191–200 of 471 posts
But at least we can talk to search engines now
This has nothing to do with AI really. It's a century of pumping out CO2, not 2 years. Maybe in the future... but you can't blame AI for this year.
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oh, yes. Anything but stopping the extraction, trade or combustion of fossil fuels. Even if the workarounds have unforeseen consequences.
Let's say a magical enviro-fascist cabal of superhumans appears tomorrow and are somehow able to completely dismantle and ban all sources of energy that emit large amounts of CO2 while also somehow providing replacement quantities of non-emitting alternatives (e.g. wind, solar, and nuclear). In this environment we will still need to geoengineer the planet for as long as the carbon we have already burned remains in th…
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El Nino involves moving moisture around, not just reducing precipitation all over. So the opposite can also be seen in some places. The eastern US and parts of the midwest have had a very good year, an the US harvest of maize is projected to be the 2nd highest ever, slightly above 16 billion bushels. Locally (New York state), things have been so wet we're seeing premature leaf drops from maple trees due to leaf fungu…
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AMOC collapse [0] is Europe's potential big climate challenge. Nasty business. I wonder how to help prevent that from happening. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_meridional_overturnin...
Get in a time machine. Go back to 1970. Make sure world starts phasing out all coal power by 2000, replacing with nuclear and what renewables are available then, and make sure modular scalable reactors are available for China so they use that instead of coal to power their rise. Convince everyone that late 20th century unscientific greens are full of shit and nuclear power is better than coal. (Renewables were not fu…
The fantasy is that an economic system predicated on infinite growth can be made compatible with finite resources. Take, for example, the fact that renewable energy keeps growing as a percentage of total energy generation, yet total GHG emissions keep rising. That's a result of the system of incentives set up by capital. Yes, the economy can become less coupled to resources (as it has), but there is a limit, unless you seriously want to argue that iron (for example) can be an arbitrarily small portion of the economy.
An economy is a method of allocating resources. This economic system is extremely terrible at meeting base human needs (consider that we produce many times the amount of food that's needed to feed everyone's needs, but massive amounts of it used for industrial meat production and biofuels).
> we are never returning to pre industrial times
This is an absurd strawman.
> everyone needs to become poorer
This is, in fact, the industry propaganda. What degrowth advocates for is taking as our first priority meeting human needs and living sustainably (which can be made compatible with most of the technology we have today in some form), rather than the ideology of growth for growth's sake, which mainly results in massive amounts of wasted resources and funnelling wealth into the hands of a few.
> “Hey Africa, we know we colonized you and all but can you do us a favor and stay poor to help fix the problem we mostly caused?” There is not enough “fuck you” in the universe for that one.
This is misdirection. Getting water, food, shelter, and medicine for everyone on the planet is well within our means as a species. It is the ideology of free movement for goods but not people and infinite growth that makes it impossible to meet those needs, because it requires and underclass who can be used for cheap labour and contained in states built for that purpose.
It's not poor people who stand to lose from degrowth, it's the ultra rich.
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> because .. inevitably .. this super dry summer means there will be heavier rains in October What's the process here for that region? I don't think the moisture is waiting anywhere.
I’ve had it explained to me that it evaporates in the heat and gets deposited in the mountains and the atmosphere above the more northern states, where .. once things cool down, it condenses and moves through tributaries in a big rush or two during the massive temperature changes of October/November. The thunder storms we’ve had in Vienna in the last few years have produced amazing floods - reminiscent of the desert…
I have an ancient forest near where I live in Switzerland. In the core zone of the forest they do no maintenance whatsoever. The trees live, they get gigantic and very old. They die. At some point the top breaks off and then many years later the rest of the tree is so fungus-eaten it tips over too and rots on the ground. Sunlight never reaches the ground because of the tall giant trees so there's no undergrowth. It's…
AMOC collapse [0] is Europe's potential big climate challenge. Nasty business. I wonder how to help prevent that from happening. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_meridional_overturnin...
Unironically the anti nuclear luddites killed the main chance to be divert climate change that we had over unfounded fearmongering
* Building nuclear plants is a 5-10 year plan. More if you haven't built them in a while.
* The first economy in the world has quite literally started wars over oil because it wants to keep using it.
* The countries that would be the biggest emitters right now are also the ones doing the most in electrification.
Building more nuclear wouldn't have changed shit: there is an ongoing work to maintain the world dependent on fossil fuels. We can't even get electric cars to properly pick up.
I have an ancient forest near where I live in Switzerland. In the core zone of the forest they do no maintenance whatsoever. The trees live, they get gigantic and very old. They die. At some point the top breaks off and then many years later the rest of the tree is so fungus-eaten it tips over too and rots on the ground. Sunlight never reaches the ground because of the tall giant trees so there's no undergrowth. It's…
That forest was crispy dry, almost dusty in recent weeks. One spark could burn it all down easily. We had... 2 properly rainy days through whole summer? Few thunderstorms but they were very local, and all of them avoided directly our area and that forest like plague.
At least those crayfish managed to survive as I've seen 2 last week, they are more susceptible to water pollution and some brutal fungal infection which can be brought from other streams and basically sterilize whole stream (happened in other parts of our canton around Lausanne). Water somehow didn't stop. Back where I come from in eastern Europe their local crayfish weren't often so lucky - streams bone dry.
Just took a train ride from Vienna to Budapest for a few days, and couldn’t help but notice how very, very dry everything is .. as an Australian living in Europe for a few decades now, I’ve always been intrigued by just how green everything is, literally something growing in every single crack in the pavement, or endless rolling green fields of prosperity during spring - whereas, where I’m from its year-long spinifex…
It’s not really a common perspective, but I have a theory that the primary cause of especially this kind of drought has way more to do with Europe essentially draining itself through all of the river straightening projects of the 19th century. How could it not be. Before all the industrial age river straightening that has gone on until even rather recently with damming and concrete encasement projects in I think even…
It would be interesting to see whether one could apply that to European waterways as part of marshland regeneration.
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It was in a much steadier state for hundreds of thousands of years before the 20th century. Don't be obtuse.
The vast majority of people concerned about climate change think there is some paradise we could have kept if only we hadn't been so "climate-sinful". It's uncomfortable to contemplate that the world is changing uncontrollably around you.