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A 'cold blob' in the Atlantic could be a sign of AMOC shutdown

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Re: A 'cold blob' in the Atlantic could be a sign of AMOC shutdown

#171

Post by no_wizard »

giantg2 wrote: post #119
no_wizard wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This ignores too much to be a good faith argument like lack of options to choose. Ability to choose in absence of regulation, the fact that industry spends millions to curb any regulation and I know ok missing other factors. Individual choice is actually a small part of this wheel, almost negligible. The vast majority of polluting is done by industry, and they also do the most not to make things better and actively o…

People want the products. Industry wouldn't exist, or not at this scale, without that. The easiest way to see this is air travel. The vast majority of it is unnecessary - business trips that could be a zoom call, vacations, shipping, etc. People got to every place on earth using trains and ships before air travel. Possible exceptions are medical transport and some types of products, which are tiny by comparison. So y…

It’s not that simple.

For instance, consumers want fast and high speed rail and light rail in cities, yet the federal government is still subsidizing hundreds of billions of dollars to car centric projects rather than allowing municipalities and state governments to have control over those funds they come with strings attached that force them to choose car centric options.

Affordable housing is another example. Consumers want reliable cheap homes but every single attempt to unseat obtuse regulations and policies that make home bulldog a nightmare across metropolitan areas all over the Us entrenched home owners fight in as many ways possible to keep new homes from being built. This pushes more people into farther out suburbs that makes an existing issue even worse.

So no, it’s not all consumer choices, not even “pretty much”.

The false dichotomy that it’s simply choice is not a good faith argument.

The other flip of the coin is this: people can consume in ecologically smart and sustainable ways, and often given the choice they do but lack of choice exists across most sectors that don’t allow them to or are knowingly priced higher than the alternative options due to poor regulation or lack of proper subsidy on the scale of the dirty alternative.

And we subsidize a lot when it comes to oil, natural gas and coal, let alone other industrial polluting industries.

Re: A 'cold blob' in the Atlantic could be a sign of AMOC shutdown

#172

Post by harrisi »

awongh wrote: post #96
Kon5ole wrote: post #87

I don't know if it's too late to stop the worst case scenarios of global warming yet or if there's still time, but it doesn't seem to be happening anyway. The world can't deal with something that requires global concentrated efforts. However, I do think we have time to prepare for the worst case scenarios, and individual countries and states can do that efficiently on their own. Improve evacuation routines in floodab…

Since covid I’ve actually become less convinced of this. Yes there were national interests at play and there was a lot of general chaos. But. The level of international coordination with vaccine rollouts and agreements between countries was way more than I had initially expected. Of course this feeling depends on what your own baseline expectations are. My takeaway was that if the conditions arise that we all decide…

Millions of people died when a possible solution of "hey, everyone, let's stay inside for a couple weeks" could've possibly effectively eradicated the virus does not seem like a great example of humanity's ability to cope with imminent global existential threats. The potential solution(s) to the massive brick wall we're speeding towards are far more inconvenient than "everyone just hang out for a minute." It's radical change to everything in society.

The comparison with Covid is also striking because the only reason a global "don't travel too much" solution couldn't work is due to the nature of capitalism. It's not like we couldn't feed everyone. It's just that some people with too much wouldn't gain as much for a little bit. Which is the same root cause of why solving climate change is impossible without radical change.

Unfortunately, I don't know the answer. I'm quite certain it's not to maintain the status quo, though.

Re: A 'cold blob' in the Atlantic could be a sign of AMOC shutdown

#173

Post by no_wizard »

Moldoteck wrote: post #137
no_wizard wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Steady state nuclear power plus wind and solar would. In today’s world, make the grid more reliable and greener than ever. Nuclear should not be off the table. It’s safe, it’s well understood, it’s reliable and is a very cheap way to create base load capacity that renewables like solos and wind can build out on top of

France and Sweden proved Renewables+Nuclear can decarbonize your electric grid almost fully and pretty damn fast - under 20y with old tech without any automatic welding and such... With proper policies the whole planet could do something similar in much less time... The challenge still remains decarbonizing the rest/electrification

> The challenge still remains decarbonizing the rest/electrification

A challenge that can be more easily addressed if it can scale first to handle induced demand only rather than base load. It’s a smaller problem that way.

Re: A 'cold blob' in the Atlantic could be a sign of AMOC shutdown

#174

Post by kruffalon »

gorjusborg wrote: post #153
jandrese wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You see a whole lot of panic from industrialists over the birth rate drop in the industrialized world. They claim it is an extinction level event for humanity. This is not quite correct. It is an extinction level event for economic models that assume unbounded growth of the consumer base.

This is an important distinction: what is good for ecology is not necessarily good for economy. If we need unbounded growth to jeep our economic system to function, its the economic system that is wrong, not nature.

Capitalist economy.

Economies can exist in many different ways. At its core it is just a way to describe how we move resources between ourselves and that can be done in many, many ways.

Re: A 'cold blob' in the Atlantic could be a sign of AMOC shutdown

#175

Post by deadbabe »

Avicebron wrote: post #64
deadbabe wrote: post #14

Could we put underwater data centers there to reheat the waters?

ah the "boil the oceans" strat. Interesting play.

I don’t think we could boil the oceans or even affect their temperature much even if we put every data center on Earth into the oceans and multiplied their amount by 10. Earth is really, really big.

Re: A 'cold blob' in the Atlantic could be a sign of AMOC shutdown

#176

Post by lostlogin »

RickJWagner wrote: post #165
hliyan wrote: post #32

I recently finished rewatching The Three Body Problem in which (spoilers follow) the world panics and goes into overdrive because an alien invasion is due in... 400 years. If the current climate trends continue, vast areas of the Earth may not be suitable for habitation within half that time, and we still can't seem to convince some people this is real. Granted I was a climate change skeptic myself until about 10 yea…

Something that would help a great deal would be some very public, clearly worded predictions about future events that should happen. Climate scientists could help convince skeptics by correctly predicting future events. Skeptics could vet the predictions immediately to avoid late refutations. They’d look foolish if they tried to downplay the events if they didn’t raise concerns at the time they were predicted. Lookin…

> clearly worded predictions about future events that should happen.

These are already out there. Extreme weather events are happening with all increasing frequency. But as with the slow boiled frog, when is it a crisis? The denier just claims we have always had extreme weather events, and they are correct (and this sidesteps the argument).

Re: A 'cold blob' in the Atlantic could be a sign of AMOC shutdown

#177

Post by AnimalMuppet »

yoyohello13 wrote: post #131
NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Below replacement would be terrifying if there were one thousand humans, The funny part is that it should terrify you whether there are 10 humans or 10 billion. At the current rates, it's over in about 12-13 generations regardless of the number you start with. That's how it works... no matter how big the starting number, it's how many generations you have left. Think of it this way? You know the dumb story they taug…

This whole comment rests on a very big assumption that these rates will never recover. Just because you can fit a trend line doesn’t mean the projections will pan out. It could just as easily be the case that once population starts meaningfully decreasing, the opportunity cost of children will also decrease and fertility rates will recover. This happens all the time in nature. Our population absolutely exploded over…

When will the trend recover? When civilization falls to the point that nobody can make birth control pills, if not before.

Re: A 'cold blob' in the Atlantic could be a sign of AMOC shutdown

#178

Post by [deleted] »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #127
tialaramex wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Below replacement would be terrifying if there were one thousand humans, it would be worrying if there were a million, and at least worthy of consideration if there were a hundred million, but there are almost ten billion simultaneous humans, we're fine.

>Below replacement would be terrifying if there were one thousand humans, The funny part is that it should terrify you whether there are 10 humans or 10 billion. At the current rates, it's over in about 12-13 generations regardless of the number you start with. That's how it works... no matter how big the starting number, it's how many generations you have left. Think of it this way? You know the dumb story they taug…

[deleted]

Re: A 'cold blob' in the Atlantic could be a sign of AMOC shutdown

#179

Post by [deleted] »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #154
yoyohello13 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This whole comment rests on a very big assumption that these rates will never recover. Just because you can fit a trend line doesn’t mean the projections will pan out. It could just as easily be the case that once population starts meaningfully decreasing, the opportunity cost of children will also decrease and fertility rates will recover. This happens all the time in nature. Our population absolutely exploded over…

>This whole comment rests on a very big assumption that these rates will never recover. J The opposite, actually. Your assumption is that the rates bounce up and down, mostly because you don't want to believe there's a problem. The rates are transmissible, older generations to the younger. No one growing up in a world where people have few or just one child will say to themselves "hey, you know what, I want 10 kids w…

[deleted]

Re: A 'cold blob' in the Atlantic could be a sign of AMOC shutdown

#180

Post by zug_zug »

giantg2 wrote: post #119
no_wizard wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This ignores too much to be a good faith argument like lack of options to choose. Ability to choose in absence of regulation, the fact that industry spends millions to curb any regulation and I know ok missing other factors. Individual choice is actually a small part of this wheel, almost negligible. The vast majority of polluting is done by industry, and they also do the most not to make things better and actively o…

People want the products. Industry wouldn't exist, or not at this scale, without that. The easiest way to see this is air travel. The vast majority of it is unnecessary - business trips that could be a zoom call, vacations, shipping, etc. People got to every place on earth using trains and ships before air travel. Possible exceptions are medical transport and some types of products, which are tiny by comparison. So y…

No it's not on consumer choice. The US government is SUBSIDIZING gasoline when it should be taxing it at a higher rate because of the environmental side-effects. This is standard economics theory, you tax any form of an environmental damage (e.g. carbon) at the rate of what it costs to clean it up.
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