Smog Chokes Delhi, Leaving Residents ‘Cowering by Our Air Purifiers’

Feed it to goats.

This is a thing that I really liked about the movie Interstellar. They faced similar problems and painted a view on what it could look like.

Actually, I think other than the obviously ethical issues surrounding anthropocene, Humanity can easily survive, as long as there is access to petroleum reserves to keep the logistical chain running - high CO2 levels though will probably make a good portion of S Asia uninhabitable.

Once that dies, the accumulated karma will come back with force (and for good ?). It's fashionable in certain circles to say US fracking can sustain the system, but I'd be very wary of such statements.

I think that we're pretty much fucked wrt climate change. It seems unrealistic to assume that we'll leave any profitable fossil fuel unburnt and I don't think that we'll scale up nuclear or renewables quickly enough. Overfishing is a similar topic where we'll keep fishing as long as people are buying fish, regardless of what it does to the oceans.

I think you are a little over-optimistic with the Mars colonization plans. A Mars colony would be dependent on Earth for material support for a very long time. Setting up the necessary infrastructure to produce all materials needed for the maintenance of the complex technology required by an extraterrestrial colony will need decades if not centuries. If civilization on Earth collapses before that, the Mars colony will die soon after.

Mars colonization is not achievable without an enormous amount of energy. Moreover, Mars is a very long way away from being a sustainable human environment. It would be far easier to colonize the Antarctic, and offer exactly the same advantages and disadvantages.

Besides, the Mars colonization plan implicitly works for only a tiny number of people, while abandoning the rest. It's prepperism+science fiction.

What's far more likely to happen is that the West remains mostly OK - perhaps with a bit more visible poverty and security state, but still with the technological capacity. While places which are less well developed or politically stable see events like this, war, flood or famine.

I might be missing something but I think that the situation on Earth would have to be beyond cataclysmic for Mars (a dead planet without atmosphere or a magnetic field) to be a better place.

Realistically, whatever damages we could do to Earth's ecosystem, it will always be much easier to fix (or cope with) things here than to create a livable ecosystem on Mars.

Indeed.

For example concerning glasshouse gases, we need to come back to 1990's emission levels because that's what the Earth can absorb. The problem is, we're about 1bn more, our levels of consumption are still soaring, and citizen of new nations deserve to emit as much carbon as we do.

Once we transfer the carbon limitations to every individual in developed country, we'll all throw our arms in the air saying "That's oppressive!". Example: When the Greek people learnt they had to pay the same taxes as the rest of Europe, they all started blaming Germany for being over-controlling and penny-pinching, and looked in the way of Putin. Imagine what would happen when our citizens understand that 90% of the people can't have meat, heating, cars or flights.

Hence, carbon limitations will create tensions, country-level protests, and probably wars, which will waste even more carbon than today. Added to the global warming which is already underway, and there's little hope to dodge a catastrophic event. Either we manage carbon properly and most of us survive with greatly reduced materialist life (e.g. no meat), either we have a big event and 5% of lucky humans survive anyway, with a greatly reduced materialist life.

Concerning Mars, launching the Human civilization on other planets doesn't sound like a desirable goal to me. We didn't even succeed to manage ours, why expanding? Notably, none the people you've ever met will be saved by Mars – Only samples of our race will be sent. We'd better send a Noah's Arch than Humans.

> We've been thrown back many times in the past

Any specific examples of when this has happened?

I honestly think there are just too many people on Earth. Every single person wants something, every, person is their own environmental catastrophe due to our consumerist driven society and our diets.

Imagine 4 billion plastic coffee lids a day going into landfill, the ocean or needing to be recycled, and in this case, burned. Just that problem alone is incredible, hard to fathom.

I watched people all through Europe, deliberately take their cigarette butts, and drop them into storm water drains, frequently, almost everywhere I looked. I just couldn't believe it. I thought about saying something each time I saw someone do it, but in the end I just didn't think it was worth it. Could you imagine how much damage a single plastic bag or cigarette butt does to a marine eco-system in the course of it's life? I really can't believe people even want to eat seafood for the sake of their own health.

I've traveled through Europe and Asia for the last year and there is just so many people, it was even hard to sleep, like people just living on top of each other. Climate change is having a major effect on Europe, there is no doubt, in Holland, they were hosing raising bridges down so they would close properly, this was happening for days on end, it was 30+ degrees, insane, the bridges just weren't designed for the heat.

Right now, I'm in Bali on my way home from Europe volunteering for a startup who is trying to reduce landfill intake by taking green waste before it hits landfill and turning it into a reusable product (http://www.balicompostcrafters.com/), I visited the tip, it was a catastrophe, all the toxic run off just washes into the harbor each time it rains, the local government solution right now is to just put mud/dirt on top of it all. More amazing is that the tip is next to a sea turtle sanctuary.

My Fiancee and I swim at the beach daily, we can always swim out to the reef, pickup a plastic bag, head back to the beach and easily fill the bag up full of plastic objects, straws, bags, coke bottles etc. People just look at us like we're crazy lunatics, as if that's "Somebody else's job".

Unless most people wake up , tomorrow, roll up their sleeves and start cleaning stuff up, I think it's just a matter of time until a big collapse really affects us.

The thing is, the whole outcome is optional still, if we wanted too I really think we could turn it around.

Colonising Mars will not save the Earth or its current inhabitants; it's not viable to move people there, for example. It'd be limited to scientists and the elite to go there, and (if science fiction is anything to go by), would merely create an entirely different country or even species, assuming people can even survive there. Communication and travel with Earth will be crap, so isolation will happen. It might help perpetuate the species, but it's not going to save humanity or the planet as we know it.

Turning the Sahara into a green garden is a 1000 times easier than colonizing Mars.

Yeah I saw that in the TV series Crown

London is still really bad, continually missing European Clean Air Quality targets and has been fined several times. The Great Smog was visible due to sulphur from burning coal etc. Whereas today, you cannot see the smog... but it is still very much there.

Visitors often come to London expecting it to be foggy, as it was in Dickens, Sherlock Holmes stories, etc. It isn't any more.

Who was it? Maybe we can shame them to action via twitter, etc. Or at least make them aware that this isn't cool

Can't have solar power if you don't have sun due to smog. Besides, who is going to pay for it? It can't compete with cheap scooters.

While your point is valid, a little compassion for those who suffer under this pollution, which is caused by a lot harder problems than a few million motorcycles.

And what do you imagine yourself helping by wagging a finger this way?