111–120 of 146 posts
Australia is burning, its government doesn't seem to think anything is wrong, they just want to dig more coal
Does anyone have a link to the paper? Also climate change is undeniable. At the risk of stirring the controversy, the real questions have always been: how much of it is because of human activity? and if that's significant, how much power do we have to change it further? Based on the evidence so far, I personally think modern civilization has triggered initial conditions for the warming cycle but is no longer the majo…
The real questions should be: what climate do we want and how much power do we have to effect it?
If the climate changes naturally but we don't want it and can stop it, maybe we should. For example, we expect this interglacial period to end between years 10k - 30k, corresponding to about a 10°C drop.
Also, the way best way to reverse current climate trends might be different then stopping the major cause.
It’s likely to kill everyone of us. From the rich to the poor, strong to the weak, through famine, war and drought. Natural disaster after natural disaster. Horror after horror. Tragedy after tragedy. Yet we’re all in state of paralysis, watching our impending doom draw closer and fates unfold. Entrusting those who will do nothing about it. Half of us are still in denial. I really wonder if we possess the survival in…
The only way to get out of this situation is a green dictatorship. It's the least painful solution. Democracy and freedom are great things, but consumerism abused them, and it's leading everyone to their own destruction. I'm tired to end discussions with "but you cannot confiscate things from people, it's against basic human rights". Ignorance and failure to listen to reason are very dangerous. I want to hope people…
The only way to get out of this situation is a green dictatorship. It's the least painful solution. Democracy and freedom are great things, but consumerism abused them, and it's leading everyone to their own destruction. I'm tired to end discussions with "but you cannot confiscate things from people, it's against basic human rights". Ignorance and failure to listen to reason are very dangerous. I want to hope people…
If you really want to kick off another civil war/world war, something like this seems like the perfect way to do so. If people tried to enforce environmentalism via a dictatorship, the rest of the population would like fight back hard, and they'd end up in a very awkward situation very quickly. Remember, the people who would want to limit other people's consumption for environmentalism sakes are significantly outnumb…
Maybe I'm not getting your point, but Assad regime is secular dictatorship, more or less? So if you wanted to say that this is something completely impossible, well, the metaphor is not quite correct. And Iran before 1979 revolution could be considered secular dictatorship as well.
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Your logic assumes everything in the world to be equal. The world is messy. If we don't start we all lose. The Internet wasn't bootstrapped because the world's countries all agreed on exactly the right way to implement networks and protocols and there are countries that have both contributed very little opposed to those that have contributed a lot. Moving to clean energy has huge economic advantage. So, again, your g…
>If we don't start we all lose. I didn't suggest we don't start. I suggested the "everyone pass laws" plan has a fatal flaw the size of China and India. >your get on board or be destroyed is counterproductive and irrational. That's not my plan, it's yours. "Laws" are the get on board or be destroyed approach. You can do it domestically pretty easy, but it's much harder across national boundaries. >Heavy, one off, pol…
>That's not my plan, it's yours.
Really? If you want to try and give your argument legs at least try not to contradict yourself in the same thread. And please don't state I made a claim falsely.
Also...
>China is on track to double its emissions by 2030
This isn't actually true [0].
[0] https://climateactiontracker.org/countries/china/current-pol...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Major nuclear powers have a significant portion of their economies tied up in fossil fuels. They will not go down without a fight. China already emits 2x US CO2 and is on track to double its emissions by 2030. There is no scale of trade war/tariffs I can imagine that will derail this.
Let's turn this around, if the markets that China sell to implement tariff's dependent on fossil fuel usage what do you expect them to do? How do you expect them to "fight" that? Do you expect they'll just give up selling to those markets entirely? That would lead to less manufacturing in China and a reduction in carbon output from the country. Manufacturing in the US/EU etc. would likely take up some of the slack, b…
Tariffs of the sort you're talking about are a great way to nudge countries in the right direction. China is already the largest polluter and is on track to double its emissions over the next decade. Stopping that will take quite a bit more than a nudge. It will take destroying their economy. Except they have nuclear weapons. I'm sorry, but we already can't get them to stop stealing our intellectual property, stop sending us products laced with lead, stop mass murder for organs, stop putting Uyghur men in concentration camps and then assigning a rapists to live with their families, stop sending fentanyl illegally the US which kills thousands every year. The idea we're going to apply enough pressure to China to turn around this boat which is going to double its CO2 emissions in the next decade seems like a complete fantasy.
Does anyone have a link to the paper? Also climate change is undeniable. At the risk of stirring the controversy, the real questions have always been: how much of it is because of human activity? and if that's significant, how much power do we have to change it further? Based on the evidence so far, I personally think modern civilization has triggered initial conditions for the warming cycle but is no longer the majo…
That is almost reasonable. But it's still naturalistic thinking, i.e. whatever happens without humans is good. The real questions should be: what climate do we want and how much power do we have to effect it? If the climate changes naturally but we don't want it and can stop it, maybe we should. For example, we expect this interglacial period to end between years 10k - 30k, corresponding to about a 10°C drop. Also, t…
This is entirely predicated on understanding how much we have affected it so far and how that effect has changed over time. How do we know we can stop it? Are efforts toward stopping it (given the Earth has gone through cycles before) more useful than adapting?
Blindly saying we can reverse something that we can't and instead should be adapting for is just as bad. Unfortunately any discussion around this is constantly devolves into emotional dispute rather than rational debate.
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Indeed, if we only think in terms of thermodynamics, the Earth could sustain trillions of people with ample private room (orders of magnitude more than our current average home+office size). And if you trickle down to implementation problems (agriculture, logistics, etc) and take mega-structures of the 25th century out from the equation (so, immediate future, 21st century) you still get a max figure north of 10 times…
i think we've been adapting to our ecosystem since humans first came into the scene. the only difference now is that we finally realised we're living on a planet that's not constant, but actually changing. this realisation is a positive in my book, as an extinction level event is always around the corner. re. how many will die: the plague has been constantly killing humans for almost 1000 years now. and we're still h…
My everlasting-optimism is only tempered by a somewhat keen awareness of that Fermi paradox thingy, a Darwinian observation that species just disappear and the world just keeps spinning.
I think the greatest invincible filter — one we just couldn't overcome — is the idea of a fatal flaw in our genetic make-up, or relatingly in the evolution of our environment, that we simply couldn't fix in time (it could be hidden, insiduous, e.g. increasingly more 'cancers' until we become born with it in majority).
In many instances, species do not entirely die from such evolutionary filters, a few survivors with just the right genes may appear and spread their immunity.
But in many instances, species just die at those filters. We still don't really know why Neanderthal disappeared, iirc there are clues pointing at a possible genetic flaw, combined with environmental pressure (sorta contra-variant doom scenario).
Which is why I think we should massively spend to solve as much of the "bio" stuff as we can, grab all low-hanging fruits now and buckle up to kick off major projects spanning generations. The value and security to be gained, in terms of ultimate survival and progress, is just too critical to miss or delay. IMHO. And it's likely to take all of tech with it, a poster-child client sector to buy and fund all manners of extravagantly awesome technology.
I'd be curious to know how your optimism shapes things in imagination, regarding our past and/or future. :)
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When will incentives ever be aligned with one's own long term interests? There is reason for despair, that competition to survive the day to day - everyone needs to get through their week, month and year - will always detract from the larger concerns about long term sustainability of our civilization and prosperity.
I worry that we have removed people's moral agency by normalizing huge debts for life's necessities. We have the technology to make housing and education cheap and plentiful, but instead create scarcities and credit to have leverage over the workforce and keep them working in ways they'd prefer not to. I mean, every day I think "but guys seriously shouldn't we use all these computers to work on the metaphorical aster…