71–80 of 104 posts
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I read somewhere that the soil is the problem, not just the local climate. And soil takes a long time to accumulate the good stuff. So in short, places with good soil will become less farmable and places with now better climate won’t have good soil. We’re all kinda screwed then.
Soil is not an essential piece to growing crops. Even now hydroponics is taking off in many places.
The Newsroom said it best, "your house is burning to the ground, the situation is dire; your house has already burned to the ground, situation's over." [1] I don't see a way that we plausibly reverse course, when nearly every government, the people running them, and the private sector leaders are all just doing an end-run to accumulate as much as they can, planet be damned. Every "climate target" gets re-evaluated an…
> Barring moonshot tech breakthrough or militant scaling-down of consumption worldwide, how can we survive? Just bare with it? The frequent storms, and severe weather frequenting USA in recent years are nothing special in East Asia. 1m Downpour rainfall is an annual event in much of India. Snowstorms where you see no more than a few meters are also very survivable, and people can adapt to live with them. Kilometers l…
I found this to be so fascinating, "At a certain point, nature takes over. Even the most forward-thinking legislature in the world can’t pass a law banning emissions from permafrost."
Solar geoengineering could potentially stop further thawing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_geoengineering
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> Barring moonshot tech breakthrough or militant scaling-down of consumption worldwide, how can we survive? Just bare with it? The frequent storms, and severe weather frequenting USA in recent years are nothing special in East Asia. 1m Downpour rainfall is an annual event in much of India. Snowstorms where you see no more than a few meters are also very survivable, and people can adapt to live with them. Kilometers l…
What about temperatures up to 49 degrees Celsius, like the heatwave in India back in 2019? If the air is moist, it can become literally impossible for even healthy humans to survive without some external way of cooling off.
Once the permafrost starts melting off, there isn’t much time left for us. Hold your children tight, and comfort them for the rest of their short lives.
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There are surely economic niches where fossil fuels will survive for much longer than the 8–16-year transition period I'm talking about, for example in submarines and circumpolar research stations, but I think the picture for fossil fuels is considerably less rosy than you suggest. Burning fossil fuels requires not only continuing operational expenses to extract them from the ground but also capital expenditures to b…
I don't disagree on the price signals, but this is the logic of corporations with assets, liabilities, cash flows, investors, boards, etc. It isn't necessarily the same as the logic of nation-states sitting on finite resources that may, from some point, only fall in total value. Or the logic of money launderers, who are perfectly willing to make terrible deals in order to convert undesirable resources into desirable…
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Coordination problem: whoever takes a break gets invaded, overthrown, and annexed by whoever doesn't.
Really? Let's take the case of Switzerland, everyone wants to go there, they are literally spending money to supress the increasing exchange rate to avoid a collaps of exports... what would happen if they took a years break.. I mean maybe it would be better, letting the CHF, go higher , allowing the swiss to leave to greener pastures, allowing others to visit such a beautiful country (and use the empty living space f…
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If only we could invent some kind of living organisms which consume CO2 and emit oxygen! (Sorry, it’s a little snarky!) I’m all seriousness, earth seems to find a balance when it goes through these types of events. Whether we’ll make it through the ride is to be seen.
You are right, Earth does have mechanisms through which it regulates the CO2 and tries to bring it back to "balance". But it is important to note that these mechanics (e.g. increased in weathering) take 10s-100s of thousands of years to take effect.
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That’s probably a significantly more difficult problem than stopping pollution as you actually need someone to pay for it directly. And of course we don’t know a good way to only try and cool the Arctic. You can ballpark this yourself a 288 K black body in equilibrium is radiating as much energy as it receives, at T^4. To drop that by 1C to 287K means blocking 1- ( 287^4 /288^4) or roughly 1.4% of all sunlight. As th…
Why does every solar geoengineering project seem to pretend that decreasing solar radiation wouldn't impact photosynthesis which also binds CO2, and, uh, supports the entire food web / our civilization? We already are massively stressing the biosphere: mass extinctions, mass destruction of habitat, mass disruption of migration patterns, warming, plastic pollution, invasive species. And the suggestion is to reduce inc…
Since the sulfur dioxide goes away after a year or two, if it does start to cause a problem then you can simply stop emitting it. However, if you absolutely want to avoid potential impact on crops, another proposed method is to use a fleet of wind-driven ships, seeding low-lying clouds over the oceans.
As for storing CO2 underground, there is one method that might work: pumping it into basalt formations, where it turns into rock in about a year. There are several pilot projects doing this.
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> The gases being released aren't toxic until a hundred times higher than current levels. You obviously have no idea what you are talking about. Current atmospheric CO2 level is 400ppm which already has a measurable impact on performance on tasks (compared to 250ppm couple decades ago). Increasing it to just 1000ppm further degrades performance. And 2500ppm makes it difficult to concentrate on anything complex. Even…
As a casual observer trying to follow the conversation and learn more, I would prefer to hear just the facts with the data to support it, rather than the personal attacks regardless of whether you think they’re fair or not.
It is now socially more acceptable to post obvious falsehoods than to point it out. Think about it.