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Fastest rate of natural carbon dioxide rise over the last 50k years

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Re: Fastest rate of natural carbon dioxide rise over the last 50k years

#331

Post by amanaplanacanal »

olalonde wrote: post #125
duozerk wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah yes, a "source" from Charles Koch's Cato Institute. Do you really expect to be taken seriously with this "rebuttal" ?

Here's another source using data from the "EM-DAT International Disaster Database"[0]. Excerpt from the article[1]: > As we see, over the course of the 20th century there was a significant decline in global deaths from natural disasters. In the early 1900s, the annual average was often in the range of 400,000 to 500,000 deaths. In the second half of the century and into the early 2000s, we have seen a significant dec…

Better weather prediction probably has a large hand in that.

Re: Fastest rate of natural carbon dioxide rise over the last 50k years

#333

Post by onion2k »

goatlover wrote: post #77
fmobus wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a bad argument. If Americans would emit CO2 at the same per capita rate as china, the world would be much better off. The fact that the Chinese can emit much less per capita and at the same time have raised their standards of living significantly over the last few decades, all while producing a huge fraction of manufactured goods consumed worldwide goes to show that something is deeply wrong with the US' polic…

If Americans emitted the same per capita rate as China, they would have a lower standard of living. This shouldn't be the argument anyway. The focus should be on cleaner and more efficient technologies, which includes nuclear.

By that argument China should be releasing more CO2, unless you have a reason why Chinese people shouldn't have the same quality of life as Americans.

Re: Fastest rate of natural carbon dioxide rise over the last 50k years

#334

Post by mrguyorama »

somenameforme wrote: post #317
vasco wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I know no single person on earth can do it all by themselves - all the mechanisms I'm aware of at least.

To my knowledge, this is correct. In theory a command from e.g. the President is authoritative and should legally be carried out. In practice, you'd require every person along the chain to implicitly agree to effectively ending the world. Even at the bottom of the chain, there are likely multi-key requirements so even there you don't have just one person with his hand on the trigger. This makes one of the biggest thr…

In America this is not actually a useful thing. America's ICBM silos have technicians sitting in front of consoles, and basically every day, they get a command of keywords/numbers to punch into the computers. The technicians do not know whether the numbers are a test, or a real launch, at any time. This is purposely designed to prevent a low level button pusher from preventing the US from launching nukes.

If the president wants to launch a nuke, the only thing that stops them is their cabinet simply not relaying the order. This happened several times when Nixon got shitfaced.

Like nearly everything in american government, this is just a "norm". The only thing preventing an insane american president from doing pretty much anything, at least for a while, is "norms" and customs. Nixon wanted to nuke pretty much all of Vietnam pretty much all the time, and it was only his cabinet that prevented that. But there is no precedent, or legal reason, to actually force that to be the case. So what happens if you then get a president who has surrounded themselves with a cabinet that explicitly thinks Nixon was right, that Nixon had the right to burgle the Watergate hotel because the president should be able to do anything (this is a real faction in US politics right now) and have openly put together a plan to fire damn near everyone on day one and replace them with explicit yes men?

Re: Fastest rate of natural carbon dioxide rise over the last 50k years

#335

Post by Der_Einzige »

mhardcastle wrote: post #324
daveguy wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fear of AGI is very real. But our proximity to AGI is marketing hype. In terms of existential crisis #2 and #3 are serious and already worth investing in mitigation. But #1 (AGI) is science fiction.

In 2022, the median ML researcher surveyed thought that there is a 5% or 10% chance of AI leading to "human extinction or similarly permanent and severe disempowerment of the human species," depending on how the question was asked. https://aiimpacts.org/2022-expert-survey-on-progress-in-ai/#...

I claim in 2024 this has doubled or tripled.

Re: Fastest rate of natural carbon dioxide rise over the last 50k years

#336

Post by jtolds »

jpadkins wrote: post #325
belter wrote: post #3

We are in the multilayered race between - The risk of the rise of AGI - The risk and madness of Nuclear conflict - The risk of runaway Climate change My money is on Mother Gaia. She will brutally and swiftly discipline her puppies.

1) Is real but will have net positive impact on humanity (of course there will be losers, but like most new technologies humans will have more for less effort) 2) It is real but unlikely to end humanity. Much more likely to create large areas that are unlivable, but a lot of work has gone into avoiding world ending scenarios. 3) Is mostly hype. Doom predictions in the last 20 years on this topic have been very wrong.…

How can this be such a top-voted answer? What?

Without even going into the unsubstantiated assertion with #1, your comment on number 3 shows a dramatic misunderstanding of how compounding effects work. You can't use the last 20 years to linearly project like this. It is true that most scientists agree that humanity will likely not go completely extinct, but it is also true that most scientists agree that many, many individual humans will be impacted. It is tough to say just exactly how humans will be impacted, but think famine, war, major societal upheaval.

Here's a citation if it helps: https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/71/9/894/6325731

Re: Fastest rate of natural carbon dioxide rise over the last 50k years

#337

Post by sniggers »

gmd63 wrote: post #104
c048 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

'Mother' Gaia will wipe all complex life from this planet with 1 to 1.5 Billion years if her 'undisciplined' puppies don't find a way to leave this ball of dirt. She's also got quite a lead with killing off 99.99999% of all species that ever lived, when compared to us.

Everyone hell bent on leaving is actually distracted from the real less immediately glamorous challenge, which is learning to sustain life and exercise restraint.

Restraint won't make the unpredictable gamma ray burst or unstoppably-sized asteroid go away.

Re: Fastest rate of natural carbon dioxide rise over the last 50k years

#338

Post by Der_Einzige »

vasco wrote: post #281
daveguy wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One person can make one command decision and make #2 a reality. That's all it takes. No matter how many people drool over AGI the bandwidth and processing just isn't there. We barely have control systems as intelligent as a bacterium.

As far as I know no single person on earth can do it all by themselves - all the mechanisms I'm aware of at least.

Tactical nukes are sometimes under the command and potential authorization of battlefield commanders who in theory could operate without the authorization of a president. Consider a risk of this happening in the context of a border war between two nuclear armed states with low spillover risk to the rest of the world - i.e. pakistan and india.

Re: Fastest rate of natural carbon dioxide rise over the last 50k years

#340

Post by Filligree »

trashtester wrote: post #298
kmeisthax wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is great until plastics that we want to keep using start getting eaten by bacteria.

sure. we may have to chose whether or not plastics should be biodegradable. Cant have your cake and eat it, too.

Wood is biodegradable, but wood houses work anyway. Ditto cotton. So long as you keep things dry they don’t tend to rot.
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