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[Global Warming] : Where will YOU be when we break the planet?
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This is a pretty horrible view of kids, I'd say. Instead of thinking about them as individuals with their own thoughts and beliefs.
No, christian churches, and especially The Vatican, openly say this. They actively put pressure on their members, women in particular, to crank out dem babies, economy, 3rd world and carbon footprint be damned.
The fact that more and more people are reaching western levels of energy consumption is causing a lot of issue though. China is already the #1 producer of CO2 (though not by capita). We're on an accelerating scale still, and because we're letting it slide for so long, the actions to stop it become more and more unfathomable.
And while I see the problem ranging from 'very serious' (Which will mostly result in 'most wildlife + a lot of poor people get fucked, while the rich offset the problems locally') to 'disastrous' (One of the Doomsday scenarios becomes real, and the whole global ecosystem becomes destroyed), I agree that right now there seems to be very little indication that the world is going to act on it at all. And that's because while we are the cause of the problem, it's very hard to get the world to do something about a problem that is probably not going to peak until our children's children reach adulthood. Every single person in power won't see the worst of it. Because the actions have to be so drastic, and everyone has to participate. This is in shrill contrast to the sulphur/smog/ozone layer actions taken earlier, which were focussed on a subset of industry.
Peak energy is a bad joke. There's enough thorium to power the world for several millennia.
Mostly I am just saying the cost of creating energy is increasing[and that this trend is likely to continue], so we are moving to sources that were less attractive in the past. A lot of hyperbolic bullshit was spewed around about peak oil being leading to the end of civilization, so it's loaded term with a much more extreme connotation than I actually mean.
Though, when it comes to nuclear fission, there is a lot of left over cold war fears that shape the political climate, and those are a non-technical issues that are standing between us and making full use of nuclear resources. Fear is fundamentally stopping us from generating more power from nuclear energy, and in a lot of ways that's a more difficult thing to overcome than an engineering problem.
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Not really, you can make fertilizer out of coal, Illinois has been doing that for years now.
Furthermore, farming only uses a tiny fraction of all oil usage, and peak oil (which we've almost certainly hit a few years ago, by the way) doesn't mean it's all gone, it just means there's less of it. Unless something fucking crazy happens like a nuclear war in the middle east, we'll have enough for food.
The biggest paradigm shift in farming will come from having to be more water efficient.
Probably referencing pine beetles, which are a serious problem in the western US (where I live). There are sections of entire forests where up to something like 90% of trees are dead already.
Less predators (mostly birds, AFAIK) = more beetles. More beetles = more dead trees. More dead trees = more forest fires.
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Are we referring to no more Haber Process? As in, no more Nitrogen-> Ammonia?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process
'All' fertilizer is made from fossil fuels.
That.....isn't a good thing.
It seems like oil and gas has it's main use as portability for use in vehicles or generator backups, while coal is used in industrial processes and power stations.
Coal should be the easiest to replace, is it just because it is so damn cheap that it is still being used?
Would reducing the amount of meat eaten help in any way? I know factory farming of animals can't be good for the environment but from a practical standpoint how much of an effect does it really have?
You'll have better batteries.
When you get right down to it, compressed tanks of hydrogen aren't really much more dangerous then a tank of petroleum. The pressure is what kills you, not the flammability and that can be engineered against - any punctures benefit from the fact that hydrogen is so light that is disperses rapidly.
The thing we're waiting on at the moment is a cheap, efficient air-breathing cathode for fuel cells. There's no real indication this is a thing that can't be had, since there are lots of potential paths to one (polymer wrapped nanotubes, boron-based molecules etc.). Presuming I ever finish my Ph D, I'm going to applying like hell to get attached to a research project for such a thing.
It's also worth noting that solving that particular problem solves other problems - for example, you can build large stationary batteries if you can use an air-cathode (my particular interest - find a way to use a solution of iron, for about $3000, to store 100 kWh of energy - or enough to run a large house for a day or 2). This would solve pretty much all the problems with personal PV or larger solar power projects.
Of course, we don't even need to do that - the technology exists today to build grid-scale base-load solar power plants, it just requires the political will to implement it. Molten NaCl thermal storage is 80% efficient over night, and can be built using regular steam turbines like those in coal-fired power stations. Nuclear is a bit of red herring in this regard - if you have it then you should keep using it (looking at you Germany) - but a country like Australia with plentiful sunshine should be pushing hard on baseload solar, since the nuclear debate basically is how the coal companies and conservatives end up justifying doing nothing.
The thing is though that methane doesn't have a particularly long-lifespan in the atmosphere - according to wikipedia 8.4 years mean. CO2 has a lifespan of over 100 years, so there's a massive difference in how much specific emissions matter (i.e. CO2 quite literally will just keep piling up, whereas a lot of methane is exchanged out quite quickly).
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I didn't say that a flat 70% of species would go extinct. I said that it's difficult to assess how many would go extinct, and that current models range from 40% to 70% (page 221).
Pest population explosions can be expected to kill a lot of forest (as well as do a lot of other damage). When a lot of dead plant matter, and especially dead wood, has collected in a forest and conditions are both warm & dry, fires - especially large fires - can be expected to be much more common.
Again, we're talking about models, not certainties - there might be some unknown factor that would, say, prevent tree parasites from exploding in population, or perhaps rainfall patterns would adjust in such a way that most of the dying forests become wet for most of the year.
Not in any meaningful way. Cattle ranching, and even factory slaughterhouses, aren't a very significant source of CO2. Cattle do emit a significant amount of methane (as Burtleboy pointed-out), but methane doesn't stay in the atmosphere very long (as ELM pointed-out); the only reason methane (and later, perhaps water vapor) is a significant danger in some of the models is that CO2 may thaw out so much marshland so quickly that we have a large spike in methane at the same time that we have a high concentration of CO2, causing a chain reaction known as a 'positive feedback loop' that causes a runaway greenhouse effect, somewhat akin to what happened on Venus.
I'm only seeing 40% on page 221.
Tell me that we've won the ozone layer when my skin doesn't turn crispy when i'm outside in the sun for longer than 30 minutes in the summer.
Our weather reports down here include times of day when you are STRONGLY advised to wear sunscreen or sun protection of some form or another when outside for any length of time. This usually covers times from 9am-5pm. That is pretty much the entire day. Why? because we have no ozone layer. It's a hole. It has apparently been getting better, but i could show you photographic evidence of what just about 40 minutes outside did to me when i didn't have sunscreen on.
Lets just say that I went crunch for a few days.
You have to fight through some bad days, to earn the best days of your life.
There is the well-known University of Bristol study that indicates biodiversity could be expected to sharply increase if human activity ceased (though 'human activity' encompasses more than just climate change).
You probably won't find an academic peer-reviewed study where the researchers test the possibility that a 40-70% reduction in known species is a normal trend, for the same reason you won't find a peer-reviewed study that tests the possibility that pulling up really hard on your shoelaces is a better means of reaching the moon than traveling in a rocket. It's well outside the domain of rational speculation.
Wired had a really great article on thorium maybe two years back? http://www.wired.com/magazine/2009/12/ff_new_nukes/all/1 Good read if you haven't seen it before, I think you will like it.
I like to think I am fairly green, there isn't too much I can do to my living situation because I live in dorms aside from recycling and walking/biking. Back at home though we were pretty good; there are a lot of 'green' things we would do because they actually saved money and my parents had grown up poor so 'reduce reuse recycle' was something they were already quite familiar with. At our hokiest we had a compost heap and grew some of our own fruits and veggies, which in some cases ended disastrously because we could just not keep up with how quickly the plants were growing (and they pretty much got nothing but compost and water). We continue to have a problem with things going to waste because my gosh it is just too much food (my mom now just gives away most of the fruits and vegetables).
Aside from Thorium, there's the ability to use deuterium & tritium to create a stable nuclear fusion reaction, which is what we'll be attempting with ITER in 2019-2020.
And then there's the fact that the Earth intercepts enough solar radiation to produce a hilarious amount of energy.
Energy isn't a problem. Even storage (the main foot-stomping argument posed by fossil fuel proponents) isn't as large a problem as some people seem to think. The problem is that we're a bunch of idiot monkeys who are too short-sighted to comprehend what our actions are going to result in.
A lot of the western population is effectively carbon neutral. All you have to do is conserve power & water, and drive less frequently (that last one is the stickiest issue within the United States & Canada, due to suburban sprawl), which most people do out just to save money anyway. The western world's population growth has also plateaued.
The problem is that we did a lot of damage before the population became conscious of the problem, and now we have developing nations trying to get off of their knees with our oil & gas model helping them make all of the wrong choices in doing so.
Part of the problem here though is that people thought we outgrew our externalizes but it turned out we just created/discovered a bunch of new ones.
The ozone problem is a good example of how even if everyone understand the problem and a fix is created at a significant cost, it will still have long term adverse effects and some people will still contribute to the problem because it is cheaper.
Citation needed. No seriously. There was no scientific consensus on "global cooling" a systematic review of the literature for the 70's found that there were people who posited that particulate pollution would lead to dimming and thus cooling but that wasn't in the context of a full atmospheric model. Overall the warming effects of pollution out weight the cooling effects, And lets be clear here, particulate pollution does cause cooling. Without all the particulate shit being pumped into the atmosphere and reflecting sunlight the planet would be warmer.
That problem consisted mostly of changing aerosol cans and refridgerators though, while changing our Climate Change prognosis to something less problematic would mean cutting all our energy use in half in the next decade.
I use these,
although pulling the strip out of the wall at night / when you go on a trip is almost as easy and a good 15 dollars cheaper.
Oh my God.
Oh my God, guys...
You aren't really "carbon neutral" if you don't drive because everything is trucked to you by amazon and grocery chains.
Something that frustrates me is ... I live in the reddest of red states. All I hear about is how fake global warming is and how it's a buncha bullshit.
EVEN IF these beliefs weren't entrenched on a theophilosophical level with my family and neighbors and they were still opened minded there still wouldn't be time to educate each one of them
How can people be whittled down on these issues?
Honestly? Have "green" energy concerns donate more to the Republican party than companies with a vested interest in the status quo. Not much an individual can do on the education front.
Yes but making fertilizer doesn't need to be anywhere near as environmentally destructive as burning it. With coal, almost anything except burning it is more friendly than burning it (for example, you can actually make diesel out of coal and it burns relatively clean, it just depends how much money you want to spend along the way to be environmentally friendly).
Besides, there's plenty of fossil fuels for fertilizer. North America could cover the entire world's need for thousands of years at current usage rates - it's personal transportation that's fucking us, and coal power that's fucking us for global warming (hey, thanks anti-nuclear movement of the 1970s!)
I'm not too worried, after all Congo never had a green revolution and they have something like eighty million people and very little in the way of money or technology comparatively. Almost all malthusian die off scenarios imagine that nobody changes their behavior, that we keep driving the same amount with $40/gallon gas and megafarms keep fucking that chicken with fertilizer and water prices triple what they are. The last major oil shock took nearly a decade for the US to resume previous usage levels of oil - so society can change. They just won't until things are likely irreversibly bad and all the poor get fucked.
Well, that's true, but the idea behind individual carbon footprints is that you're just tracking your own direct energy consumption. In theory, the grocer should be tracking their own carbon footprint, and attempting to minimize it as best they can (in reality, of course, most grocers have no interest in that or are part of a corporate entity that legally cannot mitigate their carbon footprint because it would slice into their profits to do so.
If you had to track absolutely everything you did that indirectly results in emissions, you could never realistically achieve carbon neutrality, which would defeat the purpose of initiative.
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