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Climate Change: Where every storm is Perfect
That_Guy
I don't wanna be that guyRegistered User regular
I don't wanna be that guyRegistered User regular
In keeping with the movie themed thread titles, the climate change thread is back. In the last thread I think we were able to establish a few points where we all agree. Climate change is bad. It's being caused by humans. Currently humans are doing little to abate the anthropocene extinction event currently going on. There is some small hope. New renewable energy generation has become cheaper to build than new fossil fuel generation in some industrializing economies like India and China. Electric vehicles are set to vastly displace internal combustion engine vehicles while enjoying the benefits of cheap clean renewable energy. Humans were once standing at a knife's edge. Now we've tipped over and are carrining downhill into extinction. It's up to the new generation to see just how bad it's going to be and just how much we can negate the effects.
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The insect die-off is one of those things that's felt suspiciously underreported, because who cares about insects right? It feels like something happening that means we could see some pretty dramatic shifts in the viability of crops on a mass-scale - but over a timespan which is problematic, 10-20 years or so.
And that feels really problematic - because one of the things which has kept us going the way we are for so long is our massive overproduction of food. The fact that starvation is political, not resource constrained is something we've had in our favor for so long that the reaction of western civilization to actual possible food-shortages does not feel like it will go down well.
When you can't feed your kids, you tend to get pretty pissed off.
What's causing this? Massive use of pesticides from crop production?
Some interesting books across a wide spectrum of climate change related areas that I've recently come across:
Firestorm, by Edward struzik
Extreme cities, by Ashley Dawson
Seeds on ice, by Cary Fowler
Storming the wall, by Todd Millar
Designing climate solutions, by Hal Harvey
2018 emissions increased overall, and coal energy generation was one of the main factors in the increase.
I've harped on this issue before, but renewables and natural gas growth in advanced economies are simply displacing coal use to developing economies. Since coal is a globally traded commodity, as the advanced economies use less coal it will get cheaper and more accessible for developing economies.
Developing economies need to develop a sizeable baseload before building renewable sources. They're not going to get nuclear power plants because of proliferation fears and their high upfront cost. Liquid natural gas infrustructure is still undeveloped. Thus the growth of coal use.
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/05/lamu-island-coal-plant-kenya-africa-climate/
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
In terms of "human" extinction, we simply haven't seen an industrial scale response to some of the problems that are likely to come. People may not like Blade Runner bug protein farms, but you can be assured if that was the "only" option, people would do it.
Alternate energy is its own can of worms, since as I understand it, there may not be enough rare earth metals to create the kind of power we'll need in 50 years. Which means either a return to Fission or hopefully Fusion.
All of this stuff is concerning, but so is, you know a Yellowstone eruption or gamma ray burst that flips out all organic life in the solar system like a switch. If it happens, there's no use worrying about it anyway.
Unless of course we engineer a virus which kills all cows, that will surely save us... (no I'm not letting that horrible idea go from the last thread).
I don't think "If it happens, there's no use worrying about it anyway" is the appropriate reaction to Climate Change, here. I didn't quite understand all of your post, but like... this is preventable. It's not like a gamma ray burst from space.
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Anyway, despite how insane the current administration has been on the subject, the EIA has remained an excellent source for energy statistics.
Our first game is now available for free on Google Play: Frontier: Isle of the Seven Gods
"Orkses never lose a battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fightin so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't die neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!".
humans aren't going to go extinct
most of humanity will likely die off, sure, but as a species we are absolutely one of the most adaptable ones
"we" will likely still be "here" when the sun goes nova
The world has plenty of copper and sand. We aren't at any risk of running out of the materials needed for renewable energy production. You don't NEED rare materials to produce solar power. It just makes it easier. We may never crack sustainable fusion. We have the technology NOW to power the entire world with solar. It's been estimated that to power the entire US with solar it would cost around 20 trillion dollars and require around 21,250 square miles of land. Here's the thing though. 40,223 square miles of federal land is already leased out to oil companies. If we had spent the war on terror's $6 trillion on renewable energy we'd already be already be a 1/3rd of the way to being totally renewable. Redirecting oil subsidies to renewable energy would easily get us the rest of the way there over the next decade or so. The thing is, no one has any interest in REALLY changing the current infrastructure. It's attitudes like "we'll have fusion in 10 years" are prevending real change from occurring.
A GRB, asteroid or supervolcano are HIGHLY unlikely to happen in the near future and we can't do anything about them anyway. We can do something about climate change NOW. It's just plane wrong to equate manmade climate change to natural disasters like that. Climate change is far from inevitable and can be prevented.
No one is seriously suggesting we wipe out cows. Stop being a silly goose. Moving from a system of factory farms to lab grown meat, however absolutely will prevent a lot of extra pollution. It's a lot easier to bolt a gas capture system to the vent of a lab than it is to the ass of a cow.
The point is finding a middle ground for spreading the message beyond, "we're all going to die in 50 years" which yes, I just read in the local paper from a high school op-ed, and pushing for more sensible tech in our current political grid lock. I think Europe has the head start on that front for sure.
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I don't think "We're all going to die in 50 years" is a sellable message, because the Baby Boomers taught me that the counter argument is "Fuck you, got mine. I'll be dead by the time that happens."
No one is suggesting that we are all going to die in 50 years. You seem to be the only one waxing hyperbolic right now. In all seriousness though, a massive amount of currently inhabited land is going to be uninhabitable in less than geological time frames. Not just from rising sea levels but from general erosion and flooding due to increased heavy and severe storm activity. Once enough sea ice melts away, all the land ice it's holding back will fall into the ocean causing a (geologically speaking) very rapid rise in sea levels and loss of salinity. All that extra fresh water will cause ocean circulation to stop and all the warm water (and air) will stop flowing away from the equator, causing most of Europe to freeze. On geological time scales the earth will be fine but most of humanity won't survive.
I'm fairly sure in the next 10-20 years the baby boomers are going to have a bit of a revelation that the millenials will also be writing the history books.
Not quite sure what that end of life crisis will look like, but I'm expecting at least a bunch of articles on the importance of understanding how they had no choice or something.
Your first post literally contains the phrase, "Humans were once standing at a knife's edge. Now we've tipped over and are carrining downhill into extinction."
What interests me is the tech and innovation side, because I found out about cool companies and techs like carbon storage that I wouldn't have heard of otherwise.
I'll admit I was was being a bit dramatic there. If we don't do anything we are facing possible extinction, though. Not in 50 years, but certainly in less than geological timescales.
No, and add on to that every type of Malady/epidemic/weather-caused natural disaster and any type of atrocity humans have ever inflicted upon themselves will be inflicted all at once with magnitudes more intensity and frequency than ever before.
The conservatives in government aren’t going to pivot to “how do we fix climate change” once they can no longer deny it. Their position will be “who do we need to keep out/kill to maintain our in group’s standard of living/place in society?”
I agree with this.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/26/europe/longyearbyen-doomsday-vault-climate-change-intl/index.html
Even better news, just outside town is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which carries copies of the world's crop seeds with the intent of restoration after a catastrophe. That vault is in grave danger from the warming temperatures as well, and if it goes then a lot of rare and endangered forms of crops go with it.
Who's going to pay for it? Would be the first thing shut down in the US in a Republican government.
Norway's got oil money and brains.
Well, historic storms just fucking wrecking shit is kind of a symptom of using as cheap as possible building techniques and materials.
If we started burying things in conduits and building buildings out of things other than cheap wood and plastic they would definitely survive 70mph winds. But that's expensive, and that's why we don't do it.
Not that I'm defending anything or anyone here. It's garbage and we need to work on sequestering as much fucking carbon as we can because the sun's only getting brighter and hotter.
Supply isn't really a problem. Rare earth minerals aren't particularly scarce. The US has closed mines on deposits that could meet global demand for a century or more, and parts of Canada probably have even more. China and Africa have capacity to expand production as well.
The real issue is that mining in general is environmentally unconscionable and rare earth mining is the worst kind. Mining the stuff in a safe and clean way is possible, but so expensive that it's just not feasible while China will turn a blind eye to giving millions of people cancer and so many mineral exporters of Africa either don't give a shit or don't actually have enough control within their own borders to enforce regulations on mines that are being run by a mix of local warlords and foreign corporations.
This is why there's commercial interest in asteroid mining even with none of the engineering in place yet. Because reaching our monkey fingers across the sky to grab a primordial smudge of cosmic leftovers might be more economically viable than cleaning the fuck up after ourselves.
Let's fight climate change by pelting the earth with asteroids. Brilliant! Next we will tackle the problem of house fires by setting ourselves on fire instead.
Less globally apocalyptic, but I think the last time Krakatoa exploded it cooled the earth several degrees for several years.
I mean we can just detonate several nukes and kick up dust if we want to go that route.
They do it for wildfires.
Well, I don't want to kink-shame…