Scientists have detected warning signs of the collapse of the Gulf Stream
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Whether the prophet uses computer models and fat piles of data and is called a scientist or not is a detail.
If you get bad news, look at the proportionality of cost preparing for the event compared to the cost of the event. A pandemic preparation and proper pre-warn system (as South korea and taiwan had it) would have cost absolutly nothing compared to the pandemic cost.
Same goes for gulf stream collapse. Cost of the for-warning system, cost of agricultural switch of europe to the canadian model, against the cost of not doing so..
Fair enough.
The difficulty arises in context when a menu of risks exist, and resources to mitigate them are insufficient to address all of the risks sufficiently.
Choices occur, and consequences follow.
The problem is that a huge proportion of those resources is being hoarded by the super-rich.
As a society, we have collectively decided that allowing massive, unprecedented concentration of wealth is more important than addressing any of the critical issues facing us today.
Personally, I disagree with that decision, and believe we should require those who can part with billions of dollars without it affecting their lifestyle in any way to do so for the benefit of all.
The budget for it was 800 million dollars.
It was removed from the budget in 2018 and I believe the funding ran out September 2019.
It only took three months.
By March 2020-the administration was putting out $800 BILLION dollars.
And since then they’ve put out more.
Taiwan—which adopted the US system (and therefore was in Wuhan January 4) had no real outbreak until 2 month ago—and even then, the outbreak was contained.
Frustrating…
I wonder whether people would take the decisions more seriously if they had to vote on them as they so in Switzerland.
If you were to switch overnight to referenda in say the United States the result would be mayhem.
The difference seems to be whether the appeal is to the intellect, or the appeal is to fear.
At any point in this journey the climate problems could have been brushed aside by going nuclear. If we aren't going to go nuclear, then we've done the sensible thing and waited for renewables to be cost competitive.
The science is following trends, using models and projections. There are real measures that show more instabilities, signs of weakening and the models explain why with confidence. From that we can anticipate, knowing the accumulated effects from trends may "lag" by 30-50 years. For anticipation, this means events will worsen over that span even if we stop emissions.
That greenhouse gases in a closed vessel causes warming when light shines is settled science past 100 years. We see cooling stratosphete and warming troposphere, all in line with the models.
It's kind of like discovering your house is on fire, then arguing warmth is good for cooking.
Sci Hub seems to not fetch it.
Politicians don't make the climate, consumers are - consume driven climate crisis.
Consumers have much less control over all of this than you seem to think.
Consumers have all of the control.
Don't eat meat.
Switch to a green energy provider.
Buy small car.
Move to a smaller house.
Buy used clothes.
Use your phone longer.
Consume less!
Growing up in Germany, I understand your opinion. No one wants to take personal responsibility. After WW2 no one in Germany was responsible for anything. WW2 just happened. The others did it. I followed orders. This opinion changed when people grew up who were born after WW2 which lead to a cultural revolution. The same will happen with the climate crisis. Children born now will hold current consumers responsible in the future - and they will be angry with their parents and grandparents.
If you want to change the world, change the incentives. Tax CO2 released from fossil fuels appropriately (enough to offset the effects completely) and everything will adjust thanks to the magic of the market.
Which ones? What corporations consume more energy that do not produce things consumers buy? If you buy a car, the corporation is using up energy, but for you, to build your car. They don't consume the energy for themselves.
Facebook uses energy? Yes so you can consume Facebook.
It's also worth noting that consumers rarely have the data necessary to compare the environmental impact of products or services being offered. For example: are ebooks or print books more environmentally friendly? It's easy to pretend the former since it looks cleaner. No trees are being chopped down to make pulp. No diesel belching trucks to deliver physical goods. On the other hand, there was a time when the semiconductor industry was seen as clean since it lacked the belching smokestacks of traditional industries. (The mining of rare materials was unseen. The dumping of hazardous chemicals was unseen. Ewaste wasn't even acknowledge until the mid to late 90's.)
Exactly, and this is the kind of problem that's solved by taxing externalities appropriately. Then the impact shows up in the price, and the common consumer behavior of preferring cheaper products naturally leads to preferring lower environmental impact products.
A minority does.
Every consumer can buy a smaller car that uses half the the steel and consumes half the gas.
A minority does.
Every consumer can eat less meat.
A minority does.
Consumerism trumps everything. Consumerism is ten thousands years old when people started to produce for other - and the strongest force to predict people behaviour. Consumerism killed East Germany and it brought down the Soviet Union and it will consume capitalism.
Not overnight, but in a free market, people buying SUVs over smaller cars makes producers make more and larger SUVs. That trend can be reversed if consumers start buying fewer SUVs and more smaller cars. I think that would work in reality too, even though the real market isn’t a perfectly free one.
Consumers can only slow down climate change. It is impossible for consumers to implement the systemic changes needed to reach carbon neutrality.
The climate crisis is not because we're not carbon neutral, but because produce so much CO2/methane/[..].
Carbon neutral is the wrong concept. Raising cows and eating them can be done carbon neutral, but converting CO2 into methane still leads to a climate crisis.
Humanity hasn't been carbon neutral for at least 5000 years, not being carbon neutral is not the problem.
Precisely. And who pumps out the majority of those gasses? The companies incentivised by capital to continue doing so!
I think people need to eat less meat. So I agree with you there. In fact I agree with pretty much everything you listed in your other comment.
But.. Doing all of that will not stop the companies that are actually destroying the environment. They will continue to do so unaffected by our personal choices, as long as they're being paid to turn our lights on.
Putting the burden on the individual to change their life is ridiculous when there are things out of people's control.
[1]https://climate.leeds.ac.uk/news/demand-side-potential-needs...
If US were to ban ICE cars and truck and switch go horse-and-buggy tomorrow, it will save 29% of US emissions. US accounts for 15% of global emissions. Thus the overall global savings will be 4.35%, or about 1.44 GT CO2/year. Fantastic. Yet 95.65% of emissions will still be going out every year. In 20 years, emissions have grown from 25 GT CO2/year to 36 GT CO2/year, or about .5 GT CO2 / year. The whole 4.35% savings would turn out to be a minor blip, overtaken in about 3 years by new emissions elsewhere in the developing world.
We are already 40+% above Paris agreement 1.5C emissions levels of 25 GT CO2/year. We need deep cuts on massive scale. If the world were even remotely serious about tackling CO2 emissions for a rough but perhaps survivable crash landing, we'd see:
* World wide moratorium on building new coal/gas/oil power plants and ICE vehicles.
* World wide moratorium on economic growth. Good bye lifting the third world out of poverty. Good bye western retirement.
* Gradual phasing out of industry in developed countries. Good bye middle class lifestyle.
* Ban of immigration from low emission countries into high emission countries.
https://www.c2es.org/content/u-s-emissions
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gas-emis...
Don’t let companies follow demand from consumers, let consumer only buy stuff that won’t destroy our only world.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_...
San Francisco is coastal for example but a lot of it is actually at high enough elevation to survive sea level rise, and I suspect its proximity to the ocean makes it more likely to weather temperature increases than somewhere like Phoenix (which is totally screwed if its water source dries up).
https://www.insider.com/floods-belgium-heavy-rain-wreaks-hav...
A few weeks before, a windburst, basically air dropping down from great hight, came from nowhere and destroyed some homes, again in the inland. No direct attribution to climate change, but another weather fenomena so rare they had to explain it to the news readers.
https://www.msn.com/nl-be/nieuws/nationaal/beauraing-eerste-...
At least the coastal regions have an easy fix: higher dikes.
By allowing the river to overflow in certain areas, downstream cities along the river won't be faced with flash floods (just a prolonged period of higher-than-average water levels).
(edit: it seems "wet meadow" [2] is the closest English equivalent, although those seem of natural origin and not specifically intended as a flood-management device)
The only thing I can think of for windfall is living with a much stronger roof over your head.
Let everyone who currently has a plan keep it. Any new residents must use private insurance. After a disaster, those that had government flood insurance will be paid out one final time then be obligated to move or use private insurance.
- Don't use plastic straws to save sea turtles. When nets are majority cause of sea life death, straws are not even a 1%.
Same with oil, coal industry.
Recycling, vegetarianism, minimalism etc. are highjacked by big business to shift blame for pollution to an average person. Its easier to push narrative that if only people recycled, there would be no microplastics and heaps of trash. Only if there was less cows the global warming would stop. And the most recent only if we stop bitcoin the planet would be saved.
When you say:
> I should be eating bugs to stop the Gulf Stream collapse?
You are falling for their narrative and getting outraged at imaginary people and imaginary scapegoat solutions (or people who fell for it and tell you that you should be vegan etc).
You can help by not feeding that propaganda machine.
There had been warning signs and reports that something should be done to fix the building. But because it was a condo the fixes would have had to be paid by the individual condo-owners. So they voted not to do the expensive repairs, and then many of them died because of that.
Maybe climate-change is a bit like that?
High horses also collapse from time to time, so best not ride yours so proudly.
They didn't want to allocate a budget for repairs in the future.