We Are Living in a Climate Emergency, and We’re Going to Say So
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
What I saw was incredible! They were making homes that keep cool during the summer and warm during the winter and you can grow crops on the roof because the house is covered in mud (wow!).
For 2 weeks when I was there (during the winter in Montana) I woke up earlier than everyone so I can light up their rocket mass heater. A few blocks of wood heats up this mass that dissipates heat throughout the day. The house stays between 66 degrees (coldest) to 72 (warmest) in the morning when the fireplace is on. As a Californian, I never thought there were so much efficiency to be gained from something as simple as a fireplace.
They lived a healthy lifestyle with minimal waste and energy usage and it helped inspire me to live a more sustainable lifestyle.
Just a really cool experience! I'm going back again this summer for their conference: https://wheaton-labs.com/permaculture-design-course/
Permaculture is really awesome.
I really dislike how it feels scientists are positioning themselves into politics more and more. I have less and less confidence that journals are attempting to describe and report without bias.
Maybe it's because I hadn't read anything but tech related white papers pre-covid, but reading a ton of research during covid really lowered my expectations for the standard to which publishing scientists hold themselves to.
If a mud fight erupts around you then you can either try to ignore it with zero chance of winning or you can join it with a chance to win. Either way you will come out covered in mud.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Szil%C3%A1r...
When you are aware of a major emergency coming our collective way, it is your duty to try and avoid it or mitigate its consequences. Any other behaviour would be unethical.
> I have less and less confidence that journals are attempting to describe and report without bias.
If you are talking about mainstream media, then fair enough. They most often suck at reporting science.
If you are talking about scientific journals, then at least I haven’t seen a major shift in “subjectivity”. Bearing in mind that any piece of writing is unavoidably subjective by nature. Science does not depend on individual scientists being perfectly objective people.
> Maybe it's because I hadn't read anything but tech related white papers pre-covid, but reading a ton of research during covid really lowered my expectations for the standard to which publishing scientists hold themselves to.
This has always been the case (ignoring the manure in predatory journal and obvious résumé padding). One article in itself is meaningless. Something can be considered probable if it has been validated separately by independent people. In case of global warming, an awful lot has been.
If you want to gauge the opinion of experts in a given field, it is more useful to read reviews or monographs than articles, which are always going to be limited in scope.
It would be ethical to make data sets public and verifiable to eliminate questionable reproducibility.
The UA study that gets cited so much for showing the U.S. has effectively the highest mass gun killing events in the world, for example, never released their dataset. This is a study that was referenced by the president, even.
This seems reasonable and appropriate. As much as I want to believe in humanity, I'm not optimistic that we're going to be able to actually solve this before things get really bad.
Climate change makes things more catastrophic. It's not dishonest.
Weren't most burned acres on federal land (managed by executive branch under Trump)?
https://www.redding.com/story/news/2018/11/11/trump-blames-s...
The most economically-destructive fires are at the Wildland-urban interface (WUI), especially new residential developments that build right up to and in large, dense forested areas. Without proper fire mitigation for houses, infrastructure, and communities, devastating Camp Fire scenarios are entirely possible again.
No, the main problem there was a neighborhood situated in a highly flammable area in the middle of a forest.
The ERCOT report [0] on the 2011 Texas outage states, verbatim,
> "The winter weather event of February 1-5, 2011 was determined to be a one in ten year event for some regions of Texas in terms of low temperature extremes and duration."
Or, if you'd rather be kinder to Texas power generators while using the same report,
> "Taking these temperature extremes into account, and coupling them with the sustained winds of this event, it is estimated that the resultant [...] event suffered by many Texas generation facilities approached a one in 25 year severity."
With this decade-old report suggesting extreme cold may well occur roughly once per decade, I will respectfully follow up with: Never anticipated my ass.
[0] http://www.ercot.com/content/meetings/other/keydocs/2011/201...
Also, taxes and pensions are very small problems compared to uninhabitable coastal regions, mass migrations and food shortages that climate change predictions show us.
Age pyramid? That's not the biggest issue in China's demographics: it's the sex ratio. Talking vague FUD about China isn't helpful and doesn't contribute to this discussion.
Mass migrations and food shortages are happening now, but not as bad as they will be. This is due to both climate and US Monroe doctrine meddling (crime caused by the War on Drugs and installation of right-wing leaders with death squads).
I'm pretty sure that's because of Missing women of China[1], not necessarily the one child policy.
[1] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex-selective_abortion#China and the other linked articles.
Sure, let's nuke the whole world and get rid of the human species to save the environment! What a wonderful take.
Furthermore, is there any sensible, hopeful, safe, stable, productive, and generally happy society that has mass shootings and addictions/crimes of despair nearly everyday?
And the grim prediction is rather than climate change, the real problem is population growth.
Population growth is not a massive problem: we already know that human population will hit a max of 10 billion people and from there start aging progressively and reduce over time.
This is the finest kind of denialism, and it is really going to bite us hard in about a hundred years at most.
There isn't any first-world country with the number and frequencies of mass shootings or gun-related homicides the US does. 2/3 of gun deaths are suicides, which are a bigger problem of preventable acts of despair. Murder is entirely different. 54% of mass shooting are family-related. Roughly 40000 gun deaths in the US per year.
Comparing with other countries is ridiculous at best when not nonsensical. No country enables citizens to purchase weapons like in the US and no other country has hundreds of millions of weapons in circulation. Trying to make it look like a single variable problem is a joke.
Reducing the number of humans is not the same thing as extinction. Your argumentation is lacking.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/as-disease-ravages-coral-reef...
Climate change will not really impact most of us alive today.
This is why it has been so hard to get people to make real changes, spend real money reducing our footprint. A lot of people just don't care because they will be dead and gone when the real trouble starts.
Climate change is already effecting millions of people worldwide in drastic, life-changing ways, and those effects will only increase over current lifetimes even under the most aggressive plausible decarbonization scenarios.
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/22/climate/climate-change-fu...
> That price — more vicious heat waves, longer wildfire seasons, rising sea levels — is now irretrievably baked in. Nations, including the United States, have dithered so long in cutting emissions that progressively more global warming is assured for decades to come, even if efforts to shift away from fossil fuels were accelerated tomorrow.
Which still doesn't bode super well for a coordinated global response to the climate emergency. But it does point to which areas of the world are likely to manage the best while the rest of us descend into chaos and anarchy.
Perhaps the people there will manage better but that's all they'll be able to do is manage and not prosper. Rising sea levels won't spare those that manage to muster up a better response.
Of course, I'm not sure how we can build such a culture of acceptance around masks in the West, where masks are seen by some as an attack on personal liberties.
Don't worry, natural selection will take care of them in due course.
And it’s not over, our way of life is still very much in jeopardy from government throwing away civil liberties to “flatten the curve” which somehow turned into “flatten the economy”, this is probably the most terrifying thing I’ve seen in the past 30 years.
But we are still here because there are enough people that can recognize and fix out mistakes.
And global climate change is one of the biggest mistakes humankind has made.
As a side note, do people think Russian trolls have invaded this site to foster dissension? If any group of people could figure this out the people on this site could.
Strange that you consider advocacy to be both "whining into the ether" and also "coercion". Do you outsource all your personal decisions to whoever happens to be waving a sign outside city hall? If you don't have the strength to make your own choices in the face of a few eco-friendly Chevron commercials or people sharing memes on Facebook, then they aren't your real problem.
Many of the people "whining into the ether" are already doing those "genuinely meaningful" things. They're calling for you to come join them.
Keep dreaming.
I've given up even trying to debate any portion of the climate because no opinion other than agreement is allowed. You must fully agree with all statements because even questioning minor parts gets your branded.
The damage done to serious debate is astounding.
Yet, read a paper from a hundred years ago, fifty years ago, twenty, or ten, and even five, and you will see what has been predicted before and never come to pass will be predicted again with the same vehemence if not worse.
Are there things we can change and need to change. Yes, and we have been making great progress. However doubling down each time you don't get it right will not make it better.
It was fun here while it lasted
The layout on the ground is true to how the grandparent lays it out. Questions are rejected. Doubts are branded as essentially unfaithful. Credentials are waved as proof of correctness instead of evidence combined with ideas, all while people with differing beliefs or ideas are stripped of their credentials, or have them invalidated. It's a recipe for close minded and one sided discourse.
The problems in science, as practiced today in academia, are legion. Meta science show the accuracy of the general landscape is poor. Common errors abound, papers that are considered the gold standards for years are shown to be built on faulty premise, code, methodology, etc.
To be fair, doing it right is HARD. Throw in even some mild corruption, bias in funding, dismissal of the skeptical, peg career advancement to publishing metrics (It's like measuring productivity by lines of code checked in. Once everyone knows it's happening the metric becomes totally useless due to systemic manipulation. The meta game shifts to hiding your manipulation of the metric while you manipulate the metric.). This system tends to produce generally poor results.
But let us take this post as a spring off point. You presume there is a baby. Both your posts illustrate this as an unquestioned axiom. However, I don't see a baby, it might well be a rat. It's down in the dirty water and I can't really identify it. The crux of the issue between us is then: 'Is there a baby, or something else?'. Which violates your axiom. Most people simply will not question their axioms. Which is when debate opponents start reaching for the, 'you're not qualified to have an opinion', 'your question is invalid', etc etc.
I'm not interested in debating the baby's potential eye color without first ascertaining the quality of the underpinnings of the system that declares a baby exists. I have found them to be rotten, mostly through smell as direct inspection is actively shunned. We don't really know it's actual state because academic science doesn't have systemic audits. The raw data, transforms and/or code/models are usually kept privately under tight wraps. This behavior is systemic. The generalized form of quality control in academic science is peer review, and my experience with quality systems is this is the bottom rung, the LOWEST form of quality check you can use that is actually a quality check.
If peer review is a good enough quality standard really depends on the product, customer, and the reputation my group desires to retain going forward. I think it's fine for low cost systems where schedule and budget are the customer's primary concerns. If something is of vital importance, I would demand higher levels of quality assurance than the lowest bar.
To sum up. If someone is declaring that there is an emergency. I consider this of vital importance! Thus, I find it perfectly reasonable to question the foundation until higher quality practices are in place to vet the entirety of the structure.
As tens of thousands of people get exposed to this year after year, that becomes the visibility of the emergency.
So I see your hyperbole, but it's BS.
- transoceanic superconducting cable connecting Europe to solar in the Sahara.
- tax credits for distributed battery storage (Powerwall)
- X-prize like awards for improved battery technology
- carbon tax
We don't live long enough for our brains to fully appreciate a crisis which evolves so slowly, even if we trust the people who are doing research on it.
Look at California Governor Newsom. From what I have read, he seemed to have tried to implement the restrictions recommended to him by scientists (not withstanding his politically stupid decision to celebrate at the French Laundry). But he is now facing recall, and that is in deep blue California.
If a leader in a democratic country actually tried to implement what was really required to fight climate change, they would be finished politically, and all their agenda rolled back.
If you can't convince people that a novel pandemic filling killing millions and routinely filling TV with coverage of dead bodies in overflowing morgues is something that requires them to change their behavior, good luck trying to do that with climate change!
Just like the big bright spot in the USA's fight against Covid are the vaccines, I think ultimately, it will have to be a technological solution that still allows people to continue their consumption that will have to save us. If we don't come up with such a solution before it is too late, we are in for a world of hurt.
He is facing recall because he proceeded to go ahead and ignore his own lockdown rules.
Also his recall effort was aided by COVID. Without some special stipulations put in place for COVID (relating to extended dates for signatures), it’s possible he wouldn’t even be facing the recall.
There are presumably thousands of people in the world who study ancient Mesopotamia, and there's nothing wrong with that either.
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-03-31/japans-cherry-blossom...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral_bleaching#Pacific_Ocean
[3] https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/fuel-moisture-content...
[4] https://www.apa.org/science/about/publications/climate-chang...
My mind on this is is not settled, but how does this factor in the unknown future of radioactive waste? We're not even through 0.1% of the time it will remain a threat. Every single nuclear TWh comes with a debt that must be repaid over thousands of years. Ensuring the death toll from that remains at zero is basically impossible to guarantee right now.
[1]: We need to go from 51 billion tons of greenhouse gasses per year to 0 by 2050.
Declaring a war on bitcoin would be as futile as War on Drugs and the Prohibition. Might as well embrace it, try to tax and regulate it, and move the revenue from it to worthwhile initiatives that can buy humanity more time.
Having said that, in an ideal world, I’d agree with you and say we should shutdown bitcoin and all other activity that’s superfluous to humanity’s struggle against climate change. Industrialized meat production is out. International air travel is out. Raising all other product prices according to the climate externalities they cause. Doubly or triply replanting the forests in the Amazon and elsewhere. It’s gonna take sacrifices now to prevent suffering later, if we’re going to make it past this potential Great Filter.
A single Bitcoin transaction now consumes 30 days of power for the average household, as much as it takes a Tesla to drive from SF to well past New York, at this point closer to SF-NY-Miami. And generates half an iPhone of e-waste (100g).
It also consumes 5X as much energy as mining gold, which is the second worst option.
Electricity can be generated from zero carbon means, nuclear, solar, wind, hydro, etc. There’s an order of magnitude more solar energy hitting the Earth every day than humans ever use.
Instead of stopping progress and living in the past, we can find a better way to make use of it.
Just how much power do you think physical currency consumes? Data, citations, estimates please. Because I know handing a $10 bill to my buddy consumes 0kWh, and doing the same with Bitcoin costs $20 and consumes 30 days of power.
If you want progress you'll have to do something that moves the world forward not warms it up.
It doesn’t matter how much power it uses if it’s switched to solar, and there are lower power options like proof-of-stake coming online anyway.
The relevant metric is tons of CO2 released, not kWh used. Bitcoin could be run with zero CO2 released if we chose to, in which case shutting it down would do absolutely nothing in regard to climate change.
Basically, it can't really be economically recycled, and it isn't. It's just thrown in heaps where poor folks in developing nations scrabble through the toxic remains.
"Useful metals" is a few grams of gold, tin and copper. The rest is plastics (non-recyclables) and FR4 (epoxy filled fiberglass). Fiberglass is also not recyclable.
Your plan amounts to little more than greenwashing.
> Recyclers can make money from selling scavenged metal from electronic equipment, says Puckett, but the process to retrieve usable metals is typically extremely toxic. Workers who remove the metals often have no protective equipment and breathe in high levels of toxic chemicals, which are then released into the atmosphere. And most of the countries where the processing takes place -- China, India, Ghana, Pakistan -- do not have regulations in place to protect workers or prevent the primitive recycling operations.
Most of electronics is plastic (epoxy is a plastic), and by and large plastic simply isn't recyclable. That's one of "mother's little lies" the plastic industry has been telling you for years to feel better about consumption. Reducing waste is the only way.
[1] https://recyclenation.com/2017/04/where-does-e-waste-end-up/
[2] https://www.npr.org/2010/12/21/132204954/after-dump-what-hap...
Basically, it can't really be economically recycled, and it isn't. It's just thrown in heaps where poor folks in developing nations scrabble through the toxic remains.
"Useful metals" is a few grams of gold and copper. The rest is plastics (non-recyclables) and FR4 (epoxy filled fiberglass). Fiberglass is also not recyclable.
Your plan amounts to little more than greenwashing.
[1] https://recyclenation.com/2017/04/where-does-e-waste-end-up/
[2] https://www.npr.org/2010/12/21/132204954/after-dump-what-hap...
Meanwhile in reality, Bitcoin's security and value is actually backed by the very scarcity of electricity (computing power) you want to deny, and almost all Bitcoin is mined with the dirtiest, cheapest and most climate unfriendly energy available: Chinese coal.
Most would not claim that a Visa transaction and a Bitcoin payment are close to equivalent (the article you linked even acknowledges this). Mining gold is a more interesting comparison, but even though I can go start mining Bitcoin right now, I can't go start mining gold.
The article provides a more thoughtful exploration that gets into some of the nuance and makes a stronger case against mining. I mention this because someone reading your comment might be tempted to discard it outright because "those comparisons make no sense".
To those people: read the article.
They have burning of resources built in. Proof of work, their primary mechanism so far, is literally: Waste energy on meaningless computations, until you hit a "lucky" one, with all previous computations having no inherent value themselves.
Physical currencies don't have this inefficiency built into their core. In fact, unlike cryptocurrencies, it's in everyone's best interest to make the currency's operation as efficient as possible.
It's pretty hard for me to imagine that either of these things are going to happen. I don't think that cryptocurrencies are ever going to be really useful because they're so inefficient, but I also think that they're here to stay as a speculative/gambling tool.
PaaS, pyramid schemes as a service.
Bitcoin just has to be the second easiest way to gamble from home to be utterly worthless.
That's a bold proposal.
Bitcoin mining doesn't cause pollution, running a power plant does. If the power plant isn't publishing reasonable records as to pollution caused and tax recovered then you add it to the estimated total for the country and tax imports, that way the country fixes itself because they don't want to lose trade.
In the short period Australia had a carbon tax, the profits were used to reduce the cost of other taxes so the average person came out even but you would be incentivized to constantly beat the rest by reducing your emissions so if you cause less damage than the average person, you pay less.
Even if Pigovian taxes were implementable[1], that's how they work. Since there is an optimal amount of pollution, the taxes are supposed to be set where the marginal cost to society of an additional unit of pollution is equal to the marginal benefit to society of that extra unit of pollution.
Note the hand-wavy terms "benefit", "cost", and "unit". The devil is in how those are measured. Since central planning authorities are horrible at figuring stuff like this out, one generally ends up in a situation worse than the one which one would like to fix.
As for the "clean up" aspect, I heartily recommend that one read and understand Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen[2]. Here is an excerpt[3].
Specifically, "clean up" is not free.
[1]: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/230475696.pdf [2]: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674281653 [3]: http://webpage.pace.edu/dnabirahni/rahnidocs/law802/The%20En...
The easiest way to solve this is to ban PoW coins in favor of PoS coins. There is nothing inherently valuable about BTC that wouldn’t be just as valuable in an equivalent PoS token.
I agree that raiding individual mining locations is counterproductive. Instead, go after the exchanges, where bitcoin is exchanged for real money. Without an economic incentive to mine bitcoin, the mining would slow down and stop.
The lack of reversible transactions is a bad thing. Without reversibility, there is no recourse against fraudulent transactions. Reversing a transaction requires the active participation of the fraudulent actor. This is why ransomware really started taking off once bitcoin and friends picked up. Before that, there was no economic incentive to hold computers for ransom, because any payment made could be reversed after the hard drive is decrypted.
And that might be possible by getting people and businesses that don’t cheat on their taxes to sell any holdings with something like a wealth tax.
The only bad thing about bitcoin is its electricity consumption.
There's also the way it allows those with access to energy they don't own to launder that access into money. Plus facilitating all manner of illegal activities (and I'm favor of making some things, like drugs, legal. Tax evasion or murder-for-hire, not so much).
None of the unimaginable amounts computations wasted on proof-of-concept have any inherent value at all, until someone hits that final "lucky" one, that allows the transactions to take place.
This is a prime example of the monetary system having been made more efficient over time.
What then guarantees the security of the financial system and of our money?
Why is the green solution to everything more prohibition and rules? What happened to believing in the future, in innovation and technology...
Of course I want to live in a world like that, just like I like living in a world where my neighbor is not allowed to just break into my house without consequences. Just like I like living in a world where people are not allowed to dump unbounded amounts of toxic waste into lakes and oceans.
We have regulation for what's allowed in food. Are you okay with that? Or do you prefer becoming an expert at food sciences so that you can test yourself that a food brand isn't trying to sell you something poisonous as a cost cutting measure?
> Why is the green solution to everything more prohibition and rules?
Because otherwise greedy people with no concept or care of long or even mid term effects mess things up for everyone else, and even themselves.
> What happened to believing in the future, in innovation and technology...
That has never been the case without regulation. We made cars and airplanes, we added tomes of regulation to make sure cars and airplanes work well enough to keep the people dying directly from them at a minimum.
If I wasted all energy available to us both on growing poisonous fruit that smells bad, would you object to that? Oh, but doing so would be deciding what is useful and what is not!
Again, the same applies to everything. You might not find a regulation about how much mercury is allowed in food items necessary or even "useful", but I, and many other people, are glad it exists.
You already do because here in reality resources are constrained.
> Why is the green solution to everything more prohibition and rules? What happened to believing in the future, in innovation and technology...
The green solution is to build technologies that become more efficient as people use them not less.
We know putting carbon in the air has an inverse square relation to temperature increases. We can prove this. So why not focus on the actual science instead of debasing yourself further? (2+2 can equal 5 was a recent position this journal took)
Do actual science, please.