Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, the point of a futures market is to have a reliable supply which matches demand and allows everyone who works to produce and use a given commodity to have a reasonable expectation of demand and how production should be matched to it. Goldman-Sachs should _not_ be inserting themselves into profiting on the poor's daily bread. https://theecologist.org/2011/sep/13/how-goldman-sachs-start...
A "reliable supply" is fundamentally not possible with all the vagaries of the natural world. Even the Code of Hammurabi makes reference to this*, and we still have "acts of god" in modern parlance. Futures significantly pre-date your link. * https://ehammurabi.org/law/48
Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter
231–240 of 401 posts
Re: Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter
#232Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cheap cooling vests distributed at scale, kept cool or "recharged" by a portable and unpluggable solar panel, seems necessary. Individual air conditioning is too expensive and most affected people need to work outside during the daytime.
The solution to climate change is definitely not more gadgets and power use.
In any case, the effects of extreme heat on the body are the easiest part of climate change to mitigate with current technology. The hard part is the famine.
Re: Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter
#233Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is this actually true? That sounds suspicious. I’d love to see that data.
https://www.ucs.org/resources/us-military-and-oil that article links to the dod's own reporting.
What you said is much more vague and could be reasonably interpreted to mean “the DoD uses more fossil fuels than the entire country of China,” which seems intuitively false.
Re: Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter
#234Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But we also have recent history demonstrating that this will not be allowed to happen, no matter how much starvation there is in poorer countries, we WILL have our steaks. Not negotiable. Indeed, though given Trump's behaviour I have wondered what will happen when it's poorer *US states*. Fortunately, the farmers had a word and seem to have stopped the deportation of the undocumented (illegal) immigrants who do so…
Anyone who is actually wondering hasn’t been paying attention.
He may do a Mugabe and reward the faithful at the expense of the nation. He may do a Pol Pot, and punish the opposition until there are none left and then turn on the faithful and only get stopped when their internal crimes against humanity cross an international border and a foreign army steps in. He may do a Stalin and deny (or be ignorant of due to all the sycophants) the existence of a problem. He may say the equivalent of "Let them eat cake" and bring a repeat of all that entails.
Based on precedent, in such a hypothetical, I suspect he will put a 1000% tariff on all food imports to raise enough money to feed everyone, which obviously won't work but he won't know that, and then complain about how unfair everyone is being.
Re: Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter
#235All we needed to do was stop burning fossil fuels we really are fucking dense.
Re: Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are fishing boats doing that could cause so much emissions in a single day?
You're dragging heavy nets on the sea floor releasing heavy amounts of carbon dioxide and destroying ecosystems that are net contributors to decarbonization like seaweed, seagrass, etc. A single boat with a single net can do insane damage in a single day. The problem is: when it comes to industrial food production, both fish and meat are insanely taxing on the environment. But people, we, *don't want to accept that h…
And the ideal, carbon-neutral reality is difficult to stomach: We humans just go back to the old ways (maybe the stone age is about the right period), wherein:
We build some stuff out of rocks (which themselves are difficult to form without even so much as copper tools). We use trees and plants where we have them (and we tend to die off when the use becomes unsustainable).
We grow and produce what we can on our own, and we do not tend to travel very far to trade for other things.
When the weather regionally turns ugly for a season or two, as it must eventually do, we have no fallback plan other than to starve until our numbers decrease to something that can be sustained (which may be zero).
We did all that stuff once. I don't think anyone really wants to go back to those methods.
So we do change what we can, where we can tolerate that change: It may be contradictive in some ways to charge up an EV at home with solar power and then make a special trip in that EV to pick up some cheeseburgers, but it's still an improvement over changing nothing at all.
And sure: We can do even better than that. We can build neighborhoods that are safe and efficient to walk or bike in so that it's more practical to get a cheeseburger without driving, and promote more of them by actually choosing to live in them. We can choose to eschew cheeseburgers altogether. There's lots of things we can do. There's a lot that we are doing.
(And I'm going to think about many of those ways this afternoon, in just a couple of hours after the weather dries up some, as predicted by our amazing computing-machines. I'll wash my hands with clean running water from the pipeline that runs all the way to my kitchen both before and after I get some prefabulated burger patties out of my grid-powered freezer and fire up the propane grill.
I'll do all of this while I bask in the unbridled decadence of not having had any opportunities to form memories of nearly running out of food as the yet another winter tirelessly wore on.
After that, I think I might work some on getting networked audio happening with Dante on my Linux desktop. I've got time for that kind of thing, since I'm not out tending the fields and chasing away the thieving poors with a stone hoe.)
Re: Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Nobody in planet modelling has ever suggested that the 3 phase El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) We saw already around 2020 or so that specialists opinions didn't really matter. Feelings and politicians opinions were more relevant... so "nobody in planet modelling" means nothing if Politicians and Activists tries to create this link.. Al Gore, if I remember correctly, and António Guterres, i think last month, tri…
The most anti-facts and anti reality bulshit comes from people who mock feelings and opinions while framing themselves as factual and u biases. Especially in climate change "debate".
Re: Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter
#238Earlier quoted context omitted.
The world is bigger than your relatives. I'm sure he was referring to already food insecure places. The rich countries will have food available, probably at elevated prices. In places where there's actual famine people will do crazy things to get their hands on food.
If the plan isn't to stockpile food communally through a big corporation making a tidy profit for being well prepared in a disaster, and it isn't to stockpile it personally... what is the plan? There won't be any food. There are very limited options here. Those two are, by far, the two best ones for reliably being able to access food. Someone has to build up a reserve. Literally, you should to be able to point someon…
> Ideally that someone who is very, very motivated to get it right and make it happen. Those big corporations charging extra are going to keep people fed.
They (a corporation) are motivated, by profit. Meaning some people will remain fed because they can afford it. The rest will not be fed. I simply don't think that's ethical.
Re: Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter
#239Re: Super El Niño Keeps Growing as New Forecasts Reach Record Territory Ahead Winter
#240Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was inevitable we'd get to the point where climate change began substantially disrupting ecology and human livelihoods. Looks like we're ahead of schedule. People dying from extreme heatwaves, weather, and famines due to climate change has been predicted for decades at this point; and this is exactly the sort of climatic setup that will enable this to happen.
> People dying from extreme heatwaves, weather, and famines due to climate change has been predicted for decades at this point; and this is exactly the sort of climatic setup that will enable this to happen. Yeah, people have been "predicting" it, but the fact is that this is currently mostly hyperbole, driven by bad reporting and activist exaggeration. What is happening, right now, is that winters are mostly getting…
>Setting aside the debates about model quality, etc., surely we can all agree that predictions are not evidence?
Predictions are warnings. When we have the evidence it will be too late. So let me ask you, what direction are we headed?