World Scientists’ Warning of a Climate Emergency

Relevant Posted today: The Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), Portugal Space Agency (PT Space), European Space Agency (ESA) and Unbabel Labs open competition for a €500,000 award that will combine Artificial Intelligence and space technologies to solve major environmental issues. The winning team will present its solution at Web Summit 2020.

https://unbabel.com/news/500k-ai-moonshot-challenge-will-com...

Because there aren’t any solutions we can centrally plan and just make happen between 7-8B people, 200 nation-States, and far more than 200 government jurisdictions without a massive massive massive body count.

The cost of doing nothing is that there will still be a high body count.

Look at the solutions proposed: more forest land. Yes, we need more forest land, we need to save what forests we can, but growing new forests to a venerable age takes time, and I’m not convinced we can do so in a sustainable manner at scale given our preponderance to farm mono cultures which will be susceptible to disease before any of their benefits can even be realized.

There’s the existing forests, but it turns out the nations that own those forests, because national borders and all that, would really like to develop that land. Brazil has outright rejected foreign intervention in their latest elections by political, economic, and diplomatic means. So do you want to be the one to suggest we invade Brazil and hold them in economic subjugation at literal gunpoint?

And then there’s the eugenics program that they don’t want to call eugenics, but ultimately it is a eugenics program. Getting people to have fewer babies is a good way to reduce the population, but the problem is poorer countries are going to continue to have more children because it turns out, having that extra household labor is really helpful. Then you get problems like Shinzo Abe all but begging his nation’s people to get freaky and have more babies, or the massive sex imbalance between the PRC and India where there are far more males than females, and there will soon be tens of millions of young adult men with absolutely no chance of having a wife or having their own families.

The truth is, we don’t know what to do. Even if we think we do, we don’t know how to go about it. Even if we make a plan and execute it, we will still be left with a boatload of other problems.

11,000 scientists can sign a letter that we need to do something, but they’re scientists. They’re not politicians. They’re not engineers. They’re not soldiers. They’re not farmers. They’re not living with the reality of what they are proposing, nor are they making an effective case because they don’t have a good forum with which to do so.

Here’s what you and I can do though: we can go about our lives until we die, possibly by an environmental catastrophe but more likely old age, and hopefully not trash up the planet too much ourselves before we do. If you want to forego modern conveniences and still be a member of some society, feel free to buy some land and start up an intentional community, take a leaf out of the Amish playbook.

You are describing a deluge, end of times. Not a rise in sea level.

I absolutely hate how such articles are designed to make most readers feel guilty, while not offering any realistic and quantifiable action plan. Nope, the average reader of this will not give up their plans on having a family, to delay the global warming for the less environmentally conscious part of humanity by a couple of milliseconds. They won't change their lifestyle from living in a house, traveling to events and eating tasty food to suddenly sitting in a 100 sqft box and eating sustainable pea soup every day. What those articles do is give more votes to the green politicians, whose platform often consists of taxing things people enjoy and spending that money to produce more fearmongering articles. So instead of a small shop owner flying with their family to a vacation in Hawaii, the same plane seat will be taken by a politician flying to a climate change conference where they will commit to spending more taxpayer money on creating committees, publishing papers and making sure as many people as possible vote green.

On the other hand, there are not many articles on addressing climate change from an engineering standpoint. How much of the CO2 emissions come from burning gasoline? How much of that CO2 could be trapped back by switching to biodiesel? What would be the CO2 output of producing the necessary fertilizers and compensating for the increased corrosiveness? Are there better ways of trapping atmospheric CO2 in something that can be easily loaded into a gas tank in 5 minutes? Can we compensate the greenhouse effect by emitting some reflective particles into the atmosphere?

There are plenty of quantifiable and constructive ways to to reduce the global warming that would actually require research and collaboration across the board, but somehow instead we are stuck in a loop of guilt and are fighting on who should get blamed and taxed for something we are not yet solving.

I wish that were true, but there are already uninhabited islands that have sunk below the waves [1]. There are inhabited ones (e.g. the Carteret islands) which are on their way out and already suffering:

"Since 1994, the islanders of the seven atolls, lying only 1.2 metres above sea level, have already lost about 50 per cent of their land. Traditional food sources have become scarce, regularly placing the islanders in situations of near famine. The communities also face severe water shortages due to prolonged droughts and sea-level rises that affect their freshwater supply." [2]

[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/2146594-eight-low-lying...

[2] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2019-06-11/understanding-...