Ice loss from Greenland and Antarctica hits new record
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Don't get me wrong, "adapt" is going to be painful. But I think it will be painful in the way the industrial revolution was painful: Lots and lots of cultural displacement, shifts in lifestyles, etc. But it'll also make some new billionaires and powerhouse industrial centers based around the need to fundamentally change our society to stop making it worse and to solve the problems a heating globe produces.
Note: btw, it was an absolue nightmarish period to live in !
Funny so, that even back then society didn't really collapse into the sorry state TV wants us to believe it would today.
Indeed, and not just there.
What pains me the most is that we collectively could be mitigating this with far more vigor but that would be in conflict with the worship of the quarterly profit report.
Does your city have parking mandates, for instance, where developers are required to furnish N parking spots per dwelling unit or store?
That kind of thing locks automobile usage in place in suburbia, so that many people are stuck in a lifestyle where they are forced to use an automobile all the time, for everything. And transportation is a huge contributor to greenhouse gas emissions in the US.
Something like carbon taxes or caps would actually deal with the problem. Unsurprisingly, there's a lot of pushback on them.
Books like https://islandpress.org/books/arbitrary-lines and https://www.brookings.edu/book/fixer-upper/ are decent starting points for more in-depth discussions of all this.
One just reopened near me, and it's been quite successful so far:
https://www.bendbulletin.com/lifestyle/bruno-s-6th-street-ma...
It's not just a store, sure, but the entire reason the commercial space exists is because it was a market before we got a zoning code making that sort of thing functionally illegal in most residential areas.
No one is saying you have to always go to the corner store, either. Who knows what the market would provide. They aren't high margin businesses. But at the very least, we should re-legalize them and see. This stuff isn't black and white: if you skip a few trips by going to a local barber, but still drive to work, that's still progress.
Where I lived in Italy, there was a smaller neighborhood grocery store we went to for most things. It was a little bit more expensive than the big box one, but not the kind of corner store prices you're talking about. They had fresh fruit, veggies and meat, so I often stopped there to pick up some things to make dinner with, nice and fresh, rather than a weekly run to Costco or something, as is more common in the US.
What city is it?
There are lots of businesses that I would not want to be in. Does that mean they shouldn't be legal?
> Of note: The study found that if countries only meet existing emissions reductions based on current policies, and warming were to reach 2.7°C by 2100 (4.8°F), the top 5 countries most vulnerable to unprecedented heat (based on the number of people exposed) would be India, Nigeria, Indonesia, the Philippines and Pakistan.
> In this scenario, up to a third of humanity would be exposed to such extreme heat and be well outside the human climate niche, the study found. The heat would not hold off until the end of the century, but ratchet up noticeably over time.
> The study concludes that for every 0.1°C (0.18°F) increase in global average surface temperatures, another 140 million people will be exposed to dangerous heat.
A global war would ensue, where everyone would try to defend their southern borders from the intruders and try to "go north". And billions of deaths will happen out of necessity, since "the north" can't sustain enough food production for 7-8bn of people.
And since many would die anyways, every nuclear power will make sure to use their nukes to destroy the ones trying to come from the south and to break up north.
In the end, it would be a nuclear war between the USA and Russia trying to use the situation and extend the full control over the Arctic.
Fundamentally, if you look at the level of suffering due to conflict and climate that already exists, I'm just saying we'll all be more aware of that, and HN readers are much more likely to experience that, vs saying we're all going to end up with Mad Max scenarios.
What is this in reference to? Climate deaths are at an all time low [1].
[1] https://www.humanprogress.org/the-collapse-of-climate-relate...
In your analogy we are not the frog though, we are the pot, and we are the asteroid, since we are the ones causing the catastrophe. Except on geologic timescales, the pot isn’t slowly being boiled, it is being pressured cooked on a thermo-nuclear reactor. Extinction events are seldomly this sudden and extreme as climate change is currently.
How do you figure? An asteroid impacting the planet "making life miserable for a few thousand years, wiping out 75%" in seconds of an impact, or a cataclysmic volcanic eruption that happens in seconds/minutes/hours. All of that near instant destruction compared to the 100-200 years of man made pollution on industrial scales.
Sure, but that leaves a heaping helping of the remaining 25% to carry on to eventually repopulate the planet with more glorious life. It's happened before, it'll happen again, and whether we're the reason or the victim doesn't really matter. Life finds a way, with or without humans.
We're still in below average temperatures. Considering our dummy ancestors were around 50 million years ago, when averages were 30 degrees hotter, I don't see why man, as we are now, wouldn't survive. The poles will be nice tropics, once again [2].
Society as is, is doomed, but man is probably fairly permanent.
[1] https://www.climate.gov/sites/default/files/styles/full_widt...
from
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/whats-hotte...
[2] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/study-north-pole-once-was-tropi...
We're just desertificating vast regions of the planet, not turning them into "nice tropics".
While true, this vague statement may be misinterpreted by readers. Per Wikipedia[0], about 55 million years ago is the first fossil evidence of any apes. The 'homo' genus, which is what I'd consider "our dummy ancestors", doesn't appear until 2 million years ago (and anatomically modern humans 300,000 years ago).
When people speak of "humanity" they don't mean "the human species". They/we mean of "human society", our current variant, which just invented computers, artificial intelligent, and until very recently seemed set on ending all resource scarcity, curing all diseases, and becoming inter-planetary.
Will humans survive somewhere in the climate as our ancestral species did before us? Of course.
But losing 2000 years of societal progress is not something to just waive away as nothing.
As long as we are succeptible to a tiny rock floating in space swiping our little planet and wiping out all of us, we must progress technologically, and a regression to merely surviving and dying of a broken ankle is not an answer.
They were clearly talking about humans, the animal, not society.
But not US, WE, todays societies will be gone. Why is this an argument with 'conservatives'? The stupid 'woke' should stop worrying about climate, because humans will adapt.
But why is this a 'conservative' argument, when all of their religions will also be gone. When we are back in the stone ages, there will be humans, but not 'Republican'. Unless, in the dystopian future, the Christian Right does devolve into a Taliban like Ameri-stan where they can go 'Old Testament' on gays. But that does seem like a pretty long game argument. Is it really: "Deny Climate Change so we can destroy civilization back into bronze age so we can just wander the desert worshiping god, like we were supposed to"
I don't know why conservatives think that, but I think it's silly to think that humans, the animal, will be wiped out within the next 1000 years, due to the very real climate change that is happening.
That's massive, global, collective, directed, and specific choice. Now if we could just get the exact same class of people who wear lounge suits by default to consider acting on climate change as the same sort of default...
[Sorry, couldn't resist, please downvote]
I was clarifying that the OP was not suggesting grand collective action will take place to adapt to climate change.
You simply need to convince the handful of people in charge.
Unfortunately, this climate change thing really throws some of those people:
“Here’s a snowball, it’s very cold out…”
We send some pretty low IQ people to DC.
“adopt aggressive climate saving measures”
They could have adopted “non-aggressive” measures and not feed the climate deniers. By doing nothing sooner, requires more pain later. We have been discussing the problem for almost 5 decades.
In fact, a higher percentage of their total energy is met by renewables than for the US. They have 3x the capacity of the US while their per person energy usage and emissions are still significantly lower than US.
Let's not pretend China does nothing.
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2022/02/ranked-10-countries-e...
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/primary-energy-renewables
The sort answer is: It’s really not an excuse for us not doing anything.
One of the principles of negotiation is showing goodwill, so let's all just start by doing our part, and then the international community can have a strong negotiating position with defectors. Being a defector ourselves doesn't help! (I prefer to suffer while striving for a good, than suffer slightly less knowing I'm part of the problem)
We have already done it multiple times. Does really no one remember the refrigerator gases, the CFCs?
The same economic doomsday arguments were made at the time, without them food production would suffer globally, and it won't matter anyway since it is a global problem and what about all the countries that will keep using them?
The onus on making a similar argument with greenhouse gases today would be on the ones saying it's impossible this time. The greenhouse situation may be so much more complex but the economic arguments are the same. We know how to solve them, by trade agreements and international tariffs.
Like with everything, the problem isn't a lack of practical solutions, it is a lack of willpower to pay the short term polical / economic costs needed to avoid massive long term harm.
U.S. House Rep. Paul Broun, a Georgia Republican, doesn't believe in evolution, the Big Bang theory, or the teachings of embryology. In fact, in a Sept. 27 talk at Liberty Baptist Church in Hartwell, Ga., the member of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, who is also a medical doctor, called those areas of science "lies straight from the pit of hell."
The same applies to Global warming but on both sides.
That's just my opinion though.
* Ban on non-indigenous whaling
* Ban on ozone depleting gasses
* Several human rights treaties
* Nuclear non-proliferation
* Ban on mineral extraction and military activities on Antractica
* etc.
Leaded petroleum was such an easy, local problem that solving it just happened at the national level, no need for binding international agreements.
I actually think the smart approach to serious action to prevent global warming would be similar to that taken for Nuclear non-proliferation: The big, strong countries force the others to accept they cannot have emissions and anyone who doesn't agree gets (at least) sanctioned into poverty or maybe "liberated"...
But most countries are much more interested in cheap energy (and meat and construction and other CO2e sources) than they ever were in nukes. Most citizens don't personally care if their leaders have nukes, but they care if they can afford meat and electricity.
And of course, for this to work, we would need those strong countries to ALSO give up their CO2e, something no world power has done and which the US and China are actively headed in the OPPOSITE direction of.
The ban on whaling is also a good example of a few bad actors ignoring the consensus and making the whole thing much less efficient. And that's (again) only for "whale meat", hardly as interesting a product as <almost everything that causes climate change>...
With regards to global warming the responsibility of inaction lies solely on one bad actor, the USA, and only [initially] one political sub-faction in the USA. In 1997 all the world (including USA and China) came together and approved the Kyoto protocol, and made this painful discussion that would deeply affect our fossil fuel industry but save our climate. It was on its way to be ratified everywhere, public support was in its favor, so was the Clinton Administration, all European powers, and the Communist Party of China. Everybody agreed that the cost of climate change was greater than the benefits of cheap energy.
However at some point the oil industry in the USA fought against it, it got stalled in the USA senate and finally killed by the George Bush administration, in order to save their fossil fuel industry. If the USA hadn’t killed it, and even if they would have only half-assed the implementation, and even though China would come to ignore it, we would still be much further along the way of reducing our emissions.
You see, the world can come together and make painful decisions that affects all of us. It has done so multiple times in the past (even with respects to climate change) and it will in the future. It is really only because a certain industry has a disproportional hold over a certain country’s discourse that despite these agreements we have failed to act.
Aside from that, the US is currently below its 1990 levels while China is 4x its 1990 levels and double the current US production. It doesn't seem to line up with what you're saying about the US not taking action.
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
You can create a nice graph here and add counties to compare.
I’m not listening to the China argument, I’ve heard it many times before, it is always the same, and it is always done in bad faith. It was even the reason claimed by the USA senate to stall the Kyoto protocol over 20 years ago. We now know it had nothing to do with the supposed unfairness and everything to do with the fossil fuel lobby muddying the water,
Sure sounds like you’re saying the US isn’t taking action. And in calling them a bad actor you’d think that emissions are going up out of control instead of down below levels that predate the protocol by 7 years. It sounds like your arguments are in bad faith.
> I didn’t say that USA didn’t take action.
It sure does sound like I just moved the goalpost here doesn’t it. However if you continue reading the paragraph it surely should be clear I’m talking about inaction in commit to an international agreement. That was also what my parent was talking about, getting people to agree to act, not the action it self.
However even if you didn’t misunderstand me, and I’m actually being disingenuous here, you’d still be wrong. The Kyoto protocol called for industrialized nations to reduce 8-20% of their 1990 emissions by 2012. Most countries stayed within their targets, with a notable exception of Canada. Canada notable followed USA and withdrew the protocol after USA failed to ratify it. USA was still at +4% emissions in 2012 and didn’t go back to 0% until 2020, where Covid pushed them over the edge. 2020 was supposed to be the second target with most nations targeting -20% reduction. USA will not reach that in another decade.
USA is responsible for a huge part of historic emissions, prior to 1997 China was responsible for almost none of it. Had the Kyoto protocol held, China could still be a party to the 2020 target.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co-emissions?t...
This is the graph you should be looking at, when judging fairness of the protocol, and bad actors. You should ask your self in 1997 when China had the population of Europe and USA combine, while still only responsible for the equivalent of the UK alone. If in 2001 USA and Europe would start to flatten out while China stay under Europe. You should look at the top line, the biggest historic emitter, and ask, why were the USA the first country to bail on the protocol, and why have subsequent trials of another protocol mostly failed.
That graph is good at pointing out that historically the US has contributed more than anyone. I didn't dispute that. It just seems like a silly argument to go back hundreds of years before any powers recognized it was an issue and use that as a basis for what should be done going forward so that other countries can catch up to the US's historically awful record. You see something, you fix it.
You can say this argument is not sound, if you do, just be aware this is the same tactic used by the oil lobby that killed the protocol, it was not done in good faith back then, and I think the same is true of modern incarnation of these refutations.
Actually in more resent climate proposals, delegates from poorer nations, and climate justice advocates, have actually been trying to push for a development fund in which richer nations fund green infrastructure projects in poorer countries, the historic polluters—especially the USA—have predictably pushed back against this and landed on a much weaker climate relief fund at the last COP. If the oil lobby (and by extension the USA government) was sincere about the supposed unfairness of the Kyoto protocol, this would be a great compromise, and totally align with You see something, you fix it. But alas, they are bad actors, and such proposals yielded limited results.
I don’t think it is fruitful for us to be arguing about what I meant by inaction in my previous posts. You obviously misunderstood me, I tried to clarify but you still persist that I didn’t mean what I say I meant. The original point was that there exists a historic president for an international agreement of reducing carbon emissions, which everyone agreed to. Future agreements should therefor be possible. Identifying bad actors and pointing fingers at those at fault for previous agreements failing seems relevant to this discussion.
And of course I’m pushing my ideas. The history of who killed the Kyoto protocol is still up for debate. I’m of the opinion that the death of the Kyoto protocol and all subsequent agreements rests in one bad actor, the USA. There is not a historic consensus about this, and you’ll find historic accounts that disagree with this (or more likely you’ll find historians putting less importance on the Kyoto protocol than I do). I’m pushing what I believe is the most accurate—or rather the most relevant—narrative of history here.
Mass die offs have happened historically but nothing short of the black plague is in line with the range of possibilities before us.
What do you mean? Now I'm scared...
Why would people just suddenly start dropping dead?
The good news is that there are similar possible outcomes that things won't be that dire.
250K dead / year by 2050, 5 million / year or so by 2100.
The tough part is that such models have a lot of uncertainty and that it is very well possible to be alive but to be utterly miserable. I'm normally fairly optimistic about our ability to influence our lives but on this one I'm not, this will happen and we're along for the ride, it's a rearguard action at this point where we can try hard to minimize the damage but not avoid it completely.
https://bigthink.com/the-present/births-and-deaths-per-year/
When we think how many of those deaths - and the suffering leading up to them - could be changed by reducing obesity, reducing sugar intake, increasing exercise, reducing air pollution, reducing smoking, increasing vitamin D levels, reducing alcohol consumption, reducing stress by any means (city noise to hypercompetitive workplaces to ragebait media), improving road safety, and "we" don't act on most of that. And then how much more we would have to act to hold or reverse climate change to save comparatively fewer people, it seems ... not a bad idea, but a sadly unlikely one.
(Incidentally, 67 million -> 72 million is about a 7% increase in deaths. Which is in the region of the excess deaths in 2022 which correlate with COVID vaccination in 2021 in European countries. A study from a Norwegian University finds a correlation of 1% increase in population vaccinated in 2021 -> 0.1% increase in excess deaths in 2022. Not caused by COVID which they excluded, not caused by a bounceback after a year of fewer deaths which they accounted for, and as far as the authors can tell not caused by delayed access to health care which was widespread and not linked to vaccination levels in different countries; and if that's roughly in the region of the expected climate change deaths, you can see that not only are we not doing much about this, we are barely even talking about it in public, which doesn't bode well for the climate change equivalent: Dr on YouTube citing studies and evidence and not conspiracy theories: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iyo2UNQcdpQ )
But the number of people dying due to climate change is a difficult to pin down number. Do you or do not include for instance people dying in wars when the proximate cause for the war was climate change or mass migration? Some believe you should, others say that wars have always been fought. So it's a tricky problem for many intrinsic reasons and it is an even trickier problem because there are so many ways to interpret the data.
All this adds up to us doing nothing until it is way too late.
Can that be fully offset by increase standards of living and improving healthcare/medicine? 250k is not a lot statistically on a global scale (and I really doubt the capability of these models to accurately predict what's going to happen in 50+ years)
> The tough part is that such models have a lot of uncertainty and that it is very well possible to be alive but to be utterly miserable.
I'm not saying it's going to be tough for a lot of people in some places. But I don't really see how for humanity as a whole it can be much more than a slowdown than potentially can be fully compensated by further technological progress. Of course increasing economic inequality can likely only make it worse rather than better
https://www.carbonbrief.org/extreme-co2-levels-could-trigger...
As the paper itself clarifies, the worst case model for CO2 emissions still wouldn't have us hit those levels for 75 years.
> If fossil fuel use continues to rapidly expand over the remainder of the century, it is possible levels could get that high. The Representative Concentration Pathways 8.5 scenario (RCP8.5), a very high emissions scenario examined by climate scientists, has the Earth’s atmosphere reaching around 1,100ppm by the year 2100. But this would require the world to massively expand coal use and eschew any climate mitigation over the rest of this century.
So yes, it is a scary theoretical possibility. One that helps show why even minor mitigations of CO2 emissions growth are better than nothing. However, it is a risk that is not imminent and is something that even our current anemic response to global warming will probably avoid.
Honestly that’s really not reassuring. I would have hoped it take far longer than that
Scary stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eM1aakTzMw
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermohaline_circulation#Shutd...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_meridional_overturnin...
Not acting now means we'll have to act more aggressively in the future under more adverse conditions... like controlling the weather to make sure we get a successful harvest of food.
That doesn't mean the decarbonization won't happen but that it might need different political agreements, perhaps different technological setups, cost sharing mechanism etc. - but that will delay things, highlighting again the need for contingency approaches.
Oh right, forgot where I was commenting.
For the elites maybe success means something different to us.
A billionaire is only a billionaire if there's a society to be richer than 99.9999% of everyone else.
If wealth is measured by how much ammo you've got, your bank account or the fact that you have lawyers on retainer won't mean much.
A brief blip of liberal democracy has only been made possible by a surplus of resources created by industrialization. If that surplus disappears, or gets fully siphoned up by the elites, we'll be right back to times of feudal lords, their knight-enforcers, and everyone else.
Being locked in a fortress with a few dozen armed men who’s loyalty depends on “currency in a bank” having any value doesn’t seem very safe to me.
But what do I know, I’m not a billionaire.
But I don't doubt the actual result will end up like the Don't look Up satire
1. Segments of the local population are armed as well or better than their security contractors and outnumber them thousands to one.
2. None of the locals are confused about where the canned goods are being hoarded.
3. Heavy equipment is both ubiquitous worldwide and shockingly simple to operate effectively.
Tins of beans in fallout shelters are there to get you though the worst 30 days, and then rebuild. If there is global ecological collapse, who cares if you're stocked for 2 years? Unless you've got a lot of farm gear, tooled for future environs, and lots of people to use them, then you're only promising yourself a slow death later.
I've heard this a bunch and even seen a article -- "ultra wealthy creating climate change bunkers" but never heard any specifics. No one named companies building them, or where they are except some nebulous reference to New Zealand.
The whole thing reeks of "can't be proved, must be true" FUD clickbate.
These together function as a bunker with armed guards to protect them against the effects of climate change.
When it is too smokey in Claifornia where one of your mansion is, simply fly your private jet to Kamchatka where you last parked your superyacht. Or if it is also smokey in Kamchatka, you have a smaller yacht parked in Patagonia.
Are you in Florida and another hurricane is on its way? Notify your private chefs in Egypt about your plans to stay in your palace over there for the next 3 weeks.
It's become such a popular opinion that I wonder if it's being pushed.
Mitigation might be cheaper, but disasters that already happen have more clear incentives.
It’s terrible that we aren’t addressing issues early but it’s hard to see how we fail to adapt. At worst I think we see total excess deaths around two billion (which is a lot! but basically let’s us discount most of Africa and a few hundred mil from Asia and Americas).
We have less than 100 million people living a lifestyle that 7900 million people try to achieve. A few prominent people on the top blames it on the 1500 million or so, that have managed to achieve what most of us call basic decent living. Yes, the bar has gone up the last 30 years. Significantly. Yes, many would be fine on 1990-levels. Many wouldn't. The next 5 billion or so work hard to catch up regardless, and they're offsetting anything the smaller part does, by the sheer amount of growth. The poorest 1½ billion that's left are mostly trying to survive. The rest of us could have done _something_, but it's the ones who are worst off that'll take the worst blow.
I'm over 40, and learnt about this in school over 30 years ago. My grandparent's generation knew, and did nothing. My parent's generation are still struggling with basic things like throwing glass and metal in a separate container for recycling. The time for solving this with wonderful technological innovation has come and gone. We _could_ try to force some kind of return to sustenance farming, but previous attempts at such social engineering have ended in near-genocide. And so, all that is left is to deal with the consequences of deciscions that were taken long ago.
The good thing is that more and more people agree about climate change being real. We might have screwed up preventing disaster, but at least we still have a chance to dampen the impact.
edit: no idea why imgur thinks my plot is erotic. But, if anyone is too afraid to click, it's a linear looking increase, up to the right, from 20 to 21C.
Some times it feels like we're re-arranging deck chairs. The US administration plans more drilling in Alaska, Russia continues to seek new natural gas and oil sources; human civilization continues on as if nothing is happening.
I hope we can end all use of fossil fuels in the energy sector before 2030 but I remain doubtful.
It seems like we may simply end up with no polar caps and have to survive the next few thousand years without them.
The ice in Antarctica won't completely melt, it's been there a very long time and it would take a very long time and a very dramatic change to cause that. If we manage to cause that we're really fucked, because the changes to everything else would be catastrophic. But Greenland could happen over the course of a millennia. That would have far reaching consequences, as it would likely disrupt the Gulf Stream (I know that's not the right name for it, but everyone knows it by that name).
peak oil: More recently, the EIA's Annual Energy Outlook 2015 indicated no production peak out to 2040. However, this required a future Brent crude oil price of $US144/bbl (2013 dollars) "as growing demand leads to the development of more costly resources" source: https://www.eia.gov/pressroom/presentations/sieminski_050420...
peak gas: "One forecast is for natural gas demand to peak in 2035." source: https://www.power-technology.com/features/energy-transition-...
peak coal: Most main coal exporters peaked already. China is scrapping the bottom of the barrel: "In 2021, the government ordered all coal mines to operate at full capacity at all times, including holidays; approved new mines, and eliminated restrictions on coal imports." source: https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-takes-the-brakes-off-coal...
I am getting concerned about the impact on increasingly expensive fossil fuel and climate impact on economies. The sooner countries stop to rely on fossil fuel the better, period.
That's because we are. Action on this should feel at least as global, as desperate and as uncomfortable as what was done during the pandemic. It should have a very tangible economic impact, because the measures require a big reorganizing of the economy. Which is why nothing is being done about it.
But boy does capitalism have its chokehold on our imagination. Economists, academic and arm-chair alike, seem to think our current system is a fundamental law of the universe like thermodynamics or something.
Ah well. As always it seems what we believe is more influential and important than what is real.
While we do lose ice every year and do so at rate much higher than the historical average, we don't actually set a new record every year.
> Melting peaked in 2019, when the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets lost a staggering 612 billion tonnes of ice.
It doesn't seem like we will end up with no polar caps (at least not in our lifetimes), but they will be greatly reduced in size and lead to very significant rises in ocean level.
"So as counterintuitive as expanding winter Antarctic sea ice may appear on a warming planet, it may actually be a manifestation of recent warming."
[1] https://www.climate.gov/news-features/featured-images/antarc...
This article is about loss of ice mass.
> How does the melting of land ice matter to sea ice formation? The resulting meltwater is fresher than the seawater. As it mixes with the seawater, the meltwater makes the nearby seawater slightly less dense, and slightly closer to the freezing point than the ocean water below. This less dense seawater spreads out across the ocean surface surrounding the continent, forming a stable pool of surface water that is close to the freezing point, and close to the ice onto which it could freeze.
I'm currently trying to find new housing that is low-car friendly (my lifestyle), and also dog-friendly (my gf's lifestyle). Yes, we live in the bay area, but this applies to every single major tech hub in America. If we want to get a two bedroom unit, that's both safely bikeable to central SF, but also a few blocks from a dog park, we're going to probably need to pay about $4000 per month. That's about $50,000 per year; it's about 40% of the SF median household income.
As much as I hate the way our sprawl is infecting climate change... the real reason sprawl has taken over is that we've blocked urban housing construction for 70 years.
I hardly blame younger folks for their exurban lifestyles at this point. I can barely afford being an urbanist, over 40, without having roommates... and I consider myself fairly well off. And I'm counting down the days until I say 'fuck it' and just move to Milwaukee or Pittsburgh where I could basically retire (not at all a slight, just the extremely rare affordable urbanist cities). I can't imagine what it would be like with kids.
If you pretend to care about the environment, you need to be at your city council meetings demanding high-density, mixed-use, housing in your neighborhood.
Any serious move would take some convincing, especially with a partner who is from the area. As someone who prefers the cool fog to warm sun, there aren't a lot of friendly climate zones friendly that don't involve the pacific northwest, but that's a tough sell to normal folks that think grey skies are unpleasant.
As someone pretty much fatalistic about stopping climate change, I think the fortunes may favor the pacific northwest over Northern Europe in the next 50 years. It's an awkward gamble to make, but it's one that takes a lot more than just weather into account.
I do, but when moving here it was just my wife (then gf) and I on working holiday visas. Ireland is wonderful in many respects but also a deeply frustrating place, it's extremely car-dependent outside the middle of Dublin and perhaps what's harder is that most people see that as fine. Climate breakdown is viewed as a far away problem for other people, and rural communities can be insular. I have heard that some areas in Clare and West Cork are transforming, though.
That being said, I live in a beautiful house on 3.5 acres a 15 minute bike ride from the train station and we want to move to the Netherlands so our kids can have actual freedom before learning to drive. Also a lot more jobs on climatebase.org are in NL (and DE), they're never in Ireland.
I live in a spectacular suburb of Denver, probably the nicest part of city that's still somewhat affordable for normal folks. My car-centric lifestyle is indeed convenient, but it's also efficient and resilient. I fucking love Costco.
I drive a 1996 Honda minivan for which I paid $2000. This minivan does 25-30 mpg in the city. I fill that minivan right to the gills on my monthly trips to Costco, which allows me to minimize my miles driven, gas consumption, and time wasted on the mind-numbing task of buying staples. The less frequent trips to the store naturally requires us to store more food at home, so we end up having enough to last at least a couple of months in case of an emergency.
Now, I could move to one of them fancy "walkable" neighborhoods they're building, and further cut down my car usage by taking light rail to a more expensive neighborhood grocer three or four times a week. This would require me to waste dozens of hours and spend hundreds of extra dollars simply to save a pint of gasoline per month.
I'm interested to hear your case for why I should want to make that trade?
If you think that's a good trade, there's no convincing you of any moral duty to make sacrifices for future generations.
I'm don't think moralizing is an effective way of changing minds, of course. I'm just generally disappointed that we haven't decided, collectively, that change is important enough to plan for and execute with minimal inconvenience for most people. That was my view 22 years ago, and it was very naive.
Goodness. So not only is my judgement incorrect-- I'm also irretrievably immoral? What could I do differently to redeem myself in your eyes?
Any theory of moral sentiments must be universal (this is my background in academic philosophy talking), so an moral sentiments I have must apply to you as well, otherwise they wouldn't actually be moral sentiments. That doesn't mean that I think anyone making different choices than I do is a "bad person" or anything (my other comment in this thread specifically discusses how difficult the tradeoffs for urbanism have become in this country), I only mean that I think that you should generally care about other people, even people that aren't born yet, at least collectively (gasp: how pearl-clutching of me).
Again, I'm a fatalist at this point, simply because the level of push back to any non-symbolic change has been much more than I thought it would be for all collective changes needed. We have a few tricks up our sleeves in the form of geoengineering, and the eventual dominance of effectively free electricity in the future, but as it stands, I think it's going to get much worse before it starts getting better, and caring about whether someone lives in the suburbs isn't worth the energy.
I'm curious: how do you feel my monthly pint of gas compares to your pet dog's consumption of food resources, including the environmental destruction of factory-farmed meat, packaging waste, and transportation costs?
I don't have a dog.
I think other forms of environmental destruction can be relevant in general, but generally irrelevant to any discussion of climate change.
I think it's perfectly sensible to be concerned about climate impact on a macro scale and for people to make reasonable trade offs. I don't think "car=bad", only that in many areas (including where I live in CA) it's the highest single-source of greenhouse gas emissions, so it should be paid the appropriate amount of attention to.
Ok, that's funny! Sorry, your girlfriend's dog, with whom you live, and on whose behalf you seek to move nearer to a dog park.
> generally irrelevant to any discussion of climate change.
You think the factory-farmed meat that your girlfriend's dog consumes is irrelevant to climate change? If not, then I'll reiterate my question: how do you feel my monthly pint of gas compares to your girlfriend's dog's consumption of resources?
I'm trying to have a reasonable discussion about the systematic sources of GHGs, and then am just getting whataboutism deflection in every response.
I do think GHG heavy meat-consumption that is associated with climate change should be disincentivized just as much as I think GHG heavy fuel-consumption should be.
If you want to keep asking me to make arbitrary GHG comparisons (that only a PHD researcher would be able to accurately calculate), then I'm not going to respond. Whataboutism is only an effective rhetorical device if your intentions are in bad-faith.
I neither said nor implied that, and in fact I'm saying the opposite. You absolutely have a right to your moralizing regardless of your GHG emissions.
> I do think GHG heavy meat-consumption that is associated with climate change should be disincentivized just as much as I think GHG heavy fuel-consumption should be.
Well thank God, I thought it was just me. FWIW I also have family members who are dogs, and I spent countless hours developing a vegetarian dog food recipe, and I spend countless more making the shit. I learned the AAFCO guidelines (which are woefully inadequate IMO), and made a spreadsheet to make sure my dogs get what they need from calcium to taurine. I, my wife, and my kids are all vegetarians, and my kids were horrifed to learn how many animals have to die to feed our pets.
> Whataboutism is only an effective rhetorical device if your intentions are in bad-faith.
If I were pointing out hypocrisy only to justify my own life choices, then that would qualify as whataboutism. But I assure you that's not the case. I personally find factory animal farming to be the nearly the most repugnant, immoral thing that humans do. But I also understand that not everyone wants to spend a chunk of their life making vegetarian dog food, so I'm not about to accuse you and your girlfriend of immorality if you make different choices.
I certainly agree with you there. It's good to find some common ground.
I think there are perfectly good reasons for you to hold moral views over my decisions. I do think that moralizing isn't effective, I just think that if we have a systemic problem, which I believe that GHG emissions is, than making it more painful to participate in that system is an effective way to stop people from accidentally participating.
The entire point of this discussion is that the convenience and affordability of suburbia and sprawl is part of it's proliferation, and systematization (similar to consuming factory-farmed foods). It sensible for us, if we care about these issues, to want to change the convenience and affordability itself because they create path dependencies.
You can very sensibly swap your automobiles' carbon footprint with a vegetarian lifestyle. The problem is that by being a stakeholder in the automobile-first system, it's important to be politically active in making that system less affordable and convenient to begin with. It's definitely possible to do, even with misaligned incentives (lord knows I've got some strange behaviors considering my views), but abstinence-only in a systemically broken system is merely a symbolic change.
Edit: my girlfriend (who happens to be vegetarian) said "I would like to know more" about your vegetarian dog food. If you have a website or anything about it I will pass it along.
I have pages of my own notes, but here's a good resource, probably all you need to put together a good recipe:
https://www.aafco.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Pet_Food_Re...
My recipe does NOT give you a complete dog food. It's more of a protein supplement. I also feed my dogs other stuff. They get a lot of scrambled eggs, and I give them soup that I make for us humans if it doesn't have too much garlic or onion in it. Otherwise, they eat no refined carbs or sugar, ever.
Note there is no fat or oil in this recipe. I add the fat later at meal time. I did it this way because it's much much easier to deal with this stuff if it's not greasy. Without fat or oil, I don't even have to wash out the bucket in between batches; I just let the residue dry and it all just flakes off with a spatula.
When I feed my dogs, I scoop out the servings with a stout measuring cup, and I smear it around the dog dish. If I don't smear, they'll just swallow the ball of food whole and then throw it up later. I then add some oil to give the dogs their fat. I keep two different mixtures of oil handy for cooking in repurposed Heinz ketchup squeezy bottles. One is a mixture of half coconut oil and half sunflower oil (or canola). I keep this in a cabinet, and it stays squeezable at room temps. I keep another bottle with olive oil and a little canola in the fridge. The canola keeps the olive oil liquid enough to squeeze in the fridge.
Any oil will give the dogs their required fat, and I just grab whichever is handy and give each bowl a healthy shot.
I also make a mineral supplement for them which is similar to a recipe I use for myself. It's mostly to supplement calcium and magnesium, since this food recipe is heavy on the phosphorus and a bit short of AAFCO recommendations for minerals. My mineral recipe is a whole other topic, but you can easily supplement this recipe with some calcium citrate and epsom based on the AAFCO guidelines. I buy all my supplements from bulksupplements.com, except epsom which I get at walmart.
I also supplement with taurine and L-carnitine. Dogs require both and cannot synthesize them, and their deficit is theorized to be behind the recent cases of cardiomyopathy seen in dogs fed a legume-heavy diet.
I also supplement with beta-alanine and a little creatine.
And just for good measure I grind up a few Kirkland multivitamins for old people (no iron) that I take myself and add those. Like half a dozen. Everything ends up being well within the AAFCO recommendations.
Recently I've been adding more salt to get the dogs to pee more. Retail dog foods generally use about 1% salt by dry weight, and that's what I'm aiming for. Dogs can handle a much wider range of salt than humans, and peeing enough is important for kidney health. Dogs don't drink more just because you tell them it's healthy.
Here's the equipment I use:
- 2 gallon plastic bucket. Home depot sells them. I got mine free from a walmart bakery. - Coffee grinder to grind flax seed - Waring Big Stick commercial immersion blender. These are expensive, but indispensible for my recipe. I got mine on Ebay for a hundred or so. - 8 gallon pressure cooker. Any cheap pressure cooker will do.
Ingredients:
- Beans, dry, 10 C (2 kg) - Yogurt, whole milk, unsweetened, 2 C - Flax Seeds, 2 C (336 g) - Tomato paste, 10 Tbsp - Protein isolate, soy, 1 packed C (120 g). I order this in bulk wherever I find it, usually ADM brand. - Salt, 2 Tbsp (18-36 g). Lately I've been using more.
The beans can be any beans, but avoid red beans because of the high lectin content. I use whatever I have handy, usually lentils, chickpeas, or black beans.
I always soak the beans over night, and if I'm using chickpeas I'll go ahead and sprout them for a couple of days. It's not a lot more work, and I do it anyway when I make hummus for the humans. Soak them overnight, empty into a colander, and be sure to rinse several time a day or else they'll turn really nasty. They should stay smelling sweet and fresh like water. If they start smelling bready then you'll never get rid of the taste. This is more advice for hummus; dogs give a shit about bready beans. If it starts growing mold then throw it away. I don't fuck around with mold.
I cook the beans for at least half an hour in the pressure cooker at full pressure. Boil with the top off at first, and skim the foam off the top before putting the lid on. This will help keep foam out of the valve.
After the cooker depressurizes, transfer to a bucket, add the salt and tomato paste, and blend with an immersion blender. It's important to blend while hot; as the beans cool they will rapidly thicken and become unblendable.
Let the stuff cool enough that it won't kill the yogurt. Wait till it's cool enough to stick your hand in.
Grind the flax in a coffee grinder. Combine flax, soy protein, and any supplements you're using in a separate bowl. Add this and the yogurt to the bean mush, and knead thoroughly. There's no easy way through this part. You just to get in there with both hands and knead the shit out of it. Play some loud music and enjoy the forearm workout.
A batch will feed my dogs (70 pounds of total dog weight) for about two weeks. But here's the coolest part: because of the yogurt, it doesn't have to be refrigerated. It will just ferment in place. I've been doing this for years and I've never refrigerated it. I take a bite myself now and then just to be satisfied that I'm not poisoning them. It's not what I'd call "good" but it's not nauseating either. Of course, if I had to keep a batch for longer than a couple weeks I'd probably refrigerate it.
I should also note that I make my own yogurt, and that might contribute something to longevity out of the fridge. I use a 6-gallon insulated cooler with a Cobalt Aquatics Neo-Therm 50 watt aquarium heater set to 96 deg F. I cook two gallons at a time. It's the easiest thing in the world; I open a gallon of milk, pour in Lifeway brand kefir (which isn't real kefir but but makes fine yogurt) till it hits the very rim, put the cap back on, give it a few shakes and twirls at the end of my arm, and put the bottles in the cooler with a few inches of water in the bottom. Plug the heater in and cook for a couple of days. Makes some great sour yogurt. I make gallons of this stuff every week. I'm sorry about the dairy cows, but we rely on yogurt too much to abandon it.
IMO, making your own dog food is only sustainable if you don't have to treat it like human food. Remember that dogs can and will happily eat feces without ill effects, so don't worry too much about hygiene or taste. If stuff falls on the floor or gets hair in it, don't worry about it. The dogs won't care. The only think I'm cautious about is mold; I won't feed them visible mold. Otherwise, treat the job like slopping pigs.
> In the early 1990s, ice sheet melting accounted for only a small fraction (5.6 %) of sea-level rise. However, there has been a fivefold increase in melting since then, and they are now responsible for more than a quarter (25.6 %) of all sea-level rise.
It is a bit strange how much melting ice caps get attention more than the thermal expansion of water, but I expect that is because a melting ice cap is much more visceral and easily understood and explained than the thermal expansion of water.
As expected, activists disrupted the protest. Intensely. The meeting concluded with 80% of shareholders signing and approving Shell's plans.
Dutch politicians confronted Shell's leadership:
What you're doing directly opposes what should happen and even accelerates the climate issue. It's highly immoral.
Shell: well, that's just your opinion, dude.
Either we all don't care or we wake up: self-regulation will not happen. Stop being so naive about it.
This in the long run will reverse the climate change, so after we go extinct, the remaining species will thrive :)
He (most probable pronoun) probably has kid(s) as well.
Otherwise not so much.
I mean, if your reason for optimism is "science has a long history of failed predictions" then yes, that kind of shit will not be looked upon kindly on this forum.
https://reason.com/2023/04/27/global-warming-trend-is-only-o...
If you don’t like the source, click through to the original data sources.
The article does say it could potentially increase total water evaporation by up to 6% though, and that could be useful.
It would do tons for the local ecosystem, though. That evaporated water would fall as rain across eastern Egypt and the Middle East.
Not to mention of course the truly incredible amount of hydropower.
100% I think the main benefit of this project would be to restore some ecology & create power. There may be some small benefit to the earth as a whole too, but it seems silly to make this effort for somewhat enhanced evaporation.
The majority of society resists change as this is just a fact of life however when that change is forced that resistance often surfaces in negative ways and here we are in 2023 with so much 'change' beyond that of just the climate.
If we can convince governments and corporations to step up, that's something.
But there's such a huge percentage of people who either couldn't give af, or if there is even the smallest disturbance to their daily life will resort to conspiracy theory.
People would rather lie to themselves than face a minor inconvenience or change to to their lives for the greater good.
Where are all the heroes? Are they just p!ssing around on Tiktok?
Or think that it will just solve itself.
But I'm depressed about the lack of will and capacity. We don't manage to come together and decide what to do or to deliberatey control our behaviour. (I.e help ourselves avoid climate change.) So we are in general not very sophisticated as a civilization, this whole thing is just going to happen to us.
A trancendentally smart organism would understand and avoid the crisis before it hits, but we will hit the resource usage ceiling knowingly.
Governments only act on pressure from the base, especially when it is take difficult decisions that would most likely impact in the short term the economy (e.g. diverting $B to new energy sources, optimization for homes, transportation, etc.). It is an investment for the next decades.
Unless the cockroaches want to wait 300 million years, they won't have the easy coal and oil reserves to jumpstart them to an 'advanced' civilization.
Which might be a good thing? Maybe some future inhabitants will invent an oil-producing algae because they didn't have an easier option like we did.
Imagine a planet with just grass. One species. It's thriving. Highly successful. Who needs "intelligence"?
Today, the climate is impacted by emissions made in 2003. Emissions from today won't have an impact before 2043 (on the climate. Still have an impact right this moment on the oceans acidity btw).
I'm not doom and gloom though. Your kids will suffer, but I'll probably make it just fine. Still, I'm making all I can to preserve future humans some pain, but I feel like I'll stop making efforts soon.
Do things seem dire? Yes.
Is this the time to give up? No!
We all already know what needs to be done. What we lack is the political will to do so because 50% of our political leadership has refused to acknowledge any necessary action and instead keeping everyone busy with distractions like threatening trans people and re-banning medical procedures.
There is an appalling lack of focus on the big picture from the percentage of the population that, let's face it, is motivated by religion and nothing else.
We have a rising threat of authoritarian fascism worldwide, and it's NOT in order to save humanity by enacting sweeping societal change to address our warming planet, but is instead to reintroduce hierarchical societal roles based on gender, race, and sexuality, and give those at the top of the food chain another generation of blissful prosperity while the planet burns.
Our ancestors overthrew governments, assassinated leaders, and uprooted whole societies over far less.
I realize a community of technologists and startup enthusiasts benefit from capitalism, but it needs to be asked whether the system that brought so much prosperity to humanity over the last 100 years will be the same that brings us atrocities and gloom in the next 100.
Painful revolution must not be considered off the table.
But brace for impact, probably.
The impact on the global economy could be severe, and we might all have to rethink our lives and our plans.
The concern to me is that if we manage to break the current stable climate, the impact could be extreme. It looks tens of thousands of years to get the extra 5 degrees to make earth livable, and now we might add an extra 5 degrees in the coming decades. It will be very hard to rollback. And we might extinct so many species in the process, that will not come back.
Enjoy presiding over the rubble of civilisation. Any mass revolution is going to end with destruction of humanity as the nukes go off.
We are going to continue to see yearly records be set. Bigger fires, more ice melting, worse droughts, etc. Eventually, the global poor will be forced to relocate and even the leftest leaning countries will realize that it is infeasible to accept all these immigrants (looking at Europe in particular). Mass riots will occur along those borders, but eventually eco-immigrants will die off and the more wealthy countries will “just” adapt and move on.
As we see mass casualties due to food shortages and violence, I’d imagine we will see a drop in greenhouse gases from those regions which, ironically, will help the climate change problem.
Eco-fascists are abound
The "west" will need to lift all the boats, in its own interest.
Now we should feel the sense of community and humanity, facing a global challenge. Every country should take it seriously if only for their own national security.
We all need sustainable energy, and fossil fuel is not going to do it because
1. it is a increasingly limited resources, with geopolitical implications that will only increase in intensity as the quantity will decrease and price will increase.
2. it makes the climate issues only worse.
Either one or both would bring chaos globally. We very seriously need to rely on other source of energy.
Set a mere 80 years in our fictional future, it assumes as a core premise that we failed to take the kind of big bold sustained collective action necessary to prevent it from happening.
----
Oh, wait...
Assuming this is a plausible threat, would you prefer the government to simply decriminalize vandalism?
Whether the ends justify the means is a different question and maybe one reserved for more severe crimes? In another century, the relation whether blocking traffic for a protest is acceptable vs. 4 K increase in temperature will look quite differently than it does today. However, history will remember what we do now, not in ten years, as we have done far too little for decades and are now quickly approaching the tipping points our grandchildren will learn about in school.
> In einer Pressemitteilung teilte die Gruppierung mit, es seien in ganz Deutschland „Rohöl-Pipelines abgedreht und damit der Ölfluss unterbrochen“ worden. In Zweierteams hätten Aktivisten die Notfall-Absperr-Stationen der Pipelines betreten und „mit ihren eigenen Händen die Sperrventile“ aktiviert, die in Notfällen ein sicheres Abdrehen des Öl- und Gasflusses ermöglichten.
> In a press release, the group [Letzte Generation] announced they "turned off crude oil pipelines" all across Germany "and thus disrupted the flow of oil". Supposedly, the two-person activist teams entered emergency valve stations of pipelines and manually activated the shut-off valves, which are responsible for safely turning off oil and gas transmission.
If the right-wing media already acknowledges that there is no "blowing shit up" but "safely turn[ing] off", I'm pretty sure you'll find it hard to frame it otherwise. It also would not fit the picture: Letzte Generation has been explicitly non-violent.
You'll also find that this happened over a year ago. There was definitely no emergency, as "blow shit up" would imply.
1: https://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article238407383/Let...