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Rising carbon dioxide levels now detected in human blood

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Re: Rising carbon dioxide levels now detected in human blood

#141

Post by WorldMaker »

tt24 wrote: post #133
WorldMaker wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reminder that corporations spent a ton of money on propaganda to make us all believe individual sacrifices can have a noticeable impact when the largest offenders are all corporate. Even if everyone reduced their personal carbon footprint by avoiding meat/dairy and the industrial cattle farms mysteriously disappeared overnight, that's still a drop in the overall greenhouse gas emission problem. Also note that "everyo…

Why do the corporations pollute so much? Is it just for the love of the game?

To some extent, yes, it is deeply for the love of the game: planned obsolescence, single use products, nothing built to last, "razor blades and ink cartridges" where worse user experiences sell more products, intentional over-production to drive over-consumption through consequent demand for artificially low priced goods ("the Wal-Mart effect"), and so forth.

If we don't find ways to price in externalities into the markets and/or the regulations, companies find ways to push things to externalities to cut corners and artificially increase sales and/or profits or have easy ways to market "cheaper" products versus better quality products.

You may want to point fingers at the demand side, but even the most basic, simplified micro-economics is all about how supply-and-demand is a complex dance, supply has more tools up its sleeve than it seems, and a lot more control than demand. Consumers can demand more durable, more reliable products until they are blue in the face, but suppliers are free to just not supply them because cutting corners makes more profits and somewhat happy return customers are more profitable than a very satisfied one-and-done-for-life customer.

Re: Rising carbon dioxide levels now detected in human blood

#142

Post by specialist »

lapcat wrote: post #139
specialist wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm old enough to remember the Obama Admin's support for the nascent battery and PV industries. Ditto Biden Admin's support for our transition to renewables (IIJA, IRA). Unprecedented. The type of Keynesian investment in the USA (industrial policy, pro-labor) unseen since FDR's New Deal. > don't forget that Joe Manchin No one on the left ever will. That said, it's important to note that the Democratic (center-left) c…

> So we should celebrate, and learn from, the occasional success. What success? It's too late. The time for decisive action was decades ago. The worst case scenario is occurring now. Humanity totally failed to avert a disaster. We've already blown past the global temperature thresholds that scientists warned about. Now we're going to have to deal with the consequences. There's no going back in time to prevent it. Thi…

Methinks our current path has been determined since ~1980, with ~2000 probably being the last chance we had to stay under 1.5C.

So, well, whaddya gonna do?

The trick is deluding oneself that we can somehow muddle thru this. (Humanity has in fact survived worse.) Otherwise I wouldn't get out of bed in the morning. Is that reasonable? If not, then I might as well soldier on.

Re: Rising carbon dioxide levels now detected in human blood

#143

Post by specialist »

mrguyorama wrote: post #88
lapcat wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the other would very much like to take action on the issue if they had the political power. They had political power! During the Biden administration, during the Obama administration, during the Clinton administration. Al Gore is a famous environmentalist... for making a movie after he was out of power. What the hell did he do for the environment when he was literally in the Oval Office, at the side of the Presiden…

>During the Biden administration, during the Obama administration, during the Clinton administration The president doesn't actually control much in the USA, despite the nonsensical shit republican congresses let them get away with. Obama, Biden, and Clinton could not do anything that wasn't approved by congress. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Party_divisions_of_United_Stat... Democrats have not really held enough powe…

Correct. We're in a vetocracy. h/t Francis Fukuyama

Both our Senate and SCOTUS are anti-democratic. I daresay they've proven reactionary, with a few notable exceptions.

Re: Rising carbon dioxide levels now detected in human blood

#144

Post by lapcat »

specialist wrote: post #142
lapcat wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So we should celebrate, and learn from, the occasional success. What success? It's too late. The time for decisive action was decades ago. The worst case scenario is occurring now. Humanity totally failed to avert a disaster. We've already blown past the global temperature thresholds that scientists warned about. Now we're going to have to deal with the consequences. There's no going back in time to prevent it. Thi…

Methinks our current path has been determined since ~1980, with ~2000 probably being the last chance we had to stay under 1.5C. So, well, whaddya gonna do? The trick is deluding oneself that we can somehow muddle thru this. (Humanity has in fact survived worse.) Otherwise I wouldn't get out of bed in the morning. Is that reasonable? If not, then I might as well soldier on.

> Methinks our current path has been determined since ~1980, with ~2000 probably being the last chance we had to stay under 1.5C.

That's why I said "I realized this back in the 1990s" and was later complaining about Al Gore.

> Otherwise I wouldn't get out of bed in the morning. Is that reasonable?

This is not like nuclear war—which could still happen, because we still have the weapons, and the madmen to use them—where we're all going to die tomorrow. We're already seeing the effects—as the submitted article shows—but the worst is yet to come. We're cursing our descendants with a world much more hostile than the one we were born into, for no other reason than greed and selfishness. It's the ultimate betrayal of the future. (By the way, I'm a human and deliberately chose to use em dashes, because I felt like it.)

The best thing to happen for global warming in recent years was not the Biden administration but actually the pandemic, because it significantly cut industrial output for an extended time.

Re: Rising carbon dioxide levels now detected in human blood

#145

Post by slibhb »

pluralmonad wrote: post #138
slibhb wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You clearly haven't given a lot of thought to questions like "where does all this cheap food/housing/heating come from?" The fact that fossil fuels -- since their mass adoption in the late 19th century -- are the single largest cause of improved living conditions is standard economic history. > An unsustainable solution is not in-fact a good solution. It was a perfectly good solution. It replaced wood fires which are…

This all seems very confused. I would say you clearly have not thought this through, but that would be fairly rude given the tiny scope of this comment thread. If your definition of better (or perfectly good) is: makes me more comfortable in the short term then I can understand that perspective.

So your opinion is that humanity should not have burned fossil fuels, we should have kept burning wood, until solar/wind/nuclear were invented? Seems obviously wrong.

Re: Rising carbon dioxide levels now detected in human blood

#147

Post by gcanyon »

WorldMaker wrote: post #108
gcanyon wrote: post #5

Higher carbon dioxide makes us dumber: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7229519/ I wonder how long before in-home CO2 extraction becomes a thing.

I have friends that fell down air monitoring rabbit holes in the situation of the early 2020s and one of the things they have remained obsessed about is home CO2 levels and have active monitoring equipment and "pager alerts" and other things setup. Home carbon capture is sort of a thing already: buy more houseplants, keep them alive and healthy. Though the most common home interventions for now are still "open a wind…

I can't find it now, but I saw a video where a guy was trying to offset just the CO2 he produced himself with plants.

   1. He gave up on "plants" because they were nowhere close to offsetting him.
   2. Switching to algae, he used a 55 gallon drum of it because the numbers said that would work. He gave up when the CO2 level reached something like 2000 ppm
   3. He ended up with something like 3 drums, as well as special mixers to make sure the algae got access to as much CO2 as possible, and he had lights focused on the algae drums to make them as efficient as possible, and he still ended up barely keeping the CO2 at the "dangerous but not completely toxic" level, and it wasn't stable either.
Plants are a terrible way to try to manage CO2.

Re: Rising carbon dioxide levels now detected in human blood

#148

Post by beeforpork »

And while we pump CO2 into the atmosphere, we also shrink the engines that could get it out again, like the rainforest in Brazil. Perfect optimisation!

(I don't want to shame Brazil, it's a global chain of problems. And other forests are decimated, too, like in Sweden and Estonia, for the demand of produce worldwide.)

Re: Rising carbon dioxide levels now detected in human blood

#149

Post by frm88 »

zdragnar wrote: post #117
hxorr wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just an assumption, there is research that shows this. For example: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/as-co2-levels-ris... More specifically, yes, protein content decreases with rising CO2 levels. Maybe not enough to cause obesity on its own, but enough to be a compounding factor. Especially when your staple is, say, rice -- which is what the paper linked above looks at.

The assumption is not the variation in the nutrient counts, but in the link to obesity. The rise in obesity has much stronger correlating factors than CO2 levels- diet and sedentary lifestyle being far stronger. This is especially obvious when looking at the cited study: > The new study evaluated 18 types of commonly grown rice to see how they would respond to elevated levels of carbon dioxide. In the experiments, th…

In the last sixty years, there has been an alarming decline in food quality and a decrease in a wide variety of nutritionally essential minerals and nutraceutical compounds in imperative fruits, vegetables, and food crops. The potential causes behind the decline in the nutritional quality of foods have been identified worldwide as chaotic mineral nutrient application, the preference for less nutritious cultivars/crops, the use of high-yielding varieties, and agronomic issues associated with a shift from natural farming to chemical farming. Likewise, the rise in atmospheric or synthetically elevated carbon dioxide could contribute to the extensive reductions in the nutritional quality of fruits, vegetables, and food crops.

The decline in nutrients isn't limited to rice and/or CO2 levels but spread across almost all varieties of fruit, vegetables and food crops with margins as high as 80% dilution and causes from chemical/genetical agriculture to rising CO2 levels.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10969708/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngjAqzam0fU

Re: Rising carbon dioxide levels now detected in human blood

#150

Post by specialist »

lapcat wrote: post #144
specialist wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Methinks our current path has been determined since ~1980, with ~2000 probably being the last chance we had to stay under 1.5C. So, well, whaddya gonna do? The trick is deluding oneself that we can somehow muddle thru this. (Humanity has in fact survived worse.) Otherwise I wouldn't get out of bed in the morning. Is that reasonable? If not, then I might as well soldier on.

> Methinks our current path has been determined since ~1980, with ~2000 probably being the last chance we had to stay under 1.5C. That's why I said "I realized this back in the 1990s" and was later complaining about Al Gore. > Otherwise I wouldn't get out of bed in the morning. Is that reasonable? This is not like nuclear war—which could still happen, because we still have the weapons, and the madmen to use them—wher…

I concur. On (most) all points you've made in this thread.

Two things.

#1

What if you're wrong? What if one day you wake up and the world (as we know it) hasn't ended?

I totally understand nihilism, despair, despondency, hopelessness, etc. Under Reagan and living near Boeing, I was convinced we'd get nuked. I embraced the punk/goth lifestyle. Then I was diagnosed at 19yo with a terminal disease (aplastic anemia).

Then the weirdest thing happened.

We didn't get nuked. And I somehow beat the odds, surviving an experimental treatment (and its aftermath).

"Well shit" I said to myself. "Now what?"

And make no mistake; It was monumentally hard to pivot. To plan further ahead then "what's for breakfast?"

Fortunately, I had role models and mentors. Like the two science and policy people I worked (volunteered) for at Audubon. They knew the score. And yet they continued to fight. Marveling, I asked how they did it. Saving the salmon (in this case) was their day job. Living their lives, as best as they could, during their own time. It wasn't denial or compartmentalizing. It was choosing to embrace life, to give them the energy and purpose to continue the fight.

#2

What else are you gonna do?

During the 2000s, I was so filled with anger and disgust. I somehow fell into direct activism (leading vs just volunteering). I met so many other angry people. Most of them stuck in a doom loop. (Therefore useless, detrimental even, to activism.)

Learning activism as I went, I eventually decided a key factor to change was somehow transmuting that outrage into action. So we leaders stopped just opposing bad policy and decisions. We advocated for a better way, as best able.

So, ya, the world's going to hell. What are you going to do about it? Check out? (Which, IMHO, is a perfectly rational and valid decision for most people.) Will you fight for what's yours? Defending the future, and our planet, and a more just society.

The hardest part, for me, to becoming an activist was how to get started. There are few resources and even fewer mentors. Most people who try bounce off the wall of policy and politics and gatekeepers. So I know that individuals converting their outrage into action is wicked hard.

My Big Idea, as a recovering activist myself, for maybe mitigating that hurdle was starting an activism book study / support group. The goal was get something rolling, then document it, then spawn off new cells. (Something I learned how to do with design pattern study groups, back in the day.)

Members picked a topic, the smallest possible change, the lowest hanging fruit, they wanted to see happen. So participants could learn and experience the whole process and skill building needed for success. (Something I learned from Luke Hohmann, wrt teams delivering products, back in the day.)

And then we supported each other's efforts. We were off to a good start; 7 members, meeting twice monthly.

Alas, I had some health and family crises, and that study group didn't survive my departure. (Another wicked hard problem.)

In conclusion...

I think I understand where you're at. I feel like I was in a similar place, more than once.

All I want to convey is that you might be able to find a way thru by finding some positives to focus on.

Recovering from radiation, I used kitten and puppy pictures to cheer myself up. To prove I'm also not a bot, here's my corpus: https://imgur.com/user/zappini/favorites

Now I binge on podcasts like David Roberts' Volts. He's a natural born pessimist, like me. Yet he chooses to find and signal boost the people doing the hard work of implementing our glorious all electric future. He's also been (for me) a gateway to finding more sources of joy and optimism.

Holler if you wanna talk. zappini@gmail.com

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