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The Uninhabitable Earth

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Re: The Uninhabitable Earth

#61

Post by norea-armozel »

uptown wrote: post #33
latch wrote: post #15

It's pretty hopeless. I used to think we'd adjust in time, but that was when the decline looked more linear (or at least I thought it looked more linear). Of the many people who I know who are seriously concerned re climate change, I'd say 2 have taken truly meaningful steps . It's not the handful of climate change deniers that's the problem. It's the overwhelming number of people who want to say they're green, but s…

The system has evolved to make change very difficult. One part of this post on ZeroHedge shows you the supply chain involved with just a ketchup. 52 transport and process stages. Fifty-two. "Just how energy inefficient the food system is can be seen in the crazy case of the Swedish tomato ketchup. Researchers at the Swedish Institute for Food and Biotechnology analysed the production of tomato ketchup. The study cons…

You should read Homebrew Industrial Revolution by Kevin Carson, particularly his break down of the Industrial Revolution. Mostly the IR was driven by state actors or those who could influence them such as with the UK's Enclosure Act which forced peasants to work in factories and in the US with the transcontinental railroad which was lobbied for by industrial interests on the East coast who wanted a slice of the West coast pie of regional production/consumption. Basically, everything up to this point is the result of capitalism and its owners who are protected from market forces of regional and local production/consumption which would follow more closely than what we have today where companies literally throw away brand new shoes and electronics to keep their prices high.

Re: The Uninhabitable Earth

#62

Post by epall »

cbennett wrote: post #17
phkahler wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't worry, this is a pure climate alarmist. You can tell by this quote and others: "But no matter how well-informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough." This person is literally saying we need to be alarmed. I really didn't understand the part where they said methane has 34 times the greenhouse effect as carbon over a period of time and then changes the timeframe to bring the multiplier put to 84 times. To…

>> This person is literally saying we need to be alarmed. And why shouldn't we (he) be doing that? Actually the author's goal is transparent, to shake up perception, to provide fodder in the imagination of folks to ultimately change how urgently we treat this in public forums. I thought this was a quite trenchant point (from the article): >>Over the past decades, our culture has gone apocalyptic with zombie movies an…

Methane deteriorates in the upper atmosphere fairly quickly, whereas CO2 sticks around. Methane is a dramatically better insulator than CO2, so in the short run its impact is higher, but when you stretch out the timescale, your methane is deteriorating while the CO2 sticks around, so the relative impact tilts slowly toward CO2.

Re: The Uninhabitable Earth

#63

Post by extra88 »

hacknat wrote: post #52
latch wrote: post #15

It's pretty hopeless. I used to think we'd adjust in time, but that was when the decline looked more linear (or at least I thought it looked more linear). Of the many people who I know who are seriously concerned re climate change, I'd say 2 have taken truly meaningful steps . It's not the handful of climate change deniers that's the problem. It's the overwhelming number of people who want to say they're green, but s…

> It's the overwhelming number of people who want to say they're green, but still own two cars, never take public transport, eat meat daily, live in big houses, and buy buy buy. The car and the "buy, buy, buy" are the only real problems. Cut those two out and the big houses and meat aren't a big deal (or are at least workeable). Probably the biggest thing you could do to help the environment is not buy any kind of mo…

I don't know about all meat but the deforestation for cattle ranching and feed, methane produced by the beasts themselves, and other factors seem to be fairly significant. The much greater energy requirements to light, heat, and cool big houses should not be discounted so easily either.

Re: The Uninhabitable Earth

#64

Post by averagewall »

EGreg wrote: post #56
latch wrote: post #15

It's pretty hopeless. I used to think we'd adjust in time, but that was when the decline looked more linear (or at least I thought it looked more linear). Of the many people who I know who are seriously concerned re climate change, I'd say 2 have taken truly meaningful steps . It's not the handful of climate change deniers that's the problem. It's the overwhelming number of people who want to say they're green, but s…

Just thinking out loud here, but if the arctic somehow contains more carbon and methane than all we've released into the atmosphere ( can someone explain why that is??? ) then can't we: 1) Coat the entire arctic with a more reflective compound, so it will not be as likely to melt under the same summer temperatures... the expense of this would be far less than the fallout later. This may interfere with some life in th…

There are lots of good ideas for reducing or eliminating the harm of climate change. But they're sacrilegious because people worry they might lull others into not trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. I'm pretty confident we'll do something like this to fix it when it comes.

Re: The Uninhabitable Earth

#65

Post by tertius »

latch wrote: post #15

It's pretty hopeless. I used to think we'd adjust in time, but that was when the decline looked more linear (or at least I thought it looked more linear). Of the many people who I know who are seriously concerned re climate change, I'd say 2 have taken truly meaningful steps . It's not the handful of climate change deniers that's the problem. It's the overwhelming number of people who want to say they're green, but s…

> If you're concerned that scientists are now talking about the low single-digit years we have to change.

This type of alarmism does not help anyone. The "authorities" have been saying "single digit years" for decades, not "just now". The average person has seen very little change causing more denialism to spread.

Please stop.

Re: The Uninhabitable Earth

#66

Post by louprado »

latch wrote: post #15

It's pretty hopeless. I used to think we'd adjust in time, but that was when the decline looked more linear (or at least I thought it looked more linear). Of the many people who I know who are seriously concerned re climate change, I'd say 2 have taken truly meaningful steps . It's not the handful of climate change deniers that's the problem. It's the overwhelming number of people who want to say they're green, but s…

> "It's not the handful of climate change deniers that's the problem. It's the overwhelming number of people who want to say they're green."

We see time and time again that laws are required to achieve massive rapid change and reduce the economic impact of that change.

In 1974 one could have spent thousands on a custom installed catalytic converter. That "green" person would have experienced a great financial burden and see no measurable impact on air quality. It would have been a foolish decision. That's why we need laws and that is why the handful of climate change deniers, that have a disproportionate influence on policy, are so dangerous.

How one votes is what matters (mattered) most.

Re: The Uninhabitable Earth

#67

Post by extra88 »

EGreg wrote: post #56
latch wrote: post #15

It's pretty hopeless. I used to think we'd adjust in time, but that was when the decline looked more linear (or at least I thought it looked more linear). Of the many people who I know who are seriously concerned re climate change, I'd say 2 have taken truly meaningful steps . It's not the handful of climate change deniers that's the problem. It's the overwhelming number of people who want to say they're green, but s…

Just thinking out loud here, but if the arctic somehow contains more carbon and methane than all we've released into the atmosphere ( can someone explain why that is??? ) then can't we: 1) Coat the entire arctic with a more reflective compound, so it will not be as likely to melt under the same summer temperatures... the expense of this would be far less than the fallout later. This may interfere with some life in th…

These are not very good gen-engineering ideas but we may be compelled to engage in gen-engineering of some kind. It will be risky, with side effects that we'll know but more worrying will be the unintended effects that we didn't predict. They more we can do to reduce our negative output, the less ham-fisted tinkering with the planet's systems we'll have to do.

Re: The Uninhabitable Earth

#68

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

A few observations:

Trying to scare people into behavior does not work very well. The Catholic Church spent centuries threatening people with eternal hell if they had extra-marital sex, and people still had extra-marital sex. Studies have shown that abstinence only sex education results in more teen pregnancies. Thomas Malthus saw an impending famine and begged people to have fewer children. People did not listen.

What works is "magic science." A solution that allows people to behave the way hey do, and we come up with a solution that just works. Birth control has resulted in a decline in teen pregnancies and population stabilization where it is available. The green revolution is able to feed people, without most people having to do anything different in how they eat.

The other thing is that people don't really think this is a true emergency. An evidence for this is the quote "What if global warming is wrong and we made the planet better?" If it is a true emergency, we should be doing stuff that make the planet worse if it is wrong. We should be pushing nuclear power - even to the the point of reducing existing safety regulations. A Chernobyl every decade is preferable to global warming. Politically, we should be willing to trade existing environmental regulation for those which reduce CO2. For example, what if we traded the Endangered species act for a carbon tax?

Third, we should be pushing for research and funding for climate adaptation at his point. The focus has been on mitigation, but it should switch to adaptation. We should be working on scaling up and testing models of carbon sequestration and Geo engineering.

EDIT: Per cbennett's comment, changed prevention to mitigation and mitigation to adaptation to be more in line with official terminology.

Re: The Uninhabitable Earth

#69

Post by cbennett »

epall wrote: post #62
cbennett wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> This person is literally saying we need to be alarmed. And why shouldn't we (he) be doing that? Actually the author's goal is transparent, to shake up perception, to provide fodder in the imagination of folks to ultimately change how urgently we treat this in public forums. I thought this was a quite trenchant point (from the article): >>Over the past decades, our culture has gone apocalyptic with zombie movies an…

Methane deteriorates in the upper atmosphere fairly quickly, whereas CO2 sticks around. Methane is a dramatically better insulator than CO2, so in the short run its impact is higher, but when you stretch out the timescale, your methane is deteriorating while the CO2 sticks around, so the relative impact tilts slowly toward CO2.

While you are right that methane wont naturally stick around for ever, and that it breaks down sooner than CO2. After googling around a little, I finally managed to find the source of the author's two numbers, and in the end I am more troubled than ever :/

>>At issue is the global warming potential (GWP), a number that allows experts to compare methane with its better-known cousin, carbon dioxide. While CO2 persists in the atmosphere for centuries, or even millennia, methane warms the planet on steroids for a decade or two before decaying to CO2. In those short decades, methane warms the planet by 86 times as much as CO2, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But policymakers typically ignore methane's warming potential over 20 years (GWP20) when assembling a nation's emissions inventory. Instead, they stretch out methane's warming impacts over a century, which makes the gas appear more benign than it is, experts said. The 100-year warming potential (GWP100) of methane is 34, according to the IPCC.[1]

Doesn't 'reducing' (really, normalizing) the GWP for the ~80 yrs of the 100yr period (when it is not existing) seem sort of like an accounting trick? In other words, if 20GT of CH4 were released next year from the Bering Sea into the atmosphere (this would be spectacularly bad), the overall shock to the climate/atmosphere systems is precisely the same.

[1]https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-bad-of-a-gree...

Re: The Uninhabitable Earth

#70

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

awjr wrote: post #5

This always reminds me of this cartoon https://uk.pinterest.com/pin/514325219919218393/ "What if it's a big hoax and we create a better world for nothing?" I think the key point that the article makes is that fossil fuels have enabled much of the industrialisation of the 20th and 21st century but it is also beginning to make certain areas of the world uninhabitable and yet we still seem to want to ignore the warning…

Your quote demonstrates that global warming is either not all that bad or you are not advocating enough stuff to fix it. If it really is an emergency and is that bad, we should be doing stuff that would make our world worse if we are wrong.
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