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Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)

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Re: Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)

#241

Post by birksherty »

Gravityloss wrote: post #234
birksherty wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some things are better only for humans. For every other species it's worse. The whole ecosystem is worse than ever. The better things will also become useless in few dacade as the climate is tracking the worst case scenario of the IPCC report.

The wastewater cleaning is certainly better for marine life.

That's only one thing, overall there are way too much oil leaks and plastic in oceans, so it's silly to say things are better. Then there are things that are hidden like https://www.cbsnews.com/news/california-environmental-disast...

and https://v.redd.it/ayd4itr1kqg71

Marine life halved in few decades https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/marine-wil...

Re: Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)

#242

Post by esarbe »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #240
esarbe wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The budget - and I think you are talking about the budget reconciliation - includes a lot of stuff besides infrastructure. It's the budget after all.[0] Well... one half of the country is working on such a budget. The other half is doing everything to sabotage that budget, get back control of the senate and the house and spend that $3.5 trillion on a tax bill for the super-wealthy. You know, like the last time they d…

Not a word about solar (or wind) in your rant. Solar is dirt cheap, and being built at a quickly accelerating rate. You'll say "but storage". However, storage is getting cheaper even faster than solar/wind production is, and storage is not necessary for its use in food production.

> your rant.

Uff! I certainly didn't write it as a rant. But fine, I'll take that. But my intentions are good. I just want to make it clear to all of you that we face calamity and destruction and that there's no magical technofix that will save us. We will have to completely overhaul our socialeconomical value and incentive structures. Fat chance of that happening. (Prove me wrong! Do it!! Save mankind!)

> Not a word about solar (or wind)

Not a word about my pretty conclusive rebuttal of nuclear power as the technojebus to save mankind! I guess today no one gets what they want.

Hey, sure, we can do a feasibility examination of solar too.

> You'll say "but storage".

Haha, no. Storage is fine. There are pretty nice battery concepts in development. Liquid metal batteries are one crazy idea that I think has promise.

No, the problem lies elsewhere. Let's see: nowadays about 1.5% of energy comes from solar power, both PV and CSP. That's about 100GW (about one nuclear plant) and takes up about 1000 square miles.[0]

Let's say we somehow have the political will to cover a third of our energy needs with solar, somewhere in the ballpark of 2TW. That would cover an area of about 22,000 square miles.

So, to get to only about 33% of solar power by 2050, we'd have to cover 785 square miles with PV or CSP. Every year. For the next 28 years. Every year.

As a metric; in 2020 we've added about 190 square miles (or about 19GW) of solar power. Even if the current growth of solar power installations continues for a few years; we're still ridiculously off target. The bottleneck is installation capability.

The story is different but similar with wind.

[0] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/

Re: Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)

#243

Post by wyager »

esarbe wrote: post #238
wyager wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re not the total biomass. Are you intentionally clowning me here? Just because a couple species types have declined by X%, the total global biomass has not declined by that much. This paper tries to measure the thing you claimed as 75% over the last hundred or so years as actually being around 45% over the last 5,000 years. http://vaclavsmil.com/wp-content/uploads/PDR37-4.Smil_.pgs61... I found this on the green…

> Are you intentionally clowning me here? Let's assume good faith on both sides, otherwise this discussion will go nowhere. Agreed? > They’re not the total biomass No, they're not. I never claimed that. My claim was that >> Of course fish and insects are part of the biomass. Anyway. That out of the way, let's have a look at > Just because a couple species types have declined by X%, It's not a couple of species. It's…

> Let's assume good faith on both sides… I never claimed that.

It’s hard to assume good faith when you keep saying nonsense and then acting like you didn’t. You said:

> Since the middle of the 20th century, we've lost about 75% of biomass and roundabout the same in biodiversity.

That’s obviously untrue, so now you’re acting like you were only talking about fish?

> I think we have established that the 75% is not "off by orders of magnitude". Could it be 60% reduction? Or 50%? Sure.

Did you notice that the 45% reduction was over five thousand years, not ~75 years as you claimed?

Once again, you are saying totally whack stuff to the point where I have to assume you are trolling me somehow.

Re: Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)

#244

Post by Gravityloss »

birksherty wrote: post #241
Gravityloss wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The wastewater cleaning is certainly better for marine life.

That's only one thing, overall there are way too much oil leaks and plastic in oceans, so it's silly to say things are better. Then there are things that are hidden like https://www.cbsnews.com/news/california-environmental-disast... and https://v.redd.it/ayd4itr1kqg71 Marine life halved in few decades https://www.independent.co.uk/climate-change/news/marine-wil...

Yeah, of course. But some areas in the sea, like close to the city where I live, are in much better shape than they were before I was born. There's plenty of data on that.

The sea in total is not doing great, because of agricultural emissions.

Re: Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)

#245

Post by esarbe »

wyager wrote: post #243
esarbe wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are you intentionally clowning me here? Let's assume good faith on both sides, otherwise this discussion will go nowhere. Agreed? > They’re not the total biomass No, they're not. I never claimed that. My claim was that >> Of course fish and insects are part of the biomass. Anyway. That out of the way, let's have a look at > Just because a couple species types have declined by X%, It's not a couple of species. It's…

> Let's assume good faith on both sides… I never claimed that. It’s hard to assume good faith when you keep saying nonsense and then acting like you didn’t. You said: > Since the middle of the 20th century, we've lost about 75% of biomass and roundabout the same in biodiversity. That’s obviously untrue, so now you’re acting like you were only talking about fish? > I think we have established that the 75% is not "off…

>> Since the middle of the 20th century, we've lost about 75% of biomass and roundabout the same in biodiversity.

> That’s obviously untrue,

I've provided quite a bit of material for your research. Here are some highlights:

- birds: reduced by 29% (north america) since 1970

- birds: reduced by 20% (europe) since 1980

- ocean fishes: 80% lost in the last 100 years (global)

- insects: 82% lost in the last 27 years (Europe)

- freshwater fishes: 80% lost since 1970

- non-livestock mammals: 78% lost since 1960

I freely admit that the 75% since 1950 number is a ballpark guess. Given the data I refer to above, I reckon it's not far off. Certainly not orders of magnitude and it is certainly not "obviously untrue". We can debate if we lost 75% or 65% or 55%, but given the consequences in any case it doesn't really matter[0].

> so now you’re acting like you were only talking about fish?

What? No. I'm talking about global, total biomass. Every species, every habitat. I'm sorry if that wasn't clear. (Why would you think that I was talking only about fish? Are you trolling me?)

With regards to fish I wrote

> The most visible I think it is for fish. There alone we've lost an approximate 80% since the 1950ies.

To rephrase; the decline of fish is easily observed by the ever diminishing returns of fishery fleets and there's a lot of data about development of the fish population.

> Did you notice that the 45% reduction was over five thousand years, not ~75 years as you claimed?

That's one paper that makes some assumptions and comes up with a model. I have to check it in detail and it looks interesting. But that does not in any way refute the data in the papers I already provided or the very comprehensive report by ZSL[1]. This is a very thorough study that compiles data for 21,000 populations of animals from 4392 species.

To quote: "The population sizes of mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles have seen an alarming average drop of 68% since 1970.

> Once again, you are saying totally whack stuff to the point where I have to assume you are trolling me somehow.

I'm sorry if you got that impression, because it's not my intention. I thought that I'd made a good case by quoting the research and various papers. I'm not sure why you say that this is "totally whack"; everything is sourced pretty well.

[0] We're staring into the abyss and the abyss is winking back.

[1] https://www.zsl.org/sites/default/files/LPR%202020%20Full%20...

Re: Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)

#246

Post by timbit42 »

TheBlight wrote: post #41
ncphil wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you really so sure of that? I'm old enough to have known a lot of people who lived through the Depression _because_ of FDR's programs. Whether the New Deal alone could have saved the country is literally academic to the tens of millions who were saved by jobs in the CWA, WPA and CCC, or the relief provided by the FSA, SSA and economic aid to businesses under the NIRA. It seems unusually cold hearted for any histo…

Yes, I'm sure.

Since you provided no proof, you can be ignored.

Re: Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)

#247

Post by TheBlight »

timbit42 wrote: post #246
TheBlight wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I'm sure.

Since you provided no proof, you can be ignored.

I don't have time to teach remedial U.S. history. You can find charts that clearly indicate the phenomenon here (for ones which show pre-WW2 data): https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

Probably the best chart: https://wtfhappenedin1971home.files.wordpress.com/2020/06/im...

Re: Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)

#248

Post by rickdangerous1 »

grecy wrote: post #46
mikewarot wrote: post #6

Of course we are, this too shall pass. There is a constant struggle to keep things afloat, people seem to forget that at times, especially the rent seeking class who place little to no value on infrastructure, both physical and societal. If we get another FDR style reset, things should be good for a generation or two, if not... the horrors of history will rhyme once again. Edit/Update: The New Deal provided a social…

> this too shall pass As long as the world remains human habitable, I agree with you. If even 10% of the landmass where humans currently live becomes uninhabitable due to the impacts of climate change like flood, heat, drought, stable society as we've know for ~50 years has little chance. Hundreds of millions of people will have no place to live, no food, and no water. The only possible outcome would be immense uphea…

Many parts of the world are very sparsely populated. The north American continent alone would easily double or triple its current population. We'd have to be smart about it, think carefully where we put new cities etc so that we hedge against climate change... it would be easily doable.

Africa too, is capable of supporting a much higher population IF we want to get really serious about doing so.

Re: Are we on the road to civilisation collapse? (2019)

#250

Post by kortilla »

tarsinge wrote: post #93
kortilla wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the risk to individual humans has dropped substantially as technology advanced. People were much more likely to just starve to death 100 years ago or die from simple medical ailments. The pressure we are putting on other species and flora is immense but humanity’s future has never been so certain. The only way to claim civilization collapse is to move the goal posts to a population decimation. But even that would…

> as technology advanced The current shortage give us a glimpse of how fragile it is though. I don't see how we could handle a more serious disruption.

This disruption is about as serious as it gets (global pandemic) and I can still buy a brand new iPhone.

This isn’t shit compared to things like the gas rations in the oil crisis.

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