AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
And the reason for that is that voters won't deal with it because collectively we're all (Americans, Canadians, Brits, Europeans) unwilling to pay the higher prices and deal with the competitive disadvantage thanks to India and China.
You want an impossible thing to happen. I don't see the harm in trying to engage the public at large and attempting to change the opinions of those whom are open to it.
And the reason for that is that voters won't deal with it because collectively we're all (Americans, Canadians, Brits, Europeans) unwilling to pay the higher prices and deal with the competitive disadvantage thanks to India and China.
You want an impossible thing to happen. I don't see the harm in trying to engage the public at large and attempting to change the opinions of those whom are open to it.
Humans in general have a large bias towards short-term thinking. And that's not really a bad thing, it just really screws us on this particular issue. And it makes things 10x worse when the people who benefit the most from our current status quo of cheap fossil fuels (oil execs, the Koch brothers, etc.) are also people with enormous political power.
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lonelyahavaCall me Ahava ~~She/Her~~Move to New ZealandRegistered Userregular
And, if the US did act unilaterally we would find ourselves at a GIGANTIC comparative advantage as other nations tried to continue using high energy/high pollution technology. If we had acres of solar panels, dozens of nuclear power plants, biodiesel production and so on as the price of energy skyrocketed we would retain good access to energy. If we built low impact farmland and restored rivers,deltas and marshlands then temperature change and subsequent stress on local species would be buffered and productivity would remain higher. If we lowered water use in our cities and industry then lower rainfall would not diminish our industrial and agricultural capacity so much and mass death from thirst/dirty water could be avoided. If we installed white roofs on our homes and reflected sunlight as much as possible from all non-agricultural surfaces then again we'd save energy and urban heat island effects would be diminished which would lower ambient temperatures slightly, encourage rainfall and lower water stress in cities. if we planted forest, espescially heat tolerant trees, then water retention in the soil would be improved and each drop of rain would be used more efficiently. In adition carbon would be sequestered and oxygen would be generated, buffering the CO2 increase.
So if the US acts, and noone else does, then the US survives as do many of the species in it and the rest of the world burns. Hell, we might even be able to move fast enough to develop good enough tech to avoid the problem entirely.
There really is no reason to not act. Yes we can't save the planet alone, but we could save ourselves. It's like saying that if a ship is sinking due to someone knocking holes in the side you shouldn't put on a life vest. Yes, being in the water is going to suck and you'll be cold and wet, but you'll definately die if you do nothing.
I'm not a scientist, or lord help me anywhere close to well enough educated on this topic at all, but this line here, this line just seems wrong to me.
It's called "Global Climate Change" for a reason. Even if the US did manage to fix all of it's energy problems, find a solution to balance their own soil and water and air issues, it's not going to change the effects of the rest of the world. It won't build a bubble around the US. We'll still be subject to the changes going on globally and those changes are going to be... bad for the US. Maybe not as bad as they once could have been, but still bad. because everything is interconnected.
AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
Exactly, which is why you have to try to grab the narrative bull by the horns. The climate change denial lobby has controlled the narrative because the average voter doesn't get that global warming causes things other than hot weather so when we have winter the herpderp comes out.
Shifting it to what is in my opinion a more accurate phrase to describe the actual problem goes a pretty big distance to bridge that gap since someone might not understand that global warming means harsher winters in parts of the world, they can get that the increase in tornadoes can be caused by a change in climate.
And, if the US did act unilaterally we would find ourselves at a GIGANTIC comparative advantage as other nations tried to continue using high energy/high pollution technology. If we had acres of solar panels, dozens of nuclear power plants, biodiesel production and so on as the price of energy skyrocketed we would retain good access to energy. If we built low impact farmland and restored rivers,deltas and marshlands then temperature change and subsequent stress on local species would be buffered and productivity would remain higher. If we lowered water use in our cities and industry then lower rainfall would not diminish our industrial and agricultural capacity so much and mass death from thirst/dirty water could be avoided. If we installed white roofs on our homes and reflected sunlight as much as possible from all non-agricultural surfaces then again we'd save energy and urban heat island effects would be diminished which would lower ambient temperatures slightly, encourage rainfall and lower water stress in cities. if we planted forest, espescially heat tolerant trees, then water retention in the soil would be improved and each drop of rain would be used more efficiently. In adition carbon would be sequestered and oxygen would be generated, buffering the CO2 increase.
So if the US acts, and noone else does, then the US survives as do many of the species in it and the rest of the world burns. Hell, we might even be able to move fast enough to develop good enough tech to avoid the problem entirely.
There really is no reason to not act. Yes we can't save the planet alone, but we could save ourselves. It's like saying that if a ship is sinking due to someone knocking holes in the side you shouldn't put on a life vest. Yes, being in the water is going to suck and you'll be cold and wet, but you'll definately die if you do nothing.
I'm not a scientist, or lord help me anywhere close to well enough educated on this topic at all, but this line here, this line just seems wrong to me.
It's called "Global Climate Change" for a reason. Even if the US did manage to fix all of it's energy problems, find a solution to balance their own soil and water and air issues, it's not going to change the effects of the rest of the world. It won't build a bubble around the US. We'll still be subject to the changes going on globally and those changes are going to be... bad for the US. Maybe not as bad as they once could have been, but still bad. because everything is interconnected.
All true, although on the plus side the US has so much political power in world affairs that if we took strong unilateral action, we could probably convince a lot of other countries to join us as well. If nothing else, we could at least be prepared for what the future is going to be like.
Shifting it to what is in my opinion a more accurate phrase to describe the actual problem goes a pretty big distance to bridge that gap since someone might not understand that global warming means harsher winters in parts of the world, they can get that the increase in tornadoes can be caused by a change in climate.
Well, over a long period of time, winters will get shorter / warmer more or less everywhere. "Harsher" is kind of nebulous; the nadir in temperature for yearly local weather is not representative of the overall picture (if you have one day in a year that is the coldest on record for, say, 20 years, and but the rest of days the winter is 10~ degrees warmer than any other year on record, the winter was not really harsh at all - there was just one exceptionally cold day).
You want an impossible thing to happen. I don't see the harm in trying to engage the public at large and attempting to change the opinions of those whom are open to it.
I think that the current climate problem is akin to discovering as asteroid coming at us with the sun at it's back just a few days before it intercepts our orbit. It's probably already too late to do anything meaningful.
With Love and Courage
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AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
It's too late to avert the damage, but it isn't too late to minimize it or stop further damage from happening. Throwing up your hands is bad form, imo.
But that might be because I refuse to let boomers screw me anymore, which may speak to a bigger psychological issue... *shrugsies*
It's too late to avert the damage, but it isn't too late to minimize it or stop further damage from happening. Throwing up your hands is bad form, imo.
Well, I don't like to sugar coat things. I mean, if the asteroid example, we'd be at the mercy of our engineering limitations (and our lack of foresight regarding space exploration & observation). In terms of global warming, we're at the mercy of our social limitations (as well as the fact that after a certain point, positive feedback takes over and what humans do is irrelevant).
Films like to tell us, generally, that we are special and will heroically rise to the occasion when big problems crop-up. Historically, we are actually rather bad at doing this, but because we are good at mitigating problems on a small scale when they are right in our face we've managed to get by. Faced with an overwhelming problem that has spent decade upon decade building-up, we don't seem to be socially / psychologically equipped to meet the challenge (you can see this with the way emissions targets were treated: we basically just ignored them / ridiculed them).
I hate when some one links TED talks here. I always lose an hour of my life to watching various talks, then get really depressed about the whole situation we've gotten ourselves into.
I'm a proponent of the school that doesn't view emission reduction as the only answer. Or, to state it strongly, any conceiveably achieveable plan of emission reduction, no matter how drastic, isn't likely to solve this problem much, so we need to shut up about emission reduction and look for a more aggressive solution. Like comperhensive alternative energy, or even more aggressive, like engineering counterbalances. Purposefully emitting things into the atmosphere that will have the opposite effect of carbon.
Anyone who views the problem and solution in terms of blame and sacrifice, which is pretty much every political voice on the matter, needs to be ignored. I want to hear more from those who have actual innovative solutions.
If and when we do royally fuck ourselves into a desert, I think then we can look back and place blame, and most of it IMO will be on the heads of those, Gore included, who insisted on preaching a moral/spiritual/quasi-religious/misanthropic slant... who like most religious nuts, steadfastly denied that we could achieve salvation except through sacrifice and penance for our sins. We need to stop thinking that way, because we never solve problems that way.
We solve problems through innovation and engineering. Make an electric car that everyone wants (we're almost there). Replace coal with nuclear. Invent nanobots that eat atmoshperic carbon and shit nitrogen or something. Stop talking about how I have to do less and be less and accept less and use less and spend more for less... that leads nowhere.
To paraphrase George Carlin:
Doesn't it seem wrong to use technology to fix the problems that technology introduced?
No it doesn't, and people who express this sentiment as something serious are damaging the effort, driving away allies, and generally making things harder for everyone.
It's also worth noting that we're we to pursue tbloxham's ideas as he describes them, we'll likely destabilize the whole world. The current power arrangements are going to be completely upended.
It's also worth noting that we're we to pursue tbloxham's ideas as he describes them, we'll likely destabilize the whole world. The current power arrangements are going to be completely upended.
So, do you have a means of:
A) Magically conjuring coal out of nothing, so we can continue using coal-fired power plants forever?
Running coal-fired plants without increasing the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere?
The closest historical period to the projected level of warming is called the Mid-Pliocene Warming Period about 3 million years ago. Temperatures and CO2 levels were close to what the ICCC predicts for mid-to-worst case scenarios. There's a ton of research being funded right now on the period.
If conditions follow this period, you'll have massive sea level rise as the most immediate observable effect. And when I say massive, I mean that we'll pretty much say goodbye to Florida (yellow is 25m):
Worth noting that the ICCC worst case reports for projected CO2 levels are actually being overtaken by reality. Even with the moderate predictions, rising sea levels would displace around 1 billion people.
It's also worth noting that we're we to pursue tbloxham's ideas as he describes them, we'll likely destabilize the whole world. The current power arrangements are going to be completely upended.
So, do you have a means of:
A) Magically conjuring coal out of nothing, so we can continue using coal-fired power plants forever?
Running coal-fired plants without increasing the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere?
Nope. Do you disagree that it'll be very destabilizing?
Nope. Do you disagree that it'll be very destabilizing?
Not at all. But continuing to use fossil fuels for our energy production won't just be destabilizing; it'll terminate the entire enterprise.
It's sort-of like chemotherapy for a cancer patient: yes, it will be a very harrowing and destructive treatment. But the alternative is that you just flat-out die.
Look on the bright side guys, by 2020 oil will be so expensive that the market will (very painfully) take care of a large chunk of our emissions for us
Wouldn't their large populations and smaller life cycle pretty much allow for them to adapt quickly to changes in the environment?
Not if it kills them all off first.
Ignorant question. What happened to them the last time we had a 2c uptick in the global mean temp?
From what I recall, large scale extinction events followed by a change in mean O2 concentration in the atmosphere?
Rooting around in my head here for old info because I don't keep up with this stuff, but didn't we have a significant warming period in the 1400s?
Not to this scale as far as I'm aware.
Also, that was part of a natural cycle. The problem isn't the rise in CO2 itself, it's the fact that we're causing it and there's potentially no end to the uptick (until civilization becomes untenable). The world and the environment will of course survive, but it may not be a very comfortable place for us to be.
I'm rather sure there is an upper limit to how fucked we can make everything with CO2, I mean eventually won't it block most or all of the IR radiation, like a room full of windows and pulling one shade after another? Granted that limit is probably somewhere between extinction of all land animals and extinction of all ocean animals
Look on the bright side guys, by 2020 oil will be so expensive that the market will (very painfully) take care of a large chunk of our emissions for us
Wouldn't their large populations and smaller life cycle pretty much allow for them to adapt quickly to changes in the environment?
Not if it kills them all off first.
Ignorant question. What happened to them the last time we had a 2c uptick in the global mean temp?
From what I recall, large scale extinction events followed by a change in mean O2 concentration in the atmosphere?
Rooting around in my head here for old info because I don't keep up with this stuff, but didn't we have a significant warming period in the 1400s?
Not to this scale as far as I'm aware.
Also, that was part of a natural cycle. The problem isn't the rise in CO2 itself, it's the fact that we're causing it and there's potentially no end to the uptick (until civilization becomes untenable). The world and the environment will of course survive, but it may not be a very comfortable place for us to be.
I'm rather sure there is an upper limit to how fucked we can make everything with CO2, I mean eventually won't it block most or all of the IR radiation, like a room full of windows and pulling one shade after another? Granted that limit is probably somewhere between extinction of all land animals and extinction of all ocean animals
On the longer term I believe one of the usual predictions is that following the period of high CO2 you get a prolonged ice-age due to exactly this reason.
EDIT: Although, intuitively, I think I'm bullshitting on that - in that while it naively seems possible, it's probably way more complex then that especially when you consider the albedo of land/sea/ice etc. which means visible light can become heat while passing through the atmosphere quite easily.
Look on the bright side guys, by 2020 oil will be so expensive that the market will (very painfully) take care of a large chunk of our emissions for us
More likely we'll switch the civilian economy to coal and gas while all oil gets commandeered for military use in extensive wars for resources.
I don't see how, C02 blocks the outgoing long wave infra-red radiation only if I'm not mistaken.
Quick googling puts the upper limit at "how fucked can we make things!" at preventing 30% of incoming heat from leaving from C02, however other things like water vapor are more effective and can be increased by higher temperatures, which also increases cloud cover which is a massive negative sink
It's super complicated and probably not even worth figuring out, because the answer is clearly "higher than is survivable"
The real disaster would be a mass die-off in ocean plankton, aka 70% of the world's oxygen production by photosynthesis. And hey, we might just get there thanks to CO2-induced ocean acidification.
I'm rather sure there is an upper limit to how fucked we can make everything with CO2, I mean eventually won't it block most or all of the IR radiation, like a room full of windows and pulling one shade after another? Granted that limit is probably somewhere between extinction of all land animals and extinction of all ocean animals
^ The upper limit of what CO2 can probably do to your planet ^
Of course, we'd all be long, long dead before a positive feedback loop got this far.
Humans in general have a large bias towards short-term thinking. And that's not really a bad thing, it just really screws us on this particular issue. And it makes things 10x worse when the people who benefit the most from our current status quo of cheap fossil fuels (oil execs, the Koch brothers, etc.) are also people with enormous political power.
I believe this is in large part due to generational isolation. I mean, we tend to only really consider the immediate two generations around us as relevant(parents, children, grandparents to a lesser extent). There was stuff about Vimy Ridge on Canadian news recently, and even that era is fading out of relevant discourse or public consciousness, despite the sentiment of 'let's remember this so we don't make the same mistakes'. Which, of course, won't likely be the case. Global Warming is even more isolated in this way, it's almost invisible to any immediate generational vision.
I'm not even really sure what humanity would be like if we existed differently than this, in a more farsighted capacity. Maybe once we have absurdly(compared to now) long life spans, we'll begin to radically alter perspective in this manner.
I am very pessimistic about any serious action to counteract CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions. Awareness of the problem has been there for decades, the evidence is never enough, it has become insanely political, and no action can be undertaken unless all major nations step in, something that seems extremely unlikely. There is ever less political will do something, while every year that we wait the steps needed to stop the effects become more drastic (and thus, more political unviable).
At this point it seems inevitable that we will burn all our oil and all our gas in the next few decades. After that we'd probably end up with a patchwork energy solution, where the big question appears to be how much coal we'll use. Many energy sources are hovering roughly in the same ballpark in $/kWh terms, it's hard to predict where it ends up. Fusion would be nice, though people need to remember that Fusion Fuel for the type of reactors we're attempting is not cheap and limited in supply (One of your possible solutions is 'mine the surface of the Moon for He3' .... )Harder still to see where transportation will go (I'm hoping that it won't be biofuels, because those are economical disasters and environmentally dubious. Graphene based battery solutions are looking somewhat hopeful).
I'm also very cynical about the consequences. Rich countries will no doubt make short-term solutions to solve the worst of the effects (High dams, improved infrastructure to deal with changing temperature, rainpatterns and possible extra storms etcet.) while poor countries will continue to get fucked, and maybe the poor people in the rich countries. I'm expecting a lot of 'Another big flood has hit Bangladesh' type news in the coming decades.
And interesting effect of rising sea levels is that since the earth is a spinning ball, the water won't spread evenly at all. Those near the equator (Not the entirety of Europe) will suffer much more, and the countries there are not likely to have the funds to deal with it.
The 'disaster' scenarios (methane release from tundras, oceanic anoxia, Antarctica melting) are all terrible, some just about beyond belief.
What really gets me is the time line. I remember being in my teenage years, when people first really started talking about climate issues and CO2 stuff, and them saying "not in your life time". Now the tag line is "maybe in a few decades?"
That's decidedly in my life time. I'm genuinely excited and concerned that all this disaster stuff will become a reality by the time I'm in my 40's to 50's.
The real disaster would be a mass die-off in ocean plankton, aka 70% of the world's oxygen production by photosynthesis. And hey, we might just get there thanks to CO2-induced ocean acidification.
The real disaster would be a mass die-off in ocean plankton, aka 70% of the world's oxygen production by photosynthesis. And hey, we might just get there thanks to CO2-induced ocean acidification.
Listen you
I said this like two pages ago
Don't you go stealing my ideas
I find it morbidly funny that there are about three dozen different possible extinction events related to global warming. The really amusing part is that all of these - with the exception of turning our planet into Venus - are things that have happened multiple times in the history of the Earth.
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AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
What really gets me is the time line. I remember being in my teenage years, when people first really started talking about climate issues and CO2 stuff, and them saying "not in your life time". Now the tag line is "maybe in a few decades?"
That's decidedly in my life time. I'm genuinely excited and concerned that all this disaster stuff will become a reality by the time I'm in my 40's to 50's.
They didn't mean YOUR lifetime, they meant in the lifetime of average voters.
And, if the US did act unilaterally we would find ourselves at a GIGANTIC comparative advantage as other nations tried to continue using high energy/high pollution technology. If we had acres of solar panels, dozens of nuclear power plants, biodiesel production and so on as the price of energy skyrocketed we would retain good access to energy. If we built low impact farmland and restored rivers,deltas and marshlands then temperature change and subsequent stress on local species would be buffered and productivity would remain higher. If we lowered water use in our cities and industry then lower rainfall would not diminish our industrial and agricultural capacity so much and mass death from thirst/dirty water could be avoided. If we installed white roofs on our homes and reflected sunlight as much as possible from all non-agricultural surfaces then again we'd save energy and urban heat island effects would be diminished which would lower ambient temperatures slightly, encourage rainfall and lower water stress in cities. if we planted forest, espescially heat tolerant trees, then water retention in the soil would be improved and each drop of rain would be used more efficiently. In adition carbon would be sequestered and oxygen would be generated, buffering the CO2 increase.
So if the US acts, and noone else does, then the US survives as do many of the species in it and the rest of the world burns. Hell, we might even be able to move fast enough to develop good enough tech to avoid the problem entirely.
There really is no reason to not act. Yes we can't save the planet alone, but we could save ourselves. It's like saying that if a ship is sinking due to someone knocking holes in the side you shouldn't put on a life vest. Yes, being in the water is going to suck and you'll be cold and wet, but you'll definately die if you do nothing.
I'm not a scientist, or lord help me anywhere close to well enough educated on this topic at all, but this line here, this line just seems wrong to me.
It's called "Global Climate Change" for a reason. Even if the US did manage to fix all of it's energy problems, find a solution to balance their own soil and water and air issues, it's not going to change the effects of the rest of the world. It won't build a bubble around the US. We'll still be subject to the changes going on globally and those changes are going to be... bad for the US. Maybe not as bad as they once could have been, but still bad. because everything is interconnected.
Global climate change leads to disasterous consequences which you can't survive as a society for a variety of reasons.
i) Global climate change -> Big temperature shifts, changes in rainfall patterns, droughts, floods, massive energy price spikes etc
ii) Local climate damage -> On the way to all this pollution you have drained wetlands, destroyed and filled in flood plains, allowed deserts to expand, and built giant hot cities on the coast. Local species have been displaced, and chemical poisons are present in soil, rivers and waterways
iii) Lack of preparation -> Your society is hugely reliant on shipments of fossil fuels, your population lives clustered on unsheltered coastlines, often in flood plains of drained and redirected rivers. You lack techniques to improve efficiency and allow communication in disasters. You lack technological and cultural preparedness for change, and you have not begun taking steps to modify your use of the environment to be more efficient.
No country alone can do anything about i). The US cutting emissions a lot would help, and perhaps big technical moves by us would create enough breakthroughs to avoid it completely but it is true. Climate change is global. CO2 in china is just as bad as it is here.
However lots of the effects of climate change are so bad due to ii) and iii). If you have an already stressed ecosystem, and then stress it more from climate change then it may be unable to adapt. If you have a well managed and stewarded local ecosystem then the stress will not be on top of already existing stresses. Good management is the difference between these two news stories in 2050....
"Shock in Arizona today as Primary resivoir 2 is empty, and temperatures reach 10 degrees above their seasonal norm. Farmers across the midwest are reporting reduced yields as the government cuts water use by 5% per acre again. We take you now to our reporter Jane Stevens onsite at Yosemite, where water management techniques are a fact of life for park rangers. Meanwhile famine in India and China has killed 3 billion so far, and the global population has fallen to its lowest level since 1950s."
"Forest fires and brush fires consume the entirety of the south, and what remains of the government is reporting that there are no resources left to deal with the problem. The government says that anyone living below Oregon is effectively abandoned by the US as what little infrastructure remains retreats north. President Johnson has called for a day of mourning from the capitol in Bismarck, where todays temperature is 115. With harvests in these states abandoned, the price of food is now double what is was two years ago. Meanwhile famine in India and China has killed 3 billion so far, and the global population has fallen to its lowest level since 1950s."
Preparation and ecology management is the difference between disaster and extinction.
On the upside, the third world is really fucking bright and our attempts at making solar economically viable are creating a cheap power source with low overhead, so world adoption of sustainable energy should be very rapid. According to The Atlantic, East Africa is moving into wind and hydro power already despite a large number of recent oil finds.
On the upside, the third world is really fucking bright and our attempts at making solar economically viable are creating a cheap power source with low overhead, so world adoption of sustainable energy should be very rapid. According to The Atlantic, East Africa is moving into wind and hydro power already despite a large number of recent oil finds.
Their advancement is skipping decades of our history technology advancement because they don't have outdated infrastructure holding them back. For example, they're going right to cellphones and bypassing land-line installation altogether.
I'd really like to see geothermal heating and cooling come down in cost. Imagine the amount of energy we wouldn't have to use if we were all heating and cooling from an even 50 to 60 degrees instead of wildly swinging -10 to 110 degrees
On the upside, the third world is really fucking bright and our attempts at making solar economically viable are creating a cheap power source with low overhead, so world adoption of sustainable energy should be very rapid. According to The Atlantic, East Africa is moving into wind and hydro power already despite a large number of recent oil finds.
It makes more sense for an economy which uses very little energy in the first place to use low start up cost wind and solar. I wouldn't say that it is evidence of some grand ecological awareness or genius, simply that it's hot and windy there and people are much more likely to have $1000 for some solar panels than $10 million for a coal power plant. All their high energy intensity stuff is produced elsewhere.
What are the economic effects of massive wind energy farms? It seems harnessing the wind in any fashion could have a distinct effect on things a few hundred miles away.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
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AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
What are the economic effects of massive wind energy farms? It seems harnessing the wind in any fashion could have a distinct effect on things a few hundred miles away.
I'm not sure I understand the question. Do you mean environmental effects? Because aside from fucking with bats and sheep sleeping schedules I don't think those exist.
Economically it works just like any other power industry.
They can alter local weather patterns to a degree. I know it was a concern because a lot of the turbines are on agricultural land and could conceivably affect crop growth.
They can alter local weather patterns to a degree. I know it was a concern because a lot of the turbines are on agricultural land and could conceivably affect crop growth.
I've always kind of wondered about this .... I mean, they're way high up in the air and the wind would be blowing regardless right?
Something along the lines of winds not cooling lands further inward properly? I don't know, seems like it would have some effect on the environment locally at least.
not a doctor, not a lawyer, examples I use may not be fully researched so don't take out of context plz, don't @ me
I'm hardly an expert on it, but there are some articles indicating that it can raise ground temperatures in the vicinity of the wind farms. Whether that will have any real impact or not I can't say.
Here's a BBC article on it for example. It seems like this particular problem can be mitigated through re-engineering, so I don't know if it's even a valid concern for future projects.
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You want an impossible thing to happen. I don't see the harm in trying to engage the public at large and attempting to change the opinions of those whom are open to it.
I'm not a scientist, or lord help me anywhere close to well enough educated on this topic at all, but this line here, this line just seems wrong to me.
It's called "Global Climate Change" for a reason. Even if the US did manage to fix all of it's energy problems, find a solution to balance their own soil and water and air issues, it's not going to change the effects of the rest of the world. It won't build a bubble around the US. We'll still be subject to the changes going on globally and those changes are going to be... bad for the US. Maybe not as bad as they once could have been, but still bad. because everything is interconnected.
Democrats Abroad! || Vote From Abroad
Shifting it to what is in my opinion a more accurate phrase to describe the actual problem goes a pretty big distance to bridge that gap since someone might not understand that global warming means harsher winters in parts of the world, they can get that the increase in tornadoes can be caused by a change in climate.
All true, although on the plus side the US has so much political power in world affairs that if we took strong unilateral action, we could probably convince a lot of other countries to join us as well. If nothing else, we could at least be prepared for what the future is going to be like.
Well, over a long period of time, winters will get shorter / warmer more or less everywhere. "Harsher" is kind of nebulous; the nadir in temperature for yearly local weather is not representative of the overall picture (if you have one day in a year that is the coldest on record for, say, 20 years, and but the rest of days the winter is 10~ degrees warmer than any other year on record, the winter was not really harsh at all - there was just one exceptionally cold day).
I think that the current climate problem is akin to discovering as asteroid coming at us with the sun at it's back just a few days before it intercepts our orbit. It's probably already too late to do anything meaningful.
But that might be because I refuse to let boomers screw me anymore, which may speak to a bigger psychological issue... *shrugsies*
Well, I don't like to sugar coat things. I mean, if the asteroid example, we'd be at the mercy of our engineering limitations (and our lack of foresight regarding space exploration & observation). In terms of global warming, we're at the mercy of our social limitations (as well as the fact that after a certain point, positive feedback takes over and what humans do is irrelevant).
Films like to tell us, generally, that we are special and will heroically rise to the occasion when big problems crop-up. Historically, we are actually rather bad at doing this, but because we are good at mitigating problems on a small scale when they are right in our face we've managed to get by. Faced with an overwhelming problem that has spent decade upon decade building-up, we don't seem to be socially / psychologically equipped to meet the challenge (you can see this with the way emissions targets were treated: we basically just ignored them / ridiculed them).
No it doesn't, and people who express this sentiment as something serious are damaging the effort, driving away allies, and generally making things harder for everyone.
So, do you have a means of:
A) Magically conjuring coal out of nothing, so we can continue using coal-fired power plants forever?
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/06/090622103833.htm
If conditions follow this period, you'll have massive sea level rise as the most immediate observable effect. And when I say massive, I mean that we'll pretty much say goodbye to Florida (yellow is 25m):
http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/cms/dn17343/dn17343-3_1000.jpg
Worth noting that the ICCC worst case reports for projected CO2 levels are actually being overtaken by reality. Even with the moderate predictions, rising sea levels would displace around 1 billion people.
Nope. Do you disagree that it'll be very destabilizing?
Not at all. But continuing to use fossil fuels for our energy production won't just be destabilizing; it'll terminate the entire enterprise.
It's sort-of like chemotherapy for a cancer patient: yes, it will be a very harrowing and destructive treatment. But the alternative is that you just flat-out die.
I'm rather sure there is an upper limit to how fucked we can make everything with CO2, I mean eventually won't it block most or all of the IR radiation, like a room full of windows and pulling one shade after another? Granted that limit is probably somewhere between extinction of all land animals and extinction of all ocean animals
On the longer term I believe one of the usual predictions is that following the period of high CO2 you get a prolonged ice-age due to exactly this reason.
EDIT: Although, intuitively, I think I'm bullshitting on that - in that while it naively seems possible, it's probably way more complex then that especially when you consider the albedo of land/sea/ice etc. which means visible light can become heat while passing through the atmosphere quite easily.
Quick googling puts the upper limit at "how fucked can we make things!" at preventing 30% of incoming heat from leaving from C02, however other things like water vapor are more effective and can be increased by higher temperatures, which also increases cloud cover which is a massive negative sink
It's super complicated and probably not even worth figuring out, because the answer is clearly "higher than is survivable"
^ The upper limit of what CO2 can probably do to your planet ^
Of course, we'd all be long, long dead before a positive feedback loop got this far.
I'm not even really sure what humanity would be like if we existed differently than this, in a more farsighted capacity. Maybe once we have absurdly(compared to now) long life spans, we'll begin to radically alter perspective in this manner.
At this point it seems inevitable that we will burn all our oil and all our gas in the next few decades. After that we'd probably end up with a patchwork energy solution, where the big question appears to be how much coal we'll use. Many energy sources are hovering roughly in the same ballpark in $/kWh terms, it's hard to predict where it ends up. Fusion would be nice, though people need to remember that Fusion Fuel for the type of reactors we're attempting is not cheap and limited in supply (One of your possible solutions is 'mine the surface of the Moon for He3' .... )Harder still to see where transportation will go (I'm hoping that it won't be biofuels, because those are economical disasters and environmentally dubious. Graphene based battery solutions are looking somewhat hopeful).
I'm also very cynical about the consequences. Rich countries will no doubt make short-term solutions to solve the worst of the effects (High dams, improved infrastructure to deal with changing temperature, rainpatterns and possible extra storms etcet.) while poor countries will continue to get fucked, and maybe the poor people in the rich countries. I'm expecting a lot of 'Another big flood has hit Bangladesh' type news in the coming decades.
And interesting effect of rising sea levels is that since the earth is a spinning ball, the water won't spread evenly at all. Those near the equator (Not the entirety of Europe) will suffer much more, and the countries there are not likely to have the funds to deal with it.
The 'disaster' scenarios (methane release from tundras, oceanic anoxia, Antarctica melting) are all terrible, some just about beyond belief.
That's decidedly in my life time. I'm genuinely excited and concerned that all this disaster stuff will become a reality by the time I'm in my 40's to 50's.
Listen you
I said this like two pages ago
Don't you go stealing my ideas
I find it morbidly funny that there are about three dozen different possible extinction events related to global warming. The really amusing part is that all of these - with the exception of turning our planet into Venus - are things that have happened multiple times in the history of the Earth.
They didn't mean YOUR lifetime, they meant in the lifetime of average voters.
Global climate change leads to disasterous consequences which you can't survive as a society for a variety of reasons.
i) Global climate change -> Big temperature shifts, changes in rainfall patterns, droughts, floods, massive energy price spikes etc
ii) Local climate damage -> On the way to all this pollution you have drained wetlands, destroyed and filled in flood plains, allowed deserts to expand, and built giant hot cities on the coast. Local species have been displaced, and chemical poisons are present in soil, rivers and waterways
iii) Lack of preparation -> Your society is hugely reliant on shipments of fossil fuels, your population lives clustered on unsheltered coastlines, often in flood plains of drained and redirected rivers. You lack techniques to improve efficiency and allow communication in disasters. You lack technological and cultural preparedness for change, and you have not begun taking steps to modify your use of the environment to be more efficient.
No country alone can do anything about i). The US cutting emissions a lot would help, and perhaps big technical moves by us would create enough breakthroughs to avoid it completely but it is true. Climate change is global. CO2 in china is just as bad as it is here.
However lots of the effects of climate change are so bad due to ii) and iii). If you have an already stressed ecosystem, and then stress it more from climate change then it may be unable to adapt. If you have a well managed and stewarded local ecosystem then the stress will not be on top of already existing stresses. Good management is the difference between these two news stories in 2050....
"Shock in Arizona today as Primary resivoir 2 is empty, and temperatures reach 10 degrees above their seasonal norm. Farmers across the midwest are reporting reduced yields as the government cuts water use by 5% per acre again. We take you now to our reporter Jane Stevens onsite at Yosemite, where water management techniques are a fact of life for park rangers. Meanwhile famine in India and China has killed 3 billion so far, and the global population has fallen to its lowest level since 1950s."
"Forest fires and brush fires consume the entirety of the south, and what remains of the government is reporting that there are no resources left to deal with the problem. The government says that anyone living below Oregon is effectively abandoned by the US as what little infrastructure remains retreats north. President Johnson has called for a day of mourning from the capitol in Bismarck, where todays temperature is 115. With harvests in these states abandoned, the price of food is now double what is was two years ago. Meanwhile famine in India and China has killed 3 billion so far, and the global population has fallen to its lowest level since 1950s."
Preparation and ecology management is the difference between disaster and extinction.
Their advancement is skipping decades of our history technology advancement because they don't have outdated infrastructure holding them back. For example, they're going right to cellphones and bypassing land-line installation altogether.
Let 'em eat fucking pineapples!
It makes more sense for an economy which uses very little energy in the first place to use low start up cost wind and solar. I wouldn't say that it is evidence of some grand ecological awareness or genius, simply that it's hot and windy there and people are much more likely to have $1000 for some solar panels than $10 million for a coal power plant. All their high energy intensity stuff is produced elsewhere.
I'm not sure I understand the question. Do you mean environmental effects? Because aside from fucking with bats and sheep sleeping schedules I don't think those exist.
Economically it works just like any other power industry.
I've always kind of wondered about this .... I mean, they're way high up in the air and the wind would be blowing regardless right?
I'm sure I'm not thinking it through properly
Here's a BBC article on it for example. It seems like this particular problem can be mitigated through re-engineering, so I don't know if it's even a valid concern for future projects.
Does it affect other wind farms in parallel? Obviously there's a loss of energy isn't there?