41–50 of 384 posts
- I assume the coasts are a nonstarter.
- Moving inland could be nice, but the ground would need to be pretty arable to restart civilization there. I'm guessing somewhere in Africa is a safe bet, given the lack of resource exploitation there, but then again, there's not much infrastructure at the moment.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It always amazes me how much people and governments focus on prevention when it comes to climate change If the US government was actually focused on prevention, that would be a huge step up from "denying there's a problem."
Do you all honestly think that the US or what people there think is the biggest issue effecting pollution? Last time I checked as a nation we are working hard to reduce emissions have some of the lowest in the world. Perhaps it would be more useful to go and bash China and India, two countries in which seeing a clear sky in a large city is a rarity.
It doesn't feel like its a problem because of two reasons:
1. Pollution and CO2 emissions are two separate issues. The US has strong pollution regulations regarding pollution near large populations, so even if it contributes to the green house gas problem for people living in cities air quality is good.
2. The US was previously the global leader in pollution by a wide margin, producing 300x what Brazil produced for instance in 1950. In recent decades, manufacturing in the US has become cleaner bit by bit, so there has been improvement. This is unfortunately dwarfed by the quality of Europe where pollution was always a lesser problem, and environmental guidelines became more stringent faster than in the US.
Many people like to compare the US to Europe, and in that respect the US usually looks terrible but the US isn't Europe and has never been in the same place socioeconomically. It is better to compare the US to China or India, because in geopolitics we are in the same place---large manufacturing nation, large population, large geography, former colony, quasi-imperial ambitions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, exponentials are tricky. By the time danger is clear, it's too late to do anything about it. But hey, at least this will probably be self-limiting. Disruption will arguably reduce population and industrialization, and so CO2 emissions will drop.
And then good luck rebuilding civilization now that every easily accessible resource has been mined/harvested out.
This is precisely why Dr. Guy McPherson has predicted human extinction on earth by 2030. Methane clathrates coming from the Arctic sea floor and from Canadian and Siberian permafrost. This is the most serious threat we face now.
So, this sort of thing must have happened in past warm periods. Yet life survived.
Well this is pretty much the beggining of the end then.
Some summary points:
- Total amount of methane in the current atmosphere: ~5 gigatons
- Amount of carbon preserved as methane in the arctic shelf: estimated at 100s-1000s of gigatons
- Only 1% release would double the atmospheric burden of methane
- Not much effort is needed to destabilize this 1%
- The volume currently being released is estimated at 50 gigatons (it could be far more)
- 50 gigatons is 10x the methane content of the current atmosphere
- We are already at 2.5x pre-industrial level, there is a methane veil spreading southward from the arctic.
- Methane is 150x as powerful a greenhouse gas as CO2 when it is first released.
Here is a longer video for those who have the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FPdc75epOEw
Well this is pretty much the beggining of the end then.
The consensus is that unchecked GW would not be a human extinction event.
- "Not a big deal"
- A catastrophe, comparable to World War II
- The greatest catastrophe in recorded history
- The extinction of industrialized civilization
- The extinction of the human species
- The extinction of multicellular life
- The extinction of all Earthly life
- The destruction of Earth as a planet