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Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

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Re: Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

#261
post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Crashing the economy" is literally the worst thing you could do to fix climate change. Even in a stagnant economy, people are still commuting to and from work in their gas-guzzling cars, and heating their homes in the winter. CO2 emissions aren't going to change a ton. But what a stagnant economy does is prevent any kind of investment in renewable energy and electrification, because there's no excess money to use fo…

You don't need private investment to do electrification and renewable energy. That can be done by the government. Which doesn't have funding problems, ever.

Late USSR had funding problems. Crashed due to having them. So governments have funding problems too.

You may also ask Argentine.

Re: Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

#262
post #98

It's odd how everytime somebody mentions slashing oil production by 50 or 75%, people are immediately up in arms. Same for red meat or cheap air travel. Western rich countries have too many really spoiled consumers. It's weird to say, but we should crash the economy if it can slow down climate change. I mean there are plenty people in other parts of the world who don't have such a high standard of living, and it's no…

You realize that would cause countless death _today_ if you don’t replace the oil with something else? People will starve, become homeless, and maybe anarchy will reign. Not just in the developed world but globally.

This is only true if you literally crash the economy and do nothing else. What we can do is instead shift priorities, like food and housing security, while reducing the economy by not doing useless, pointless things. Do we really need all these things we buy at the store now?

Re: Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

#264
"China, the United States and India — contribute 42.6% total emissions, while the bottom 100 countries only account for only 2.9%.". Asia is the largest emitter with China at 27%". While selling renewables to the rest of the world, China seems reluctant to reduce its reliance on coal-fired power stations.

'Global Energy Monitor and the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air finds the country quadrupled the amount of new coal power approvals in 2022 compared to 2021.'

Chinese scientists are hardly backward in understanding climate science. So what's the logic here? Presumably if they could maintain energy supplies without coal, they would.

https://ourworldindata.org/annual-co2-emissions https://energyandcleanair.org/publication/china-permits-two-...

Re: Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I upvoted you, but IMO: - private cars and their usage are too cheap - air travel is too cheap - producing garbage is to cheap - politics is top centered around providing infinte fuel for "growth" instead of distributing resources rationally Yes, this is a political opinion. The stunt many people do is pretending that climate denialism and politics centered on fueling growth are not a political opinion but "rational"…

Agreed, both on the whole and in the details. But if I'm forced into the "either/or" mindset of the OP of a hypothetical choice to shrink GDP by 1% by stopping all vacation car travel or deficit spend 1% GDP as a "Manhattan Project" to get lab grown beef commercially viable, I'm voting for the latter.

The latter sounds like fantasy though, and it's not the lab-grown meat per se I'm talking about.

Also I wasn't talking about car usage exclusively during vacations, I was explicitly talking about private car usage.

People literally get governmental subsidies for building homes in the suburbs, then commute by car and pollute the planet in order to avoid car traffic.

Anyone who fails to see the absurdity of this has drank too much Kool-aid for my taste.

Re: Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

#266
post #227

[dead]

To save someone a click, it's this sort of drivel with no citations:

> Furthermore, we have recently detected a number of alarming anomalies in all the layers of the Earth system. There is an extraordinary displacement and destabilization of the Earth’s core, a sporadic and chaotic acceleration of the planet’s rotation, and a shift in its rotational axis. This scenario is compounded by a critical weakening and emergence of atypical anomalies of the magnetic field, and a change in the composition of the upper layers of the atmosphere. These events have culminated in an extreme activation of magmatic foci, and an accompanying increase in deep mantle earthquakes - bringing about a decrease in the thermal conductivity of the ocean. As a consequential result, our oceans have lost their ability to function as a compensatory and cooling mechanism. All these alarming factors indicate only one thing - To Wit, Our planet is on the verge of self-destruction, and humanity has only a few years remaining to avert this impending catastrophe.

Re: Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

#267
post #14

[flagged]

Dont let global warming get you down, civilizations die all the time, just like that, why ours could wake up dead tomorrow.

I just wish we didn't go down so stupidly. I could understand mere greed. I could even understand ordinary ignorance.

Instead, we chose stupidity. The answers were right there. It wasn't a secret and it wasn't all that difficult. Instead people pretended it was a vast conspiracy against them, denying both basic physics and the data.

We still debate why and how Rome fell, but they'll look back at us and say, "yeah, they were just a bunch of dumbfucks."

Re: Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

#268
post #98

It's odd how everytime somebody mentions slashing oil production by 50 or 75%, people are immediately up in arms. Same for red meat or cheap air travel. Western rich countries have too many really spoiled consumers. It's weird to say, but we should crash the economy if it can slow down climate change. I mean there are plenty people in other parts of the world who don't have such a high standard of living, and it's no…

> there are plenty people in other parts of the world who don't have such a high standard of living, and it's not that big of a problem. Go live like that for 6 months and get back to us: food insecurity, inadequate healthcare, and few civil services or safety net. Those other countries are not net zero pollution either. You wanna crash the economy? How then will we develop the innovations to fix this problem? Can't…

It also completely ignores the fact that developing countries move exactly to what the Western world does.

Why do so many people eat insects or are pure vegetarian in India? Because many are simply too poor to afford meat. You know what's one of the first major things Indians change when their wealth increases? Adding more meat to their diets.

Re: Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

#269
post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Europe doesn't have food insecurity. Health is pretty good and there's a safety net. Even China scores pretty well on those points. Yet their per capita emissions are much lower than the US.

Europe has tons of cars and air travel that is cheaper and more plentiful than that of US.

Europe may have many cars, but they are smaller and drive shorter distance.

Perhaps air travel is cheaper. But wages are lower meaning people need to work more hours before they can take a flight.

Re: Earth had hottest 3-months on record; unprecedented sea temps & extreme weather

#270
post #98

It's odd how everytime somebody mentions slashing oil production by 50 or 75%, people are immediately up in arms. Same for red meat or cheap air travel. Western rich countries have too many really spoiled consumers. It's weird to say, but we should crash the economy if it can slow down climate change. I mean there are plenty people in other parts of the world who don't have such a high standard of living, and it's no…

Have you done the cost:benefit analysis? Curious what makes you so confident that "crashing the economy" (you're aware of all the excess death and despair this would cause?) is the best move here.

I feel like maybe some Western leaders have done a bit of this, and their conclusion has been "Let's let the poorer few billion of the world die rather than fuck up our own electorates' lives.". Obviously with a bit of twist and turns like "My hands are tied, I don't want to crash my economy by being super radical (so I'll adjust things a little here and there like asking car manufacturers to promise to be neutral by 2035), but external effects like death and destruction in poorer countries? Well... that's their own shit to deal with."
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