"Chinook in the Yukon River appear to be particularly vulnerable to a common parasite—and warming waters may be abetting the infection"
We know the fucking problem, we know the fucking solution, and we simply don't because the rich people would lose a bit of money and they control everything.
The solution is not easy. But it is known.
It's definitely not easy, but it's not even particularly hard, either. The solutions are there and ready to go. Everything we need to do to solve it has been done before[1]. We have done and continue to do many more difficult things than solve climate change.
The only difference between the hard things we are doing, and solving climate change, is the latter would make the ludicrously-wealthy very slightly less wealthy, instead of very slightly more. That's it. That's the whole debate. That's what we're burning the planet for.
[1] With the exception of carbon capture, which is only necessary now because we wasted so long doing nothing.
I should have started going to the gym before, I'd be healthier today. I guess I'll just never go to the gym. I should have been eating heather food before I got diabetes and high blood pressure. I guess I'll just keep having a terrible diet. Same kind of logic.
But we'd then have to move on to other things like deforestation, overfishing, water conflicts, plastics, etc. It's not a panacea, but it would reverse course on a pretty significant root cause.
If the US, Europe, Russia, India, and China stop burning fossil fuels, we'll be well on our way. I'm not really worried about whether Ecuador is burning fossil fuels right now, it cannot be a meaningful amount of output compared to those 5.
It is not the solution because it simply just ignores the problem: coordination. It’s like saying the solution to cancer is to kill cancer cells without affecting the functioning of the body. Well, that’s the hard part.
I expect that countries that invest heavily in solar or nuclear like China will have a huge advantage in 20 years, when energy availability enables industries like steel production, datacenters, ammonia production, transportation, and water desalinization to essentially become cheaper and cheaper as more and more solar gets built.
It is. This is not a debate anymore, if you disagree, you either don't understand or don't want to understand and neither of those is my or anyone else's problem to solve. You're wrong.
It looks like you have a few similarly confused commenters who think this is relevant to addressing the problem. It's a mystery why you want to derail the discussion to a debate about the cause rather than how to fix it. Maybe you're trying to say that understanding the cause is relevant to the solution, but if you are, you need to say it a lot more clearly.
The set of potential solutions would be quite different if the cause wasn't humans. Might even be impossible.
But we have quite a lot of evidence that we have been affecting the climate pretty substantially since the beginning of industrialization and increasingly so since, so it makes sense to work on the human causes.
These other options require resources and time to implement, and the political capital required to make that happen has been and will be increased because of the aforementioned 'debates'.
Because trapping us in this endless debate of what the "real" cause is has been the go-to strategy for the oil and gas industry, where no matter how many times it is bloody proven, they hem and haw and say "well we need more evidence" but they aren't like, not selling gasoline anymore until we know it's safe are they? They just keep doing exactly what we're pretty damned sure is killing the planet, while endlessly debating whether it is or not.
What are the generic fixes for global warming, that are applicable to any potential cause?
Would the set of potential mitigating actions look the same between human-caused climate change and something like prolonged increases in solar energy output?
We have a ton of evidence for human-caused climate change. Understanding the factors that contribute to a problem allow you to take more appropriate actions. Without looking at the causal factors, your ability to thoroughly mitigate tends to be limited.
If you were trying to fill a bucket but the bucket was losing water as fast as you poured it in, wouldn't you look into why, maybe see if there's a hole? Or would you just keep pouring and hope for the best?
Your other solutions don't work even in the metaphor's context. Flowing water doesn't freeze easily, so you're either cooling the whole system to insanely cold levels or you're pouring ice cubes into the bucket. But we're moving water in the bucket, not ice. We want liquid water. Are we gonna stand around and wait for it to melt when we get to where we're going? And won't the water just leak out while we wait?
Cement? I can see that going two ways. Either the hole is so big that the unset cement flows through easily, or it does manage to fill the hole. In the first case nothing has changed except you now have a puddle of cement under the bucket, possibly starting to bind the bucket to the ground. In the other, you may indeed plug the hole, but you've substantially increased the bucket's weight and reduced its capacity.
So now that we've both over-extended a metaphor - what are the generic solutions you propose for global warming?
But since you're hungry for alternatives other than stop doing the things that caused global warming, there are the geoengineering options.
I'm not hungry for alternatives. I'm hungry for the debate to end and us to move forward towards less polluting energy sources and transportation means.
As we agree there is no true debate to be had about the causes, we should move on to solutions.
Time for another metaphor!
Let's say you live in a big house with a bunch of other people. There's a problem, someone keeps shitting on the floor. You even know who the floor-shitter is!
You could ignore what you know about the cause of the situation and just focus on after-the-fact mitigation. You could put down absorbent pads and hope the floor-shitter chooses to use them. You could establish a shit-watch rotation that attempts to detect and clean up the turds as soon as possible after they're laid. You could remove all carpet and rugs to make the cleanup easier. You could install air filters and fresheners to help with the smell.
Or you could address the cause, and seek ways to stop the floor-shitter from shitting on the floor in the first place.
The options are nuclear for baseline with solar and wind supplementing it. Or geoengineering. The cost will be astronomical and voters will not be happy to pay for it. Also, bizarrely, countries with nuclear have actually been turning off their nuclear.
Given the incentives that exist, it would probably be a good idea to think seriously about the geoengineering options.
The debate matters because we don't have consensus as a society that climate change is occurring. The scientific consensus has been consistently and aggressively countered in the public sphere. The interests that have pushed the counter narrative do not push for action regardless of cause. They push for inaction, because action costs them money.
If there was a societal consensus that global warming is a massive problem and we were pouring tons of cash into geoengineering, I'd be on board with your position. But we're not, we're still arguing about whether it's happening at all or whether it's enough to really be a problem or whether it's worth doing anything at all.
The debate matters, and causality matters for establishing the facts in the debate.
Are the people driving around in ridiculous giant SUVs and trucks and turning off the nuclear plants all not convinced that global warming is happening? I'm guessing they just think it will all work out somehow in the future.
But I hope you're right.
You aren't wrong but that block of ill-informed voters didn't simply manifest from the ether. It was created for a purpose and it's working.
None of that has to change to solve climate change, so that's good news for those voters. If you think those changes are necessary, you are being lied to.
The bad news for them is that not solving climate change will make their gas, food, housing, and healthcare prices skyrocket. The choice for most voters is like deciding whether to spend $0 now, or $10,000 later. Choose wisely...
This is at best an oversimplification, and at worse another convenient lie we tell ourselves because then we ("the never rich enough!") can feel righteous anger about nothing happening, while not being responsible for it.
Years ago, the government elites of France decided that global warming was a serious problem and they should cut down on fossil fuel usage. And then what happens? Nationwide violent protests, because the one thing "we the people" hate more than global warming is higher gas prices.
This is at best an oversimplification, and frankly, it feels like a pretty deliberate one.
Yes, the Yellow Vest protests began because of a proposed fuel tax by Emanuel Macron, which was set to directly impact lower income/rural voters. Which it would, because wealthier people in metro areas don't drive nearly as much. The movement evolved over time to incorporate many rural vs. city conflicts, things like lack of government services in non-populous areas, low minimum wages, and overall income inequality and all the social ills that follow it.
People weren't upset that gas was getting more expensive: they were upset that it was becoming unaffordable in areas in which buying it is not optional. You simply cannot live in the rural areas of any western country without a car. Period. Paragraph. The infrastructure demands a vehicle or you cannot get around. So when people are already struggling and ostensibly green-minded ideas like gas taxes are proposed, with no alternatives for them besides driving: yes, they get pissed off.
Measures like these have been protested far and wide because of things exactly like this, because governments keep trying to offset the costs of green policy on working class voters who are already struggling, because their donors are the wealthy elites who don't want to pay for it despite being eminently able to. And worse still these results are then used to say "see, people don't REALLY want to save the planet" when it's quite bluntly obvious, to me anyway, that what people don't want to do is..... starve.
https://www.riverkeeper.org/news-and-events/news-and-updates...
If you asked Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos if we should build nuclear plants, they’d say yes with hardly any hesitation. If you let them build the plants, they would.
But if you ask most people who work as environmentalists they’d oppose them. In fact, it’s a bare majority of Americans who would support nuclear and even as recent as 2015 that was a minority.
The plebs are usually the problem when it comes to these things. Because they are innumerate, stupid, and unable to see the consequences of their own actions. They combine these traits with equal weight in politics in our system - which is a flaw in it but far better than the flaws in any alternative one.
I don't "want them to build them and charge me money" I want them to pay their fair share to fund the building of public utilities. Before you say these things are better private, go look at what happened to electricity prices in Australia are privatization.
The plebs are usually the problem
Sure mate.
It's time to be honest about what stops progress: the common people.
Plebs build open source software, so stick that in your pipe and smoke it.
The plebs are making SQLite make their default extension etilqs so that no one blames them when software that uses SQLite creates temporary dbs.