Tokyo Is Preparing for Floods ‘Beyond Anything We’ve Seen’
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Instead, it claims that the purpose of the tunnels is to protect the areas surrounding some smaller rivers upstream of Tokyo, which are on flood plains and regularly used to get flooded (no climate change required, just regular rain season/typhoon does this). Now due to urban sprawl more people want to live there, exacerbating the problem and creating the need for this system.
I do not doubt that climate change is happening. I just don't like articles with such a clear agenda in the background, especially when the official sources contradict the statements.
[1] http://www.ktr.mlit.go.jp/edogawa/gaikaku/intro/01intro/inde...
(Please correct me if I'm wrong or I missed something.)
Let me tell a second hand anecdote of a Burmese village.
It was a rather small collection of huts raised on tall poles. But it was a village none the less.
All paths in the village were laid out with a connected mass of wood. Along the path were sticks, rising pretty high up in the air. Somewhere along the top of the sticks were a lot of cuts made out in the wood, at various heights. By a knife or so.
In the dry season, this path laid on the ground to be walked on. You didn't have to walk on it of course, since the surrounding dirt was dry.
In the wet season however, floods often came. And so, they raised the path up along the sticks so that it became a water bridge for when floods came. They raised it to the level of the highest cuts that were made in the sticks. A very reasonable thing to do, in order to connect the village in times of crisis, without using boats.
Interestingly, however was the background of the cuts. Each cut represented a water height that had some time ago been the highest the flood had become. So each season, they only raised the water bridge to the level of the worst flood they had experienced.
They did not have a margin.
While they didn't prepare for less than what they had previously seen, they only prepared for the worst flood in history, and not the worst flood in history + a margin.
Did they have room on the uprights to tie the cross members higher? Maybe the flood water held the wood up (buoyancy) and the uprights were there as anchors.
How did they raise the wood? I imagine it weighed a lot.
And I can imagine Japan doesn't want to risk Tokio.
If there's a natural disaster which would wipe out the population of New York once every 5000 years, we should be willing to spend $15 billion per year to prevent it.
https://www.travel.co.jp/guide/article/5796/
To protect from climate change and the increased risk of flooding.
The rest of science doesn't get described so confidently because people don't care if the general public believes it or not. If you're interested in understanding, not politicizing, then it doesn't matter if there's a consensus or not. Look at the history of consensuses about how nature works to see how unhelpful they are at determining what reality is.
Um what? I feel like you haven't spent 10 minutes in a physics class. As someone who spent many years studying physics, you have to get within range of the quantum level before people in that field start feeling a little shaky in their beliefs.
The history of consensuses? Yes, please, you should do that, because it has gotten us quite far given the constraints of time. There are so many crackpot ideas that are thankfully rarely explored due to consensus.
1. The earth is flat.
2. The sun revolves around the earth.
3. Fire is an element.
4. They have chemical/nuclear weapons.
5. No one can enter the search market; AltaVista owns the market.
6. Pets.com can't fail - look at who is invested and how big is the market.
7. Noone will ever need more than 640K of ram.
8. There is a world market for maybe 5 computers.
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/09/08/640k-enough/
There's also no clear evidence that Thomas Watson ever made the world market for five computers statement:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Watson#Famous_attrib...
You ignore the others, that dogma leads to shallow thinking.
All the world is the blend of chaos and order; acceptance and rejection, yin and yang. Your contribution helps drive the analytical consideration of acceptance or rejection.
I accept that prevailing scientific/expert opinions can also be right.
I accept that the claim of climate change, if true, would have disastrous consequences on a huge number of human lives, and of course business.
I also accept that I'm not seeing people studying this field denying human caused climate change.
I am not seeing countries other that the U.S, where it has become political, denying climate change.
In fact, I see a larger number of nations in the world agree on something than ANYTHING in human history. These countries have their own scientists.
I can certainly entertain that a few countries might make false claims to push other countries to make bad investments. But you're claiming that a global conspiracy on a literally unprecedented scale is happening and that we should ignore a high consequence concept because a relatively small number of people that happen to come from the single country where it is a political issue and to a dizzying degree come from outside the field say everyone else is wrong?
I'm not a climate scientist. I've done a little digging and have my own guess as to what is likely correct, but frankly my opinion of this is low confidence because I'm so ignorant on the topic. When one side says volcanoes are orders of magnitude less greenhouse gas contributers than humanity, and the other side says the reverse, any decision I make is based other than evidence.
Using the same criteria I use to decide what OTHER scientific advice I follow, I conclude that there is a chance that counter positions to climate change are correct...but is more likely that they are wrong.
High chance of occurrence x high consequence if it happens = you need a lot more evidence than I've seen.
If the history books in 500 years talk about how humanity put forth a lot of effort to stop a calamity at a global scale that turned out to be snake oil, that is still a result preferable than about how people followed dogma that lead them to discount repeated evidence and the millions or billions of people suffered for generations. That might sound like a straw man - i could say that failing to rub my head daily would have disastrous consequences - but when paired with the likelihood that someone on the internet saw through this global hoax, it is part of my reasoning.
May I ask your profession and country of residence?
No I'm not actually. What I'm saying is what I said. It was in reference to the ancestral post asserting that arbitrary confidence was being applied to certain statements.
Philosophy of science says we can't prove theories (of a certain type, which includes most of physics), only disprove them. So there aren't scientific truths, just current best theories.
Many cultures had religious myths about the history of the world which they widely believed.
I'm not saying that people who disagree with the consensus are necessarily right, or even that we should bother to listen to them - just that sometimes they might be so consensus isn't a reason to judge something as true.
While Einstein revised them, the Newtonian equations are correct enough that they are still generally used for all kinds of things.
If that the best example you can use to make the argument that the current scientific consensus could be wide off the mark, you've done more to refute your argument than advance it.
Obviously I can't give an example of current consensus being likely wrong because if I knew that, scientists would too and it wouldn't be the consensus.
Here's a snarky example though. See if you can find the flaw in it - current consensus among scientists is that you can't prove causation without doing an experiment - in particular you can't prove it using historical data. This is an obstacle to medical research since ethics impedes controlled experiments on people and it's part of why nutrition advice is frequently wrong (there you go for even more examples). But climate scientists have apparently done just that - themselves demonstrating that either the consensus is wrong or they're wrong. Either way, a consensus is wrong.
These are just an arguments to show how wrong consensus can be though - in reality I'm pretty sure that climate scientists don't acutally believe they're right without any doubt. It will be politics and attempts to manipulate people that changes confidence values into supposed certainty.
Often there is some evidence in both directions (for/against a theory), so we likewise have experience and examples where we must decide based on that imperfect info.
Given that we will never be able to prove this causation, at least not in the next few lifetimes and given that, right or wrong, the people (vast majority) in the field are saying the problem is real; Given that inaction is terrible if this is all true, then what evidence would convince you (or any example climate change denier) that the concerns are valid?
You can't even disagree with anything related to the topic without people jumping to the conclusion that you're a climate change denier and insisting on educating you. It shuts down genuine discussion. Even evolutionist arguing creationists have managed to admit that it's just a theory, but then go on to show how strong theories can be which is perfectly righ. Climate change hasn't got to that level of honesty - people are afraid to say it's just a theory because of their agenda.
Re: GMOs - you want to discuss the impact on monocultures, chemical levels and environment impacts (good or ill), prions or other corners of proteins we don't understand, patented genes, wild release of genes (including the patented ones), the economic value in talking cost vs improved yield, or even a serious discussion about what level of labeling (if any) is reasonable? Too bad, you're going to have to deal with people that think GMO food will mutate THEM if eaten.
climate, gun control, vaccines, free speech, etc - you can't have a nuanced, serious discussion to explore details because you have to fight off the fringe(s).
OTOH, however, a higher-than-linear curve of greenhouse gas emissions and year after year, into decade after decade of inaction, has an impact. The 2 degree threshold isn't a firm line...but it's also not arbitrary. If we need to make drastic change, but we've frittered away the decades that COULD have made that more gradual, then yeah, importance of action is higher. I'm not saying we have all stop driving tomorrow...but our current pace is not what we need, so the pressure is up. If we weren't taking as many steps backwards as we are taking forward, if the models said we were closer to a target than the projection said 10 years ago, that'd allow some reduction in the pressure. Instead of saying "we just need to keep our eye on the ball" we have to say "LOOK! THERE'S A FRICKING BALL!".
So I can understand the sense of urgency. Like race relations or gender issues in tech, any complaint that people are overreacting, or that this isn't the time, or this isn't the place has to come with some believable explanation of how they see a better way that hasn't been tried and failed.
To your concluding point: Climate change is a theory. I'll admit that. It could be wrong. The overwhelming majority of those in the world with relevant data and experience can be wrong. Really. But I don't see much evidence that that is more likely than the theory being mostly correct.
With that admission, where are we? Well, we've agreed to something that was already not in question. But for most it's NOT an agreement. We have to somehow convince people that their gut instinct is not a value that should even be considered when deciding things. And again, and again.
When exactly will we STOP agreeing that it's a theory and move on to what to do with it? Will another 10 years be enough? 20?
...Actually, it's 97%. I found the paper, which describes the data set and their methodology: http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/11/4/048...
That's a bit like asking what percentage of Christian priests believe God exists. There's kind of a selection bias there.
More helpful are broader surveys including earth scientists, geologists, etc, which (as I recall, not having the source handy) come up much more conflicted, close to 50% disagreement on various critical questions.
There also the issue of what questions are asked. It's easy to ask, 'is the climate changing', get a near-unanimous response to this near-tautological statement, and declare victory. But that question has nothing to do with any real disagreements real people are having.
The actual questions at hand are much more delicate. First among them is the question of what question we should even be asking.
Wait...while i agree that the methodology that gives 97% suffers a selection bias, I don't agree with the above. I would not trust a survey of priests about the existance of God, but I'd prefer their thoughts on the existance of a particular book of the bible than a survey of choir members.
Science is huge and detailed. I'd not trust geologists over physicists about physics. I acknowledge that physicists are not 100% correct, but that doesn't make non-physicists suddenly more likely to be correct.
I can see your point if the claim is 97% of scientists, but the claim is about climate scientists, because they determine the consensus on the topic.
What method of saying whether or not there is a consensus would you accept that doesn't involve bringing in people with no knowledge or experience with the topic?
You mentioned a 50%ish figure for scientists. Do you have a citation? Even if I think the result unconvincing (based on tjis limited info) I'd like to see their methodology and sample size.
There may also be extra safety requirements for people tunnels that could raise costs. A tunnel used for cars for example will need some way to deal with accidents. Imagine a big accident in the middle of the tunnel, perhaps with a fire, during rush hour.
You'll need some way to get rescuers in even if the public traffic lanes are completely blocked both ways by the accident. If there is also a fire you might need a way for people on foot to quickly get out.
These requirements could increase the space requirements for the tunnel, driving up costs. They might also cause limits on where the tunnel can go or how deep it can go, which may drive up costs.
That's great if you're paid to model the traffic but probably not so great if you now have to pay the added expenses.
I know, it's not realistic... but it would be nice to see. I have this picture in my head of the entire government running like it did in The Pentagon Wars (that's billion, with a "b"...) and nobody can stop it.
Warning, this could take a minute.
The Big Dig was pretty much my first project outside of the lab. I am not overly fond of admitting to my part in the project but it could be worse, much worse. Truth be told, we did our job just fine, but I digress.
By the time I got involved with the project, it had been in planning stage for quite a while and had undergone a number of revisions and had many funding proposals. My involvement was because I was busy taking traffic modeling into the computer revolution stage.
These various plans all needed to be modeled, of course. Even if there wasn't a snowball's chance in hell, it needed to be modeled. Even trivial changes will mean new modeling. It's lucrative work, if you can get it. Though, it's not much more than a fancy plugin today, it's based on some pretty complicated math and can be improved by adding more data points. Again, I digress...
Now, being new to the world of working as a contractor for municipalities, I had great expectations from the government representatives. I was quickly disabused of such notions but, again, I digress.
The Big Dig had many, many people working on it. It was in the public eye for a fairly short time, compared to the time it lumbered as a meandering project in the planning and pre-planning stage. Yup, they plan to make plans and call it pre-planning. This, of course, goes hand in hand with fact finding, feasibility studies, ecological impact studies, noise studies, and these may very well require constant revision as the plans change.
Well, traffic modeling is just one of those things.
At any point in time, any contractor, sub-contractor, or affiliate could have gone to the media to say just what you propose. In fact, if you examine the archives, I'm sure you'll find ample evidence of people doing just that very thing.
Sure, the amount I made on the project was just a rounding error, but there were a lot of rounding errors.
Then, you have people who will fight it, at every step of the way. They will tie it up in court for as long as they can, which means even more revisions. People sometimes wonder where I got my legal knowledge... Some was in academia but the majority of it was through experience.
There is tons of waste in government, I think we know that. But, politicians will add more - so long as it gets them votes. Interestingly, in this case, the guy campaigned on prosperity for the local economy. The project must not disrupt local business. Got to make money, after all. Yet, it slowed the project down and probably added a good 10% to the overall budget. The lengths we went to were absurd.
And so it goes...
Sure, someone may stand up and tell the politicians that they are insane and that they are stupid but, frankly, we've been saying that for years and nobody actually listens. We can't opt out, because we have contracts.
Oh, contracts? Yeah, every time you extended the project? I got a nice bonus to help grow my business. Every time I had to run the models again? Thanks... Every time I had to go get more data? Thanks...
The Big Dig was what enabled me to get my business up and functioning. We had more contracts before the first year was over and that project seemed to last forever.
I can see why people would just go along for the ride. If I'd had more insight and experience, I may have said something. I doubt it old have done any good, I'd have still had contractual obligations and the penalty clauses would have meant I was a poor man today.
Well, there is a wall of text. Make of it what you will, I guess. It is summed up with contracts, politicians, municipal workers, and citizen expectations.
Contrast that to the Canada line in Vancouver, which was built using a cut-and-cover method. All the business owners in the Cambie corridor were convinced that this would be a minimal disruption to their business.
By the time construction was done, every single merchant along the corridor went out of business. Strangely enough, cut-and-cover proposals for more subway lines in Vancouver are as dead as a Monty Python parrot.
In Seoul I grew up watching subway construction all the time. Yes the local traffic suffers for many years, but the underground construction is covered with iron roofs that allow overground traffic, and people get used to it. After all, a street is likely to have subway construction because it had a large number of people using it: these people don't suddenly go away. (If they did, it would be a major blunder on the part of subway planners!)
The whole street looked like a large bomb crater for a year.
Yes, you could still access the buildings, but why on earth would you shop on Cambie, when you could go the next block over to Robson. Even a 10% reduction in customers could sink many retail businesses, over such a period of time.
This is hacker news. It's easy enough to google for 2 seconds to learn a new term.
Notably: I only modeled traffic. I am not to blame. ;-)
(I have used that caveat so many times.)
Then the Monitoring and Control process group will evaluate Planning again each time it loops back, so it makes no sense to me their plan failed, multiple times really for each loop. It's even worse knowing that each time they come back to Planning as part of the process they screwed up yet again.
Case in point: it was only 17 months from Trump announcing his candidacy to winning the election - plus his party put up over 20 nominees.
1,200 Japanese workers convert above-ground train to subway line in a matter of hours.
https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/2msfz2/1200_japanes...
$3.2B of that is going to replacing the system's electrical infrastructure, replacing 90 miles of track infrastructure, and on retrofitting all of the tunnels, including the Transbay tube, new train control systems, relieving crowding, and more. [1][2]
BART has problems, but it's not spending 3.5B on lights and cleaning seats, and to suggest otherwise, especially without a citation, is arguing in bad faith.
[1] http://www.bart.gov/better-bart/the-plan
[2] https://sfbay.ca/2017/05/11/bart-maps-out-plan-to-spend-3-5-...
My point was to highlight that we've allocated them $3.5billion for repairs, essentially; we're getting no new track from that bond (where the comments I was responding to were talking about wholesale new constructions).
It seems like they all acknowledge the reality and danger of climate change and are willing to spend money on it.
In TFA Houston wants $400 million to build a reservoir. They seem to acknowledge that things are only going to get worse for them as the years go on. And yet everyone there still drives everywhere spewing carbon into their own air with every trip, public transit is in a poor state, and oil exploitation continues apace. Everyone's OK with spending money and manpower on huge public works projects, but they're not OK with addressing habits and addictions that make the projects necessary in the first place.
It's as if our eyes can see the oncoming train just a mile away, but instead of stepping out of the way we want to build a mechanized winch that will temporarily lift us over the train, and hopefully we'll be done building it before the train hits us, and oh yeah, never mind how we're supposed to get down, or the taller train after that one.
Why can't we put that money, effort, manpower, and will into actually addressing climate change and make crazy projects like vast man-made Mines-of-Moria-style underground tunnels and huge artificial reservoirs unnecessary?
Yes it's a global problem, but solutions to global problems start at home. Throwing our hands up and saying it's pointless until the other guy does something too can't be the way to progress on this issue.
Your train example is a pretty good one, but you've mixed up the metaphor. Here, "stepping out of the way" = mass migrations out of coastal cities. "A mechanized winch that temporarily lifts us over the train" = flood control projects like in Tokyo, Houston, Venice, or the Netherlands. "Calling the train company and asking them to stop running trains" = stopping global warming by addressing carbon emissions.
If you had a train barreling down on you, which one would you choose? I'd bet it wouldn't be calling the train company and asking them to stop running trains, because a.) they are unlikely to anyway and b.) even if they were willing, by the time you got through to someone with the power to stop the trains you'll probably be dead anyway.
I'd argue that the actual solution to global warming will be more akin to "stepping out of the way": people will evacuate from major cities, major cities will be destroyed, and people will pick up the pieces of their lives elsewhere. If they're proactive, they might evacuate before the city is actually destroyed, and we'll see mass migrations of people (as have been happening for the last several hundred years anyway) away from areas that will face greater climate risks and toward areas that benefit from global warming.
That's what humans do: we adapt to our environment. Only in particularly hubristic times (like now) have we expected to adapt our environment to us.
We must reduce emissions and push for sustainable infrastructure and solutions, now.
We must adapt and we must also mitigate. Only through the combination of both efforts and through our determination and willingness to lead sustainable lifestyles will we be able to beat climate change. We must push for renewable energy, and technological solutions to efficiently use resources.
The policy coming out of the White House is against these efforts and we need to find a way to prevent them from hurting us and our posterity by postponing the efforts to transition to clean energy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/09/climate/clean-power-plan....
Most people don't want to die, and so we have a self-interested argument for not destroying our environment. But we're at the top of the food chain - well before there's a lasting impact on the earth's ability to sustain life, we'll all be dead. It's the height of hubris to believe we have the ability to effect lasting change on the earth's environment that won't disappear once we do.
> A study based on a coupled climate–carbon cycle model (GCM) assessed a 1000-fold (from <1 to 1000 ppmv) methane increase - within a single pulse, from methane hydrates (based on carbon amount estimates for the PETM, with ~2000 GtC), and concluded it would increase atmospheric temperatures by >6 °C within 80 years
Am I reading this right that it would take 80yrs to get to +6c, so it would still be a gradual increase? Is it an exponential increase?
Anyone recommend a documentary about this?
Just cca 11,000 years ago, without any human intervention (nobody driving SUVs around back then), temperature has risen dramatically which caused massive ice sheets on top of North America and Europe to melt. This caused sea levels to rise by 120 meters, swallowing an area of land larger than China and Europe combined.
Until this day we still don't know what caused that (and it seems to be a reoccurring event as it has happened multiple times). The last time it happened it has caused extinction of most of megafauna (with some remnants surviving in Africa as it was least affected).
We are struggling to cope with sea levels rising by 1-2mm per year. Imagine if they rose by 120m in couple of years. All coastal mega cities - NYC, SF, Tokyo etc would be underwater completely.
We aren’t going to entirely destroy life on the planet, which will eventually recover great diversity (speciation to fill new ecological niches in some new stable equilibrium) within a few million years after we’re gone, but it will look significantly different than what we are familiar with.
That’s not much consolation to people who feel attached to what human societies and cultures we have all spent a lot of effort developing.
Your GP said "we must" do some things. No, there isn't a single obvious best answer. We don't know what the longer term effects will be and whether building protection will be enough or not - or enough to pay for their useful life. We don't have accurate science for that. Even if we did, we've still got hundreds of years to prepare, and importantly, future money to spend on it, which is cheaper than spending money today because of the time value of money. Every solution costs money and it's no obvious which one is cheaper.
Where did you get the mass extinction and "entirely destroy life on the planet" ideas? I know there are frequent extinctions of insects and large mammals, but that's been going on for centuries and is nothing to do with global warming. Global warming might exacerbate that but again, I don't think we have clear predictions of whole food chain collapses.
EDIT: I see you've toned down your comment from a strong belief to a suggestion of a possibility, so the main motivation of my reply doesn't really apply now.
We're not talking about packing an extra sandwich for a picnic here. These things cost.
I think I know that when you said "anthropocentric", you really meant "anthropogenic" but I really had to think hard to see if you were using a clever word to make a point about our own perception of human life. Eventually I decided it was just a spelling mistake but it took effort and I'm still not sure. So trying to be accurate is helpful if you're going for understanding rather than just expressing a feeling.
There are reasonable people predicting that type of mass extinction will occur within our lifetime. This blog makes a pretty good argument it will happen: http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/p/extinction.html?m=1
In my opinion, to think that human caused global warming and sea levels rising by 1.5mm per year will lead to global extinction event seems a bit far fetched when you compare it to what caused the last global extinction. The current climate changes are minuscule compared to huge climate changes (not caused by any human activity!) that happened quite recently.
Sure, we're going to have a smaller change in climate but we're also a lot more precariously placed than they were (and about as incapable of dealing with it.)
You are right that our civilization is very vulnerable because of our agriculture and food logistics being very fragile. A single really bad draught on a global scale would cause massive problems in feeding the large population we have.
I would argue that in this respect overpopulation is a bigger problem than climate change though. Instead of focusing on emissions and renewable energy there should be more focus on decreasing world population from current unsustainable level.
Oh, no, sorry, I wasn't - I was just saying that it was already quite wobbly and even a small push from something like climate change could topple it.
Have they got Paul Erlich on board?
If we've shifted planetary equilibrium far enough, we could be just "2 or 3 volcanic eruptions within a short window of time" away from accelerated feedback effects into a runaway catastrophe
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/06/the-ends...
I used to think that we were, and when I read that article, I kept looking for flaws in its logic or counterexamples in other press. But ultimately, it interviews a real expert, and his logic is correct: we're drawn to flashy apex predators at the top of the food web, but these species spring in and out of existence all the time, and when it comes to the fossil record, they're barely a blip. If we were actually in a mass extinction, we would be worrying about cockroaches, ants, and seaweed going extinct, not tigers and rhinos. And of course, we wouldn't be here to observe it.
That's not an argument to completely fuck up the environment, since, like I mentioned, we'll be the first to go and most people have some sense of self-preservation, let alone preservation of the human species. It is a reminder of just how insignificant we actually are on a planetary scale, and of how our cognitive biases often lead us to think that we are more important or more powerful than we actually are.
> “I think that if we keep things up long enough, we’ll get to a mass extinction, but we’re not in a mass extinction yet, and I think that’s an optimistic discovery because that means we actually have time to avoid Armageddon,” he said. [...]
> “The only hope we have in the future,” Erwin said, “is if we’re not in a mass extinction event.”
* * *
I guess it’s a bit fuzzy where you draw the line. Perhaps mass extinction is not an inevitability and concerted global action or some technological breakthroughs could still save us, but it has an uncomfortably high likelihood considering how bad humans are at staving off uncertain long-term threats.
I think it is much easier to have one or both of the latter outcomes in the med term (the next few hundred years, say) without it necessarily ending in human extinction.
The first is already happening. The second is highly likely. #3 and 4 are possible, but beginning to strain the bounds of likelihood. Somehow whenever global warming comes up people tend to jump to the last level, ignoring all the other steps and the massive reduction in complexity that has to happen without adaptation from any other lifeform for us to get there.
Too bad the people who die in the name of "carrying capacity"always tend to be brown and poor.
"President, what's your solution to the North Korean nukes?"
"Nothing to worry: the problem is self-limiting. If they start a nuclear war, billions will die, and then the survivors will be too poor to build any more nuclear weapons, so naturally there will be no more nuclear wars."
"But what about Puerto Rico? When are the aids coming?"
"The problem is self-limiting. If we do nothing, most of them will die or simply move to somewhere else, and then next time another hurricane hits there will be less people to die!"
And the people too poor to evacuate will stick it out in the city hoping for the best, and die in the aftermath of the next catastrophe.
The population of the Greater Houston area is 5.6 million. Just look at the map https://goo.gl/maps/rU1ZWvfjy9w You can get out via 45, 59/69, i-10, 290, 69NE, or hell even 249. It's quite possibly the most spider-webbed city in the country. You can go to Austin, Dallas, San Antonio.
And every hurricane those freeways are deadlocked, and people are caught by the storm from behind, and old people's oxygen tanks explode on their busses because of texas heat, and that's without a full-blown evacuation ordered. We even run out of gasoline, the Oil City.
I'm not sure what the solution is but yea, evacuation out of Houston is not an option. I just wish there was some way to tackle the "big truck" mentality out here so we can start reducing our contribution to climate change. Our one attempt to build a inner-city metro is a comical failure that people just crash their giant trucks[1] into on a regular basis because they built the damn thing on ground level on main street.
And its actually not a problem. Rich countries can build flood defenses just fine. The Houston flooding could have easily been prevented if the US cared about infrastructure. After Katrina plans have been submitted. They just need funding.
> even if they were willing, by the time you got through to someone with the power to stop the trains you'll probably be dead anyway.
But in reality, "we're" not just doing one thing. There are many things going on to solve the problem from multiple levels. While Tokyo is building up flood protections, Australia(n banks) is actively divesting from fossil full projects.
"Centralisation breeds anomalies: beach resorts often buy their seafood in Mexico City’s wholesale market, hundreds of miles from the coast."
https://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21665027-its-combinat...
Changing emissions profiles IS adapting. We've already done it with smog and lead, etc.
Even this is optimistic. It seems more likely to me that cities like Houston will keep getting flooded and "bailed" out (ha ha) by federal relief funds and state bond issuances.
You can't generalize at this level of granularity. Humans have done a lot of "adapting the environment to us" - draining swamps, building canals, reversing rivers, building dams, making water, power, and sewage distribution systems.
This.
Every single person who claims they believe global climate change is a very serious, and man-made, problem absolutely should be taking personal steps now to address it. Telecommuting is a thing. Home-solar is a thing. Electric cars are a thing. Quit telling _others_ to solve the problems, and start doing it personally, now.
Put another way: if you're seriously concerned about global climate change, and using gasoline-powered vehicles (directly or by proxy), you're not seriously concerned about climate change - and I can't take your concerns seriously because you don't.
And "leaders" who take private jets to "climate change policy conferences" are straight-up charlatans.
(I'd be construed as a "climate change denier", and yet I do more about mitigating climate change than anyone else I know.)
Be the change you want in the world. You can afford it.
This being effective seems contrary to everything we know about economics. If even a huge portion of people voluntary lower consumption or energy usage, it frees up that energy to be consumed more cheaply by other people and so the overall consumption is hardly impacted. Historically this is the case.
If you don't price an externality into the market with a tax or credit or it's useless.
Put another way: if you're seriously concerned about global climate change, and do not support pigouvian taxes or other policy that will actually have an impact, you're not seriously concerned about climate change - and I can't take your concerns seriously because you don't. You're just concerned about projecting the appearance that you care.
> You're just concerned about projecting the appearance
> that you care.
Yes it is unnecessarily snarky and if I could edit my comment I would remove that line.
Not necessarily. If your parent had been a car-user and staunch supporter of Pigouvian taxes, they may have felt personally and unreasonably attacked by their previous poster and merely responded in kind. Notice that the language is identical, signaling a reflexive reaction.
Personally, I think they are both right about what needs to be done. Personal action and collectively enforced action.
Not really, oil extraction is capital intensive, oil wells have finite lives, and you can count on people extracting the cheapest oil first. As fossil fuel demand drops, the risk of operating a well increases and that makes borrowing more expensive, the capital costs will be amortized across less energy so the energy will have to be more expensive, and energy should naturally get more expensive as time goes on and the easiest oil is depleted. Sure, technology changes and reduces the cost of extraction but moving away from fossil fuels isn't an incentive for developing more extraction technology.
Not to mention that people's investments in alternative fuels / transportation brings the costs down for everyone else and as costs go down, more and more people will be willing to pay the eco-friendly premium until some day they're less expensive and people select eco-friendly consumption out of their own self-interest.
I think this day is closer than most people realize for electric cars. Gear heads and regular folks are going to love electric cars when the batteries get better, at some point, it's going to cost a lot extra to get a ICE vehicle and that's going to be a rent extraction on idiots who dream of rolling coal in F250s.
Even as a kid, I laughed at the absurdity of that campaign. Of course it had zero effect.
Something that will work is to tax pollution, i.e. a carbon tax. Making it more expensive will do far more to influence behavior away from it than any marketing campaign. And besides, it raises spending money for the government, too.
Using the tax system to "internalize the externalities" (economist jargon) is an efficient and effective way to do it.
yet advertising and marketing happens.
Telling people who continue to commute by car or use grid electricity or travel internationally that they don’t really care about climate change is idiotic – not just useless but actively counterproductive because it makes people dismiss you as an arrogant jerk.
What’s needed are large-scale policy changes (international agreements, public investment in research and alternative infrastructure, changes to zoning laws, carbon taxes, regulations of agricultural runoff, crackdown on tax evasion and money laundering and international bribery, ...), which takes significant amounts of political organizing effort, money, and political capital (including flying various leaders around on jets).
That's a strawman. What the parent comment says is that people's behavior reveals their preferences. A more clear example is this - someone who drives a Suburban for fun and burns their trash isn't in a good position to demand that others go out of their way to treat the earth better.
Only if they are rational economic actors.
If you live in the sticks and want to buy food which is several kilometers away, do you throw up your hands in the air and starve so that you don't use your car?
If I'm following your point you're saying that some people make choices against constraints and that we should understand their constraints before we impugn their actions.
And you're absolutely right. I don't begrudge anyone for driving a truck who uses a truck, and much of the debate about 'what you need' seems to follow this thinking - if you're using your truck in such a way that a sedan is a viable alternative, how costly is it really to put that person in a sedan? And that's a very valid point (personally, I think we have to many trucks and SUVs on the road because fuel is unreasonably cheap and trucks / suv owners don't bear the full costs of crashing / insuring them).
But we can ask that people do the things they expect of others - or at least it's defensible to ask someone to be the change they want to see in the world.
The person who lives in the sticks might have an opportunity to grow their own food, and depending on their views about the environment it's an avenue to explore.
And there's also a point about 'harm reduction' - driving a car to get groceries is more defensible than driving an SUV to get a candy bar and leaving it running while you shop to keep the A/C pumping.
If someone has to drive a car, they need to understand that not all cars pollute alike. A 2016 Prius pollutes orders of magnitude less than a 1959 Chevrolet 2 ton truck and the person should consider ways they can reduce their harm to the environment if they want others to do the same.
Personal steps are our main chance at a short term effect, and we need that short term effect. A huge part of greenhouse gas emissions for instance is due to meat. It amounts for more than half of it if you count cattle respiration ! This is something that can be almost exclusively solved by personal involvement, i.e. eating less meat or no meat at all. Likewise for personal transportation and home heating/insulation. With these three things other which people have a lot of control, we cover a large part of greenhouse gas emissions.
It won’t make any detectable difference if I go 100% solar and vegetarian, or if I spend all my disposable income on gasoline that I burn in amusing ways.
Collective action is the only thing that matters for this. If you go all-in on a low carbon lifestyle for yourself, and your friend nudges government policy towards something that reduces emissions, your friend has done far more to mitigate climate change than you have.
As I recall from the time, the rise of the SUV came from imposition of emissions limits on cars, which didn't cover trucks so the spacious & fumes-spewing "enclosed car-styled truck" was inspired. Did that help emissions in the long run? Here in the southern USA, 2/3rds of vehicles aren't emissions-efficient sedans.
Just because you recognize that your personal actions won't affect the outcome as it pertains to you doesn't mean you can't recognize that the personal actions of a large number of other people will affect the outcome as it pertains to you.
To stretch your analogy, you are playing prisoners dilemma with someone who is swearing he will snitch, has a lawyer who is saying "my client will cooperate fully with the police" and who has signed a document explaining the facts.
...trying to minimise one's carbon footprint is, quite obviously, an iterated prisoner's dilemma: you can observe other's behaviour every day (and vice versa) and react accordingly.
The problem is that nobody plays it with a single other person, but with "all of humanity" instead. Any change in others' behaviour will almost certainly be only gradual, and not accessible to daily perception.
Let me get it straight, you mean Leonardo Di Caprio, George Clooney and Al Gore should live like the peasants? Please, hold my beer.
Spewing tons of CO2 en route to a CO2 control conference, when the same ends could be met via teleconference, is hypocrisy.
You can live well while reducing your impact on the environment. They certainly have the money to.
On the other hand, making a point of using telecommunications could make for a good PR stunt, which could increase attention and thus effectiveness. It could also help promote the idea of using teleconferencing as an environmental measure. Overall, though, I’m not sure how good a stunt it’d be - it might give people the impression that fighting climate change requires people to make great personal sacrifices in their way of life, which, whether or not it’s true, could hurt the cause by creating cognitive dissonance. (I’m pretty sure it’s not true, per se. Rather, it would require a ton of money, which would hurt people’s way of life indirectly, but not as obviously.)
"You run a marathon and smoke?"
"It's better than just smoking."
"Solutions to global problems start at home." --> If everyone in Houston switched up their SUVs for Prius', nothing globally would change at all, except that the people of Houston would have smaller cars. Why does this make sense for them?
This is why Climate Change is hard. Individually nobody is causing that much damage (except maybe Californian cows) but the sum of the parts causes an extraordinary problem.
If I have a pile of coal, and you want electricity, I can sell you coal for a good price. I make a profit, you get energy, we both lose a tiny bit due to increased global warming. The other 7 billion people in the world each lose a tiny bit to global warming and get zero direct benefit from our trade. It is rational for me to keep selling you coal, and for you to keep buying it, while we can keep the game rolling and push the costs onto everyone else.
It's be beneficial for everyone else if they banded together and prevented us from trading without paying them appropriate compensation.
If you're feeling particularly misanthropic / politically foolish, repeat similar argument about living in society with high per capita greenhouse gas emissions. Suppose you and a partner decide to have children. Maybe everyone else in the world should band together and demand compensation/regulation for the global environmental impact due to population growth in these countries. Some things we currently regard as individual freedoms are not logically compatible with constrained resources/constrained pollution sinks.
They did it to create jobs. In the same way the US is said to have a "military industrial complex", Japan has a "construction industrial complex", wherein the government builds a whole lot of infrastructure the country can't really justify or even maintain. Flood control, rail lines, airports, etc. It's all stuff an industrialized country needs, but the Japanese take it up to eleven in an effort to stimulate the economy.
Or do you have any sources?
Paradoxically enough (but not so much if you think about it a while), a review of patient mortality rates during doctor's strikes found that mortality decreased when doctors were on strike.
Nice podcast on some of these things: http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2009/11/boettke_on_elin.htm...
In part because the Carbon Industry is huge and powerful, and holds power over most of the worlds major governments.
I mean Rex Tillerson, the former head of Exxon Mobil is currently the US Secretary of State.
The rest is because the machine of Late Capitalism is built on a presumption of endless growth with no consequences. The crisis that's barrelling down on us is so __alien__ to the established way of thinking that it's literally impossible for these economies to react with anything other than stupor and paralysis.
When one of the super volcanoes burps its going to screw up a lot of things, and it would be nice to have some options.
I wish we had a global system of carbon taxes, and hope that we might make an effective solution. And I wish cities like Tokyo would push harder for national/international solutions. But I don't think they're wrong to prepare locally.
Unfortunately, a global carbon tax would put the billion dollar Climate Change Bureaucracy Industry nearly out of business. And people act like we haven't seen this kind of perverse incentive structure--bureaucratic inertia--before with the War on Poverty, War on Drugs, War on Terrror, etc.: they all end up focusing on self-preservation rather than their apparent objectives.
Houston needs to get to the point that they can handle 60+ inches of rain in a 24 hour period. Token efforts might keep their budget balanced and the voters appeased until the next election, but they're getting 100 year storms so frequently now, they'll have to stop calling them that.
Climate change is great and all, but even if you sharply cut carbon emissions today, it would take a years before 100 years storms went back to their previous frequency.
One should not assume that climate changes have been, are, nor will be, exclusively caused by human action; one should not think that there is a single, global path of action that will somehow set all future climates to some ideal version. More concretely, consider that we happen to live in an interglacial period. [1]
It sucks to have to drive for miles to get anywhere in Houston. Public transportation is downright dangerous in Houston where the threat of violent crime is very high. It is not practical to arrive at work sweaty from walking or bicycling. Just being outside on a motorcycle moving at moderate speed causes intense perspiration within 10 minutes. Air conditioning is necessary. There is no alternative to the gasoline powered automobile because the city is planned so poorly. So you deal with it the only way you can by taking personal responsibility to ensure your own safety and comfort. Fundamentally the problem may be poor planning or that the government is dysfunctional and taxpayer money is squandered.
Obviously the answer is a bit of both, so it's not entirely clear what you're arguing for....
This probably won't happen, though. We're f#@^ed.
Meaning you can make excellent progress towards your goal without committing injustices on an industrial scale. Instead, you get to work on empowering women and bringing education, economic opportunity, and health care to everyone.
Yeah!
"Injustices on an industrial scale"? When billions of people are displaced from the rising coasts, when entire nations disappear into the ocean, when our over-homogenized agriculture fails to sudden environmental shifts leading to widespread famine, we'll wish we had just gotten vasectomies instead.
Careful how you throw around “they” there buddy. We Houstonians are 7 million diverse people doing the best we can with what we have.
Thanks for your outrage on our behalf. Instead of grand standing and virtue signaling perhaps you could, you know, actually do something to help.
A quick skim only showed studies showing cost of each fatality e.g. USD 1.6e6 in US listed here https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
I have a question for the global climate change skeptics out there.
Are there any major countries in the world besides the US and maybe Russia where the central government agrees with you on what is happening and what to do about it? (If there are give us some links)
My question still stands.
China is definitely building new coal plants, just not in every district. Beijing has a ban, for example, but not surrounding Hebei.
Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster was happend. Disasters occur at unexpected places.
Come on, guys. Read before you comment. Jesus.