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The Gargantuan Lie That Is Collapsing the Climate

currentaffairs.org

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Re: The Gargantuan Lie That Is Collapsing the Climate

#141

Post by inigyou »

K0balt wrote: post #112
unsupp0rted wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it be too late?

Because photosynthesis grinds to a halt at about 40c. This is what people are missing. Climate change isn’t the world hiding in their apartments with the AC blasting, its cities burning a week after everything seemed fine. Civilisation takes millennia of stable, plentiful resources to create, and a week without food for 30 percent of the population to utterly destroy. I’d love to be wrong, if you disagree please say…

Climate change is no food next year because this year's heat wave killed all the crops. If we're unlucky. But there's still next year to get unlucky. And the year after that. And the year after that.

Re: The Gargantuan Lie That Is Collapsing the Climate

#142

Post by inigyou »

K0balt wrote: post #137
tim-star wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

at the end of the day 'personal changes' as a fix for climate change are just another lie big corporations fed us to make it feel like the onus was on a personal level. the amount of co2 that industries pollute and that various regulation would be able to change is multiple orders of magnitude compared to regular personal responsibility.

Frankly, the self reinforcing methane loops we have already triggered make emissions almost irrelevant at this point. If we want a planet compatible with human prosperity, we have no choice but to do planetary scale geoengineering; albedo management and metascale carbon capture are really the only options at this point. We crossed the rubicon a few years ago and even stopping emissions altogether tomorrow won’t stop…

What's your evidence we hit the methane runaway tipping point?

Re: The Gargantuan Lie That Is Collapsing the Climate

#143

Post by sdellis »

pingou wrote: post #107
sdellis wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the accumulation of wealth and power. This is the natural consequence of unregulated capitalist incentives. Do you think the corporations care about the individuals?

I suppose you can see it that way, but ultimately the power is mostly in the hands of individuals, either by voting in elections or voting with their wallets. However, this does not mean corporations aren't actively trying to influence and manipulate them, or that they don't exert pressure on politicians. Aren't Americans responsible as a whole for electing Donald Trump, for example?

Over 70% of Americans oppose data centers being built in their local area, yet they continue to be built, even when local elected representatives publicly oppose it. It's easy to see who really has the power and how futile elections can be.

Re: The Gargantuan Lie That Is Collapsing the Climate

#144

Post by sdellis »

geertj wrote: post #99

Sadly I think the only solution is to invest to build more energy infrastructure and more AI, so that in the future when the shit really hits the fan we have enough energy and assistance from AI to create a scalable technology to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere proactively. In my view there is no credible future in which the world will become carbon neutral in 1 or even 10 years. It just ain't happening. This is one o…

AI is literally burning through vast amounts of fossil fuel, all so we can write more homogenous emails and vibe code useless things, and your proposal is moar AI?

Re: The Gargantuan Lie That Is Collapsing the Climate

#145

Post by alexk307 »

yorwba wrote: post #82

I wondered where this article got the idea that "half the planet" would die "in 26 years or less" with 3°C of warming. It appears to be a misreading of the table in https://actuaries.org.uk/media/ni4erlna/planetary-solvency.p... "Figure 12: Planetary solvency risk impact and likelihood definitions (illustrative)" qualified by "A risk impact matrix is a methodology for ranking potential impacts, not a prediction or ce…

Not to mention that if we limited access to fossil fuels today, billions of people would be dead within months. If we turned off the spigot, billions would starve and civilization would collapse quicker than you could say climate change

Re: The Gargantuan Lie That Is Collapsing the Climate

#146

Post by sdellis »

40four wrote: post #51

Okay great. We’re out of time. Fine, we get it. But the problem with this article, and many other similar articles, is it seems like it’s just designed to scare the shit out of us. No call to action, no recommendations in what to do about it. It’s basically insinuating that we, the regular people, are the responsible. As there in-lies the problem, and it makes me furious. The onus to engineer our way out of a climate…

If you are looking for the "call to action," you are missing the entire point of the article. There have been millions of calls to action for over 50 years and they have not made any difference. The point is that we must sit with the fact that it is too late. We have made our death bed and now we must be prepared to deal with what comes next.

Re: The Gargantuan Lie That Is Collapsing the Climate

#147

Post by sdellis »

ghusto wrote: post #109

> This particular sub-genus of grifts, half-truths and strategic omissions ... “Manifest Destiny.” “Aryan superiority.” “The divine right of kings.” “The domino theory.” “Israel has a right to defend itself.” aaaand, you lost me.

If you read the article, he is not saying that Israel doesn't have a right to defend itself. He's saying that Israel's right to defend itself has been a lie told to justify the genocide they are carrying out in Gaza.

Re: The Gargantuan Lie That Is Collapsing the Climate

#148

Post by alexk307 »

> Before that [Holocene], for hundreds of thousands of years in the Pleistocene era, humans (and our hominid ancestors) spent most of their time running from drought, fires, floods, extreme cold and heat, predators, and each other. The population was likely no more than a few million people spread across the whole planet. At one point we may have almost gone extinct, with just 10,000 Homo sapiens clinging to life. But after the advent of the Holocene and its remarkably stable climate, in only 100 centuries the world population has risen to 8 billion.

This is extremely misleading. The "remarkably stable" climate didn't bring the world's population up to 8 billion, it was abundant energy from fossil fuels (7 out of 8 of all of the humans that have ever lived have done so in the industrial era). The Holocene isn't some serene stable climate period - there are still natural disasters at about the same rate they have been occurring throughout the past 11k years - but the difference is that we're much less likely to be killed by them due to abundant energy and technology. The transition from the Pleistocene into the Holocene definitely made life easier, mostly because of the natural warming.

Re: The Gargantuan Lie That Is Collapsing the Climate

#149

Post by polotics »

K0balt wrote: post #135
ericmay wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, because (and I'm being a bit flippant) I sure as hell am not giving up my gas stove while billionaires fly around in private jets and MAGA guys are coal-rolling in their F-250s... It seems to me that carbon capture technology plus renewables and nuclear + dream energy (fission) will be the future but we're probably not going to go off of fossil fuels much, which will necessitate in part the need to suck this…

CO2 capture and planetary albedo management are going to be the only way. For cO2 capture to be meaningful, we need to increase our planetary energy production by 2 or 3x so we can put that energy into sequestration, and obviously those gains cannot be based on fossil fuels. Albedo management is much faster to roll out, but will have a lot of pushback because it will also create locally undesirable outcomes. The tipp…

Just in case if not aware yet: read Termination Shock, a Novel by Neal Stephenson

Re: The Gargantuan Lie That Is Collapsing the Climate

#150

Post by GeoAtreides »

40four wrote: post #51

Okay great. We’re out of time. Fine, we get it. But the problem with this article, and many other similar articles, is it seems like it’s just designed to scare the shit out of us. No call to action, no recommendations in what to do about it. It’s basically insinuating that we, the regular people, are the responsible. As there in-lies the problem, and it makes me furious. The onus to engineer our way out of a climate…

you:

>It’s basically insinuating that we, the regular people, are the responsible.

the article:

>Like all grand lies, “we have more time” takes many different forms, often focus-grouped. [...] There are the queries of “What’s your carbon footprint?,” as if individual people with plastic bags or straws were the problem and not gigantic multinational corporations.

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