing returns on his old blog, the Archdruid Report. The original site went defunct when he moved to his new blog, but the posts are still available in various mirrors, though I can't remember which post was the best example of his discussion on diminishing returns. But it's worth a google. He also writes fairly often about "the religion of Progress" and "the myth of Progress", as far as I can remember.
In addition, advances in technology are what got us into the climate change/resource depletion/overpopulation predicament to begin with. Is the solution really to apply yet MORE technology, with as yet unknown consequences?
And of course it would be immoral and unethical to try and "solve" overpopulation. It's more that it's a factor to keep in mind in models of the future, in terms of what types of events you expect to happen.
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It's truly sad that someone cannot openly discuss their concerns about how weather is/will be affected by climate change without it being cluttered up with a couple anti-science trolls spewing their garbage. The OP even made it clear if you disagree with AGW fine, but this thread is not for you.
To the OP, to put your mind at a bit of ease (if only temporarily) here is a good link for you to peruse:
https://www.skepticalscience.com/extreme-weather-global-warming.htm (https://www.skepticalscience.com/extreme-weather-global-warming.htm)
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So, what IS the purpose of this thread, if not to be a circle jerk of people crying "woe is me" about climate change?
Apparently anyone who questions what will be the ultimate result of global warming and what can be done about it is an "anti science troll." You gotta love the poster that dragged income inequality into the conversation. That's on topic, isn't it...
I see Mr. MM put up some solar panels on his business building in downtown Longmont and did so at a reasonable cost by DIY. Sol has his panels, which seem to work even in the perpetually cloudy PNW. The deserts are being covered with solar farms and here in "progressive" Santa Clara County, a lot of County buildings have solar roofed parking lots. Those are nice, teeny steps. Let me know how you are going to support 7 billion people (or better yet, the projected 11.5 billion) without industrial scale agriculture and a very costly, energy dependent supply chain. Hint: having everyone farm their back yards and trade locally ain't going to accomplish that goal.
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So, what IS the purpose of this thread, if not to be a circle jerk of people crying "woe is me" about climate change?
Apparently anyone who questions what will be the ultimate result of global warming and what can be done about it is an "anti science troll." You gotta love the poster that dragged income inequality into the conversation. That's on topic, isn't it...
I see Mr. MM put up some solar panels on his business building in downtown Longmont and did so at a reasonable cost by DIY. Sol has his panels, which seem to work even in the perpetually cloudy PNW. The deserts are being covered with solar farms and here in "progressive" Santa Clara County, a lot of County buildings have solar roofed parking lots. Those are nice, teeny steps. Let me know how you are going to support 7 billion people (or better yet, the projected 11.5 billion) without industrial scale agriculture and a very costly, energy dependent supply chain. Hint: having everyone farm their back yards and trade locally ain't going to accomplish that goal.
No, the anti-science trolls are those who feel the need to debate a science fact with nonsense garbage. Often try to link to stuff they don't understand or failed to fact check thinking they are somehow disputing AGW. The OP tossed out a legitimate concern about how AGW is/will affect weather. And they made it clear this was not a place for the anti-AGW folks.
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These forums are for discussion and debate, not for circle jerks.
We will see, in retrospect, what the scientific facts are. And the results of those facts.
No one here has come up with a list of actionable steps that will have any effect on the outcome. Without that, my suggestion is that everyone prepare themselves for a less pleasant future than the present. A discussion of how to that might actually be useful.
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These forums are for discussion and debate, not for circle jerks.
We will see, in retrospect, what the scientific facts are. And the results of those facts.
No one here has come up with a list of actionable steps that will have any effect on the outcome. Without that, my suggestion is that everyone prepare themselves for a less pleasant future than the present. A discussion of how to that might actually be useful.
The first post that you made in this thread is quoted in it's entirety below:
Before you all start with the beating of chests, rending of clothes, and wailing, I suggest you read this blog post from Granola Shotgun: https://granolashotgun.com/2017/01/16/king-tide/
In particular, this passage:
10,000 years ago San Francisco Bay was a dry grassy valley populated by elephants, zebras, and camels. The planet was significantly cooler and dryer back then. Sea level was lower since glaciers in the north pulled water out of the oceans. The bay isn’t that deep so a relatively small change in sea level pushed the coastline out by twelve miles from its present location. Further back in pre-history when the earth was warmer than today sea level was higher. The hills of San Francisco were small islands off the coast of ancient California. These cycles play out on a scale we humans can’t perceive in our daily lives. You can think of this process as a larger version of the tides that play out over thousands of years instead of twice a day. There’s absolutely no need to debate human induced climate change. The climate changes all the time with or without us. The real question is how we will adapt over time.
The reality is that climate change has been occurring since the planet was formed, and on a geologic time scale, it happens very rapidly. Are humans affecting the current rate of change? Probably. Are they affecting the direction? Climate change happens constantly, so the jury is out on that one.
We will need to adapt to whatever change happens. However, governments aren't going to do a whole lot about what their countries are doing, except for reducing some pollutants that are inconveniently killing off their populations. If the human species is still around when the hilltops of San Francisco are next islands in the Pacific ocean, we will have succeeded at adapting. Otherwise, some other form of life will dominate the planet.
1. In it you quoted a factually incorrect source (to your credit, you later did check the information posted and admit that it was incorrect).
2. You made the misleading statement "The reality is that climate change has been occurring since the planet was formed, and on a geologic time scale, it happens very rapidly.", as an apparent attempt to equate the current unprecedented rate of human caused climate change with the natural and radically slower climate change that has happened in the past.
3. You indicated that there was doubt as to whether humans were impacting the current rate of climate change, where virtually none exists among the scientific community.
This infusion of misinformation and half-truths is likely why people have been responding so negatively to your posts. Because the science doesn't really support the point of view that you appear to be espousing, the tactics you've chosen to debate are all that can be brought forth. They're typical of climate change deniers and their ilk . . . which is to spread lies, and do everything possible to cast doubt upon the actual science related to climate change. Misrepresentations, outright lies, and the sourcing of incorrect material is the reason that the original poster asked denialists to stay out of the conversation. You call it a 'circle-jerk', but other perfectly reasonable people might call it attempting to have a discussion/debate in good faith.
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I have been reading about climate change since the late 80's while I was in college, and at the time, I was, why isn't anyone TALKING about this! This is REALLY important! But it was around that time they got rid of that media fairness rule, where each side spoke. It honestly seemed to me, that governments, particularly our own, have been minimizing and suppressing, and paying speakers to spread misinformation about this, because a) it would impact private corporation profits to make changes to reduce climate change, and b) they don't want to start a panic. And at some point, the government will admit what is going on, but say it is too late to do anything. In a sense it is too late. No matter what we do at this point, there is going to be a mass extinction of many species on this planet. Not just from climate change, but from habitat loss, loss of resources, pollution, and introduction of non-native species. Collectively, both the climate change and the loss of species, will eventually impact us. There is going to be large loss of human life, from natural disasters and increase in disease and infections, and migrations/wars due to scarcity.
We were given a "break" in the sense that the oceans were absorbing c02 and both moderating the impact of the greenhouse gas. But the side effect was acidifying the oceans. We are at the point it a) is going to cause massive die off of marine life, and b) won't be able to absorb more c02. Certainly, I individually want to reduce driving, reduce meat eating, and reduce consumption. But I think at this point we need more at the government level. Develop some kind of technology to remove c02 and other gases from the ocean and atmosphere. The US build some nuclear plants so we have SOME energy to use while transitioning to renewable energy sources. Investing in renewable energy as well as taking a look in all ways, how to make the US less car dependent and less energy dependent.
Do we have that kind of leadership? Not at this point but we need it.
https://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2014/03/17/can-military-save-us-climate-change
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These forums are for discussion and debate, not for circle jerks.
We will see, in retrospect, what the scientific facts are. And the results of those facts.
No one here has come up with a list of actionable steps that will have any effect on the outcome. Without that, my suggestion is that everyone prepare themselves for a less pleasant future than the present. A discussion of how to that might actually be useful.
I mean, there are no real actionable steps mentioned in this thread, but there are places out there that show the cost and carbon mitigation effects of different proposals, and the expected path of warming as a result of that carbon mitigation.
Here's one such graph that was making the rounds earlier this year:
http://www.fewresources.org/uploads/1/0/5/2/10529860/7002642_orig.gif
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Do your homework - the evidence is there.
I have done an entire PhD's worth of homework on this topic. I assure you that I am familiar with the sea level record. Yes, San Francisco Bay was a river delta at one point in time, when the ice sheets were larger and the coastline sat offshore at what is now the edge of the continental shelf. Before that the entire interior of North America was a shallow sea. There were once alligators in what is now Antarctica. There are sea shells on top of Mt. Everest.
Our understanding of these things is exactly why we can say with so much confidence that our current climate is changing at a dangerous rate. We understand how plate tectonics modifies oceanic circulation patterns. We understand how volcanic emissions regulate solar energy balance in the atmosphere. We understand how the ice albedo feedback grows continental ice sheets. We are not ignorant children grasping at straws for political reasons, we are concerned scientists trying to find a way out of a bad situation. We have evidence of past catastrophes, and we're hoping to avoid repeating them.
I'm still waiting for your list of actions you will take personally to change the outcome of this mess...
One step was reducing my family's consumption level, which is personally gratifying and a good example for others but individually a very minor contributor.
Another step was getting a PhD and then devoting my professional career to solving various aspects of this problem on behalf of the US government. You're welcome.
How about you? Are you helping or hurting?
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These forums are for discussion and debate, not for circle jerks.
We will see, in retrospect, what the scientific facts are. And the results of those facts.
No one here has come up with a list of actionable steps that will have any effect on the outcome. Without that, my suggestion is that everyone prepare themselves for a less pleasant future than the present. A discussion of how to that might actually be useful.
There is no debating a fact, that average global temps are rising, and that humans are the predominant cause of this. You can debate how it does/might impact weather all you want because that is open for discussion and the point of the OP's post. Only AGW deniers try to turn it into a "circle jerk."
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Looks like I hit a nerve with my post and somehow this turned into a challenge to determine what steps need to be taken to mitigate disaster. A few folks have mentioned things you can do personally to reduce consumption and carbon footprint, which are necessary -- but obviously not sufficient.
What would it take to truly avoid the coming impact? We'd need a time machine to reduce impact to 0, as we couldn't even measure the effect until we had burning fossil fuels for centuries, and had built up the science to understand it.
It really looks like the changes that need to happen would essentially remake our entire system -- replacing our current systems of economics, agriculture, construction, transportation, family planning -- everything. These are not small changes that can be put in place within a single term of government. They aren't the kinds of fixes that one smart guy on a forum somewhere is going to explain in a couple paragraphs. They're not the sort of systems that you drop into place, fully formed, with no errors or unintended consequences. They're not going to work right the first time.
These are the solutions that we need to be working on NOW, with as much enthusiasm, determination, and grit that we can muster. The longer we delay, the worse the outcome.
Then there's the upside-down version of this:
Hey, if you're one of the Elite, this is the chance you've been waiting for. And all's you gotta do is keep on keepin' on. Eventually lots of "expendables" will go through an uncomfortable population bottleneck, and we can cut it with the artificial scarcity crap. I got dibs on Buffalo, it'll be the San Diego of the East!
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These forums are for discussion and debate, not for circle jerks.
We will see, in retrospect, what the scientific facts are. And the results of those facts.
No one here has come up with a list of actionable steps that will have any effect on the outcome. Without that, my suggestion is that everyone prepare themselves for a less pleasant future than the present. A discussion of how to that might actually be useful.
There is no debating a fact, that average global temps are rising, and that humans are the predominant cause of this. You can debate how it does/might impact weather all you want because that is open for discussion and the point of the OP's post. Only AGW deniers try to turn it into a "circle jerk."
To be fair I don't think AR is completely denying AGW but it can be hard to tell, posts are a little all over the place.
What he is saying is that we as individuals have no hope of making any change which I believe is a classic fallacy of thinking "I'm too small to matter" most likely paired with a personal resistance to changing behaviors. Is one vote also to little to change an election? Or one dollar too little to put towards ER?
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Looks like I hit a nerve with my post and somehow this turned into a challenge to determine what steps need to be taken to mitigate disaster. A few folks have mentioned things you can do personally to reduce consumption and carbon footprint, which are necessary -- but obviously not sufficient.
What would it take to truly avoid the coming impact? We'd need a time machine to reduce impact to 0, as we couldn't even measure the effect until we had burning fossil fuels for centuries, and had built up the science to understand it.
It really looks like the changes that need to happen would essentially remake our entire system -- replacing our current systems of economics, agriculture, construction, transportation, family planning -- everything. These are not small changes that can be put in place within a single term of government. They aren't the kinds of fixes that one smart guy on a forum somewhere is going to explain in a couple paragraphs. They're not the sort of systems that you drop into place, fully formed, with no errors or unintended consequences. They're not going to work right the first time.
These are the solutions that we need to be working on NOW, with as much enthusiasm, determination, and grit that we can muster. The longer we delay, the worse the outcome.
Then there's the upside-down version of this:
Hey, if you're one of the Elite, this is the chance you've been waiting for. And all's you gotta do is keep on keepin' on. Eventually lots of "expendables" will go through an uncomfortable population bottleneck, and we can cut it with the artificial scarcity crap. I got dibs on Buffalo, it'll be the San Diego of the East!
To answer AR's question of what is the point of this thread if we're all in agreement, here you go. Have you ever been in a brainstorming session where you have that guy who listens to each idea and picks out one flaw, tears it apart and says it'll never work? They're not very helpful. The chaff falls away on it's own as you pick out the wheat.
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Just recalled an analogy that might be helpful for those who think it's too late so what's the point.
I agree in a sense that it's too late for the perfect scenario but if we look at our current situation as a car speeding towards a brick wall at 80mph, we know that eventually we are going to hit the wall. The question is, are we going to pump the brakes, delay the impact and hope to survive the crash or are we going to say screw it and hit the accelerator cause going fast is fun?
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Just recalled an analogy that might be helpful for those who think it's too late so what's the point.
I agree in a sense that it's too late for the perfect scenario but if we look at our current situation as a car speeding towards a brick wall at 80mph, we know that eventually we are going to hit the wall. The question is, are we going to pump the brakes, delay the impact and hope to survive the crash or are we going to say screw it and hit the accelerator cause going fast is fun?
I think a better analogy is a speeding train, instead of a car, and it's being driven by the people in the back. I am rich, and thus more protected from the negative consequences of our decisions.
Sure, the crash is going to suck for the people in the first few cars. They are not the ones currently begging for full speed ahead. Those of us in the last car are still going to feel the crash, but it will be manageable because of the damage to someone else's train car.
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Looks like I hit a nerve with my post and somehow this turned into a challenge to determine what steps need to be taken to mitigate disaster. A few folks have mentioned things you can do personally to reduce consumption and carbon footprint, which are necessary -- but obviously not sufficient.
What would it take to truly avoid the coming impact? We'd need a time machine to reduce impact to 0, as we couldn't even measure the effect until we had burning fossil fuels for centuries, and had built up the science to understand it.
It really looks like the changes that need to happen would essentially remake our entire system -- replacing our current systems of economics, agriculture, construction, transportation, family planning -- everything. These are not small changes that can be put in place within a single term of government. They aren't the kinds of fixes that one smart guy on a forum somewhere is going to explain in a couple paragraphs. They're not the sort of systems that you drop into place, fully formed, with no errors or unintended consequences. They're not going to work right the first time.
These are the solutions that we need to be working on NOW, with as much enthusiasm, determination, and grit that we can muster. The longer we delay, the worse the outcome.
Then there's the upside-down version of this:
Hey, if you're one of the Elite, this is the chance you've been waiting for. And all's you gotta do is keep on keepin' on. Eventually lots of "expendables" will go through an uncomfortable population bottleneck, and we can cut it with the artificial scarcity crap. I got dibs on Buffalo, it'll be the San Diego of the East!
Spit-balling here, but quick google:
https://ourworldindata.org/how-much-will-it-cost-to-mitigate-climate-change
If we utilized all of our <€60 per tonne abatement opportunities to their full potential (which is an important assumption), McKinsey estimates the total global cost to be €200-350 billion per year by 2030. This is less than one percent of the forecasted global GDP in 2030.
The 60 euro threshold gets GHG reduced by 50% relative to 2010 levels. At the provided upper range, that $420 billion year. If you were to scale that to the economy size, that'd be about $105 billion per year. That's pretty reasonable.
More ambitious goals like zero net carbon emissions, or reducing carbon emissions by 80% by 2050...those look pretty pricey.
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Species don't last forever -- why would we?
When a species gets "intelligent" enough to exploit natural resources all over its planet, it makes sense that it would overdo things and end up suffocating in its own muck. Could be happening all over the universe -- in fact, I bet it is.
In that sense, human-caused climate change is just as natural as any other process. Could be a defining feature of our species. (And, as I said, perhaps of "intelligent" life in general?)
Seems like an uphill battle.
Edit: By the way this line of think would rather neatly address the Fermi paradox, IMHO.
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I'd just like to throw out, with regards to the forest fires, we've had a silly fire fighting policy for 100 years where all fires are snuffed out. This has resulted in dangerously overgrown forests that burn more fast and intensely than a healthy forest.
As for some of the hurricanes, you have to remember that the population in some of the hurricane prone areas has increased so much in just the last few decades. Even 100 years ago, a lot of the Gulf Coast was pretty sparsely populated. So hurricanes seem worse because there's simply more people in the way.
For reference, we routinely have massive natural disasters here in Alaska, landslides, volcanoes, earthquakes, and forest fires. But you don't hear about them because usually no one lives in the vast swaths where they take place. So with some of these newer cites like the ones in California and the Gulf Coast, you're seeing a natural assertive process take place.
Old cities like Baghdad and Rome and London have proven themselves to be relatively insulated from disaster, where as the sites of some these newer cities are just proving to be much less stable.
Anyways, I don't know that this 'explains' all symptoms of climate change, but I believe these are factors in why things seem worse.
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Species don't last forever -- why would we?
When a species gets "intelligent" enough to exploit natural resources all over its planet, it makes sense that it would overdo things and end up suffocating in its own muck. Could be happening all over the universe -- in fact, I bet it is.
In that sense, human-caused climate change is just as natural as any other process. Could be a defining feature of our species. (And, as I said, perhaps of "intelligent" life in general?)
Seems like an uphill battle.
Edit: By the way this line of think would rather neatly address the Fermi paradox, IMHO.
Totally agree, but I think nuclear war is probably the culprit there, and not runaway greenhouse effects. But then again, that's based on essentially nothing, because we haven't conquered any alien homeworlds (yet! growth mindset!)
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I took the point of this thread to be something like, "Am I right to be worried about climate change, and, if so, what should I do?", which is why, in my first post, I included a section with multiple suggestions on what you could do to be more prepared for climate change.
Regarding steps to "solve the problem" or whatever, i.e., stop climate change completely, I don't believe that's possible. I believe we'd have needed to have started in the 70s or 80s if we were going to seriously "stop" climate change. But of course, living in an eco friendly way and encouraging others to do so will at least prevent the level of the predicament getting even worse.
Regarding overpopulation, I think the sort of issues to prepare for from that could include famine and war in various parts of the world, plus mass migrations like the kind we're already seeing of refugees to Europe, which will then trigger strife between the locals and the new immigrants (which we're also already seeing to some extent). Also, a lot of places import a lot of their food at the moment - I think the UK imports 40% of its food, if I remember the stat correctly from the talk I went to several years ago while I was at uni. So consider: if crops failed in the countries the imports come from, or war or natural disasters caused shipping lines to break down, how much of your food could you currently, with your skillset, knowledge, and existing resources, forage/hunt/grow/raise/buy in your local area?
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I'd just like to throw out, with regards to the forest fires, we've had a silly fire fighting policy for 100 years where all fires are snuffed out. This has resulted in dangerously overgrown forests that burn more fast and intensely than a healthy forest.
As for some of the hurricanes, you have to remember that the population in some of the hurricane prone areas has increased so much in just the last few decades. Even 100 years ago, a lot of the Gulf Coast was pretty sparsely populated. So hurricanes seem worse because there's simply more people in the way.
For reference, we routinely have massive natural disasters here in Alaska, landslides, volcanoes, earthquakes, and forest fires. But you don't hear about them because usually no one lives in the vast swaths where they take place. So with some of these newer cites like the ones in California and the Gulf Coast, you're seeing a natural assertive process take place.
Old cities like Baghdad and Rome and London have proven themselves to be relatively insulated from disaster, where as the sites of some these newer cities are just proving to be much less stable.
Anyways, I don't know that this 'explains' all symptoms of climate change, but I believe these are factors in why things seem worse.
It's a joint problem. The human population has increased and moved into areas that used to be natural barriers for hurricanes, etc. And there is an intensification of extreme weather events due to climate change.
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2 quick points:
-I have never understood why the whole debate wasn't originally framed as a Pascal's wager situation. We don't need to be *certain* we'll get in a car wreck to put on a seatbelt (ok, most of us), and likewise even a low probability of making the earth less/uninhabitable is a big, big deal. "We need more research", when used to simply create doubt, is a scumbag move. Even if there's only a 15% chance all those atmospheric chemistry eggheads are right... that's Russian Roulette odds. With *billions* of people's lives.
-However, if you're looking at where we are today, the whole "eat less meat and ride your bike" solution is ridiculous. We started putting more carbon in the air than the planet could take back out in the *late 1800s*. We spew orders, and orders, and orders of magnitude more out today. Some pretty serious climate change is probably pretty much baked in at this point, so instead of building more models and pestering people to go vegan, we should probably be doing the energy/adaptation equivalent of the Manhattan project. GMO plants. Artificial photosynthesis, or way better solar power in some other form. Better energy storage for load leveling. Geoengineering. The die is pretty much cast - we're going to have to either survive the changes coming, or prevent them, or some combination of the two.
Annoyingly enough, most people who actually believe the science end up thinking driving a Prius and recycling their organic coconut water is going to save the planet or some such nonsense. Don't even get me started on the anti-GMO people.
So we end up doing nothing useful.
-W
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Even if there's only a 15% chance all those atmospheric chemistry eggheads are right... that's Russian Roulette odds. With *billions* of people's lives.
* other people's lives.
-However, if you're looking at where we are today, the whole "eat less meat and ride your bike" solution is ridiculous.
It would be s lot less ridiculous if everyone adopted it. Like immunizations, or education, or indoor plumbing, the immediate personal benefits are vastly outweighed by the social benefits of widespread adherence. We'll all get on board eventually. Don't encourage the holdouts.
Annoyingly enough, most people who actually believe the science end up thinking driving a Prius and recycling their organic coconut water is going to save the planet or some such nonsense.
I don't think it's fair to blame the individuals in these specific cases. The prius and the coconut water are popular because they are profitable products heavily marketed by polluting corporations who have co-opted the narrative, not because they are good solutions. Capitalism drives consumer options and marketing drives their choices. If there were a viable way to significantly reduce emission that was more profitable for corporations than increasing emissions, they would do that instead. It's all about profit, and environmentalism is just a marketing buzzword to most people.
Utility scale solar is now profitable, so now it happens. Electric cars are profitable, so we have those. Vegan diets and bicycles are not profitable solutions, so they struggle.
Long term, many people share the goal of altering the planets energy balance back to the way it was. While this is technically possible, I doubt it will ever happen just because it creates specific winners and losers. Canadians like global warming. That's the real reason we haven't done anything useful.
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Canadians like global warming. That's the real reason we haven't done anything useful.
All that maple syrup production trashes the planet.
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I think a better analogy is a speeding train, instead of a car, and it's being driven by the people in the back. I am rich, and thus more protected from the negative consequences of our decisions.
Sure, the crash is going to suck for the people in the first few cars. They are not the ones currently begging for full speed ahead. Those of us in the last car are still going to feel the crash, but it will be manageable because of the damage to someone else's train car.
And since the people in the back cars largely control the world economy, nothing will be done until the crash affects them.
[quote/]
2 quick points:
-I have never understood why the whole debate wasn't originally framed as a Pascal's wager situation. We don't need to be *certain* we'll get in a car wreck to put on a seatbelt (ok, most of us), and likewise even a low probability of making the earth less/uninhabitable is a big, big deal. "We need more research", when used to simply create doubt, is a scumbag move. Even if there's only a 15% chance all those atmospheric chemistry eggheads are right... that's Russian Roulette odds. With *billions* of people's lives.
-However, if you're looking at where we are today, the whole "eat less meat and ride your bike" solution is ridiculous. We started putting more carbon in the air than the planet could take back out in the *late 1800s*. We spew orders, and orders, and orders of magnitude more out today. Some pretty serious climate change is probably pretty much baked in at this point, so instead of building more models and pestering people to go vegan, we should probably be doing the energy/adaptation equivalent of the Manhattan project. GMO plants. Artificial photosynthesis, or way better solar power in some other form. Better energy storage for load leveling. Geoengineering. The die is pretty much cast - we're going to have to either survive the changes coming, or prevent them, or some combination of the two.
Annoyingly enough, most people who actually believe the science end up thinking driving a Prius and recycling their organic coconut water is going to save the planet or some such nonsense. Don't even get me started on the anti-GMO people.
So we end up doing nothing useful.
-W
Exactly.
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These forums are for discussion and debate, not for circle jerks.
We will see, in retrospect, what the scientific facts are. And the results of those facts.
No one here has come up with a list of actionable steps that will have any effect on the outcome. Without that, my suggestion is that everyone prepare themselves for a less pleasant future than the present. A discussion of how to that might actually be useful.
There is no debating a fact, that average global temps are rising, and that humans are the predominant cause of this. You can debate how it does/might impact weather all you want because that is open for discussion and the point of the OP's post. Only AGW deniers try to turn it into a "circle jerk."
To be fair I don't think AR is completely denying AGW but it can be hard to tell, posts are a little all over the place.
What he is saying is that we as individuals have no hope of making any change which I believe is a classic fallacy of thinking "I'm too small to matter" most likely paired with a personal resistance to changing behaviors. Is one vote also to little to change an election? Or one dollar too little to put towards ER?
I have no ideal weather they are or not. My post was a general observation as I skimmed through the earlier post. AR just happened to respond.
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Regarding carrying capacity, you might be interested in this article by Paul Chefurka, where he defines overshoot, carrying capacity and other ecological concepts. He then reviews 5 or so estimates of carrying capacity from various sources and discusses the relative merits of each:
http://www.paulchefurka.ca/Sustainability.html (http://www.paulchefurka.ca/Sustainability.html)
In this next article, Mr. Chefurka uses 2 billion as a place holder for carrying capacity in order to discuss the dynamics of overshoot. But as you see from the previous article, his subsequent conclusion is that CC is probably no more than 1 billion, and in all likelihood is a lot less. Anyway, this is an interesting read on overshoot:
http://www.paulchefurka.ca/CC_Overshoot.html (http://www.paulchefurka.ca/CC_Overshoot.html)
I found Paul Chefurka and Vaclav Smil - Professor Emeritus at U. of Manitoba (http://vaclavsmil.com) via Nate Hagens. To those on this thread who are no longer grasping for denial talking points, I urge you to watch Nate Hagen's talk 'Blindspots and Superheroes' (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUSpsT6Oqrg). The discussion of terrestrial vertebrate biomass is shocking (It starts around 19 minutes into his lecture (https://youtu.be/YUSpsT6Oqrg?t=19m12s) and is based off of data from Chefurka and Smil).
Relevant Smil publication (http://vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/uploads/PDR37-4.Smil_.pgs613-636.pdf).
Excellent links, Malaysia41. If you want numbers, check out the Paul Chefurka article.
Interesting links and it's nice that rather than arm-waving there is an attempt to arrive at well-defined ways of arriving at those numbers. While the impact of technology was briefly discussed by Chefurka, it is seemingly cast aside in favor of the "outside" and "objective" view of carrying capacity. That view appears to assume the only acceptable capacity calculations are those where one assumes (by the various measures) that humanity is necessarily in stasis and is in equilibrium with the environment.
There are two problems with that. First, taking the definition seriously, the "perpetual" carrying capacity of the Earth is zero. Unless action is taken, the sun's increasing luminosity will boil the oceans in a billion or two years. Second, the requirement that a sustainable population be able to survive in stasis is irrelevant under the condition that human knowledge and technology is rapidly growing. That growth in knowledge has already allowed for >2,000x increase in population from when 35 million "sustainably" lived. The notion of sustainability is only clear in a static society, which has not applied to humanity since the Scientific Revolution in the West and to much of the rest of the world since, perhaps, the 19th/20th centuries.
Sorry for off topic comment though. Someone posted a Vox article that approached the point I'm making: talking about overpopulation as a problem accomplishes nothing. Even if you believe there should be only 100 million or 2 billion people or whatever...well, here we are all the same.
Well, obviously when the sun eventually expands into a red giant, neither we nor any other life as we know it will be able to live on Earth. Since that's millions of years away, it's somewhat less relevant, though. ;)
It's true that technology and knowledge is still growing, but I think it's dangerous to believe it will continue growing at the pace it has been. I think it's more likely that after all the low-hanging discovery fruit have been picked, it'll take more and more effort to make smaller and smaller gains. Consider the iPhone: the first few models advanced quite a lot between them, but what extra functionality does the latest one give you over the one before it?
John Michael Greer wrote quite a bit about the law of diminishing returns on his old blog, the Archdruid Report. The original site went defunct when he moved to his new blog, but the posts are still available in various mirrors, though I can't remember which post was the best example of his discussion on diminishing returns. But it's worth a google. He also writes fairly often about "the religion of Progress" and "the myth of Progress", as far as I can remember.
In addition, advances in technology are what got us into the climate change/resource depletion/overpopulation predicament to begin with. Is the solution really to apply yet MORE technology, with as yet unknown consequences?
And of course it would be immoral and unethical to try and "solve" overpopulation. It's more that it's a factor to keep in mind in models of the future, in terms of what types of events you expect to happen.
I think it's wrong to think the sun will necessarily expand into a red giant in ~5B years. A sufficiently advanced civilization should be able to either siphon off matter from the sun to cool it and keep it in the main sequence longer and/or move the earth's orbit closer or further from the sun as needed. It's a stupidly hard problem but nothing that violates the laws of physics. And we have 5B years to solve that problem (get your slide-rule out!).
Your point about technological stagnation is very good and highly relevant. Maybe the low hanging fruit is all gone and all we have to show for it is high definition porn, Juicero, and fucking Twitter. Perhaps, though, this is an argument for having more people in the world: more people means more people potentially solving problems (though perhaps an overly optimistic view). Anyway, making predictions about the future is fraught with difficulty and the impacts of the development of AI in particular may be difficult to foresee (https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-alarm/).
Regarding whether or not more technology is the answer: it probably is the answer to our problems, but as you suggest, those solutions will raise new problems. Technological innovation is a Red Queen's race against its own deleterious side-effects but the alternative of strict "sustainability" is--depending on your point of view--much worse: subsistence foraging, constant predation, disease, and cosmic threats against which we would not have the capacity to even potentially defend ourselves. If life is worth living then technological progress is the only way to provide a chance that life persists very far, at cosmic timescales, into the future.
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Finally, to keep this slightly on-topic, I don't even think the "A" matters in AGW. If unicorn farts instead of CO2 emissions were raising the temperature, it would still potentially be cause for concern (albeit with a different set of solutions associated with it). Stating "it's part of a natural cycle" doesn't solve the problem if the natural cycle gives rise to a shitty climate. Regardless whether it's a natural or human-made problem, it can massively disrupt human civilization; our distant descendants probably won't be complacent about the sun "naturally" getting more luminous for the sake that its a natural process.
That leaves the climate change skeptic with one alternative: question the reconstruction of global temperature history and recent temperature measurements. I don't follow the science much at all but it would appear the skeptics are losing.
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I heard of carbon dioxide induced global warming - for the future - in a first year physics class at university in 1963. The science has been known since the 1890s. Sea levels are expected to rise between half a meter and a meter in this century, although if a chunk of the Greenland or Antarctic ice sheets breaks off, seas might rise several meters overnight.
The far future is now the near future, and some of it is predictable. Canada, Russia and northern Europe will benefit from global warming, as these regions know. The wheat belt will move north, and the North West passage will open, and sea transport along Russia's northern coast will benefit, in summer. The sad part is that most rich countries will benefit from global warming, and most poor countries, who have not contributed so much to the warming will suffer the consequences.
The long term consequences of the insane population boom of the past sixty years has been considered for a long time. It now seems that global warming is a possible population regulator, as some tropical regions become lethally hot, and rising seas invade low lying crop regions. Another dark horse is growing resistance by pest insects to insecticides. There was an article in Scientific American a few months ago about this matter, which I have not yet been able to track down. There is a parallel with antibiotic resistance by microbes. Microbes multiply much more quickly that insects, but the principle remains.
Mother Nature is looking into her tool chest. We will see what she does about the problem.
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I took the point of this thread to be something like, "Am I right to be worried about climate change, and, if so, what should I do?", which is why, in my first post, I included a section with multiple suggestions on what you could do to be more prepared for climate change.
Honestly, when I started the thread, it was more like "I'm really worried about climate change--more so than usual--and I'm looking for some support." But, I think "what should I do?" is a very useful direction for such a conversation to take. I think denying the science is not a very useful direction for such a conversation to take, and I had hoped that anyone who felt that way would contribute to another climate change debate thread (I checked--there are plenty!).
But note to self--any discussion on climate change on this forum will turn quickly into a debate. Lesson learned.
My take-aways here:
1) Individual actions are necessary but not sufficient.
2) Political activism should focus not just on limiting emissions but on large scale resilience measures.
3) The poorest countries that have contributed the least to climate change and have the fewest resources to cope will be hurt badly. Other species will be hurt worse and many are and will be driven to extinction.
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Recently the was a Norwegian climate expert on TV. He said that one thing we should do is catching CO2. One relatively simple way to do it is to grow forest, cut it down, transfer it into charcoal and burry the charcoal into the ground.
I think it will help for individuals to reduce their ecological footprint, like not flying. Also, it will help if fewer children were born, less than 2 per couple on average. And we should use our right to vote. At the last election for Oslo city (in Norway), the green party got 10% of the votes if I remember correctly. This made them an inportant factor in the negotiations forvthe new city government. They are now a part of the government and making some substantial non-car-friendly decisions.
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Recently the was a Norwegian climate expert on TV. He said that one thing we should do is catching CO2. One relatively simple way to do it is to grow forest, cut it down, transfer it into charcoal and burry the charcoal into the ground.
Artificial carbon sequestration is the only way to speed up the naturally slow process by which CO2 in the atmosphere is removed. There are lots of different ways to do it, some of which have their own environmental problems.
But in broad strokes, the crux of the problem is that all human technological progress since approximately 1850 has been driven by digging carbon out of the ground and putting it into the atmosphere. That's been the primary process of the global economy for over a century. We have mined and then burned coal and gas and oil as fast as humanly possible for all of that time, as our primary economic activity. Putting it all back would require atmospheric carbon extraction and burial to become the primary purpose of our economy for the next century, just like getting it all out was for the last century. Every automobile would have to capture approximately one pound of liquified CO2 per mile driven. Every airplane, every lawnmower, every power plant, every forest fire and permafrost field and cargo ship and bitcoin mining rig would have to converted into a CO2 capturing device that literally sucked CO2 out of the air and stored it in a form that could then be transported to some sort of underground storage facility. It's almost incomprehensible.
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Recently the was a Norwegian climate expert on TV. He said that one thing we should do is catching CO2. One relatively simple way to do it is to grow forest, cut it down, transfer it into charcoal and burry the charcoal into the ground.
Artificial carbon sequestration is the only way to speed up the naturally slow process by which CO2 in the atmosphere is removed. There are lots of different ways to do it, some of which have their own environmental problems.
But in broad strokes, the crux of the problem is that all human technological progress since approximately 1850 has been driven by digging carbon out of the ground and putting it into the atmosphere. That's been the primary process of the global economy for over a century. We have mined and then burned coal and gas and oil as fast as humanly possible for all of that time, as our primary economic activity. Putting it all back would require atmospheric carbon extraction and burial to become the primary purpose of our economy for the next century, just like getting it all out was for the last century. Every automobile would have to capture approximately one pound of liquified CO2 per mile driven. Every airplane, every lawnmower, every power plant, every forest fire and permafrost field and cargo ship and bitcoin mining rig would have to converted into a CO2 capturing device that literally sucked CO2 out of the air and stored it in a form that could then be transported to some sort of underground storage facility. It's almost incomprehensible.
yeah - I find it incomprehensible too.
All I can think to do is double down on my own conservation, vote, and discuss this with people around me so they vote too.
We eat vegan (our reasons go beyond GHGs, but GHGs are definitely part of the equation), we don't own a car, and we limit our travel in general. We bike with the kid to school and back every day. We keep the temp inside the house on the cold side, etc. Even so, I know it's futile. But, just like I don't want to be a part of chick culling, pig gestation crating, or systematic anal fisting in the dairy industry, I don't want to take part in pushing even a miniscule bit on the accelerator toward our species extinction.
Sucks man.
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That's been the primary process of the global economy for over a century. We have mined and then burned coal and gas and oil as fast as humanly possible for all of that time, as our primary economic activity.
Is this completely true? i.e. has the fossil fuels industry really been the primary economic activity?
There's no question that fossil fuels have been the source of most of the energy we've used, I'm just wondering if it's really been a larger activity than manufacturing + s/w development + farming + everything else in the economy.
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There's no question that fossil fuels have been the source of most of the energy we've used, I'm just wondering if it's really been a larger activity than manufacturing + s/w development + farming + everything else in the economy.
All of those things are just different ways to burn carbon. They are secondary industries, driven by carbon extraction. They would not exist without fossil fuels.
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Indeed, Sol is correct. Our entire economy (including your vegan food) is run on fossil fuels of one kind or another, with a tiny bit of solar/wind/hydro (mostly hydro) thrown in.
I can see the conservation angle buying a little bit of time. That's a good thing. But even the most frugal/environmentally conscious modern lifestyle is fundamentally unsustainable if you're concerned about carbon emissions, unless you're a nomadic herder or hunter/gatherer or something.
We are going to have to adapt/survive the changes, or else invent/geo-engineer our way out. It's probably 100 years too late to conserve ourselves to a sustainable level of emissions, unless we're willing to kill off most of humanity to achieve it.
I can say that if I was Elon Musk, I'd have the high-altitude aerosol-deploying planes all ready to go.
-W
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Indeed, Sol is correct. Our entire economy (including your vegan food) is run on fossil fuels of one kind or another, with a tiny bit of solar/wind/hydro (mostly hydro) thrown in.
I can see the conservation angle buying a little bit of time. That's a good thing. But even the most frugal/environmentally conscious modern lifestyle is fundamentally unsustainable if you're concerned about carbon emissions, unless you're a nomadic herder or hunter/gatherer or something.
We are going to have to adapt/survive the changes, or else invent/geo-engineer our way out. It's probably 100 years too late to conserve ourselves to a sustainable level of emissions, unless we're willing to kill off most of humanity to achieve it.
I can say that if I was Elon Musk, I'd have the high-altitude aerosol-deploying planes all ready to go.
-W
I agree with all this. For conservation to solve the problem, or have more effect than just buying a bit of time,, we would all have to pretty much go back to ‘living in huts’ or some version thereof. Still - even if, for example, a vegan diet requires fossil fuels , it’s 1/3 to 1/10 the amount compared to a standard western diet. (Eg Dont let perfect be the enemy of good. )
When in conversation with people who are worried about GHGs, it’s alarming how quickly they dismiss suggestions of conserving beyond small feel-good measures like turning the thermostat down a degree. We are truly cheap-energy junkies.
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When in conversation with people who are worried about GHGs, it’s alarming how quickly they dismiss suggestions of conserving beyond small feel-good measures like turning the thermostat down a degree. We are truly cheap-energy junkies.
This is so true. I know damn well I have no business eating meat or dairy for ethical and environmental reasons (not to mention that it's cheaper), but I'm still working on it. For now, I've at least cut my meat consumption way back and limited myself to meat where I know where it came from (i.e. we know some farmers nearby. we helped them slaughter their chickens. so, we can eat those chickens.). I'm still eating industrial dairy. But yeah, getting defensive about it is not helpful. The best I can say is, "It's a problem. I'm working on it."
The flying is also a rough one. Our family is scattered around the US, so we've started to do "epic" multi-day road trips instead of flying where we can. But if we want to go to the west coast? Or to Europe? I think flying is the only option. Or, of course, not going.
Bottom line: Almost everyone has room to improve. Let's not be complainy-pants about it.
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Face it, cheap energy has radically improved our standard of living over the past 200 years.
This is a dismal picture you paint. No energy and we go back to living in the dark ages. Use energy and we are subject to threatening visions of climate change.
What are we to do then? Stop having children?
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Face it, cheap energy has radically improved our standard of living over the past 200 years.
This is a dismal picture you paint. No energy and we go back to living in the dark ages. Use energy and we are subject to threatening visions of climate change.
What are we to do then? Stop having children?
Not at all. We put a shit-ton of resources into research and invent our way out of the problem, and if we need time (which would be a smart assumption to make), we geo-engineer/adapt as much as possible to keep things from breaking down badly. There's an enormous fusion reactor stationed near our planet, we just aren't great at utilizing all that free energy right now.
The problem is that neither side in the "debate" is interested in doing that thus far.
-W
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Face it, cheap energy has radically improved our standard of living over the past 200 years.
This is a dismal picture you paint. No energy and we go back to living in the dark ages. Use energy and we are subject to threatening visions of climate change.
What are we to do then? Stop having children?
How about find a way to generate energy that doesn't put carbon into the air?
Nuclear works great, but comes with proliferation and disposal risks. Hydro and wind are great, but they won't carry baseline loads by themselves without a massive build out. We need both large scale centralized clean energy production, and small scale clean energy production that can replace generators. That technology doesn't exist yet.
But we'll get there eventually. Once we figure out how to build zero point modules or dilithium crystals, it's pretty easy to use that energy to build desalinization plants and carbon capture chimneys, and then pump that water everywhere it needs to go and transport that stored carbon where it needs to go.
Cheap and abundant clean energy, if we every figure it out, solves a huge number of humanity's problems. Most of us aren't advocating fewer children, or even less energy consumption, we're arguing for reducing emissions so that we can consume more energy, and thus advance our civilization, without simultaneously destroying the place that civilization lives. Fossil fuels were a devil's bargain right from the start.
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We need both large scale centralized clean energy production, and small scale clean energy production that can replace generators. That technology doesn't exist yet.
Every river and stream in the UK that has been the site of a mill could have a generator on the site of the old mill wheel. That would go some way to providing small-scale local generation: I live in a county which would be very suitable for this, as I can think of half a dozen sites within 5 miles. I've made the suggestion before but really ought to get onto pushing it more seriously.
The old tide mills could be restarted: the Severn Barrier is just a bigger version of these.
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Cheap and abundant clean energy, if we ever figure it out, solves a huge number of humanity's problems. Most of us aren't advocating fewer children, or even less energy consumption, we're arguing for reducing emissions so that we can consume more energy, and thus advance our civilization, without simultaneously destroying the place that civilization lives. Fossil fuels were a devil's bargain right from the start.
Sol,
Usually when I read your posts - I find myself nodding in agreement and thinking, "Holy shit - he's summing up the issue succinctly and more powerfully than I ever have."
This time is different. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but you seem to be saying we needn't worry about energy conservation at all. You seem to be saying we needn't have tough conversations with all the cheap-energy junkies. We needn't lead by example, and tell those around us to curb their habits. Because, by your logic, even though we don't have clean energy solution yet, we hope to at some point in the future.
This feels an awful lot like advocating that people max out their high interest credit cards, even though their current income streams won't allow them to pay the full tab at the end of the month. They can simply hope to come up with a way to make more money before the bill is due (" if we ever figure it out"). In the meantime, embrace profligate spending / energy consumption!
It's madness.
At this point, we need to develop clean, reliable energy sources. Yes. We need technology that can scrub CO2 and CH4 out of the air. Yes. All of the above. But these technologies don't exist yet at adequate scales to meet current consumption. Until we have those technologies, I think we have to have tough conversations and curb energy consumption where ever we can. No, we needn't revert to the stone age, but we do need to conserve.
I may be wrong, but from what I can tell, it seems the survival of our species may depend on us doing everything we can to stop AGW. And the thing is, cutting down energy consumption - by every single person in the 1st world- would be an effective contribution to that effort.
Besides, cutting down energy is in line with much of the stoicism advised in this blog. It includes finding those areas in your life where making a small change can make a difference in how much fossil fuel energy you demand. You could cut out dairy altogether, and reduce meat consumption to 1x per week (both of which have more benefits than just cutting down on energy). You could bike to the grocery store. You could turn down the heat. Etc.
One single person's effort won't do much. But everyone doing as much as they can? Shit yeah. That could make a difference.
Some here have said that energy conservation is not 'the solution' but merely a way of 'buying time'. Yeah, that's one way to look at it. But buying time might be exactly what we need. Global warming is a complicated issue, and while we pursue the silver bullet solutions that Sol has outlined, we all could be doing our part to reduce our energy consumption, and hopefully, stave off AGW.
Like I mentioned before, one thing that's truly terrifying to me is how resistant people can be to the idea of conserving energy on an individual level - especially those people who seem to grasp the full implications of AGW. It's one thing for people like my dad, who to this day regurgitates denialist talking points under the guise of being a serious 'skeptic.' He regurgitates asinine talking points on just about every topic, so that's to be expected. But for people who understand that 2degC may be the tipping point of no return, well, for them to not be fighting for all of us to reduce our energy consumption. It fucking terrifies me.
I may be wrong. I hope I am. But for people in this thread, on this blog - of all places - to be saying we don't have to worry about reducing our energy consumption? Like I said, it freaks me out man.
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Face it, cheap energy has radically improved our standard of living over the past 200 years.
This is a dismal picture you paint. No energy and we go back to living in the dark ages. Use energy and we are subject to threatening visions of climate change.
What are we to do then? Stop having children?
How about find a way to generate energy that doesn't put carbon into the air?
Norway manages pretty well on hydroelectricity (https://www.regjeringen.no/en/topics/energy/renewable-energy/the-history-of-norwegian-hydropower-in-5-minutes/id2346106/).
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Also, M41, as a ChE, I know that the tech exists to reduce harmful emissions for pennies on the dollar. I just don't know how it works to go in to 3rd world / China and put these scrubbers on their stacks. But sadly, America is also sliding down the scale of having a leadership role. I fear that I will also soon be fighting to get American companies to spend those few dollars to remove BTEX (https://www.ehp.qld.gov.au/management/non-mining/btex-chemicals.html) and not frack indiscriminately (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/12/29/to-round-out-a-year-of-rollbacks-the-trump-administration-just-repealed-key-regulations-on-fracking/?utm_term=.967363ea15bd).
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I don't think we all need to start living in huts to make a difference. For example a citizen in Italy consume 40% of the energy a citizen of the US does, and I don't see them as having a lower standard of living. Especially living in the US we can really do a lot more in restructuring things to reduce energy. The biggest one being that people can live close to where they work and get groceries, or using public transport. I am constantly struck at how incredibly inefficient the US is. Everyone has to drive, everywhere. I had a job where I had to go to this office building periodically to drop off paperwork. I walked. I had to walk almost all the way around the building, no sidewalk, to get to the entrance. Because the only entrance was encased in the parking garage, because I guess the assumption is no one walks, even though it was in walking distance of the same institutions other buildings.
Office buildings keep their lights and heat on 24/7. We are instructed to keep our computers running over the weekend, in case they want to push any patches through. The way we do everything is predicated on the assumption of almost free energy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_consumption_per_capita
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I don't think we all need to start living in huts to make a difference. For example a citizen in Italy consume 40% of the energy a citizen of the US does, and I don't see them as having a lower standard of living. Especially living in the US we can really do a lot more in restructuring things to reduce energy. The biggest one being that people can live close to where they work and get groceries, or using public transport. I am constantly struck at how incredibly inefficient the US is. Everyone has to drive, everywhere. I had a job where I had to go to this office building periodically to drop off paperwork. I walked. I had to walk almost all the way around the building, no sidewalk, to get to the entrance. Because the only entrance was encased in the parking garage, because I guess the assumption is no one walks, even though it was in walking distance of the same institutions other buildings.
Office buildings keep their lights and heat on 24/7. We are instructed to keep our computers running over the weekend, in case they want to push any patches through. The way we do everything is predicated on the assumption of almost free energy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_energy_consumption_per_capita
^^^ yes! and there are places in the US that are making great strides in using renewable energy. Our local midwest college town has been working to convert to renewables for years and at this point get 40% of their energy from solar and wind. This is in a red/purple state and it can be done! You just have to get the right people on board.
The nearby large city utility began offering renewable energy a couple of years ago as well; it is a bit more expensive but worth it. Most people don't even know it is an option. So when people talk about environmental stuff around here, I'll always mention that we have the option to purchase renewables and it only costs a few bucks more a month - and many of our friends and neighbors have made the switch!
I have developed a firm belief that we just have to keep banging the drum and eventually folks will come around. It may not be fast enough to slow down climate change, but it might be enough to get us to better, cleaner, and ultimately cheaper energy to power our AC and heat when climate changes bring constant unseasonably hot and cold weather.
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This is the problem Sol and I are talking about. You can cut emissions 90% (good luck) and you're *STILL* putting more into the atmosphere than the planet can remove.
Remember, this problem started in the late 1800s. Think about the differences in population size and lifestyle then for a moment.
Conservation is indeed important, and it might buy us a little bit of time. What it won't do is save us. That is going to have to happen with technology of one kind or another (preferably clean energy tech, but geo-engineering might very well be required at least to buy more time).
-W
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To put an optimistic spin on this problem, the realization of the coming impact of climate change is one of the largest opportunities in human history to get people to work together toward the solutions that will literally save civilization as we know it. This is a tremendous challenge that will require the efforts of folks from every walk of like, every profession, every point of view -- and it will require visionaries and leaders to communicate the possible future we can build and motivate the masses to do their part.
This is like the Apollo program times ten, and so far only Elon Musk seems to want to do anything about it. We won't be saved by a few billionaires (unless you're one of the few he chooses to take to Mars). But there are exciting ideas out there, and the chance to create a world that further improves the lives of humans across the globe, in a sustainable and equitable way.
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This is the problem Sol and I are talking about. You can cut emissions 90% (good luck) and you're *STILL* putting more into the atmosphere than the planet can remove.
Remember, this problem started in the late 1800s. Think about the differences in population size and lifestyle then for a moment.
Conservation is indeed important, and it might buy us a little bit of time. What it won't do is save us. That is going to have to happen with technology of one kind or another (preferably clean energy tech, but geo-engineering might very well be required at least to buy more time).
-W
Yes. Conservation is important. And like all other parts of the solution - its a PART of the solution. Conservation, like new technologies, should be pursued. None of these aspects should be cast aside with arguments that boil down to "this one thing is not enough on it's own so let's not discuss it." Yet that's where I feel that conversations usually end up.
I type this as I realize the light is on in the kitchen even though no one is in there. I'll do my part now.
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We need both large scale centralized clean energy production, and small scale clean energy production that can replace generators. That technology doesn't exist yet.
Every river and stream in the UK that has been the site of a mill could have a generator on the site of the old mill wheel. That would go some way to providing small-scale local generation: I live in a county which would be very suitable for this, as I can think of half a dozen sites within 5 miles. I've made the suggestion before but really ought to get onto pushing it more seriously.
The old tide mills could be restarted: the Severn Barrier is just a bigger version of these.
A couple of years back, I visited The Waffle House in St. Albans, UK. (Not the American Waffle House, this is a working 16th century watermill on a river.) I was walking in the mill area and showing my 3 year old how a windmill turns the grindstones, etc. to make flour for the waffles we ate. A staff member approached me and wanted to know if I had any questions.
Me: You say the mill is green, but the facility isn't. What stops you from installing a generator in the mill? Is it that the water levels aren't constant? The cost? You also don't have solar panels. What's the deal, your politicians are saying that the UK needs more renewable energy production.
Her: Regulations. We're a historic building so we can't change things without tons of bureaucracy and hiring expensive City lawyers. We've calculated that if we were to do what you suggested, payback time is 7-10 years on the investments, and our utility costs would drop, we could lower our restaurant prices and pay staff more, there's so much more we can do. But regulations. You've got to deal with historical codes when you live in the Old World.
Me: (Speechless for a good 10 seconds) I wish you the best if you can get it done. (I really meant it.)
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This is the problem Sol and I are talking about. You can cut emissions 90% (good luck) and you're *STILL* putting more into the atmosphere than the planet can remove.
Remember, this problem started in the late 1800s. Think about the differences in population size and lifestyle then for a moment.
Conservation is indeed important, and it might buy us a little bit of time. What it won't do is save us. That is going to have to happen with technology of one kind or another (preferably clean energy tech, but geo-engineering might very well be required at least to buy more time).
-W
I've always thought of conservation as an important part of the whole solution. At the moment we've only got so many tools to use:
- reducing consumption
- conserving
- taxing business for carbon produced
- better design (cities, items for sale)
- Renewable energy (solar, wind, tidal, geothermal)
None of them will solve the problem of climate change on their own. Mass adoption will be a big step in the right direction though. The problem is that you can look at any single one of them in isolation and say 'Meh, it won't solve the problem.' which makes people think that it's useless and want to give up on it. If enough people give up on the stuff that can help mitigate the problem then we end up dependent upon theoretical future technology advances that may or may not materialize. In my mind, that's a very dangerous approach.
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I've been thinking quite a bit about our collective resistance to moderating energy use. Here's a hypothesis, tell me what you think:
Hypothesis: In our guts, we all understand the link between energy usage and GDP. GDP growth is sacrosanct. To lower energy consumption would be to lower GDP. That's a no-no. And so we avoid the topic altogether.
Take a look at this graph.
(http://www.iier.ch/pub/files/images/EAI.img_assist_custom.jpg)
You can see how access to unlimited, on-demand energy enables countries to realize high GDP per capita. As in, an order of magnitude higher than countries with <90% access.
That's a tough trade-off. It feels like if you cut down just a little bit of energy availability, GDP will plummet.
You may be thinking that energy availability != total energy usage. That's surely true. However, are they not linked? And even more so when energy is cheap? When energy prices are kept low, it may be that 'energy availability' and 'total energy use' approach being synonymous in their effect on energy consumption and human behavior. Conversely, when energy prices rise, energy become less and less available to more and more people.
You can see how there's tremendous pressure to encourage consumption here. And for many, it's motivation enough to deny there's any problem at all. For others, it's motivation to focus on future tech to the exclusion of discussing current consumption.
I find myself questioning whether GDP growth should be a main priority. Surely we could come up with a better framework for co-existing and thriving within a closed system with finite resources. Seeking GDP growth on the back of cheap, dirty, GHG generating energy is a perilous pursuit. The energy we're gobbling up today comes at such a high cost to our environment, it all seems ... well, it seems fucking stupid.
And I find myself returning to the notion that we're no smarter than a colony of bacteria, hell-bent for extinction. I just think we could be smarter than that. It's hard for me to accept that we're probably not any smarter than bacteria.
I hope I'm wrong. I hope the solutions that Sol and EV2020 and others are discussing save the day in the end.
edits: typos, etc. Also - who is that one outlier who achieves $15,000 per capita GDP with 20% availability of energy? What's that country doing to get such an amazing return on limited energy consumption???
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Based on what little google and excel-fu I can do, I'd guess that is either Botswana or Namibia. I believe they mine a ton of precious metals and precious gemstones, particularly diamonds in the case of Botswana.
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I find myself questioning whether GDP growth should be a main priority. Surely we could come up with a better framework for co-existing and thriving within a closed system with finite resources. Seeking GDP growth on the back of cheap, dirty, GHG generating, energy is a perilous pursuit. The energy we're gobbling up today comes at such a high cost to our environment, it all seems ... well, it seems fucking stupid.
There is a happiness index - Gross National Happiness, started in Bhutan. It's treated as a bit of a novelty still, but growing in influence.
One consequence of modern energy systems is that it changes human geography. Not just in transport costs, as mentioned by partgypsy, but electricity grids have enabled population centres to move away from the sources of energy (coal and oil fields, traditionally, now starting to include solar and wind) to other locations which are desirable for other reasons, many of which lead to intensive energy use. Rethinking energy generation and use could well require similar big movements in populations within countries as well as between them, which is another barrier to progress.
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Correct me if I'm wrong here, but you seem to be saying we needn't worry about energy conservation at all. You seem to be saying we needn't have tough conversations with all the cheap-energy junkies. We needn't lead by example, and tell those around us to curb their habits. Because, by your logic, even though we don't have clean energy solution yet, we hope to at some point in the future.
I didn't mean to give anyone an excuse, and if it came off that way then I did a poor job of it.
Imagine that your doctor diagnoses you with heart disease, caused by a lifetime of morning bacon. You simply cannot fix this problem by halving your bacon intake. That does NOT mean you should eat even more bacon, it means you should never eat bacon again again, plus you need to overhaul your entire diet and exercise regimen, plus you need to get on some powerful meds. And it's probably still going to kill you, eventually, because you've already damaged yourself.
Conservation helps. Conservation is vital. But in this case, reducing our emissions is like switching to low tar cigarettes, or reduced bacon consumption. From one perspective it is a step in the right direction, but from another it is just taking smaller steps in the wrong direction. I would never discourage it, but we need more than that.
I was trying to highlight that emissions (like bacon) are fun. People want more of it, even though it is bad for us, and it's always going to be an uphill battle trying to tell people to have less fun. Also, you don't fix anything by making it worse more slowly. What we need, ultimately, is a way to make it better that also allows people to have more fun. Cheap clean energy, which doesn't exist yet, is one such solution.
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Correct me if I'm wrong here, but you seem to be saying we needn't worry about energy conservation at all. You seem to be saying we needn't have tough conversations with all the cheap-energy junkies. We needn't lead by example, and tell those around us to curb their habits. Because, by your logic, even though we don't have clean energy solution yet, we hope to at some point in the future.
I didn't mean to give anyone an excuse, and if it came off that way then I did a poor job of it.
Imagine that your doctor diagnoses you with heart disease, caused by a lifetime of morning bacon. You simply cannot fix this problem by halving your bacon intake. That does NOT mean you should eat even more bacon, it means you should never eat bacon again again, plus you need to overhaul your entire diet and exercise regimen, plus you need to get on some powerful meds. And it's probably still going to kill you, eventually, because you've already damaged yourself.
Conservation helps. Conservation is vital. But in this case, reducing our emissions is like switching to low tar cigarettes, or reduced bacon consumption. From one perspective it is a step in the right direction, but from another it is just taking smaller steps in the wrong direction. I would never discourage it, but we need more than that.
I was trying to highlight that emissions (like bacon) are fun. People want more of it, even though it is bad for us, and it's always going to be an uphill battle trying to tell people to have less fun. Also, you don't fix anything by making it worse more slowly. What we need, ultimately, is a way to make it better that also allows people to have more fun. Cheap clean energy, which doesn't exist yet, is one such solution.
But, as the Scout-Master said last night to a bunch of parents of 14 y.o.s - the most rewarding part of my 'job' is when a boy steps up to the group and says, "guys, we have got to do something about this!" Why is it obvious, when dirty dishes are piled up, or hikers are hopelessly lost, or boys can't get their tent up as the sun sets; that a leader emerges and the day is saved. Yet when the planet is slowly but surely being made uninhabitable, we elect terrible politicians and collectively celebrate higher equity valuations?
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Sol said it much better, as usual. Conservation is important and helpful. It buys time, which we might very well need.
If I ran the circus, we'd be putting hundreds of billions of dollars a year into energy research and various forms of adaptation (moving away from the coasts, GMO plants that are more drought tolerant, etc), and a big chunk into geo-engineering research as well. Without some or all of those, we're screwed.
-W
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But, as the Scout-Master said last night to a bunch of parents of 14 y.o.s - the most rewarding part of my 'job' is when a boy steps up to the group and says, "guys, we have got to do something about this!" Why is it obvious, when dirty dishes are piled up, or hikers are hopelessly lost, or boys can't get their tent up as the sun sets; that a leader emerges and the day is saved. Yet when the planet is slowly but surely being made uninhabitable, we elect terrible politicians and collectively celebrate higher equity valuations?
Stroking egos and promising things you can't actually control are how you win elections. Your Boy Scout examples are when emergencies reveal leadership that people are grateful for. If that leader spoke up much sooner that they'd have to take time out of their work or play schedules to learn how to do proper land navigation or set up a functional camp site they might not have been as well received. The thread has been about preventing us from getting to that disaster scenario, and no politician is going to get elected telling folks to "do without" or imply the constituents might share some blame for their circumstances.
Consuming fossil fuels has provided us with our current quality of life. Disrupting that life with drastic changes to how we produce energy or alter entire industries that might put some of them out of work is more frightening to people than gradual changes to the climate over the course of decades. "Vote for me to save our way of life, but to do that I'm probably going to have to fire you" vs "I'm not going to overtly upset anyone's apple cart and might consider proposing some changes on the margins to get some votes from the undecided bloc, though I'll change my mind if one side is going to get me more votes than the other." Which is going to win?
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I've been thinking quite a bit about our collective resistance to moderating energy use. Here's a hypothesis, tell me what you think:
Hypothesis: In our guts, we all understand the link between energy usage and GDP. GDP growth is sacrosanct. To lower energy consumption would be to lower GDP. That's a no-no. And so we avoid the topic altogether.
Take a look at this graph.
(http://www.iier.ch/pub/files/images/EAI.img_assist_custom.jpg)
You can see how access to unlimited, on-demand energy enables countries to realize high GDP per capita. As in, an order of magnitude higher than countries with <90% access.
That's a tough trade-off. It feels like if you cut down just a little bit of energy availability, GDP will plummet.
You may be thinking that energy availability != total energy usage. That's surely true. However, are they not linked? And even more so when energy is cheap? When energy prices are kept low, it may be that 'energy availability' and 'total energy use' approach being synonymous in their effect on energy consumption and human behavior. Conversely, when energy prices rise, energy become less and less available to more and more people.
You can see how there's tremendous pressure to encourage consumption here. And for many, it's motivation enough to deny there's any problem at all. For others, it's motivation to focus on future tech to the exclusion of discussing current consumption.
I find myself questioning whether GDP growth should be a main priority. Surely we could come up with a better framework for co-existing and thriving within a closed system with finite resources. Seeking GDP growth on the back of cheap, dirty, GHG generating energy is a perilous pursuit. The energy we're gobbling up today comes at such a high cost to our environment, it all seems ... well, it seems fucking stupid.
And I find myself returning to the notion that we're no smarter than a colony of bacteria, hell-bent for extinction. I just think we could be smarter than that. It's hard for me to accept that we're probably not any smarter than bacteria.
I hope I'm wrong. I hope the solutions that Sol and EV2020 and others are discussing save the day in the end.
edits: typos, etc. Also - who is that one outlier who achieves $15,000 per capita GDP with 20% availability of energy? What's that country doing to get such an amazing return on limited energy consumption???
I think the causation is likely in both directions, with higher GDP/capita also driving higher rates of electricity penetration. To me, the real take away is that once a country reaches an average income of about $20k, everyone in that country seems to gain access to electricity. It's a massive quality of life boost for its citizens, the resulting carbon emissions notwithstanding.
With that view, the country that you're heaping praise on is actually an outlier in the wrong direction, because it provides just 20% of its citizens with electricity despite an average income of $15k USD.
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In the US we will see a widening gap between states promoting renewable energy and those that don't. The West coast, Hawaii and some Midwest states are pushing hard. Other areas are not. Eventually we will reach a point where solar/wind/hydro capital cost + storage cost < natural gas capital cost + fuel cost. When that happens in each state depends on its resources & priorities, but clearly that point has arrived in some areas. I'm pretty optimistic since the US has been the last major energy consuming country that needs to get its head out of its ass.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/images/2012.04.09/RenewablesShare_nonHyd.png
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Ultimately, it does give me hope that the rest of the world takes Climate Change more seriously than the 'front page U.S. stance'. It would be easy for countries to use that as cover to leave the Paris Accord or defect from cooperative efforts, and yet the rest of the world is in an incomprehensible alignment with only the U.S. being outside the sphere of progress.
Bravo I say! I'm more than certain now this craziness is only a temporary anomaly. It's like WalMart trying out advertising with middle fingers and high prices, we will soon realize that low prices and smiley faces was always best for everyone!