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Tokyo Is Preparing for Floods ‘Beyond Anything We’ve Seen’

nytimes.com

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Re: Tokyo Is Preparing for Floods ‘Beyond Anything We’ve Seen’

#71

Post by jacobolus »

nostrademons wrote: post #65
jacobolus wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that we could be headed for a mass extinction, whether or not humans manage to survive thousands of years longer. We aren’t going to entirely destroy life on the planet, which will eventually recover great diversity (speciation to fill new ecological niches in some new stable equilibrium) within a few million years after we’re gone, but it will look significantly different than what we are familiar with. Tha…

We're not, actually: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/06/the-ends... I used to think that we were, and when I read that article, I kept looking for flaws in its logic or counterexamples in other press. But ultimately, it interviews a real expert, and his logic is correct: we're drawn to flashy apex predators at the top of the food web, but these species spring in and out of existence all the time, and…

Okay.

> “I think that if we keep things up long enough, we’ll get to a mass extinction, but we’re not in a mass extinction yet, and I think that’s an optimistic discovery because that means we actually have time to avoid Armageddon,” he said. [...]

> “The only hope we have in the future,” Erwin said, “is if we’re not in a mass extinction event.”

* * *

I guess it’s a bit fuzzy where you draw the line. Perhaps mass extinction is not an inevitability and concerted global action or some technological breakthroughs could still save us, but it has an uncomfortably high likelihood considering how bad humans are at staving off uncertain long-term threats.

Re: Tokyo Is Preparing for Floods ‘Beyond Anything We’ve Seen’

#72

Post by roenxi »

savanaly wrote: post #33
ctdonath wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yet everyone there still drives everywhere spewing carbon into their own air with every trip This. Every single person who claims they believe global climate change is a very serious, and man-made, problem absolutely should be taking personal steps now to address it. Telecommuting is a thing. Home-solar is a thing. Electric cars are a thing. Quit telling _others_ to solve the problems, and start doing it personally,…

This doesn't add up to me. I can be one of the two people in a prisoner's dilemma scenario and fully acknowledge the reality that I might be heading to jail while still playing the selfish strategy of snitching. Just because you recognize that your personal actions won't affect the outcome as it pertains to you doesn't mean you can't recognize that the personal actions of a large number of other people will affect th…

This isn't prisoner's dilemma though - everyone has a full ability to communicate with each other. That breaks a pretty basic assumption.

To stretch your analogy, you are playing prisoners dilemma with someone who is swearing he will snitch, has a lawyer who is saying "my client will cooperate fully with the police" and who has signed a document explaining the facts.

Re: Tokyo Is Preparing for Floods ‘Beyond Anything We’ve Seen’

#73

Post by jacobolus »

averagewall wrote: post #68
jacobolus wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that we could be headed for a mass extinction, whether or not humans manage to survive thousands of years longer. We aren’t going to entirely destroy life on the planet, which will eventually recover great diversity (speciation to fill new ecological niches in some new stable equilibrium) within a few million years after we’re gone, but it will look significantly different than what we are familiar with. Tha…

This issue is too political for normal people to properly understand. I don't mean to offend you personally but there's little value in the feelings of someone who's been immersed in a social atmosphere of global warming propaganda, calls to action, and pressure to shut down dissenting voices. Even scientists can't safely publish work on positive effects of climate change or areas where it's not as bad as previously…

If we manage to e.g. change ocean conditions enough (and the changes are already dramatic) to take out a significant proportion of the plankton in the world, it’s not going to go well for us.

Re: Tokyo Is Preparing for Floods ‘Beyond Anything We’ve Seen’

#74

Post by jjawssd »

jacobolus wrote: post #57
ctdonath wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yet everyone there still drives everywhere spewing carbon into their own air with every trip This. Every single person who claims they believe global climate change is a very serious, and man-made, problem absolutely should be taking personal steps now to address it. Telecommuting is a thing. Home-solar is a thing. Electric cars are a thing. Quit telling _others_ to solve the problems, and start doing it personally,…

There’s nothing inherently wrong with taking personal steps, but by themselves they are largely worthless. It’s like optimizing an I/O bound program by speeding up some of the arithmetic operations not on any critical path. Telling people who continue to commute by car or use grid electricity or travel internationally that they don’t really care about climate change is idiotic – not just useless but actively counterp…

Your basic unquestioned assumptions are that humans have a non-negligible effect on global warming and that global warming exists. Instead of jumping to conclusions, we must also question and analyze the existing evidence for the premise.

Re: Tokyo Is Preparing for Floods ‘Beyond Anything We’ve Seen’

#75

Post by alexanderstears »

jacobolus wrote: post #57
ctdonath wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yet everyone there still drives everywhere spewing carbon into their own air with every trip This. Every single person who claims they believe global climate change is a very serious, and man-made, problem absolutely should be taking personal steps now to address it. Telecommuting is a thing. Home-solar is a thing. Electric cars are a thing. Quit telling _others_ to solve the problems, and start doing it personally,…

There’s nothing inherently wrong with taking personal steps, but by themselves they are largely worthless. It’s like optimizing an I/O bound program by speeding up some of the arithmetic operations not on any critical path. Telling people who continue to commute by car or use grid electricity or travel internationally that they don’t really care about climate change is idiotic – not just useless but actively counterp…

Telling people who continue to commute by car or use grid electricity or travel internationally that they don’t really care about climate change is idiotic

That's a strawman. What the parent comment says is that people's behavior reveals their preferences. A more clear example is this - someone who drives a Suburban for fun and burns their trash isn't in a good position to demand that others go out of their way to treat the earth better.

Re: Tokyo Is Preparing for Floods ‘Beyond Anything We’ve Seen’

#76

Post by yongjik »

nostrademons wrote: post #34
blondie9x wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adaptation without mitigation will not be effective as the impacts worsen. Uncapped emissions and business as usual scenarios will cause outcomes that we will not be able to build ourselves out of. We must reduce emissions and push for sustainable infrastructure and solutions, now. We must adapt and we must also mitigate. Only through the combination of both efforts and through our determination and willingness to le…

Nah, the problem is self-limiting. If global warming reduces the carrying capacity of the environment, people will die. Dead people don't use resources; their bodies are returned to the environment by decomposers, where they will provide fertilizer for trees and other plants, which will grow even more abundantly because of the enhanced CO2 levels. Eventually the earth reaches a new equilibrium at a somewhat higher te…

LOL. Sigh. Why does global warming attract this particular brand of sophistry all the time?

"President, what's your solution to the North Korean nukes?"

"Nothing to worry: the problem is self-limiting. If they start a nuclear war, billions will die, and then the survivors will be too poor to build any more nuclear weapons, so naturally there will be no more nuclear wars."

"But what about Puerto Rico? When are the aids coming?"

"The problem is self-limiting. If we do nothing, most of them will die or simply move to somewhere else, and then next time another hurricane hits there will be less people to die!"

Re: Tokyo Is Preparing for Floods ‘Beyond Anything We’ve Seen’

#77

Post by dghughes »

KGIII wrote: post #39
emodendroket wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, nobody would have undertaken the Big Dig if the true cost were known up-front. And a debt that's 200% GDP is a unique circumstance.

The Big Dig may have been closer to the budget, except it kept getting changed. An example would be that they initially planned on shutting down certain routes until a politician decided to announce that traffic flow would not be disrupted. That's great if you're paid to model the traffic but probably not so great if you now have to pay the added expenses.

But that indicates the project was not planned well since change requests for such a large project would have been expected.

Re: Tokyo Is Preparing for Floods ‘Beyond Anything We’ve Seen’

#78

Post by alexanderstears »

KVFinn wrote: post #62
ctdonath wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yet everyone there still drives everywhere spewing carbon into their own air with every trip This. Every single person who claims they believe global climate change is a very serious, and man-made, problem absolutely should be taking personal steps now to address it. Telecommuting is a thing. Home-solar is a thing. Electric cars are a thing. Quit telling _others_ to solve the problems, and start doing it personally,…

>Every single person who claims they believe global climate change is a very serious, and man-made, problem absolutely should be taking personal steps now to address it. Quit telling _others_ to solve the problems, and start doing it personally, now. This being effective seems contrary to everything we know about economics. If even a huge portion of people voluntary lower consumption or energy usage, it frees up that…

If even a huge portion of people voluntary lower consumption or energy usage, it frees up that energy to be consumed more cheaply by other people

Not really, oil extraction is capital intensive, oil wells have finite lives, and you can count on people extracting the cheapest oil first. As fossil fuel demand drops, the risk of operating a well increases and that makes borrowing more expensive, the capital costs will be amortized across less energy so the energy will have to be more expensive, and energy should naturally get more expensive as time goes on and the easiest oil is depleted. Sure, technology changes and reduces the cost of extraction but moving away from fossil fuels isn't an incentive for developing more extraction technology.

Not to mention that people's investments in alternative fuels / transportation brings the costs down for everyone else and as costs go down, more and more people will be willing to pay the eco-friendly premium until some day they're less expensive and people select eco-friendly consumption out of their own self-interest.

I think this day is closer than most people realize for electric cars. Gear heads and regular folks are going to love electric cars when the batteries get better, at some point, it's going to cost a lot extra to get a ICE vehicle and that's going to be a rent extraction on idiots who dream of rolling coal in F250s.

Re: Tokyo Is Preparing for Floods ‘Beyond Anything We’ve Seen’

#79

Post by comex »

ctdonath wrote: post #59
notyourday wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every single person who claims they believe global climate change is a very serious, and man-made, problem absolutely should be taking personal steps now to address it. Telecommuting is a thing. Home-solar is a thing. Electric cars are a thing. Quit telling _others_ to solve the problems, and start doing it personally, now. Let me get it straight, you mean Leonardo Di Caprio, George Clooney and Al Gore should live…

Cognitive dissonance is unbecoming. Spewing tons of CO2 en route to a CO2 control conference, when the same ends could be met via teleconference, is hypocrisy. You can live well while reducing your impact on the environment. They certainly have the money to.

Is it? I don’t think teleconferencing technology is at a state (yet) where it’s nearly as effective at conveying messages and building relationships as in-person conferencing. It‘s closer than it used to be, and it may get closer still in the future (e.g. if VR gets good enough that people want to use it for that), but for now it’s not there. Teleconferencing also has a public perception of being cheaper and thus less important. So, if the goal of a conference is to cause some measurable reduction in the expected amount of carbon being dumped in the future, by encouraging government action and such - it’s certainly debatable whether conferences can actually achieve that goal, but that’s the goal - then a virtual conference would probably result in a substantially smaller reduction. And if a substantial portion of a measurable change is measurable, then it’s a lot bigger than the CO2 cost of some plane tickets, which at a global scale is immeasurable.

On the other hand, making a point of using telecommunications could make for a good PR stunt, which could increase attention and thus effectiveness. It could also help promote the idea of using teleconferencing as an environmental measure. Overall, though, I’m not sure how good a stunt it’d be - it might give people the impression that fighting climate change requires people to make great personal sacrifices in their way of life, which, whether or not it’s true, could hurt the cause by creating cognitive dissonance. (I’m pretty sure it’s not true, per se. Rather, it would require a ton of money, which would hurt people’s way of life indirectly, but not as obviously.)

Re: Tokyo Is Preparing for Floods ‘Beyond Anything We’ve Seen’

#80

Post by alexanderstears »

WalterBright wrote: post #36
ctdonath wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yet everyone there still drives everywhere spewing carbon into their own air with every trip This. Every single person who claims they believe global climate change is a very serious, and man-made, problem absolutely should be taking personal steps now to address it. Telecommuting is a thing. Home-solar is a thing. Electric cars are a thing. Quit telling _others_ to solve the problems, and start doing it personally,…

Changing economic behavior with public campaigns has a pretty much zero success rate. Anyone remember Pres Ford's "WIP" buttons (Whip Inflation Now)? It had the hubris that inflation could be stopped if only people would just stop raising prices. Even as a kid, I laughed at the absurdity of that campaign. Of course it had zero effect. Something that will work is to tax pollution, i.e. a carbon tax. Making it more exp…

Changing economic behavior with public campaigns has a pretty much zero success rate.

yet advertising and marketing happens.

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