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It's the End of the World as We know It, and I Feel Fine [Climate Change]?
burbo
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
New, spunky OP! Why do we always have to be so dour about this subject? Why can't we discuss climate change with the same detached and pedantically evaluative attitude we discuss everything else?
The recent report by the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change, the UN's group of scientists responsible for condensing, summarizing, and analyzing climate research) concluded, as each new report always seems to, that the effects of climate change are worse, and evolving more rapidly than their previous analysis predicted. Everyone on Earth will be affected.
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/3/30/ipcc-climate-changeglobalwarmingimpacts.html
Rather than blow this up into a catchall climate change thread, where I pretend like I have all the information and I bequeath this thread unto you all, I selfishly would like to harness the knowledge of the forumers here to learn more about this topic.
What I really would not like this thread to turn into is a "Does climate change exist" debate. I expect most people here are not going to be that goosey, but if you want to participate in this discussion, let acceptance of the scientific consensus be the first prerequisite.
Here's a fun set of key question for us to discuss, Will our current consumptive model of civilization survive the climate crisis? If so, how will we adapt to preserve our beloved McWorld? If not, how will everything turn out? When will this start happening?
We can even cite documents and studies and shit, and base our gross speculations on some science and whatnot. Wooo! Fill me up with knowledge ye forumers!
The recent report by the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change, the UN's group of scientists responsible for condensing, summarizing, and analyzing climate research) concluded, as each new report always seems to, that the effects of climate change are worse, and evolving more rapidly than their previous analysis predicted. Everyone on Earth will be affected.
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/3/30/ipcc-climate-changeglobalwarmingimpacts.html
Rather than blow this up into a catchall climate change thread, where I pretend like I have all the information and I bequeath this thread unto you all, I selfishly would like to harness the knowledge of the forumers here to learn more about this topic.
What I really would not like this thread to turn into is a "Does climate change exist" debate. I expect most people here are not going to be that goosey, but if you want to participate in this discussion, let acceptance of the scientific consensus be the first prerequisite.
Here's a fun set of key question for us to discuss, Will our current consumptive model of civilization survive the climate crisis? If so, how will we adapt to preserve our beloved McWorld? If not, how will everything turn out? When will this start happening?
We can even cite documents and studies and shit, and base our gross speculations on some science and whatnot. Wooo! Fill me up with knowledge ye forumers!
burbo on
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My best guess is that many of us will start to have our lives disrupted with this kind of thing within the 10-15 years. Droughts are shitty, yo. I don't know shit though. It's really difficult to find decent analysis on this subject. Google fails me. Hence, forumsourcing.
How much snow did Texas get this year?
Will it be painful to watch as certain coastal cities get inundated over the years (I'm looking at you, New Orleans)?
Yes!
Will it be expensive as hell to relocate people, and adapt to a changed shoreline and weather patterns?
Yes!
Will everyone die to masked, gun-toting bandits?
No.
That said, if you are really worried, the public-domain Nuclear War Survival Skills has just about the best advice you can get on how to properly stockpile food and water as well as plans for building your own shelter (designed to be published in newspapers before the bombs fell) in case of nuclear war/bandit attack. Where There Is No Doctor is good too.
Like, what should you, personally, do? Probably not much other than what you already do: the bigger impacts of climate change are decades away. If you experience them at all, you'll be a senior citizen at the time.
What should the next generation do, who will probably endure the impact as parents & mortgage holders in uncertain times? Probably try to become self-sufficient in as many ways as they can (that doesn't mean, "STOCKPILE WATER AND BEANS!" it means, "Learn how to garden, cook, compost, and do at least a bit of handicraft work. Reduce your household waste as much as you can,").
Your move, mediterranean countries
How do you know the bigger impacts are far away? It sounds like the droughts are already getting really severe in the American Southwest, and I've heard that there may be water refugees from places like Las Vegas as soon as next year. I wish that I could find the resource that said that, but I can't. It may be spurious. But if that's the case, how is the US going to deal with all those refugees? Especially keeping in mind that a ton of American refugees are going to have an amount of weapons that can best be described as a fuckload.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/will-you-be-underwater-theres-a-map-for-that/
Key takeaway, by 2050 there will be 3.7 million people displaced or flooded according to 2012 "Mid-range predictions". Well, what we keep seeing is that the mid range predictions keep underestimated the rate of climate changee. What does 3.7 million displaced Americans due in a droughted, flooded United States?
War over water resources is entirely possible.
What we're seeing right now in the Southwest of the U.S. might just be seasonal drought; there is some evidence that, yes, this is being exacerbated by climate change - but this is a half-time show at best. Current models (and they may change, of course) suggest that the entire west of the U.S. will experience a mega-drought, becoming mostly barren desert. That's the sort of thing that people in 50-100 years are going to be dealing with.
And yes, there will also probably be an issue with refugees moving north as drought conditions creep up through the southern states (not to mention Mexico). This also happened to some extent in the 30s - people trying to find salvation from the dust bowl by moving in droves to California, for example.
What to do about this? Well... I don't know.
Shut down Vegas.
The City of Sin uses a whopping 70 percent of its water on fucking landscaping. The average per-capita use of water in Vegas is over 200 gallons per day. San Francisco, by comparison, uses less than 49. Vegas is also notorious for buying up water rights across Nevada rather than reduce its consumption.
But is it crazy to start thinking about how to survive a refugee/power outage/government collapse situation from this kind of eventuality? Like learning the farming, water collection, survivalist kind of stuff? Isn't that how you would respond to this?
In the late ninties or early 2000s, El Niño hit and it was a nightmare. It brought about a deadly drought in Florida. Then the recent hurricanes hit and the local Florida news talked about El Niño coming back and bringing Florida "relief." Its that sort of short shortsightedness that's making the world a worse place.
Though frankly, going by those numbers, all you'd have to do is xeroscape Vegas and you'd get to keep it and bring it to just about average water consumption.
The only place that should have luxuriously thick and even St. Augustine grass...is fucking St. Augustine.
I'd like to see more water bills that scale up logarithmically/exponentially. Just showering daily, using the toilet, preparing supper, brushing your teeth, etc? A pretty decent, reasonable bill. Washing your car, watering your lawn during the hot desert summer? It's going to be painful as hell for all but the 1%.
I also want to see more in the way of GM crops that are designed to handle low-water conditions.
South Korea has this a little bit, unfortunately its in brackets rather than constants.
Eat less meat. Like, not in a hippy dippy animals are people too way. Meat's fucking delicious. But if you cut meat from most of your meals (most, not all, god I love meat) you'll use significantly less water. Chicken are the worst in terms of water use and ecological devastation from antibiotics. Beef isn't so bad because it tends to be free range before they move them to the stockyards.
This is not true. They're already building a "third straw" to drain Lake Mead even lower to slake their stupid fucking city's thirst.
http://www.8newsnow.com/story/24039783/another-delay-in-third-straw-project-at-lake-mead
You need to tone down the hyperbole brah.
Water resources ain't no fucking joke though. The US is actually one of the richest areas in the world in terms of what water we have available for drinking and agriculture and even before the droughts were were draining the Sacramento Delta, Lake Mead, and the Ogalalla Aquifer faster than they're refilling. This is pretty fucking worrisome because between those three reservoirs we grow all the food in California and all the food in the Midwest. We're fairly close to lowing power generation capability at the Hoover Dam as a result of the levels in Lake Mead as well.
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/colorado-river-hydropower-faces-a-dry-future
Ironically the best thing we could do for water in the Colorado River is to blow up a different dam, that was built in an incredibly poor place.
"At full pool, Lake Powell loses an average of 860,000 acre feet of water to evaporation and bank seepage (1 acre-foot is enough to supply two homes for one year). This is equivalent to the annual water usage of Los Angeles!"
That's almost 6% of the flow of the entire Colorado River (15m acre feet annually).
http://www.glencanyon.org/about/faq
Europe is tapped out and has been for a long time. China is turning a not insignificant portion of their landmass in to desert every year as they lower their water table attempting to grow more food.
People are going to have to stop eating meat sooner or later because it will just become too expensive to eat as a result of production prices as the supply of water decreases.
Me on the other hand, my water's included in my rent, so I run a water wheel off the kitchen sink 24/7 to save on power.
This is a big reason why I am a proponent of GMO foods, and why I opposed the labeling initiative in California recently. It was all framed in fear monger language and I was afraid that if it passed it would kill the profitability of GMO development, which would mean the research wouldn't be there when we really need it shortly down the line.
I've got a pet project I'd love to get off the ground for an automated agriculture bot that would provide irrigation, plant maintenance, and harvesting that would ideally save a lot on water by applying it directly like drip system on crops that drip systems aren't usually used on, but I haven't had the money to start prototyping it yet.
Herbicide and Pesticide resistant crops are incredibly damaging to the environment but are just one, really shitty use of GMO technology (in addition to stuff like crops that are dominant and pollinate and eradicate farmer's non-GMO crops, forcing them to pay a licensing fee for the crops they're "choosing" to grow, crops that are sterile after one cycle, etc.). A better approach would be to legislate against improper uses of the tech rather than making the public terrified of something that is, no hyperbole, almost certainly essential to the continued survival of the human race as conditions change.
The reason I became so aware of water usage in California and throughout the world is I went and saw the Hoover Dam last summer with a buddy. That thing is fucking amazing, made me really sad we don't build things anymore. While we were there we were trying to figure out what the bigass trench to the side of the thing overgrown in grass and other foliage was, and we were wondering what was up with the different colored rock layers in the canyon. Well the trench is the spillway that hasn't been used in so long nature's taking it back, and the rock coloration has nothing to do with the geologic column or anything cool like that, it's nature's fucking bathtub ring.
Sustainable usage!
The drought we're coming off of has been really bad but it hasn't been around nearly as long as we've been draining this fucker.
The worst part is because it's a canyon, the further down you go the less water's actually left depthwise, because the walls slope inward.
https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197970666737/
Of course, such widescale water mismanagement would never happen, could never happen, in 'Merica.
It has basically nothing to do with climate change or Las Vegas, it could be argued that it isn't even water mismangement, since this was the intended outcome.
Las vegas otoh could generate money even without spending huge quantities of money on water, slightly different case.
They drink a lot of water but they're generally left out to pasture until the last 4-6 months of their lives when they get cornfed in the stockyards, so it's often mostly sources of food and water that occur naturally. I could be mistaken, don't remember where I read it offhand, will try to source it later. It's the multiplier effect that makes meat damaging in regards to water resources, and if you're feeding an animal thirsty crops that humans can eat like corn (chickens) that's more damaging than grazing cattle, depending on water availability on the land they're being raised on. If we switched back to grass fed beef it'd be even better for conservation, and corn fed beef is fucking terrible for you anyway so. =/
Grain of salt with the source and all, but rough lifecycle for beef cattle here:
http://www.explorebeef.org/raisingbeef.aspx
Grazers are also really important in terms of maintaining soil health in grasslands and it depends on what kind of ecological damage you're talking. You can't gutload cattle with antibiotics, their stomachs work on fermentation so there's that at least. Chicken and pork are terrible because raised factory farm style they're responsible for all sorts of antibiotic resistant bacteria.
I guess I'm saying there's a lot of factors at play and there's definitely a place in a natural ecosystem for cattle. Since we got rid of the buffaloes, without the cattle you'd see dustbowl conditions more frequently.
EDIT: Couldn't find what I remember but who knows. Been up for more than 24 hours. Looking up the Feed Conversion Ratios Chicken is 2:1 and Cattle is <5:1-20:1 o.O The hippy sites all say 20:1 because who gives a fuck about accuracy. This dude seems to know his shit and he says 6:1
http://agricultureproud.com/2012/02/06/cattlemens-college-cattle-feed-efficiency/
When you consider that they're gaining roughly half their weight on non-human-edible roughage that's a little bit worse than chicken but considering the lack of germ warfare and the needed benefits to soil they're not all that bad. Grass fed is better because then you're not growing food for the livestock but it would not be possible to feed the current appetite for beef on exclusively grass fed.
It's frustrating as fuck trying to get balanced information on this stuff because most people talking about sustainability are very loose with their facts. Half of them say that factory farm cattle get fed a diet of antibiotics which...isn't possible.
People are just going to have to eat less meat.
I may have gotten this impression from the opening scene of a John Wayne movie.
Won't we likely see societies in the future where the primary occupation of most people is involved in either water purification or food production by means that would not be worthwhile now? Or are we looking at a more dystopic scenario where the climate makes large portions of the world uninhabitable for some reason or another to the point that, that would not be feasible for most people, and we would be seeing sudden mass dep-population at some key point in time?
Doesn't having mass migration necessarily result in changes for everyone though? Like, if 5% of the population lose their land and means of production and have to go somewhere, those people don't just dissappear. They go somewhere else, presumably somewhere that somebody already owns, and possibly have conflict over that.
Total US electrical generation in 2012 was around 4,047,765 thousand megawatthours (man who comes up with these goddamn units).
(source: http://www.eia.gov/electricity/annual/html/epa_01_01.html)
Total US freshwater use (2005 numbers, but should be close enough), excluding thermoelectric generation: 205,910 million gallons per day.
(source: http://water.usgs.gov/edu/wateruse-fresh.html)
Converting from bizarro units to something intelligible, that's:
Electricity, 1 year, 2011: 4.048e12 kWh
Water, 1 year, 2005: 2.845e11 m^3
It looks like the cost of desalinating 1 cubic meter of water varies a lot by method. I'll run with 13.5 kWh electric equivalent here (representing the upper end of efficiency for multi-stage flash distillation, which should be an easily scalable desalination method, and assuming cogeneration with electrical power) giving us a total energy cost of 3.841e12 kWh. This can probably be improved substantially using reverse osmosis or other fancier techniques.
So, the total cost of (hypothetically) producing all the US' freshwater via ocean water desalination comes in at just under 95% of our electricity generation capacity. In other words we'd have to nearly double that capacity, producing an additional 3.8 terawatt-hours of equivalent electrical power. Looking at some other data, it seems we've added about 1 terawatt-hour since 1991 (22 years before the numbers I used here). The rate at which we have added capacity in recent years seems to vary a lot, though (probably with demand), so I think we could potentially add capacity at a much higher rate than we have.
Of course, we're not going to suddenly replace 100% of the fresh water used in the US with desalinated ocean water, either. I'd guess that adding a percent or two per year is probably doable if we made a concerted effort (i.e. if water started getting expensive and Americans decided they're not so afraid of fission after all). So, I don't think we'll see water wars or a reversion to an agrarian society in the US. Water will get more expensive, we'll stop wasting quite so much, and we'll produce more if we have to. The real impact will be to societies that are already mainly agrarian (i.e. poor countries) who don't have terawatt-hours to throw around.