Dying forests, megafires, failing crops. For all the talk of a looming crisis, it seems apparent that we're already in one.
It's time to consider solar geoengineering or other more extreme mitigation strategies.
It's time to consider solar geoengineering or other more extreme mitigation strategies.
The crisis, said Eric Kuhn, former general manager of the Colorado River Conservation District, can no longer be ignored. “According to Merriam-Webster, a drought is a temporary condition,” he said. What is happening, he suggested, is something more permanent and troubling. “This is aridification.”
I think it's just because the framing for so long has been "drought", when it clear that what is going on is probably more severe.
[1]: https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2021-07-11/lake-m...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2021/jun/...
Edit: Here's a more accessible version of the graph: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6488/314/tab-figu...
Both of your links show how bad the current drought is. If the current drought miraculously reverses itself in the next several years, than what you're arguing could be true. However, it doesn't look like that will be happening - time will tell.
It's not exactly accurate because it doesn't account for water taken out for irrigation above this particular point, but it clearly shows the natural ebb and flow of the Colorado's volume.
For developed countries that have high productivity growth, falling demand as the population ages and low inflation you actually have to come up with random ideas to keep the population employed. It doesn't even matter what you do. You could let them dig holes and fill them. What's important is that the money goes to people who spend it.
You know. Instead of letting the government be the investor of last resort, why not just introduce a carbon tax and carbon tariff and just let the private sector do all the investments? It would revitalize the economy far more than a bunch of trump style tax cuts.
Green investments for climate change? Fuck that, let's save capitalism with green investments!
> China isn't doing anything, so why should we?
If the entire human race comes to an end, the last two gravestones will read: "the guy in the other grave is to blame."
https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-is-china-the-main-climate-c...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/01/16/next-chin...
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/10/01/worlds-largest-solar-...
And the irony is that such a power plant is an extreme strategic and economic resource. During wartime you no longer have to worry about how to import ever dwindling fossil fuels. During peace time, you have limitless negotiation power.
Majority renewable energy would likely push a country into a realm that is far beyond a superpower. And China seems to have caught on to this - they have probably realized how much money they are burning while securing coal reserves around the world (e.g. Zimbabwe).
The poor and first nations communities have not been well served by the current paradigm, and in fact the best outcome for them is generally left leaning policy that actually honors seniority of water rights, enforcement of environmental laws, and policies that support critical first nations fisheries and other resources (stop damming salmon runs, displacing the tribes and selling the water and power to large corporate farmers would be a great start).
It is the political right that has largely trampled the poor and first nations into the dust over the past decades, on both sides of that border.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45435593
I don't disagree with where you are going, but I think there might be easier ways to geoengineer than mirroring sun directly back out into space (unless I miss my mark at what solar geoengineering is - if so, I'm sorry). I cound't find it, there's also the "plan" to release megafauna into the midwest and pay to have them "sheparded" so they become a commodity instead of a liability, creating grasslands again.
EDIT: typo
In the long term, I hope that the economic forces of cheap renewables and energy storage might be enough to get us down to a reasonable PPM. And maybe, just maybe, we'll see advances in sequestration that get us down to where we were before.
I'm not an expert, so please don't take any of my views as fact. I'm just a layman trying to find some hope in what looks like a pretty hopeless situation.
Which is unfortunate because even if we dropped emissions to zero tomorrow, we would still be in for a few more decades of escalating climate crisis.
In the grand spectrum of what's already be chosen as far as climate change goes, this is just the very, very beginning. Our chance to act to prevent what we're seeing now was 30-40 years ago.
"Breaking news: Record-setting forest fires in California will send smoke up to Washington."
to:
"It's wildfire season again, here's our favorite air filters for 2021."
Humanity's ability to go from "oh, shit" to "this is fine" and just not realize how much worse things have gotten is incredible.
I assume in 2025 we'll all just scroll past the boring article about which ten metropolitan cities in Florida washed into the Gulf today so that we can get to some funny comics.
It's unquestionably too late to prevent global warming, and mitigation is only possible if we seriously consider organized economic down scaling. This is stuff people have known about for decades and strangely enough took more seriously in the 70s than they do now.
Carbon emissions grow every year and the rate they are growing at continues to rise as well. Fossil fuel usage continues to rise (globally, local changes are meaningless). The only time we see any serious reduction in emissions is during massive economic down turns.
Many argue that people won't accept a change of lifestyle, but that change is coming either way. Since virtually no one I've chatted with will even take economic reduction seriously I'm pretty certain it is "too late" in every sense.
Downvoting comments like this because you wish it wasn't true is really unfitting of a community that prides itself on being 'hackers' and understanding how the world works.
https://www.npr.org/2020/08/24/899422710/to-manage-wildfire-...
"Before 1800, several million acres burned every year in California due to both Indigenous burning and lightning-caused fires, far more than even the worst wildfire years today. Tribes used low-grade fires to shape the landscape, encouraging certain plants to grow both for tribal use and to attract game."
This addresses only a symptom (more extreme wildfires) and not the root issue: persistent drought / aridification amplified by climate change. To be resilient to the latter, we need to become dramatically more efficient in how we use water resources, especially in the food production pipeline.
After spending a lot of time in the Sierra Nevadas growing up, I really can see how a lot more trees are dying. A lot of it is that pine beetle wreaking havoc, but the number of standing dead trees is astounding. Old bike paths I used to fly down I now have to be careful on in case I round a corner and have a tree down; 20 years ago I just never had that cross my mind!
I mean, how many thousands of years of plastic utensil avoidence equals an oil well operation over a year?
It’s not really fun to conclude that it would be more humane to not have them, than to bring children into a world completely consumed by its egotistical inhabitant’s desperate desire to please Moloch at absolutely any cost.
Climate change and plastic pollution are two separate issues, but I would be willing to bet that the folks who support plastic pollution legislation are also some of the more fervent supporters of climate change legislation. And at the municipal level, for every plastic ordinance there are probably dozens of ordinances focused on climate change. But solving climate change will likely require global cooperation on a level that the world has never seen before. So you are essentially cherry picking a topic to accuse their supporters of being "performative" just because they haven't yet solved one of the biggest challenges the world has ever faced.
No, and I wasn’t trying to say that.
> Climate change and plastic pollution are two separate issues, but I would be willing to bet that the folks who support plastic pollution legislation are also some of the more fervent supporters of climate change legislation.
I agree, but in democratic societies (at least in western europe where I have experience), policy tends to be decided by compromise between different interests, and plastic bans and more impactful climate change occupy the same lane of general support for environmentalism.
So we get into a situation where green parties want to reduce plastics and want to reduce petrol/gas use, and our (Western European) compromise becomes a ban on plastic and little done to reduce petrol/gas usage.
With any money available, we can build solar/wind farm, which is a proven method of fighting AGW (and it even pays for itself these days!) and we can't even do that fast enough.
1 - Forcibly use the wealth of the country to solve the problem, over the objection of those prevented that use of wealth previously.
or
2 - Forcibly silence the people who are experiencing hardship as a result of the problem, so the society can go back to believing (realistically or not) that there is no such problem worth solving.
This happens by degrees, as a very rough response to the degree of hardship presented by the problem, at first, but is the expected result if the society can't democratically answer the "who will pay for it, not I" question.