Three-quarters of the land is drying out, 'redefining life on Earth'
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When you draw down the water table, the ground compacts. You never get that water storage capacity back. There's no way to uncompact hundreds of feet worth of ground across thousands of square miles of earth. There are places in California where the ground has compacted several dozen feet.
When you put poison onto the ground, it usually goes into the ground, and sure, the ground may act like a kind of HPLC column and some of that poison might take years to decades to reach the water table...but then what?
When you melt chunks of the arctic and antarctic, you don't just cause sea water levels to rise. You also reduce salinity, and affect global-scale air and water currents like the jetstream - causing dramatic shifts in temperatures and water content of air.
Indigenous peoples have been warning us for ~10 generations that selfishness will/is destroying the planet. Nobody in power has cared, instead mocking those who do as "snowflakes" and "anti growth" and "anti progress" and so on. All to make more money.
You cannot eat money.
Your friends cannot eat money.
Your children cannot eat money.
Their children cannot eat money.
People love to repeat this myth, as if most human beings won't care about others or about their own future, as if they can't understand enlightened self-interest, or can't understand climate change. Mostly, it's yet another argument for powerlessness and inaction.
The public has gotten behind so many things now and historically. Right now they are the power behind movements that have nothing to offer but brazen falsehoods, corruption, and hate. And yet all the good people say, mass movements are impossible, there's nothing we can do but suffer.
Do I wish it wasn't that way? Yes. But what if it stays that way? Is there a solution then?
I'm not saying the fight shouldn't be had. I am saying that—at least in the USA—change doesn't really appear to be a priority unless the $ is there.
In wars, enemy propaganda says the kinds of things you are saying, to create despair and powerlessness. Look up operations like Tokyo Rose, for example. It's more powerful than any other weapon - it causes the foe to unilaterally disarm. And, as propagandists intend, here you are repeating it, spreading the disease.
Imagine you are working on a team, and someone keeps saying 'nobody cares', it's probably hopeless, etc. That person is the problem, spreading a communicable disease within the team.
The good people outnumber the bad, by a lot. Goodness is not a new or alien concept, but fundamental to humanity and to every culture. Human rights has been overwhelmingly successful and popular across people and cultures. History shows it overwhelmingly. All that is missing is belief in themselves and a way forward.
Instead of this disease, you could spread what people actually need. Hope, courage, belief in what is right.
You can push for change while also recognizing that others don't respond well to it. Why? Because you need to adjust tactics to get the outcome you want.
Blindly "spreading hope" is just as lazy imo as saying everything is futile.
You have to live in the world the way it is, not the way you want it to be.
And let me be very direct: I'm close to positive the approach you've shared will not work. Sorry. It will be too late by the time people get onboard (when it's clear that the medium-term negatives will outweigh shorter term costs).
As I said, there is a long, long history of people doing far more against much greater odds. What many people are doing now is just propaganda and cowardice; nothing is stopping them.
Make the future a bright one, don't drag everyone down and make those bad things happen.
I'll state it again although I don't have good faith in this conversation: because the majority of people don't prioritize (or even believe in climate change), the tactics are going to be different than other social issues.
Literally look up any polling on the matter for "proof."
I don't endorse that kind of action, FWIW, I've lived through enough historically significant events already and I'm not even forty. But the powers that be seem unwilling to simply make less money, so something's going to give eventually.
You are on that ship. What are you doing? It's not adrift; others are steering it. If you don't also guide it, then the results are your fault just as much as those steering it.
It sounds cold but food/water/housing shortage will be solved once it starts affecting > 51% of the population. (or at least resources will start flowing towards real solutions).
The sad part is by then there will most likely be irreparable damage (as well as enormous amount of human suffering). That’s at least how the western part of the world sees things
For the record, I care, but there’s only so many people I can convince to stop eating meat
If we've seen nothing else in history, it's how effectively a tiny crust of the population can keep the Orphan Crushing Machine running as long as it doesn't affect them directly.
The one simple easiest thing you can do to fight environmental disasters is to stop eating meats. Or at least reduce the consumption of the most harmful ones. Try taking up that conversation with people whose opinion on the matter you don't know. Most of the time it's not going to be pleasant, satisfying or leading to much progress.
People like to think about big picture decisions with their taste buds and emotions.
They are disheartened by you spreading this myth. Plenty of people have and do and will do otherwise.
Wars and other localized dangers are much greater threats for people involved; WWII was a much greater threat to the West. Black people in the US have faced greater threats for most of American history.
Nuclear war is a hypothetical in comparison (although it would also be pretty bad but it’s not currently happening).
Black people in the US aren’t the only persecuted population in the world, and it’s targeted (by definition); It’s not universal.
Climate change or nuclear war would wipe out humans as a species (and most other living things) indiscriminately, regardless of race.
As someone who has, the western concept of social justice is a laughable pipe dream.
For reference, the median per capita household income is a little under $3000/year [0].
[0]: https://www.zippia.com/advice/average-income-worldwide/
Deprivation is guaranteed to fail, so I'm betting on innovation.
I'm the type of person the Trumpers call a "Soy Boy", and I'm so sick of this hyperbole.
The main solution, if we listened 20 years ago, was that we should all stop using non-renewable energy (basically all energy at the time) and eat bugs.
We are at a point now where if we don't do anything, there's a decent chance current trends take us to a nearly ~100% renewable future in 40 years (if you count nuclear and hydro).
>90% of people on the planet will take the climate change that is most likely to come from our 20-years prior fossil fuel use and the coming 40 years, than to have gone back to living like indigenous people 20 years ago and remained there forever.
There isn't really a world in which we all stopped using fossil fuels and industrial farming and arrived at all the renewable tech we have today, and the ability to produce it at the scale we do now.
Climate change is real, so is progress. Most people are willing to make the trade.
We are so inferior to be able to turn this planet into Venus, like most of the climate Doomers say we're going to.
We likely won't even bring the Earth back to it's typical temperature range - which is MUCH hotter over the last ~450M years than it is now.
If you're telling me we're going to cataclysmically destroy the planet because we might bring temperatures close to their average over the last ~450M, I'm going to be skeptical.
This is absolutely beside the point. We don't remotely need to turn the planet into Venus for our civilization to collapse.
The question is: how do you feel about probably living in a state of global instability (including war) and famines before the end of your own life? Because that's what seems to be the most likely if we don't magically start giving a shit.
That's pretty typical for the global civilization. We have a recency bias to the post-ww2 is the norm. That was a highly atypical peaceful time.
It would be surprising that trend continued - even in a climate vacuum.
How do we know that wouldn't happen anyway just given how many people have been born? How do we know that the planet getting 2C hotter is the cause, and exactly how much of the cause it is?
Are the going to offset productivity gains, and new areas being more productive?
We could almost feed 50% more humans if we had less livestock (or even just more efficient - like more pork instead of beef).
Livestock takes up almost 80% of ag land...
We're not all going to starve to death if crop yields go down slightly.
No, we’re not all going to starve to death. But it doesn’t take that much change in agricultural output for some people to starve to death. And it doesn’t take that many starving people to severely disrupt a society.
My point is that we have caused a lot of "problems" through burning fossil fuels, and at least up until now, the "solutions" that we've gotten from all the progress we've been able to make has outweighed that cost - massively.
Given that the rate of increase in emissions has slowed drastically and total emissions will likely peak this decade, and then fall pretty rapidly, I don't see any reason to believe that we're digging ourselves into a hole rather than building a better society for everyone.
I haven’t said anything even remotely like that.
Of course the benefits have outweighed the costs so far. The whole thing is just getting started. The costs are nearly zero so far. Total warming was under 1C until a few years ago. We’re looking at something like 4C of warming with current trends. Projected warming with current emissions reduction pledges is 2.8C and it’s very unlikely that those pledges will be met. The harms are almost entirely in the future. Things will get much worse before they get better.
Or as the kids like to say, we were born at the end of the Fuck Around century and now we’re in the Find Out century.
I'm sure they'd pick this world, with it's future.
And it's far from certain. The dinosaurs (and countless other species) disappeared due to a much slower process of climate change (and that is a fact, not a prediction). We humans may well disappear, for all we know.
If climate change knocks humanity back to an 18th century level, that might be it. The species might survive for a long time after that, but forever at that level or worse.
Maybe the argument is wrong and there are alternative ways to get back to high technology in that scenario. I strongly recommend not running the experiment.
Do you know anybody who wants to live the complications that are coming? :-)
What I see is that on the one hand, there are people who think that we should try to do our best with what we know (cut down on emissions, accept that we have to do less with less, and optimise our society accordingly). And on the other hand, we have people who get into the religion of technology, where some god will bring them solutions that do not exist today and that likely won't exist, but that those people really want to believe in.
You vastly under-estimate the problem. We are talking about crop yields going down dramatically. The way we are heading right now, it's completely worthless to talk about livestock: the question is really how many billions will die because we can't grow enough food anymore.
If you think 1 in 8 people globally is going to die any time soon because we can't grow enough food simply because it's 2C hotter, you are wildly out of touch.
Sure, maybe we get hit by an asteroid or something or return to world war. But that's a different story.
Where did I say that? The way it's going, we are likely to reach 4C in some decades. 4C means that human beings cannot survive outside in a large part of the Earth. That literally means that billions of people have to move away.
> Sure, maybe we get hit by an asteroid
We don't have to: what we are doing to the climate is worse. Dinosaurs died because of the climate change that was the consequence of the asteroid. Did you know that their climate change happened a whole lot slower than ours?
> or return to world war
What do you think happens when billions of people have to move? No need to wait for 4C: wait for enough ice to melt, the sea levels to raise and... well do you know how many people live close to the sea?
What do you think happens when billions of people are starting to compete over oil (because we are going there, too) in order to eat? When you start having extreme events (like drought), you rely a lot on energy to compensate. But even without extreme events: if tomorrow you remove oil, big cities starve. Because they need trucks to bring food into the city.
> But that's a different story.
Nope, it's becoming more and more likely that it will happen. Because what we observe is that the climate is worsening faster than we expected, and because instead of slowing down on the carbon emissions, we are still accelerating.
We don't know what would happen if we didn't screw ourselves, but we have some idea what will happen from what we are doing.
> How do we know that the planet getting 2C hotter is the cause, and exactly how much of the cause it is?
2C? You're being optimistic. We've past 1.5 this year. The consequences of climate change have just started: right now it's minimal (people die from natural disasters, but globally that's minimal). What we see, though, is that "bad things" (e.g. natural disasters, extreme events) are happening faster and worse than what our models predicted.
In other words, every day we observe that the consequences of us screwing the climate is worse than what we thought. Let's now think a bit about that part: the "optimistic" scenario:
* We are now heading towards 4C unless we dramatically change the way we live. 2C is already out of reach, 1.5C is already here.
* At 4C, you have a whole strip of countries around the equator that becomes unlivable for humans: it's too hot and humid, meaning that we can't regulate our temperature by sweating, meaning that we die. We are not talking a few millions refugees, we are talking billions.
* Imagine billions of people, from entire countries, deciding to move to livable territories. We're talking billions of people, with their military, moving into the lands of other billions people with their military. We have never seen that in human history, but it doesn't seem good.
* Apart from that strip of land and the 4C, in a much shorter term we are talking droughts. Imagine first world countries not having enough food for everybody.
* And last point: all of this (and more) happens in a world were the amount of oil is dangerously reaching a peak (in some places it already has: the European economy feels it since 2007 because access to oil has become harder since then). Not only it means more wars for oil, but also it means that globally we will have less oil to tackle those challenges. There is no real alternative to oil, that's just a fact: we will have less energy, whatever it is.
* Of course, in order to tackle all those challenges, we will need energy. So we will be more likely to keep using oil as much as we can, which makes it even more likely that we are going towards a world with 4C.
Last fact: the climate changes that made the dinosaurs (and countless other species) disappear happened orders of magnitude slower than what we are measuring (I'm not talking predictions, but actual measurements). So it's not completely stupid to wonder if our species (on top of the countless others that have already and will disappear in the next few decades) will disappear entirely.
And again: all that I wrote above is the optimistic prediction from our current models. And from what we measure, it's actually coming faster, harder and stronger.
You can rationalise as much as you want: if you are not alarmed, you are either uninformed or irrational.
How do you know most people are willing to make the trade? People don’t have a choice. This stuff is driven by systems vastly larger than the individual. Nobody can decide to opt out of progress so they can also opt out of climate change. Even if I could opt for a zero-emissions lifestyle, climate change would continue with no detectable difference.
If we do not achieve them, they will be done for us, far less pleasantly.
Actually, in many (most?) countries this is already happening, for better or for worse. It's just a limited subset of areas/countries that have quick population growth. This has different causes and the possible solutions are politically, socially, religiously and economically complex. Or rather, getting to a situation where a solution is applied is complex more than the actual solution.
-=[UN World Population Prospects Report 2024]=-
https://population.un.org/wpp/
there are bunch of online charts and a large PDF etc.
There is little pushback against the increase of these measures. It would be very interesting though if a fertility rate increase was warranted and folks were arguing against them in order to raise it.
This doesn't really require a lower population, it just means people need to stop expecting to live in huge McMansions with A/C blasting all the time and driving around in 3-ton SUVs. Living in dense, walkable/bikable city environments in energy-efficient dwellings, people could live quite well with a tiny fraction of the polluting energy usage.
I agree that 200 is the high end of the range, but I have always been an optimist :)
I disagree vehemently that optimists are a bigger part of the problem than those who have lost all hope and given their agency over to the hands of fate.
We can agree that the longer it takes, the more will suffer.
At this point many will suffer. But extinction within the century is far from assured.
(/s if you couldn’t tell)
Meanwhile the EROI of petrochemicals continues to fall.
The ones who are descended from the people who wiped out the New World megafauna? Noble savage myths are not going to help you get your point across.
Right now we are experiencing the lowest number of deaths from extreme weather in a century, and that's because despite all of the global climate change and other environmental challenges humanity faces, the rise in productivity, which you're dismissing here as merely dollar bills in people's hands, is making people more adaptable and resilient.
Parent:
> mocking those who do as "snowflakes" and "anti growth" and "anti progress"
You:
> the rise in productivity, which you're dismissing
What makes people adaptable and resilient is creativity and hard work. Today you can buy that with money but the money itself isn’t doing anything. If all farmers stop farming tomorrow, you die no matter how much money you have.
How money is linked to increase of productivity is still to prove, as well as parent dismissal of the rise of productivity.
I hear this a lot and trust it is a widespread occurrence. Here (gulf-coast FL), farms are commonly non-viable when sold to developers. Our tree-based crops seem especially prone to farm-busting economics, diseases and weather.
It looks like there's about 20x more ag land, by sq km, than urban land in the US (4M to about 200k). So even if urban areas doubled in size, purely at the expense of ag (and not forests), it would be about 5% loss overall.
I have a feeling these numbers don't account for suburban land use, and that's actually an issue... Not urban use.
I'd guess overall agricultural landuse would drop to 1/4th or so due to the huge inefficiencies of animal-based products, but would have to dig for proper numbers at e.g. Our World in Data.
[1] https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indica...
Yep, it's an agricultural catch 22. Arid regions where people live are generally formed by mountains absorbing rainfall. When that water washes down, it carries nutrients and forms very agriculturally productive alluvial plains like in the Nile delta (although the reason for that desertification is Hadley cell circulation, not mountains, iirc). It's both why Egyptian civilization was so successful and why so many artifacts survived as long as they were stored away from the delta. The longer the region has been arid, the thicker the layer of usable nutrients and some areas like California are also on top of ancient oceans with thick layers of fossilized organisms providing calcium carbonate and phosphorus. These regions also tend to have favorable temperatures that support multiple growing seasons per year and without plentiful water, there are far fewer other plant species to compete with.
In wetter regions, that water instead washes most of the nutrients into the ocean to the point where areas like the Amazon are so nutrient poor that organisms evolve unique adaptation like pitcher plants and the whole ecosystem depends on intercontinental dust that's carried all the way from the Sahara (the Bodélé Depression especially) [1]. Farming is still plenty feasible in wetter areas (Brazil and the PNW have plenty of agriculture for example and it's the whole basis for rice farming) but it's nowhere near as productive
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/goddard/nasa-sat...
So there'll be extended dry periods where normally rain would have been interspersed.
In some terrain, the torrential rain often runs off too, flowing to rivers, where-as a more moderate rain would get absorbed.
Yep. Humans only need money.
https://www.nasa.gov/technology/carbon-dioxide-fertilization...
1. https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2024/01/09/a-vision-for-t...
2. https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/11/20/we-need-more-w...
3. https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2024/11/09/solar-and-batt...
You'll either need less labor and materials, or get more output from the same land space, depending on your needs.
Reusing old cells makes sense in some applications, but for almost anything commercial or not a handyman special, I don't know that the numbers work out very well in their favor.
Desalination is not sensitive to input power fluctuations, as long as you have a large enough reservoir to even out the spikes. The natural desalination cycle, with evaporation of ocean water, clouds, mountains, and rivers, already worrks like that, but probably a more localized setup with electric pumps and reverse-osmosis membranes could bring freshwater more directly where humans need it.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/03/12/floating-pv-for-desal...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98hZI5CfQXU
For desalinization plants to operate with the sun entirely new massive fresh water reservoirs would need to be constructed.
Also, not everything he says is gospel