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Humanity Has Flipped the Amazon Forest from Carbon Sink to Source

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Re: Humanity Has Flipped the Amazon Forest from Carbon Sink to Source

#51

Post by tarsinge »

nine_k wrote: post #13
ArnoVW wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could be wrong, but I belief that the issue is bigger than that. If you live in the US and drive a car or eat meat, you are likely to be co-responsible. Soy culture is used to create a cheap protein feedstock for the meat industry. Modern car fuel contains ethanol (10% in the EU). The ethanol is produced by having micro organisms convert biomass. The idea being that you use the short carbon cycle (already in the ec…

If you live in the U.S. and drive a car and eat meat, you are very unlikely eating illegally-raised Brazilian beef, or consuming illegally-mined Brazilian gold. Most likely, you eat U.S.-raised beef and burn gasoline from oil that comes from the U.S. or Middle East. Surely you are adding to the global warming, but it has nothing to do with Amazonian forest being illegally cut. In Brazil, most if not all cars run on e…

The issue is not exported beef, it's exported soy to feed the beef in the US and in Europe.

Re: Humanity Has Flipped the Amazon Forest from Carbon Sink to Source

#52

Post by xwdv »

travisjungroth wrote: post #6

I spent the last 10 days in a hut on the edge of the Amazon and am in a hotel in Lima, waiting for my flight out of Peru. Seeing this story, I thought I'd add one brief first hand account. The jungle was noticeably cut down since I had last been there 7 months ago. What had been just a hiking trail to our camp had been widened to the size of a road by all the tree clearing. The trees are pretty thin and not the best…

Some people were talking about owning lots of land in case society breaks down, but owning large swathes of land you cannot actively defend is pointless for these reasons. You depend on government to enforce rules of law to keep people off vast amounts of land. And it gets exponentially harder to defend land the more of it you have.

This applies really to any resource though. Even your home could be taken away if the threat of punishment from a higher authority didn’t exist.

Re: Humanity Has Flipped the Amazon Forest from Carbon Sink to Source

#53

Post by plater »

melling wrote: post #50
MikusR wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you wasting Earths resources by flying? And for a 10 day vacation at that.

Do people still think the solution is for everyone to reduce their individual carbon emissions? “If we all just conserve enough…” Flying, for example, emits 2% of global emissions. That’s 100,000 flights a day, every day. We’ve just spent over 2 decades generating at least 40% of our electricity with coal. The carbon footprint of that was incredible. While we’ve been waiting for solar and wind to replace it…

But for people who do fly, flying represents 50% or more of their footprint.

Re: Humanity Has Flipped the Amazon Forest from Carbon Sink to Source

#54

Post by melling »

plater wrote: post #53
melling wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do people still think the solution is for everyone to reduce their individual carbon emissions? “If we all just conserve enough…” Flying, for example, emits 2% of global emissions. That’s 100,000 flights a day, every day. We’ve just spent over 2 decades generating at least 40% of our electricity with coal. The carbon footprint of that was incredible. While we’ve been waiting for solar and wind to replace it…

But for people who do fly, flying represents 50% or more of their footprint.

Try thinking about solving the big problem rather than 7 billion little problems.

You are worrying about subtracting 0.000000000001 from the 1,000,000,000,000,000,000

Telling people not to fly isn’t a solution

[update]

Anyway, I see my comment isn’t understood again. Enjoy another decade of incredible emissions.

I’m sure sooner or later people will finally get it.

Those windmills are still coming!!!

Re: Humanity Has Flipped the Amazon Forest from Carbon Sink to Source

#55

Post by sveme »

melling wrote: post #50
MikusR wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you wasting Earths resources by flying? And for a 10 day vacation at that.

Do people still think the solution is for everyone to reduce their individual carbon emissions? “If we all just conserve enough…” Flying, for example, emits 2% of global emissions. That’s 100,000 flights a day, every day. We’ve just spent over 2 decades generating at least 40% of our electricity with coal. The carbon footprint of that was incredible. While we’ve been waiting for solar and wind to replace it…

Everything has to happen simultaneously. Carbon emission reduction on a personal, community, city, state, country, supranational entity, global level.

We simply cannot continue to wait for other, more emission-intensive actors, to act first.

Re: Humanity Has Flipped the Amazon Forest from Carbon Sink to Source

#56

Post by JumpCrisscross »

praptak wrote: post #30

The headline is unnecessarily sensationalist. A mature forest is never a carbon sink. Trees can only store so much carbon before there is no more room for them to grow. Obviously, burning a forest is still bad from the CO2-in-atmosphere point of view. Not because you have destroyed a carbon sink but because you released carbon from an existing carbon reservoir.

> mature forest is never a carbon sink

Not never [1]. But never ca. 300 m.y.a.

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/mushroom-evolutio...

Re: Humanity Has Flipped the Amazon Forest from Carbon Sink to Source

#57

Post by [deleted] »

danparsonson wrote: post #34
yodelshady wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contract killers are responding to demand, but we don't let them legally practice their trade.

So people who hire contract killers are not to blame? I don't understand this argument - saying "it's not our fault the cattle/hardwood logging/mining companies cut down the Amazon" is nonsense, that's been widely known about for decades and we (collectively) just bought more and more of this stuff. It's their fault and ours.

[deleted]

Re: Humanity Has Flipped the Amazon Forest from Carbon Sink to Source

#58

Post by JumpCrisscross »

bonzini wrote: post #16
redpiller wrote: post #9

Carbon dioxide is good for trees. This will continue the planetary greening which has been occurring over the past few decades thanks to human activity. Trees are very good at adapting to and compensating for additional carbon dioxide. I look forward to further decentralization of forests and an overall greener planet. BTW, the science behind planetary greening is that higher carbon dioxide helps plants to be more wa…

In the immortal words of George Carlin, "The Planet is fine, the people are fucked".

> In the immortal words of George Carlin, "The Planet is fine, the people are fucked"

It is well within humanity's capacity to, potentially permanently but at least for tens of millions of years, end the Earth's ability to host macroscopic life. Within a few decades, we'll likely have the ability to end the Earth's life-supporting ability period.

I get the message behind the meme. But unfortunately, our actions have consequences beyond our selves. It's easier to think we're just fucking our own when in fact we're doing much worse.

Re: Humanity Has Flipped the Amazon Forest from Carbon Sink to Source

#59

Post by saiya-jin »

ricardobeat wrote: post #48

You can thank the current right-wing government for letting deforestation get completely out of control, just after the country had finally got it down to okay-ish levels around 2012-2016. They’ve been systematically reducing funding, relaxing laws and enforcement, and pushing international preservation fund backers away. The rate at which things have degraded is insane. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/12…

I wouldn't claim Bolsonaro is right wing, he is just an arrogant corrupt scumbag who got to power. Unfortunately the world has seen quite a few of those recently, and the results are dire to say at least.

Re: Humanity Has Flipped the Amazon Forest from Carbon Sink to Source

#60

Post by ethbr0 »

xwdv wrote: post #52
travisjungroth wrote: post #6

I spent the last 10 days in a hut on the edge of the Amazon and am in a hotel in Lima, waiting for my flight out of Peru. Seeing this story, I thought I'd add one brief first hand account. The jungle was noticeably cut down since I had last been there 7 months ago. What had been just a hiking trail to our camp had been widened to the size of a road by all the tree clearing. The trees are pretty thin and not the best…

Some people were talking about owning lots of land in case society breaks down, but owning large swathes of land you cannot actively defend is pointless for these reasons. You depend on government to enforce rules of law to keep people off vast amounts of land. And it gets exponentially harder to defend land the more of it you have. This applies really to any resource though. Even your home could be taken away if the…

Good point. Unpaid externalities of security: large landowners' needs for land security are higher (than resident parcels), but they certainly don't pay more taxes per acre (indeed, sometimes less).

But at the same time, efficiencies of scale in many land-intensive industries cannot be realized without large areas being combined for a single purpose.

Hard circle to square.

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