[HN Gopher] Observation-based early-warning signals for a collap...
___________________________________________________________________
Observation-based early-warning signals for a collapse of the Gulf
Stream
Author : ghc
Score : 219 points
Date : 2021-08-05 19:43 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (doi.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (doi.org)
| rationalist2948 wrote:
| There is a lot of hand wringing, worrying, blaming about evil,
| short sighted, negligent, irresponsible humans doing serious
| damage to the environment and the planet and causing disastrous,
| dangerous, destructive world wide climate change, global warming,
| rising sea levels, etc.
|
| There is no end of what we can worry about, e.g., Yellowstone
| erupting, another Krakatoa, having the atmosphere of the earth
| blown off by the blast from a supernova, etc.
|
| But just now the claim that human sources of CO2 are having
| significant effects on the climate, temperature, sea level, etc.
| are the source of a lot of angst and anxiety.
|
| So, we need to filter, separate possible disasters for which we
| have good evidence and can do something about from the endless
| number of disasters for which we have no credible evidence.
|
| For human sources of CO2: So far there is no, none, nichts, nada,
| nil, zip, zilch, zero credible evidence that human sources of CO2
| have had, are having, or will have a significant effect on the
| climate, temperature, sea level, etc. No evidence that is
| credible.
|
| All the credibility was lost, blown, thrown away, destroyed by
| the many predictions of significant temperature increases that
| didn't happen, as in the well known
|
| http://www.energyadvocate.com/gc1.jpg
|
| As a result, the alarm, angst, anxiety, hand wringing about human
| sources of CO2 is irrational, foolish, irresponsible, and
| supporting an industry of hysteria that is just a flim-flam,
| fraud, scam on the backs and in the pockets of billions of people
| and making a few people rich.
|
| While we know very well how to measure temperature and how to
| average it, we don't even have meaningful measures of climate.
|
| For the _science_ that might be relevant, essentially all of it
| fails to be science because it has long shown to have no
| predictive value.
|
| In response, until there is credible evidence that human
| activities can do good things for the climate, we should just
| junk the alarmists and forget about human sources of CO2.
| loopz wrote:
| When you accept evidence it'll already be 20-30 years too late.
| [deleted]
| deanCommie wrote:
| Before someone makes the inevitable joke, no this will not help
| offset climate change temperature gains and neutralize the risk
| of heat-waves.
|
| The summer temperatures will continue to get hotter. It's the
| winter temperatures that will get colder. Both require energy use
| to keep housing liveable. Which, unless we dramatically
| transition our energy generation to renewables, will just
| continue exacerbating the climate problem.
|
| Ugh.
| nodejs_rulez_1 wrote:
| I did not know Gulf stream stops being a warm stream in summer,
| what an interesting phenomenon.
| jakear wrote:
| Or, redesign houses to not need nearly as much energy for
| heating and cooling, preferring natural heating via the sun and
| cooling via breeze. https://www.codylundin.com/codys_house.html
| nomel wrote:
| > and cooling via breeze
|
| This makes many assumption that do not fit very large parts
| of the inhabited earth.
| qweqwweqwe-90i wrote:
| It would have been nice if the environmentalists hadn't stopped
| nuclear energy in it's tracks.
| ghastmaster wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_Stream
|
| > The warm water and temperature contrast along the edge of the
| Gulf Stream often increase the intensity of cyclones, tropical or
| otherwise.
|
| There should be less quantity and intensity of storms in the
| Atlantic, in the event this takes place.
| nerdponx wrote:
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/feb/25/atlantic...
|
| The opposite appears to be true, according to this article at
| least:
|
| > Stefan Rahmstorf, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact
| Research, who co-authored the study published on Thursday in
| Nature Geoscience, told the Guardian that a weakening AMOC
| would increase the number and severity of storms hitting
| Britain, and bring more heatwaves to Europe.
|
| > He said the circulation had already slowed by about 15%, and
| the impacts were being seen. "In 20 to 30 years it is likely to
| weaken further, and that will inevitably influence our weather,
| so we would see an increase in storms and heatwaves in Europe,
| and sea level rises on the east coast of the US," he said.
|
| See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28079665
| roter wrote:
| Not necessarily. The AMOC transports heat poleward in order to
| balance the net surplus of solar radiation in the tropics and
| net deficit radiational cooling at the poles. Lessening this
| pathway may mean other pathways may need to increase to
| compensate: like storms in the atmosphere.
| cwkoss wrote:
| What would happen if the Gulf Stream did collapse?
|
| Would a different similar circulatory system emerge soon after?
|
| Would the lack of a dominant system lead to many more smaller
| chaotic systems?
|
| Do we just not know what would happen, so that it's concerning in
| that it's unknowable?
| the8472 wrote:
| There is no requirement that water MUST circulate. It could
| simply stagnate. That's pretty much the worst case though, a
| weakened gulf stream is not the same as a total collapse.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| As long as there are temperature differences between the
| poles and the equator, there will be movement of water.
| That's thermodynamics in play.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| I think that would require all the water be the same
| temperature.
| cinntaile wrote:
| Just watch The Day After Tomorrow to know what happens.
| jacquesm wrote:
| No, that is heavily sensationalized. But a new 'small ice
| age' as a result of the gulfstream shutting down is a serious
| possibility, even if it changed direction that would already
| cause serious problems for very large parts of Europe.
| geocrasher wrote:
| Sensationalized? Sure. Hollywood. But incorrect? It's hard
| to know.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The basic premise is faulty, a chance in the ocean
| currents would not _immediately_ cause massive climate
| change, it would take a couple of centuries but would be
| pretty much inevitable. It likely would also accelerate
| other processes already in motion, so more extreme
| weather would be a pretty safe bet but not to the degree
| depicted in the movie.
| jbay808 wrote:
| Well, they forgot to account for adiabatic heating of
| that cold air getting pulled out of the upper atmosphere,
| which would have made it quite hot when it hit the
| ground. If I recall, that cold air was the central threat
| in the movie.
| fosk wrote:
| Although the benefit would be increased reflection of
| sunlight due to more icy (reflective) surface which would
| alleviate (or reverse?) the current weather warming trend.
| jacquesm wrote:
| You can kiss Northern Europe as a habitable area goodbye. So
| yes, it matters quite a bit.
| roter wrote:
| You can get a slight hint as to what it would look like by
| looking to the pacific northwest, Canada, Alaska. The
| northern pacific ocean has a "Gulf Stream" called the
| Kuroshio. However, there is no appreciable meridional
| overturning in the north pacific. Thus north-west portion of
| north america is colder than Europe at the same latitude.
| Roughly.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I've lived there. Let's say I like the European climate a
| bit better.
| failuser wrote:
| Northwest Russia is habitable. Not that pleasant, but
| habitable.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Northern Europe doesn't have ownership of Southern Europe,
| so they may not be comparable in the sense that
| habitability is somewhat subjective in the age of modern
| logistics.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| That's the thing. Growing food may be tough up there, but
| otherwise you can still have thriving cities if you have
| the capital to build appropriate infrastructure.
| jacquesm wrote:
| For a relatively limited number of people and with a
| standard of life that doesn't compare to western/northern
| Europe. It will be 'a bit of an adjustment' to put it
| euphemistically.
|
| I've lived in Northern Canada, which is somewhat comparable
| to Northwest Russia and sure, it's doable, but civilization
| as it currently exists in the countries that are exposed to
| this will cease, the present day number of inhabitants will
| be unsupportable.
|
| Just trying to imagine the UK with a climate shift like
| that and the mind boggles. What works for Iceland will not
| work for the UK without a massive reorientation, which is
| probably a friendly way of writing 'mass die-off'.
| myth_drannon wrote:
| Novosibirsk, Russia is 1m+ city... with some effort you
| can live. Russians are obsessed about populating their
| country all over even in the most inhospitable places vs
| Canadians who are just fine with living south of 60th
| parallel.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Go ask them how many of them would like to move family
| and all to Paris or Amsterdam and how many people from
| Paris or Amsterdam would like to move to Novosibirsk.
|
| I've lived in Northern Canada. Snow isn't nearly as much
| fun as it is cracked up to be when there is 6+ months of
| it in some years (I recall one year where the snowplow
| went on the tractor in October and we had the last snow
| in June).
|
| Those areas are well outside the ones where humans feel
| comfortable most of the time and don't underestimate the
| energy budget on a per-person basis required to make
| those places habitable to begin with.
| roter wrote:
| There will always be a Gulf Stream as long as there are
| westerlies, a coastline, and Coriolis [0]
|
| [0]
| https://rwu.pressbooks.pub/webboceanography/chapter/9-4-west...
| SergeAx wrote:
| Sounds like it is a time to re-download FrostPunk from Steam.
| freeslave wrote:
| different, but non paywalled article:
| https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/aug/05/climate-...
| y04nn wrote:
| This talk [1] by Dr. Jennifer Francis is a must watch, not the
| one I was looking for but this one is probably more up to date.
| She starts to talk about the Gulf Stream about 30 minutes into
| the talk.
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/QmGK6TpiwIA
| felgueres wrote:
| Solutions to climate change are not behavioral as some suggest
| here.
|
| It's about incentives.
|
| Transitioning to carbon neutral energy is possible at the expense
| of businesses' cost structure, ie. less competitive.
|
| Same applies to building retrofitting, agriculture and other
| major carbon emitters.
|
| There is no serious conversation about climate change without
| looking at nuclear energy; it is base load generation (24/7),
| cheap and carbon neutral.
|
| Bipartisan federal mandates to scale nuclear energy is the only
| real solution to this problem.
| [deleted]
| backprop1993 wrote:
| I think back to how we have responded to this pandemic. We were
| in denial until the pandemic was spreading unchecked wildly
| through the population, and even a good chunk of the population
| is still in denial after 100,000s of dead.
|
| We are a hopeless species when it comes to organizing effective
| collective action ahead of known disaster. We seem to only
| respond collectively once disaster has struck, and even then it
| takes time.
|
| I read a book in 1997 that was about this. Can not remember the
| name or author of it for the life of me. It was about climate
| change and the risk that North Atlantic currents would shift
| causing a state change that would be hard to reverse. 24 years
| later we think it is getting closer, but we still do not act
| swiftly.
| davesque wrote:
| Don't give up hope. We licked CFCs and leaded gasoline. There
| are probably plenty of other times in history when we mobilized
| to solve a problem at scale. These are discouraging times for
| sure. But ultimately there's just no point in being hopeless.
| jacquesm wrote:
| A very large fraction of the population is _still_ in denial,
| and will continue to be so until they are personally hit.
| leppr wrote:
| That's because there is no "we". The most popular way to deal
| with coordinating important collective efforts is to give up
| all power to a small elite group and hope their members are
| magically not self-interested. The effect is predictable and
| manifested with the Covid pandemic: elites were informed in
| time, prepared their own affairs adequately [1], and let the
| rest fend for themselves.
|
| Figure out some actual governance and coordination schemes and
| "we" may have a chance at beating the Prisoner's Dilemma.
|
| [1]: I have personal anecdotes, but publicly available data
| speaks for itself: https://inequality.org/great-divide/updates-
| billionaire-pand...
| chizhik-pyzhik wrote:
| Does anyone have a link to the PDF?
| 7402 wrote:
| The actual title is "Observation-based early-warning signals for
| a collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation."
|
| I don't think the AMOC is exactly the same as the Gulf Stream,
| although I believe they are related. This is not my area of
| expertise.
|
| Could anyone explain this a little better? Why was the title
| changed?
| roter wrote:
| As long as the winds blow and the Earth spins, we will have a
| Gulf Stream. What the paper is referring to is the three-
| dimensional circulation driven by salt and heat fluxes. Sinking
| cold water near places like Iceland and gradual upwelling of
| hot water in the tropics. Net result is transport of heat from
| tropics to poles and since it is water with a high heat
| capacity, a lot of heat! If this 3D flow is lessened, it means
| other things must adjust to compensate --- like midlatitude
| storms etc. The AMOC also "pulls" the Gulf Stream more
| northerly before it closes the loop and comes down the coast of
| western Europe. So UK, Ireland warmer than you'd expect given
| the latitude. Clear as mud?
| hughes wrote:
| I for one would have no idea what "Atlantic Meridional
| Overturning Circulation" refers to.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_meridional_overturnin.
| ..
|
| It's a circulation in the Atlantic that pulls warm water from
| the equator up towards Europe and the arctic.
| rednerrus wrote:
| If true, this seems bad.
| mrlonglong wrote:
| That's an understatement!
| jacquesm wrote:
| After seeing the global chaotic response to COVID I'm convinced
| that climate change will not receive a meaningful response until
| it is way too late. It apparently needs to hit the majority of
| the planet right in the gut (and then preferably the wealthy
| part) for people to get off their collective asses and do
| something about it.
|
| I'm just about ready to pack it in and hope the next generation
| is smarter than this one because we sure messed it up. We'll go
| into the history books as the people that could have fixed it but
| didn't because we were too busy with our lifestyle.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| I agree, humanity is just not equipped to deal with this
| crisis. We are not organized or disciplined enough. There are
| too many competing interests and whats worse, the problems are
| not human scale. (Meaning that people won't see the benefits of
| their sacrifices in their own lifetimes)
|
| If I were a wealthy silicon valley type guy I would be looking
| closely at the Biosphere 2 project from the 80s and other
| closed ecosystem projects. There is untold wealth to be made
| knowing how to build and manage closed ecosystems, both here on
| earth and in space. There is a lot of science to do, and a lot
| of tech to build.
|
| I would not be surprised if there were a number of secret
| ecosystem projects already underway around the world.
| klyrs wrote:
| I'd be surprised if any 'secret ecosystem projects' don't
| suffer the same fate as the Biospheres. Namely, catastrophic
| systemic collapse within a relativity short timescale brought
| on by an unmitigated pathogen.
| konschubert wrote:
| But we used paper straws, isn't that enough?
|
| In al seriousness, the next generation isn't going to be all
| that different than the last 10000 generations of mankind.
| jacquesm wrote:
| They could very well be different than all of the preceding
| ones in the sense that there could be less of them than the
| preceding generation which is something that hasn't happened
| since mankind started to reproduce in earnest.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population#Past_populati.
| ..
|
| Famines, pandemics and wars are mere speed bumps compared to
| the kind of impact this can have. And if not the next
| generation then maybe the one after it but this will not go
| on for much longer before some kind of limit is reached.
|
| It's all the same until suddenly it's not.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Homo sapiens is simply not equipped to handle exponential
| growth when planning for the future. Luckily, it seems that
| the birth rate slowdown is a global phenomenon and it's
| likely that the peak population will be well below three
| times the current population. We are not deer who have no
| other option but to reproduce at full capacity until the
| population collapses.
| lmilcin wrote:
| This is one of the very well known biases.
|
| Thinking that just because something has been true for a
| million years it is also going to be true tomorrow.
|
| This is how our brain is wired and it helps us function, most
| of the time, but sometimes it is wrong and leads to
| overlooking things until it becomes too late to react.
| konschubert wrote:
| You may have mis-read my comment as suggesting that climate
| change is no threat to future generations?
| foota wrote:
| In fairness, we did get vaccines ready nearly from the get go.
| krtkush wrote:
| The science and tech is usually always there to tackle
| problems. It's the political will and policymaking ability
| which pulls things back.
| ethanbond wrote:
| Yeah, personally very upset about the policymaking that
| prevented the hundreds of vaccines/treatments ready on day
| 1 from hitting the market.
|
| Or are we just talking about the ones that work?
| tambourine_man wrote:
| Sure, science was never the problem.
| wavs wrote:
| And in fairness, lot's of smart people have worked to create
| renewable alternatives to energy, etc.; but a subset of
| society has decided we don't need that. Sounds a lot like the
| COVID/vaccine situation.
| randomluck040 wrote:
| It's always a few people that save everything before
| resulting in a clown fiesta. I hope there will always be the
| few people.
| epgui wrote:
| Mobilizing scientists is easy because you don't need to
| explain to them that everyone's survival depends on it.
|
| It only becomes difficult when you have to mobilize
| politicians and regular folks.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| We've done a great job of making everyone's life difficult
| enough that they don't have the spare cycles to worry about
| anything farther away than next week.
| jacquesm wrote:
| In fairness, scientists have no doubt about climate change
| either. And yet, here we are. That's exactly my point.
| rchaud wrote:
| And all it needed was a Great Depression-level drop in the
| stock market, every ICU filled to the brim for months, and
| thousands dying every day.
|
| The effects of climate change have occurred much more slowly
| and silently. At some point it will no longer be silent, but
| it will already be too late to meaningfully change its
| trajectory.
| jacquesm wrote:
| And let's not sugarcoat it, the pandemic is far from over,
| there are _still_ thousands dying every day, but we 're
| pretending that it's all much better now because we are not
| currently at the peak.
|
| But in truth, and on a global scale, when it comes to new
| cases and deaths we are at roughly 60% of that peak _right
| now_ , and still going up quite rapidly.
|
| edit: And of course, the fact that the bulk of the problem
| is now facing the developed world certainly isn't a factor.
| /s
|
| Let's see how long that attitude lasts, once we realize
| that covid anywhere is the equivalent of covid everywhere
| there may be a change of heart there.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| How many people would take the vaccine if it meant their
| great grandchildren might see some benefits.
| 74d-fe6-2c6 wrote:
| you must be pretty delusional to even consider the next
| generation to be more farsighted. they'll just suffer and blame
| their parents.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I did say I hoped. I do not have any illusions about the
| chances of that hope being realized.
|
| What goes up can definitely - and must eventually - go down.
| This one is on us.
| api wrote:
| It's okay. Europe will just turn into tundra and we'll have to
| deal. We'll find some way to blame liberalism for it after
| liberals warned of it for generations and were ignored.
| WJW wrote:
| I love the optimism here, everyone always states this like the
| tipping point is sure to be in the future. TBH, it seems
| equally likely to me that the last year we could seriously
| avoid major climate change was in the early 1990s.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Climate change is not a binary "no harm" vs "worst case"
| situation where you cross some magical tipping point from one
| to the other. It is a continuum where the more damage you do,
| the worse things will be. Even if we are already doomed to
| some major troubles in the future, there is never a point
| where it makes sense to give up because it can't get any
| worse - it can always get worse.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's very well possible.
| krona wrote:
| _I 'm just about ready to pack it in and hope the next
| generation is smarter than this one_
|
| Sorry, the Flynn effect is dead.
| lowdose wrote:
| The negative Darwinian effect as Musk calls it.
| jlos wrote:
| There is simply no simple way to address Climate Change like
| there was with CFC's in the 90s.
|
| - 1/3 of emissions come China which has an autocratic
| leadership accountable neither to its people or the global
| community.
|
| - 70% of emissions come from energy consumption. 35% of all
| emissions is electricity and heat, and another 15% is
| construction + manufacturing.
|
| - Even if every mode of transportation was fully electric
| supplied by 100% nuclear supplied electricity, global emissions
| would only drop by 15%. (i.e. transportation only accounts for
| 15% of global emissions).
|
| Have you stopped heating/cooling your house? Moved to a small
| apartment? Stopped driving a car?
|
| Carbon taxes will also meet friction because:
|
| 1. They are actually regressive income taxes. The bottom 90% of
| the income distribution spend most of their wealth on necessary
| consumption (food, rent, getting to work).
|
| 2. Most of the goods taxes (electricity, heat, transportation)
| are inelastic. People may chose to purchase less consumer
| items, eat less meat, but they are still going to heat their
| homes and drive to work.
|
| I'm not suggesting to do nothing, but a smug mentality of
| "people are just not willing to do the obviously right solution
| because they are stupid" doesn't solve anything either.
| tomp wrote:
| Revenue neutral carbon taxes are by far the best solution.
|
| They're in fact very progressive - the poor consume less than
| the rich, and rich "hobbies" have greater proportional CO2
| emissions - think supercars, yachting, flying business or
| private. So the poor will receive more in CO2 "income" than
| they'll pay in CO2 tax.
|
| The only difficulty is border control - how to prevent
| manufacturers simply escaping to CO2-tax-free jurisdictions
| and importing the finished goods - but with free trade
| getting a bad rep, maybe viable solutions will emerge.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Energy and heat are very easy targets to replace with low
| emission energy sources, indeed far easier than
| transportation which is one of the few places where fossil
| fuels make sense because of their high energy density.
|
| China has a higher percentage of its energy coming from low
| emission sources than the US and single handedly accounts for
| 45% of worldwide annual investment in renewables, 3 times
| that of the US.
|
| Carbon taxes are not sin taxes meant to disincentivize carbon
| production, they are a means to pay for carbon capture. If
| you can't afford to store the carbon released from burning a
| ton of coal, you can't afford to burn that ton of coal. Of
| course any new tax is going to meet friction, but what is
| will if not the ability to overcome friction when necessary?
| minikites wrote:
| >1/3 of emissions come China which has an autocratic
| leadership accountable neither to its people or the global
| community.
|
| China is doing proportionally more to combat climate change
| than we are.
|
| >70% of emissions come from energy consumption. 35% of all
| emissions is electricity and heat
|
| There are so many "easy wins" here. Better insulation and
| other end user improvements (e.g. heat pumps), stricter
| efficiency standards and mandates, carbon taxes on the most
| polluting industries and generation methods (i.e. make it
| unprofitable to restart an old coal power plant to mine
| bitcoin), etc.
|
| >I'm not suggesting to do nothing, but a smug mentality of
| "people are just not willing to do the obviously right
| solution because they are stupid" doesn't solve anything
| either.
|
| There's not an obviously right solution to everything, but
| there are obviously right solutions to many things, and we
| are still choosing not to do any of them.
| sokoloff wrote:
| In many cases, people are not willing to do the
| theoretically/physically best/most energy efficient
| solution because it's much, much cheaper to not.
|
| My house is ~100 years old structural brick. The insulation
| on most of the vertical walls is just the plaster, air gap,
| and 9" of brick. As we remodel (very slowly), we insulate
| with spray foam, but that remodeling is never driven by
| energy concerns. It's vastly cheaper for me to keep heating
| the bulk of the house with natural gas than it ever would
| be to take money from investments and turn them into
| insulation and new plaster walls.
|
| I've had insulation and HVAC contractors out. To totally
| redo just the vertical walls and change the HVAC to locally
| electric is a six-figure proposition and by the time it's
| done, the first digit won't be a "1". The payback period on
| that is infinite if you charge yourself 2% interest (with
| energy priced as it is today).
| dntrkv wrote:
| > 1/3 of emissions come China which has an autocratic
| leadership accountable neither to its people or the global
| community.
|
| The US generates 2x more emissions per capita (15.5 vs 7
| tons). Australia generates more than the US (17), and Canada
| even more than Australia (18.5).
|
| We got plenty of work to do ourselves before we look to
| China.
| Overton-Window wrote:
| Per capita figures are meaningless. You're discussing
| imaginary lines in the dirt. The only way to tackle climate
| change is to bring down global emissions.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| The point he was making, and I agree, is that you can't
| expect people in China to make sacrifices unless you do
| first. Lets get our own personal emissions down first,
| then point the finger at China.
| octodog wrote:
| Per capita emissions are extremely relevant because it
| indicates which countries need to implement drastic
| changes.
|
| The US, Canada and Australia together make up roughly 20%
| of global emissions with approximately 5% of the global
| population. Regardless of how you slice it these
| countries need to take serious action.
| relax88 wrote:
| Who do we attribute the emissions to when Canadian
| metallurgical coal is used to make steel in China for a
| wind turbine base being constructed in Germany?
|
| You'll notice that per-capita emissions are highly
| correlated with the list of countries that export fossil
| fuels.
|
| I agree with your point but per capita emissions alone is
| a gross oversimplification.
| Overton-Window wrote:
| The hole in the stern of the ship is taking on 30L of
| water per second. The hole in the bow of the ship is
| taking on 20L of water per second.
|
| Let's just focus on plugging that latter shall we, while
| we all go down together.
| tzs wrote:
| To bring down global emissions without first imposing a
| one-world government, we have to get each country to
| bring down emissions to its fair share.
|
| The best fair first approximation to this is for each
| country's share to be proportional to its population.
| That can then be refined with some sort of emissions
| trading system so that countries that want to outsource
| high emission industries to others can provide the
| emissions budget to allow that work.
|
| Anything other than a per capita first approximation
| requires deciding that some countries simply are not
| going to be allowed to develop beyond third world status.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| You are not wrong. It has been my position from the start that
| we should advocate for minimizing human impact on the climate
| and invest in surviving the change that those who will not heed
| that advice will create. I can recommend the book "Apocalypse
| Never" by Michael Shellenberger. While I don't agree with all
| of his points he does call out some of the factors that drive
| unnecessary hype. Perhaps one of the biggest takeaways is that
| there are monied interests who are just as invested in scare
| mongering to damage their opponent interests as there are
| environmental groups.
|
| That aside, some of the early research in climate change
| actually pointed out that the result of this climate
| instability may in fact be another glacial period rather than a
| period of extremely high temperatures. Just as damaging to
| people and ecosystems but not what a lot of people think about
| when they think "climate change."
|
| And finally, there are a models and there are a bunch of
| unknowns. As the unknowns reveal themselves the models get
| better, but some things like the "great oxygenation events"
| that are documented in the fossil record are really really
| unknown.
|
| The current wildfires are a good example of an unknown. The
| drought combined with lightning is burning millions of acres of
| forest. It can do that year after year for perhaps a decade,
| maybe two, and then the properties that make the forest subject
| to massive fires are mooted. So what then? Does the American
| northwest turn into a giant savannah with sparse trees and lots
| of grassland? When the ice has melted and the moisture carrying
| capacity of the air has quintupled, The annual
| rainstorms/hurricanes/monsoons will be biblically huge every
| year. How will people respond, how will we change the way we
| build, the way we live, the way we survive? It involves change
| but the challenges of living on the earth in those conditions
| is a couple of orders of magnitude less than the challenge of
| living on a planet that has never supported life in the first
| place.
|
| Every generation is dumb in their own way, and we may get
| knocked back into a feudal existence, but what we can do as
| individuals remains the same, set good examples, practice less
| impactful living, and try to leave our patch of world better
| than it would have been had we not been there.
| thewarrior wrote:
| Can we actually get knocked back into a feudal existence ?
| lazide wrote:
| We're inundated with folks screaming about danger and hyping up
| fear from every angle - everything from economic collapse, to
| stock market crashes, to apocalyptic visions from every angle
| about climate, etc.
|
| And what most people, especially younger folks, don't realize
| is that it's AlWAYS been this way. And most of the time, when
| something does blow up, there wasn't a clear or unambiguous
| difference between the thing that blew up, and all the things
| everyone was screaming about that did not.
|
| It's natural that people are going to tune out and not take it
| super seriously, especially people who have given up on doing
| the deep research to have an informed opinion on the constant
| stream of new topics everyone is worried about. Which is a
| problem when it legitimately is a serious problem.
| tuatoru wrote:
| It has _not_ always been this way. This is completely new
| territory for us.
|
| Up until about 1900 nature was in control. Now, humans and
| domestic livestock are nearly all the land animals that
| exist. [1] [2]
|
| Climate change is bad--very bad--but its main effect is going
| to be on other risks. Global thermonuclear war (which is
| _also_ new in civilization terms) remains the biggest risk
| (probability x cost). Climate change ratchets up the
| probability of GTW.
|
| 1. https://www.ecowatch.com/biomass-humans-
| animals-2571413930.h...
|
| 2. Graphical representation: https://xkcd.com/1338/
| [deleted]
| kktkti9 wrote:
| We've had empirical measure of industry related climate
| change since the 1860s hidden away by industry, who continued
| to be confirm through private research over and over.
|
| If our math models can predict the Higgs decades before it's
| experimentally discovered, why is a math model from the 70s
| confirming society will implode in the 2040s any less
| reliable? Same correct order of operations. Reconfirmed
| recently by better trained experts.
|
| Unfortunately your "always been this" way is problematic
| nowadays since humans weren't always capable of annihilating
| themselves. A whole lot of their imagined scenarios rightly
| were bullshit. Previous generations left behind rock and
| stone buildings, some sludge at worst.
|
| We're leaving behind an industrial mess and a melted planet.
|
| Now is a very different point in time.
|
| Earth will go on with or without us. If the answer is shrug
| it off, well that won't work as a majority get anxious.
| Nihilism risks social stability and solution seeking. If a
| bunch of people aren't going to care, why support society?
| Let's all just go tribal now.
| lolc wrote:
| > Previous generations left behind rock and stone
| buildings, some sludge at worst.
|
| I don't see why we should ignore the deforestation or
| hunting to extinction that previous generations imposed on
| the planet.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes, it's the boy who cried wolf on a planet wide scale. But
| it just so happens that this planet is the _only_ planet we
| 've got and we're doing a piss-poor job of stewardship.
| Regardless of alarmists that much at least should be obvious
| to anybody with a normal IQ and up. But it's so convenient to
| ignore it all and get on with the hunt for that extra buck.
| javajosh wrote:
| There is something geniuinely unique about this time and
| place: we're at the middle-end of the greatest golden age
| in human history. And what we did was _give each other a
| break_. Professors gave their students breaks, and judges
| gave lawyers breaks, parents gave their kids breaks,
| editors give their journalists breaks, and so on. And what
| has resulted is a profound erosion of accountability,
| integrity, and self-restraint, to the point where many
| people believe that these are masochistic or at least self-
| destructive qualities. You know, for losers.
|
| My point is that you're not wrong, but it's not just that
| people are choosing to hunt an extra buck. It's that
| they've turned their back on the very idea of self-
| restraint, or the possibility of idealistic, positive
| leadership from government. It's not a choice because they
| don't know about any option other than consumerism.
|
| And those of us that whinge about it tend to be engineering
| types, disgusted by politics; and yet the solution really
| is political: you've got to learn that system, get control
| of the narrative, allocate the vast resources of government
| to the right things, and somehow inspire people to be more
| thoughtful, conscientious, and less cynical and selfish
| when it comes to getting things done for society and
| government in general. And it's a change that, if enough
| people believe in it, it will happen.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Good points.
|
| > change that, if enough people believe in it, it will
| happen
|
| I've heard that speech before somewhere...
| lazide wrote:
| I'm not sure how your comment relates to my earlier
| comment exactly.
|
| One thing to point out however - EVERY time is a
| (genuinely!) unique time, and for those in it, there is
| always the press of things to be concerned about, or
| tackle things or avoid things or whatever. Our current
| challenges are definitely unique, but the existential
| threat of Mutually Assured Destruction of the Cold War
| was no less a unique, serious, and pressing matter for
| those living it than anything going on today. And it
| could have been an apocalypse. It just happened not to
| be.
|
| Same with being in Europe pretty much anytime over the
| last couple hundred years (longer?) with constant wars,
| disease, plagues, etc.
|
| It's important to recognize, because it can help give
| perspective and balance to what can otherwise be a
| profoundly easy to manipulate state of mind.
|
| Would it make sense to sell all your assets, move the
| middle of nowhere, and live in a bomb shelter in the
| 70's? Well the Soviets didn't nuke the US, so no, clearly
| you would have been an idiot. If they had, then you would
| clearly have been a genius with incredible foresight.
|
| In the end, we do what we can based on the best of our
| ability to understand the world and our options. Because
| fundamentally a lot of these things integrate with other
| people and societies, this also means they influence
| decisions others make, and can result in huge shifts - or
| resistance to shifts - and sometimes really unexpected or
| bizarre behavior.
|
| One thing that may be happening for instance with a lot
| of the discussions today is people getting overwhelmed
| and defaulting to their 'overwhelmed' state - and not
| being aware of it.
|
| For instance, common overwhelmed behavior includes
| running away/avoidance (this isn't happening), fighting
| (fuck you, you can't tell me what to do), or freezing
| (just ignoring things or locking up).
|
| These can easily escalate over time to full on and very
| persistent delusion, and the threat to someone if someone
| starts to challenge their delusion is very real - and
| they need to defend it.
|
| Trying to deal with someone in this state by treating the
| way they are acting at face value (oh, this guy is anti
| mask so I'll give him facts!) often not only doesn't
| work, but causes more resistance because it isn't really
| about the mask or the facts.
|
| They are in a messed up emotional place, and doing the
| best they can to try to keep themselves feeling safe. It
| just so happens that they picked something that is
| dangerous to others and there is some facts that could
| ACTUALLY keep them safer. But they can't handle that,
| right now. And trying to tell them that is likely to just
| make them feel unsafe talking to you, because you're
| essentially trying to rip away their safety blanket AND
| make them feel dumb.
|
| When people feel unsafe around someone, they either avoid
| them, fight them, don't do anything and try to pretend
| they don't exist.
|
| It's a hard problem.
| aeternum wrote:
| It's not necessarily obvious. Planetary weather is a
| chaotic system and even for somewhat stable phenomenon like
| the gulf stream it's not a question of if it will collapse
| but when. Humans are likely speeding up the collapse but it
| will eventually happen regardless.
|
| If I had to choose between technological progress and
| stewardship, I'd pick technological progress because that's
| our only real chance at long-term survival. We should
| really attempt to do both and better align the hunt for
| that extra buck with both tech progress and stewardship (
| _ahem_ carbon tax) rather than demonizing it.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The number of dimensions along which we are destroying
| the habitat we depend on is staggering. Deforestation
| (killing off one of the most efficient carbon sinks,
| causing soil erosion, changing the albedo, habitat
| destruction, change in water management), CO2 emissions,
| methane emissions, a ridiculously high per-capita energy
| budget in the western world where the only cap is how
| much money you are willing to spend, killing off numerous
| species and so on. We are bad stewards. All of these are
| optional.
|
| Technology can help to sustain life in space, I'm sure it
| will enable us to sustain life here on earth. But for how
| many, and with what quality of life?
| ThomPete wrote:
| The number of dimensions we have improved life for humans
| in an environment which have always been hostile not only
| to humans but to the 99.9999% of all species ever existed
| it wiped out is quite a lot more staggering.
|
| Nature didn't give us a safe and friendly environment we
| made unsafe, it gave us a hostile and dangerous
| environment we have made safe by using technology to
| impact the planet to better suit us.
|
| All impacts have externalities but I take those any day
| over just waiting for some catastrophe to happen whether
| meteors, super vulcanos or any other real threat that is
| out there lurking.
|
| Technology is the sole reason we are 8 billion people on
| this planet and still are most better fed than 2 billion
| people were 150 years ago.
|
| Living on this planet IS life in space and we are luckily
| constantly improving our ability to cope.
|
| All solutions create new problems but these problems are
| better problems to have.
| jacquesm wrote:
| In the short term, sure. But what if this is a local
| maximum which accidentally cut off all viable future
| branches? A bit of caution when making these irreversible
| decisions would go a long way.
|
| Wiping out the rest of the planet to give us a safe
| habitat may have been a giant mistake, monocultures tend
| to end bad.
| virgilp wrote:
| > Deforestation
|
| It's not that clear-cut:
| https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/08/planet-earth-has-
| more...
| jacquesm wrote:
| Number of trees is a bad metric, you need to know the
| amount of area available for gas exchange, which takes a
| long time to build up after a clearcut and 'old growth'
| forest is a complete ecosystem, something which a young
| planted forest can only aspire to become one day.
|
| And that's before we get into the hardwood vs softwood
| differences in growth speed.
| minikites wrote:
| >And most of the time, when something does blow up, there
| wasn't a clear or unambiguous difference between the thing
| that blew up, and all the things everyone was screaming about
| that did not.
|
| History is not a linear function of progress. Conditions can
| and do get worse for people, sometimes for generations into
| the future. The stunning progress of the industrial
| revolution is the anomaly, not the norm.
|
| We're in a car that's breaking down and we're hoping it will
| be cheaper to fix later if we ignore it now. We're seeing
| once-in-a-century weather events every few years. Sea level
| rise is currently impacting coastal communities. It's not
| going to go away if we ignore it and hope things get better
| in the future, we have to work on these things now. We've
| been refusing to make incremental changes for decades, so the
| only option left is drastic changes, and they're not going to
| get easier the longer we wait.
| weatherlight wrote:
| People naturally have a survivorship bias.
|
| Thomas Ligotti has this great quote about why people, most
| people, are Optimistic (specifically with existence), that
| this is all okay, and nothing will go wrong, and that when
| things do go wrong, it'll be okay in the end
| "The point that in the absence of birth nobody exists who
| can be deprived of happiness is terribly conspicuous. For
| optimists, this fact plays no part in their existential
| computations. For pessimists, however, it is axiomatic.
| Whether a pessimist urges us to live "heroically" with a
| knife in our gut or denounces life as not worth living is
| immaterial. What matters is that he makes no bones about
| hurt being the Great Problem it is incumbent on philosophy
| to observe. But this problem can be solved only by
| establishing an imbalance between hurt and happiness that
| would enable us in principle to say which is more
| desirable--existence or nonexistence. While no airtight
| case has ever been made regarding the undesirability of
| human life, pessimists still run themselves ragged trying
| to make one. Optimists have no comparable mission. When
| they do argue for the desirability of human life it is
| only in reaction to pessimists arguing the opposite, even
| though no airtight case has ever been made regarding that
| desirability. Optimism has always been an undeclared
| policy of human culture--one that grew out of our animal
| instincts to survive and reproduce--rather than an
| articulated body of thought. It is the default condition
| of our blood and cannot be effectively questioned by our
| minds or put in grave doubt by our pains. This would
| explain why at any given time there are more cannibals
| than philosophical pessimists."
| rhacker wrote:
| favorited that... thanks
| weatherlight wrote:
| :) you're welcome!
| rchaud wrote:
| It has not always been that way. Who were the anti-vax
| superstars of 1918? And what were the ad-targeting
| capabilities of newspapers back then?
| jacquesm wrote:
| Oh, they were there. And during the black plague years too
| (the rat lickers). The difference is they didn't have a
| social media megaphone to induce a large number of
| susceptible people with their seductive tunes. "Listen to
| us and you can continue to live like you always did". It's
| a variation on that theme with the man not being able to
| understand a thing if his salary depends on it.
| minsc__and__boo wrote:
| It's been this way before, it just ebbs and flows with each
| new technology wave as we collectively learn how to deal
| with misinformation.
|
| For example, when radio was being first pioneered, there
| were people like John Brinkley who would use it to sell
| quack goat testicle treatments for erectile dysfunction. He
| became so popular that he ran for office and eventually
| moved to the Mexican border to avoid the government
| shutting down his radio towers.
|
| The internet is kind of like early radio, or other means of
| communication today. Yes, it's more scalable, but we're
| still socially figuring out how to trust it, one harmful
| misinformation campaign at a time.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_R._Brinkley
| trutannus wrote:
| They were in government at the time:
| https://www.history.com/news/1918-pandemic-spanish-flu-
| censo...
| shagie wrote:
| That would be the Anti-Mask League of San Francisco -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-
| Mask_League_of_San_Franci...
|
| Mrs. E.C. Harrington was the leading name to be looked at.
| https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5q91q53r
| belorn wrote:
| I do not think lifestyle is going to be the big culprit when
| looking back, but rather money. Nations prioritize costs over
| emissions when it comes to generating power. Most home owners
| prioritize short term costs over long term gains that comes
| with lower emissions. It not much of a lifestyle choice to burn
| coals for power or use inefficient heaters, but it is a
| economical choice.
|
| My hope is not on the next generation to be less willing to
| sacrifice the environment for short term economical gain. If I
| got any hope left it will be that politicians figure out how to
| farm tax money by targeting those that pollute, knowing that
| they can do so safely because they got popular support.
| tuatoru wrote:
| > After seeing the global chaotic response to COVID
|
| This is hindsight bias in spades. The global response to
| Covid-19 is _much_ better than could reasonably have been
| expected before the event.
|
| We don't have 10% of the world's population dead (partly
| through war), collapsed major cities due to core services
| failing, or any disasters at similar scale, and a raging
| pandemic with 20 or more virulent variants sweeping through
| repeatedly.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > The global response to Covid-19 is much better than could
| reasonably have been expected before the event.
|
| We're going to have to disagree on that. I read a couple of
| books on the subject pre-pandemic and I thought we were in
| good shape because the science was well understood. I had not
| calculated in politics, my bad.
|
| > We don't have 10% of the world's population dead, collapsed
| major cities due to core services failing, or any disasters
| at similar scale, and a raging pandemic with 20 or more
| virulent variants sweeping through repeatedly.
|
| Well, this is where some hindsight would come in handy, but
| for that we'll have to wait until this is all over, which so
| far it isn't. And this is _exactly_ the kind of thinking
| which makes me believe strongly that we will not be able to
| effectively address climate change. It takes place on a time
| scale too slow for people to give a care. The things we 're
| good at are earthquakes, storms, volcanic eruptions and
| floodings: they are there, immediately and you can do
| something about it using emergency response. The kind of
| problem that would effectively require 8 billion people to
| cooperate for a change is something that we simply have not
| mastered and my never master.
|
| But thank you for illustrating my point in a very effective
| way.
| SantalBlush wrote:
| I think it's completely fair to say that the death toll
| from COVID could have been much lower up to this point, and
| it also could have been much higher. In spite of the
| political divides, there was a lot of collective action
| across the globe to mitigate the effects of the pandemic,
| and I wish people wouldn't dismiss that for the sake of
| cynicism.
| MetaWhirledPeas wrote:
| Sadly, we might not see meaningful action until we have a
| "Climate 911" moment; a single event in a wealthy location
| where thousands of people perish within a short period of time.
| jay_kyburz wrote:
| The fires, here in Australia and the US.
| yongjik wrote:
| 600K Americans died from Covid, yet even now, it's not
| exactly hard to find people saying that the real danger was
| emergency government responses we met along the way.
|
| The tricky thing about "Climate moment" is that it's
| impossible to _prove_ that any single disaster was caused by
| climate change, because it 's statistical in nature. A super-
| hurricane could ravage Florida or Texas, and you will always
| find someone saying "You can't prove it's global warming -
| freak weathers do happen all the time! Now is not the time to
| be carried away by knee-jerk emotions!"
| l33t2328 wrote:
| Those people were mostly old and infirm, not exactly the
| groups with the most political say.
| jacquesm wrote:
| If it's millions then maybe. Say a major city wiped off the
| face of the earth or something like that. But chances are
| that two news cycles later people would just update their
| maps and talk about how great it was that they went
| holidaying in 'X' before it was wiped out.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > After seeing the global chaotic response to COVID I'm
| convinced that climate change will not receive a meaningful
| response until it is way too late. It apparently needs to hit
| the majority of the planet right in the gut (and then
| preferably the wealthy part) for people to get off their
| collective asses and do something about it.
|
| And chances are the blow will be more like the proverbial frog
| slowly boiling in water than a sudden punch in the gut, so
| they'll probably only get off their asses and do something to
| adapt to the changes rather than prevent or reverse them.
| minikites wrote:
| We gave up on the space program after Challenger. We gave up on
| nuclear power after Chernobyl. We decided that we couldn't
| solve big problems as a society. Instead, we put that effort
| into generating wealth for a privileged few, prioritizing the
| economy above everything else, because we have nothing else.
| tomp wrote:
| Silly question, but: what have you done? Have you stopped
| flying & driving a car? Do you not use iPhone and eat bananas
| to minimize global transport emissions? What's your energy
| usage compared to 1, 5, 10 years ago?
|
| The "climate industry" is full of people loudly proclaiming
| they're holier than thou, but realistically there are few
| serious global solution except basically going back to pre-
| industrial world. Thanks but no thanks, I'd rather bet on
| technological breakthroughs in the next few decades.
| jacquesm wrote:
| What I've done:
|
| - designed and built a house on renewable energy
|
| - designed and built a windmill
|
| Unfortunately both of these I have had to abandon, the former
| because it is on the wrong continent compared to where I am
| today, the latter because of permitting hassles.
|
| - I do have the maximum surface of the roof covered in solar
| panels, a good 2500W peak.
|
| - transport myself everywhere I can using bicycle / e-bike (<
| 30 km, sometimes much more than that if I'm not in a hurry)
|
| - eat very little - hardly any, actually - meat / poultry /
| fish
|
| That still leaves a ton of room for improvement but as long
| as I'm living in my current situation I personally can't do a
| whole lot more for a variety of reasons, and I would if I
| could.
|
| I have fortunately been able to stop flying completely, all
| of our work is now remote and we are pushing hard to keep it
| that way (when before our customers demanded on site visits
| all over europe).
|
| Compared to 1 year ago my energy usage is probably about
| half, compared to 10 years ago it is probably less than 25%
| because this is a much more temperate climate.
|
| So, what have you done?
| Nimitz14 wrote:
| The only thing that would actually make a difference is
| going full nuclear.
|
| But the greens put a stop to that, so I find it hard to
| take them - and anyone else who, like you, writes
| paragraphs about things that in reality do not matter -
| seriously.
| abeppu wrote:
| The crazy thing is it _is_ hitting the wealthy parts, but that
| still hasn't galvanized sufficient response.
|
| A very partial list of headline impacts in the first world off
| the top of my head:
|
| - US West Coast droughts and fires
|
| - Pacific Northwest heat dome
|
| - Texas cold snap
|
| - Epic floods in Germany
|
| - Australian wild fires
|
| - European heat waves
|
| - <fill in your favorite recent hurricane here>
|
| Even when rich SF techies were under a terrifying orange sky,
| our behavior mostly did not change.
|
| I think we need to start mobilizing the other dysfunctional
| aspects of our society to apply more pressure.
|
| - Some were upset when propublica released info about the tax-
| avoidance strategies of the very wealthy, claiming it to be a
| violation of their privacy. Should we not also find and leak
| information on extravagant emitters, to be named and shamed in
| the press?
|
| - Companies that spent years pushing opiods in the US were sued
| and came to a settlement agreement. NYC has tried to sue oil
| companies for their emissions. They're now trying to sue them
| over their false statements and misinformation campaigns.
| Perhaps _every_ state, county and city should be filing
| lawsuits against large emitters.
|
| - I think _someone_ needs to press absence of carbon taxes at
| the WTO as a form of dumping, wherein goods are being exported
| for less than their true cost, once we acknowledge the
| externalities.
|
| - Everyone hates this take, but I think local jurisdictions in
| which people die from climate-related disasters should press
| involuntary manslaughter charges against companies with
| terrible emissions records. If the headlines were, "Exxon on
| trial for deaths of dozens", I think companies would begin to
| change their behavior.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > it _is_ hitting the wealthy parts
|
| Yes, but not the majority all at once.
|
| As long as 51% of the electorate or more hasn't been
| personally inconvenienced you might as well be Al Gore
| shouting into the night.
| tsss wrote:
| SF techies making 100k/year are not rich and definitely not
| the Germans making 40k. As long as there are no spontaneous
| hurricanes sucking Jeff Bezos' space rocket out of the sky,
| nothing will change.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _The crazy thing is it _is_ hitting the wealthy parts_
|
| Until wealth can't buy its way out of the consequences of
| climate change, this hasn't really happened.
|
| Who cares about what's going on in SF when you can hop on
| your plane and fly to one of your properties elsewhere?
|
| I lived somewhere where people would build multimillion
| dollar homes on the beach, and every few years hurricanes
| would wash them away. It's happening at an increasing
| frequency now. It's no big deal, though, because wealthy
| people can afford to insure and rebuild every time it
| happens. It's just one of the costs of having a beach house
| in a desirable area.
|
| Similarly, wildfires are just one of the costs of having
| houses in the Bay Area.
| ckw wrote:
| If history books continue to be written.
| rayiner wrote:
| Getting billions of people to work together cooperatively to do
| something was always a complete pipe dream. It's the fantasy
| that, _this time_ central planning will work, because this
| thing is so important. We should have been throwing money at
| carbon capture technologies decades ago.
| jacquesm wrote:
| It's called 'trees'.
| rayiner wrote:
| So Bangladesh will not reduce emissions until it hits
| developed world status. Not one bit. Can trees absorb all
| of Bangladesh's growing emissions over the next 50 years?
| Same for India, Nigeria, etc?
| jacquesm wrote:
| It's mostly the trees that we cut down. They were already
| there. Part of the problem here is that biomass was
| declared to be 'carbon neutral', which caused a lot of
| people to interpret that as a license to cut down the
| forests and burn them. But carbon fixation is a slow
| process and growing trees to the point where they have a
| substantial gas exchange gowing takes a long time.
| snarf21 wrote:
| I agree with you but I don't think it is generational. We have
| always been a greedy species. We just finally built the
| technology to amplify our greed x2 each generation. It is
| harder to destroy the world when each person spends all their
| waking hours just trying to stay alive and fed.
| holoduke wrote:
| Nuclear power is needed everywhere. All major grids. And all
| containerships. Doable in 20-40 years with some serious effort.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Nuclear container ships are such a good idea. It is maddening
| we haven't done this and only turn war ships into nuclear
| power.
| nomel wrote:
| With the way that container ships just break apart in the
| middle of the ocean from poor maintenance [1], and the way
| that pirates take over container ships, I'm not sure I can
| comfortably agree. There would have to be some pretty extreme
| regulations, security requirements, and definitely higher
| cost involved.
|
| 1. https://www.maritime-executive.com/article/Container-Ship-
| Br...
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's a non-proliferation issue more than anything else.
| aksss wrote:
| Is it? Nuclear powered warships aren't as common as people
| think. There are only 12 nuclear powered carriers in the
| World and the US has 11 of them. I think if it were a no-
| brainer and "easy" (to install, maintain, safely operate)
| on container ships, it would be done by now. Or at very
| least you'd see more carriers operated by countries with
| nuclear capabilities. That the Russians don't operate a
| nuclear powered carrier says something (not sure what, but
| I think it indicts the complexity, reliability, etc).
|
| EDIT: For those interested, here is some great reading on
| the history and state of marine nuclear propulsion.
| https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/non-power-
| nucl...
| adolph wrote:
| Plus 90+ nuclear subs
|
| https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/ssn.htm
| nabla9 wrote:
| Russians currently have:
|
| - 1 active nuclear-powered Kirov-class battlecruiser. 1
| under refit. 2 retired.
|
| - 1 nuclear-powered cargo ship (Sevmorput).
|
| - 5 nuclear-powered icebreakers. Russians have over 400
| reactor-years of operating experience with icebreakers.
| Starting with Lenin 1957.
|
| - Not to mention submarines.
|
| The reason why Russian carrier Admiral Kuznetsov is not
| nuclear-powered has nothing to do with ability. The
| carrier design was not good to begin with and then Soviet
| Union collapsed.
| jbay808 wrote:
| Don't the Russians run nuclear-powered icebreakers?
| aksss wrote:
| Evidently. Including one container ship with an ice-
| breaking bow. From Wikipedia: "Nuclear-powered
| icebreakers are much more powerful than their diesel-
| powered counterparts, and although nuclear propulsion is
| expensive to install and maintain, very heavy fuel
| demands and limitations on range, compounded with the
| difficulty of refueling in the Arctic region, can make
| diesel vessels less practical and economical overall for
| these ice-breaking duties."
|
| No doubt that fossil fuels present an attractive option
| with their energy density and relative simplicity insofar
| as shipping in more temperate zones is concerned. Seems
| to get back to the question of incentives - short of
| artificially increasing the immediate cost of fossil
| fuels (and all downstream containerized goods) it may be
| challenging to adopt nuclear or renewables in the global
| shipping industry.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Let the nuclear powers build the reactors and design the
| ships to slide them in like big batteries then IMHO. There
| can't be more than a few thousand cargo ships in the world
| --it's a risk that could be managed.
| closeparen wrote:
| Each nuclear facility has a small army onsite, plus full-
| scale armies that can be summoned within a few minutes by
| panic button. In the middle of an Iowa cornfield.
|
| Compare that to the threat environment at sea, plus the
| logistical difficulties of carrying around that much
| security. I doubt the Navy can spare a battle group to
| escort each container ship.
| jacquesm wrote:
| They get hijacked with some regularity.
| stoolpigeon wrote:
| I've only observed it from the outside (I worked on an
| aircraft carrier - but nothing to do with the power
| plants) but what I observed is that it takes a lot of
| people that get payed a lot of money in the private
| sector to safely operate and maintain reactors. I'm
| guessing that the building costs would be dwarfed by the
| long term cost of manning nuclear ships.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Interesting challenge for us then--if we're pouring money
| into self-driving cars and constantly making strides
| there, why can't we do the same for fully automated self-
| running nuclear reactors. If there's a future where we
| trust cars 100% to drive every family safely around town,
| we should be able to trust reactors to run themselves and
| fail safe. I don't see why a human brain has to be in the
| critical loop of reactor operation, other than tradition
| or legal CYA.
| whoooooo123 wrote:
| What if one of them gets lodged sideways in the Suez Canal?
| riffic wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sevmorput
| ordu wrote:
| It would be fun watching headlines about a ship being stuck in
| Suez, if Ever Given was a nuclear powered ship. And what to do
| about terrorists capturing ships and threatening to blow them
| up.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| If the AMOC weakened dramatically, we'd be heading for a little
| ice age or worse. You're going to need gas to get humanity
| through that. But sure, we can never have enough nuclear power.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| We don't really have that time. Solar and wind can be built out
| faster. But we should do it on the margins.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| We don't really have that time. Solar and wind can be built out
| faster. But we should do new nuclear on the margins and
| preserve/enhance existing nuclear.
|
| Battery-electric (and liquid hydrogen) for container ships
| works. If someone really tried.
| draugadrotten wrote:
| > Solar and wind can be built out faster
|
| The sheer number of wind power plants that is required to
| replace a single nuclear reactor has significant impact on
| nature, wild birds and more. One wind power plant isn't much
| but what happens to wildlife when you need to place 2000 of
| them? For one reactor, that is.
|
| https://www.ans.org/news/article-933/wind-nuclear-
| infographi...
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Yeah, you need a lot, but the impact isn't great if you
| take appropriate precautions. Also, solar photovoltaic
| doesn't have that problem.
|
| Again, I'm actually very pro-nuclear but I don't think we
| should put all our eggs in the nuclear basket.
| omginternets wrote:
| I sure hope Western Europe likes it cold. Paris is on roughly the
| same latitude of Quebec city.
| [deleted]
| burntoutfire wrote:
| Norway would probably be hugely affected. They are pretty far
| up north, but, thanks to Gulfstream, have rather mild weather
| on the coast.
| anonymousDan wrote:
| Isn't this basically what caused the last ice age? The gulf
| stream is effectively the only thing keeping places like
| Ireland and England relatively mild given their latitude.
| arethuza wrote:
| You might be thinking of the Younger Dryas - which was a
| relatively short cooling in places like the UK with some re-
| glaciation here in Scotland:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas
| VintageCool wrote:
| No. The effect of the gulf stream is overstated.
|
| Wind these latitudes travels prevailingly westerly.
|
| England and Ireland are downwind of the ocean, which
| maintains more stable temperature than the land.
|
| British Columbia and Seattle are also relatively mild.
|
| New England gets cold because it is downwind of the
| continent. Also because the Rocky Mountains diverts the jet
| stream, exposing New England to more severe polar weather.
|
| The severe climate shocks of the past few thousand years were
| the result of massive ice-dammed glacial lakes (like Lake
| Agassiz) breaking through the dam and releasing incredible
| quantities of freshwater into the northern oceans all at
| once.
| progbits wrote:
| Full paper: https://rdcu.be/cspBH
|
| Link courtesy of
| https://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/oykg1y/climate_cri...
| magwa101 wrote:
| Global warming is just a couple of degrees, so if it's freezing
| in Europe, it's going to be really hot somewhere else...I wonder
| where that will be?
| Permit wrote:
| I often hear that as individuals we can't really be held
| responsible for climate change and that instead we should look to
| our government to impose laws that restrict carbon output.
|
| This made me curious: what is the "fair" amount of carbon dioxide
| that the average individual can emit? According to this
| article[1][2] published in Nature it looks like the answer is
| 1.61 metric tons of CO2/year.
|
| That strikes me as close-to-impossible for industrialized nations
| to achieve. A round-trip flight from NYC to SF emits 1.5 metric
| tons per passenger. In order to reach 1.61 metric tons an
| individual would not be able to own a gas-powered car, could not
| regularly consume meat, could not live in remote areas only
| visitable by plane etc. Many things people don't even consider
| "luxuries" (like visiting family overseas) would be a non-
| starter.
|
| In France they implemented a modest fuel tax and they got the
| Yellow Vest Protests[3] in response. I can't see the average
| individual _ever_ voting for a party that wouldn 't let them
| visit family and nearly eliminate meat consumption.
|
| As China, India and Indonesia have industrialized their per-
| capita emissions have shot up well above these levels as well. I
| imagine the same thing will happen with African nations over the
| next 25-50 years.
|
| I don't really see any way out of this other than some miraculous
| technological breakthroughs like solar powered planes which I
| understand to be near-impossible with today's technology.
|
| [1] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-018-0021-4
|
| [2] https://sci-
| hub.se/https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-01...
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_vests_protests
| emn13 wrote:
| The world is going to need a combination of a bunch of
| policies. It's not just emissions reduction; it's also carbon
| sinks, and adaptation to the non-avoided impacts.
|
| Also, none of this needs to happen overnight, and every step
| along the way is helpful. Even if we fail to achieve the
| optimistic target of 1.5C, that doesn't mean it's all pointless
| and we might as well emit whatever.
|
| And that means that those targets aren't all that important. We
| need emissions reductions, the more the merrier, whether or not
| we hit some kind of arbitrary goal or not. Whether we reach
| those exact benchmarks you propose or not kind of doesn't
| matter.
|
| I'd just like to additionally point out that however unfair
| perhaps, the premise of that nature article is some kind of
| super-unrealistic sci-fi, because there's no question of
| _everybody_ on the planet having the resources for "high life
| satisfaction", including perhaps your proposed annual plane
| trips. In fact, it's likely that the annual median number of
| plane trips even by Americans is... zero - at least most years:
| https://news.gallup.com/poll/1579/Airlines.aspx - and even the
| average is just 2 or so; this is _clearly_ a luxury.
|
| Additionally, carbon-negative processes will be necessary. How
| expensive that turns out to be, and how much carbon planes
| _need_ to emit will hopefully play a role in pricing plane
| trips in the future.
|
| For now, we could start by at least taxing jet fuel
| appropriately.
| vimy wrote:
| The lockdowns prove your point. People hate living like that.
| And it also shows behavioral change is pointless. In 2020 we
| had barely any airplane traffic. Factories all over the world
| closed, China was basically closed for business for two months.
| No traffic since everyone stayed at home. Less frivolous
| consumption, world gdp contracted almost 5 % = degrowth. Result
| for this horrible way of living? A measly 7 % lower emissions
| in 2020. A reduction that can only be achieved once, you can't
| close the same factory twice. We need 10 % lower every year...
|
| That's not worth changing my whole lifestyle for. I'd rather
| pay for geo-engineering solutions instead of something that
| lowers my quality of life and ultimately doesn't do much to
| solve the problem.
| Robotbeat wrote:
| Domestic flights wouldn't be hard to electrify (815km range
| within 4-5 years, 1300km range within 10 years... enough to
| electrify short haul flights which are half of all passenger
| miles traveled by air... and most medium/long haul flights can
| be broken up to shorter routes), and you can also do electric
| car road trips (I just drove from Texas to Virginia in a Model
| S). Eventually, even long haul flights (~4000-5000km) could be
| electrified.
|
| It's ultimately not hard to reduce emissions to low levels.
| Just use electricity for stuff we usually use fossil fuels for
| now. Until 1950 or so, most hydrogen for fertilizer was made
| with electrolysis, so it wouldn't be hard to do that. Many
| homes are already heated purely electrically. Several
| electrical grids have very low per-kWh emissions. Mix of
| nuclear, hydro, wind, solar, and geothermal makes it pretty
| feasible. Even new iron in new plants in the US (the steel
| which isn't recycled already in arc furnaces) is about half
| made with hydrogen (as part of natural gas syngas) and could be
| tweaked to be ~90-95% hydrogen.
|
| It's not hard or even particularly expensive. We just gotta do
| it and quit telling people the only way to fight climate change
| is castration (literal or metaphorical, ie degrowth).
|
| (Also, a crewed solar powered plane flew around the world a few
| years ago, although you'd want to use mostly battery electric.)
|
| ...really, the hard thing to electrify are the long haul
| transoceanic flights. A yearly visit to relatives in France has
| a massive carbon footprint right now, but it's also something
| almost no one does (compared to commuting, having a house in
| the suburbs, domestic flights, and road trips, which are
| relatively easy to decarbonize). An appropriate carbon price on
| the few electrification-resistant sectors would address the
| problem efficiently.
| bjoli wrote:
| I live in an energy-efficient appartment, drive less than
| 100km/month. I rarely buy clothes. I rarely buy tech stuff
| (except for a new phone every 3-4 years). I don't fly. I eat no
| animal products. All my electricity comes from renewable
| sources (sweden has a lot of hydro power).
|
| There is no way in hell I am even close to 1.6 metric tons of
| co2, and I really tried to bring it down. Every calculator I
| try put me at about 1/3 of the average swede, which would mean
| I am at about 2.5 metric tons.
| emn13 wrote:
| Don't forget food etc - even as a vegetarian, in Europe,
| you're likely to hit that 1.6 tons number just with food, or
| come close to it, at least as much as my google-foo tells me.
| Of course, these numbers are all quite hard to estimate, and
| particularly for animal products (which you don't consume!)
| include questionable factors like land-use changes - which
| are questionable not because they don't matter, but because
| of the remarkably optimistic assumption that land use change
| is driven by consumption, rather than driven by the low cost
| of said change for those actively doing it.
|
| But sure, it sounds like you've found a lifestyle that works
| for you and has at least considerably less impact, regardless
| of the exact number (and ignoring the exact number is likely
| wise anyhow). Great!
| tomcooks wrote:
| >In order to reach 1.61 metric tons an individual would not be
| able to own a gas-powered car, could not regularly consume
| meat, could not live in remote areas only visitable by plane
| etc. Many things people don't even consider "luxuries" (like
| visiting family overseas) would be a non-starter.
|
| So literally what was normal life in Europe up to the 80's,
| even 90s for some regions.
|
| It's not difficult to imagine how to accomplish this, we have
| even more available to make life comfortable.
|
| Ask anyone born in the 50's, they'll share tricks.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Are electric planes physically impossible or just not
| realistic with current oil prices and no carbon tax?
| notJim wrote:
| I agree these are huge challenges, and that climate activists
| are unrealistic in their expectations of how much people are
| willing to sacrifice or change. I would guess most climate
| activists take more than one flight per year, and certainly I
| do as someone who is concerned about climate (in non-COVID
| times.)
|
| For this reason, I really think technology has to be used to
| solve these problems. EVs, public transit, and high-speed rail
| where it makes sense are very straightforward answers for many
| things. There is also low-hanging fruit like insulating
| buildings, and switching buildings to use electricity instead
| of natural gas. In the US, all of these could be accelerated
| mostly with government subsidies. There aren't really any major
| technical hurdles to adopting them right now.
|
| Beyond that, I think we have to have carbon capture, and
| carbon-neutral biofuels. That would enable us to continue
| flying and eating meat. Hopefully lab-grown meats also pan out
| in the coming decades or so.
| randomluck040 wrote:
| I get all the points but the eating meat part. We simply don't
| need it, there is no benefit anymore. Not contradicting your
| overall point though, even if some things are luxury. We got
| used to it which is why we might not consider it as luxury. I
| don't think we'll have solar powered planes but maybe emission
| free trains?
| jacquesm wrote:
| > That strikes me as close-to-impossible for industrialized
| nations to achieve. A round-trip flight from NYC to SF emits
| 1.5 metric tons per passenger. In order to reach 1.61 metric
| tons an individual would not be able to own a gas-powered car,
| could not regularly consume meat, could not live in remote
| areas only visitable by plane etc.
|
| So?
|
| > Many things people don't even consider "luxuries" (like
| visiting family overseas) would be a non-starter.
|
| That is a luxury, whether you consider it one or not is
| irrelevant. When you emigrate there are certain consequences.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| So this would require martial law to implement. Basically no
| one in the US would accept those restrictions. Doesn't seem
| politically feasible without a ww3.
| richwater wrote:
| No one except loonies see "You can't own a car, consume meat
| live anywhere but NYC and can't visit your family 5 states
| over" and are okay with it.
| octaonalocto wrote:
| I strongly disagree with your comment. Your definition of
| luxury is narrow and proscriptive. If you're trying to
| evaluate whether people would accept certain changes in their
| lifestyle, their definition of luxury is the one that
| matters.
|
| In a tight definition, indoor plumbing is a luxury. As a
| person whose family vacations used to include an outhouse, I
| most certainly do not consider that a luxury in my life.
| emn13 wrote:
| The whole scenario is far fetched. We're imagining some
| egalitarian world (won't happen), in which with today's
| technology we need to make due with tomorrows resources,
| but without time to adapt and find alternatives.
|
| More realistically, we need to start making at least some
| steps. If air travel becomes more expensive, we'll do
| _less_ of it, and at least _try_ to find alternatives,
| personally. Society might try to find workarounds, like
| negative emissions, or construct alternatives (like high-
| speed rail) that are "good enough", at least for many
| flights. We might have alternative, emissions free fuel,
| someday.
|
| But the real point is: this is not going to be as extreme
| as is sketched simply because inequality isn't going away,
| and secondly - this is _necessarily_ going to happen
| gradually, so the impact will be reduced as society will
| have time to adapt. Let 's just hope gradually doesn't mean
| glacially, because then we'll pay the climate price.
| jacquesm wrote:
| No, my definition of luxury is to take anything that we
| didn't have in the last 100 years and consider it optional,
| because that's the kind of world you'll be living in
| regardless of your opinion on the matter.
|
| And then you will realize that it _is_ a luxury to be able
| to zoom around the planet on a moments notice, to have a
| multiple 100 's of KW personal energy budget per month and
| so on. These things are not givens and once they're gone
| everything that depended on them will be gone as well,
| because you will prefer to survive.
| Permit wrote:
| > So?
|
| You have made peace with these things which is commendable.
|
| That said, you must still understand how big of a change this
| would be for other people who have not. For example, I
| suspect the Canadian government would have a hard time
| telling indigenous populations in Nunavut that they have
| banned flights to their communities. Same would go for island
| nations like Iceland or even the state of Hawaii.
|
| You and I can probably both agree that others will be
| reluctant to give up eating meat, fresh fruits/vegetables
| that have been flown in from warmer climates. We can probably
| also agree that most people would not vote for a party that
| promised to shut down global international tourism.
|
| I cannot see any political solution to this problem.
| emn13 wrote:
| It doesn't matter.
|
| If prices rise gradually, people will adapt. Remote
| villages might become ghost towns (hardly the first time in
| Canada, incidentally), or become more isolated. And the
| world isn't going to turn into some utopian egalitarian
| place either, so the hard reality is that many people won't
| lose anything by losing air travel, because they already do
| none, and thus those that have that luxurious habit now
| will not need to suddenly lose it; there's time to adapt.
| Most of the US certainly doesn't need air travel either,
| and train or even road travel can be quite emissions poor;
| it just means travel will take more time (and willingness
| to build infrastructure).
|
| A more realistic scenario is one in which inequality does
| not change significantly - and then the reductions are less
| severe.
|
| But seriously: losing most air travel (or just cheap air
| travel): if that's it, count yourself lucky!
| Permit wrote:
| > If prices rise gradually, people will adapt.
|
| I think this is where you and I disagree. I would contend
| that the average citizen will resist this. I am basing
| this off what we saw in France when they introduced a
| very modest fuel tax.
|
| I think this is an issue that would actually unite both
| the left and the right. I suspect that if we made air
| travel, meat and fresh (flown-in) produce only available
| to the wealthiest 0.X% of our population we would see
| widespread outrage. It would be seen as just another
| example of inequality.
| emn13 wrote:
| So first of all - France is known for it's remarkable
| protest culture. That's not typical. Secondly, the fuel
| tax in question, while reasonable and necessary, is also
| a somewhat special case even in France because it
| represents taking away peoples everyday mobility. As cars
| electrify, that will be less so, and other measures -
| such as those targeting luxury travel like air travel -
| would surely not see quite the same levels of protest.
| And at this point, _because_ the protests were
| widespread, and _because_ they succeeded, there is going
| to be vigilance against sneaky plans by the government to
| pass it while nobody is watching - but that too is a
| fairly local issue.
|
| I expect that even in France those tax hikes will
| eventually pass, even if it takes longer than elsewhere
| and much longer than other measures. It may need some
| other compromise, like a comparable tax-reduction for
| median incomes; and some level of political maneuvering
| to placate the particularly hard hit. Or perhaps they'll
| try to achieve similar reductions via other measures such
| as speed limits and regulations on cars. But I don't
| think it's representative of social upheaval vs. climate-
| change cost in general, anyhow.
| bequanna wrote:
| > That is a luxury, whether you consider it one or not is
| irrelevant. When you emigrate there are certain consequences.
|
| Interesting. Why are you (or your political affiliates) the
| ones who get to decide what is a luxury and what is
| "essential"?
|
| Were you ordained with some divine moral authority?
|
| I can't speak for the rest of the world, but that kind of
| authoritarian thinking will thankfully never be allowed to
| prevail in the United States.
| jacquesm wrote:
| It's not me who will decide, it will be your wallet.
|
| > but that kind of authoritarian thinking will thankfully
| never be allowed to prevail in the United States.
|
| That's a very funny statement.
| ashgreat wrote:
| I created a shareable link from my university's account. I
| checked it, you will be able read the article in the browser but
| can't download it:
|
| https://rdcu.be/cstep
| spockz wrote:
| So what do we do about this? Increase the salinity? Install huge
| pumps? (The last thing is only partly in jest.)
| _rpd wrote:
| Both have been proposed:
|
| http://pure.iiasa.ac.at/id/eprint/16202/1/Hunt2019_Article_C...
| dylan604 wrote:
| Increase the salinity with desalinzation and putting the brine
| back into the ocean. Solve loss of water and salinity! Boom
| done! Simple, right?
| matttproud wrote:
| Makes me look back at the last 20-30 years of discourse in the
| United States and let out a deep sigh. Had CFC propellants
| emerged today, I highly doubt the U.S. would have been a
| signatory to the Montreal Protocol -- just to own the libs or
| avoid hindering the market by a boogeyman of 0.0001% overhead or
| some other form of contrarian political identity differentiation.
| felipellrocha wrote:
| Yeah, man. I'm often wondering where did this "own the libs"
| thing even began. It provides republicans with such a strong
| connection to their base, that if something gets even remotely
| attached to that idea, there is no budging
| qzw wrote:
| Decades of orchestrated efforts to turn political discourse
| into a culture war. Ever wonder why there are so many
| political "think tanks"? That's what they've been working on.
| rchaud wrote:
| Newt Gingrich holds that honour. He turned politics into a
| partisan bloodsport in the mid-to-late '90s. It stopped being
| about whether proposed policies would help or hurt Americans
| and more about whether such and such would defeat the godless
| liberals.
|
| The efforts to repeal the ACA show this in its most blatant
| form. The emotional heft of the argument laid entirely on the
| basis of one word: "Obamacare". It's no wonder that they
| failed to pass an alternative despite complaining about the
| ACA for the 10 years prior.
|
| But going back to the '90s, it didn't help that '96 saw the
| passage of the Telecommunications Act. This led to rapid
| consolidation of local radio and TV news stations under one
| large corporate umbrella (Clear Channel). Independent
| stations can provide a variety of viewpoints. If they're all
| owned by the same parent, they start providing the parents'
| viewpoint.
| mhh__ wrote:
| Take the election fraud things, for example. They know it's
| bullshit, they know you know it's bullshit, but they do it
| anyway.
|
| The incentives are wrong, and I don't see them getting better
| any time soon.
| throw0101a wrote:
| > _Makes me look back at the last 20-30 years of discourse in
| the United States and let out a deep sigh._
|
| George H.W. Bush ("Bush 41") actually had a decent track record
| on the environment and climate change:
|
| * https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/george-h-w-bush-
| underst...
|
| The craziness with the GOP started more recently (post-1990s).
| bediger4000 wrote:
| Bush 41's immediate predecessor did not have a decent track
| record. The craziness started well before 1980. Bush 41 was
| an aberration.
| matttproud wrote:
| Two book recommendations for their retrospective analyses
| over the last 37 years:
|
| Nick Bryant's When America Stopped Being Great (BBC
| reporter who spent formative years in USA, beyond being on
| assignment there).
|
| George Packer's Last Best Hope (Packer has a bunch of other
| fantastic material)
| matttproud wrote:
| 1992, Bush utters "Ozone Man" into the lexicon as a
| pejorative against Al Gore.
|
| There is a difference between campaign rhetoric and policy,
| to be sure, but the country lost clarity of focus rapidly as
| a nation after the Gulf War and began to let trivial things
| divide it. (I remember the 1990s culture wars, and I'd like
| to forget.) Bush senior may have been one of the last decent
| human Republicans outside of his periodic populist gestures.
| I'd say Nixon (modulo corruption) or Ford (ineptitude) or
| Eisenhower was probably the last. I'll never forgive the Bush
| son for pissing away my generations' future and Rove's
| mobilization of the demos into this gerrymandered hellscape.
| throw0101a wrote:
| And yet Reagan (with Bush as VP) signed the Montreal
| Protocol. And Bush 41 created the acid rain pact with
| Canada (PM Mulroney).
|
| A lot of blame goes to Bush 43 ("Dubya") for a lot of
| things, but I generally view him as a patsy for those
| around him that actually made the decisions and pushed them
| through.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| When in doubt, always blame Congress and not the
| president. Newt Gingrich is a bigger player here than
| either Bush.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > The craziness with the GOP started more recently
| (post-1990s).
|
| IIRC, you can date that phase to 1994 and Newt Gingrich.
|
| Though that was maybe more like phase II, with phase I
| starting in ~1980 with Reagan.
| handrous wrote:
| Yep. The late 70s and early 80s mark the beginning of
| several strategies, policies, and chess moves that paid off
| _big time_ in the 90s.
|
| The neoliberal movement gained a major presence in the
| Republican Party at the beginning of that span, and by the
| early 90s it had also captured the Democrats.
|
| The Fairness Doctrine fell, and its absence was quickly
| exploited. The ball took a while to get rolling, but was
| moving fast by the early 90s.
|
| Economic libertarianism saw some important activity near
| the beginning of that span, and its very confident anti-
| government and laissez-faire positions and language became
| very influential through the 90s, and it continues to grow.
|
| The fusion of the GOP and evangelical Christianity became
| (very deliberately) much more solid in the late 70s and the
| 80s.
|
| Basically the Republicans began in a _bunch_ of ways to
| shift toward their 2rd major re-organization and re-
| orientation since WWII in a short span of years around
| 1980, with the 90s being when they 'd pretty much finished
| that shift. They _may_ be working on a 3rd one now, which
| we may end up backdating to the Tea Party movement (that
| time being this incarnation 's "~1980" turning point).
| We'll see, depends how the next 5-10 years goes, may amount
| to nothing.
|
| As a side-effect (or bonus, to those behind it) the
| Democrats ended up having their 2nd major change in the
| same period, too (to solidly pro-neoliberal). AFAI can tell
| they're not starting their next serious shift, yet.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Economic libertarianism saw some important activity
| near the beginning of that span, and its very confident
| anti-government and laissez-faire positions and language
| became very influential through the 90s, and it continues
| to grow.
|
| That's true, but I'd quibble with the "it continues to
| grow" part. IMHO, it's peaked. It's still strong, but
| Trump and other populists dealt it a blow; and it's
| arguably now sclerotic "old thing" instead of the buzzy
| "new thing."
| slownews45 wrote:
| Yeah - even where I am there has been a pull back on stuff.
|
| We've got a ban on plastic straws (ie, you can't use one then
| throw it in the trash in the resteraunt) to help save nature.
| But you go outside and the amount of trash just blowing into
| the water from various encampments near the water is just nuts.
|
| Their are claims of concerns about carbon emissions, but
| absolute opposition to any work around nuclear. If carbon
| emissions was the or a very important issue, you'd be going
| full out on lots of ideas.
|
| I followed the attempted development of a solar install closely
| in a rich / white area (hard left otherwise). It was fought
| tooth and nail. the erosion underneath, the shading of a creek,
| this and that. Really - they didn't want to look at it. Full
| stop.
|
| So yes, even my early passion for some things have moderated a
| bit. It seems to be the left telling other people how to live.
| Heaven forbid folks live in smaller houses in the US, instead
| we are on china for their emissions (likely half per capita of
| US?)
|
| I'd love to see more problem solving from the left, rather than
| the sort of in your face bans on things. Can't we tax plastic
| straws 1 cent per straw or do a carbon tax or something that's
| a bit less nanny state style or so random and arbitrary?
| cogman10 wrote:
| > Their are claims of concerns about carbon emissions, but
| absolute opposition to any work around nuclear. If carbon
| emissions was the or a very important issue, you'd be going
| full out on lots of ideas.
|
| While I agree nuclear is the right way to go... it's frankly
| too late to put all our eggs in that basket. It takes over a
| decade just to turn on a new plant in the US due to all the
| regulations. We can work to improve that situation, but at
| the end of the day, solar and wind can be deployed much
| faster and at a lower cost.
|
| > I'd love to see more problem solving from the left, rather
| than the sort of in your face bans on things.
|
| I'd humbly submit you aren't listening the left arguments if
| you think they aren't putting out solutions.
|
| Most people I know on the left deride paper straws just as
| much as you do.
|
| The serious solutions that have been proposed are things like
| carbon taxes, subsidies for renewable installation and
| electric vehicles, ending subsidies on the fossil fuel
| industry. Regulations decreasing allowable fuel consumption
| from vehicles.
|
| These are serious solutions that would have major positive
| impacts.
|
| And, as you can imagine, they've all been met with total
| opposition from the Republicans. Ranging anywhere from
| outright denying that climate change is real to lying about
| the impacts of renewable tech or fear mongering over things
| like "How can we recycle every part of the solar panel! Guess
| we better just burn oil instead".
|
| Nuclear is a fine solution, it isn't the only solution and it
| is absolutely more of a long term solution until regulations
| around new plants ease up.
|
| In the mean time, the best actions we can take today are
| making it more expensive to release greenhouse gasses in the
| first place through taxation and subsidizing greenhouse gas
| free power generation.
| throwawaylinux wrote:
| > While I agree nuclear is the right way to go... it's
| frankly too late to put all our eggs in that basket. It
| takes over a decade just to turn on a new plant in the US
| due to all the regulations. We can work to improve that
| situation, but at the end of the day, solar and wind can be
| deployed much faster and at a lower cost.
|
| I've heard this exact same thing said for 20 years. I
| expect I'll be hearing it for another 20 at least.
| VintageCool wrote:
| You will be continuing to hear about wind and solar for
| the next 20 years for good reason: they're finally taking
| off.
|
| Wind production in the US has grown from about 2 million
| megawatt-hours / month in 2005 to 33 million megawatt-
| hours / month today.
|
| Solar production in the US has grown from 1.5 million
| megawatt-hours / month in 2014 to 17 million megawatt-
| hours today.
|
| Building new wind and solar is now cost-competitive with
| continuing to run existing coal power plants.
|
| With a friendly federal government (if our government
| actually does anything), I expect wind and solar to grow
| immensely in the next 10 years. Wind especially looks
| strong right now.
|
| https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data/browser/
|
| The EIA expects 10% growth in wind and solar this summer
| compared to a year ago.
|
| https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=47936
| bcrosby95 wrote:
| According to a friend that works with utility companies to
| plan out future capacity, nuclear's problem is the high
| upfront cost. Companies don't want to invest in building one
| for this reason alone. Building a new one puts a lot of
| capital at risk.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| Nuclear plants in America are old enough that many need to
| be upgraded. Turns out upgrading is so expensive that many
| choose to close instead. Just this week two in Illinois
| closed when the state refused to subsidize the upgrade.
|
| It's a pretty bad look, because people see these huge
| subsidies and balk, thinking that nuclear is a continually
| expensive form of energy, even though these are one time
| costs.
| erhk wrote:
| Trash from encampments is negligible when you realize how
| many plastics are just dumped into the ocean
| lumost wrote:
| If you consider how much refuse you generate per day per
| household member - and then consider that an encampment has
| next to no sanitization infrastructure, It becomes obvious
| that the encampment will generate orders of magnitude more
| waste in the ocean per capita vs. ordinary households.
|
| I wouldn't be surprised if the litter ratio was 10,000:1 or
| more.
| alexilliamson wrote:
| What?
|
| People in houses are probably using more plastic than
| people who don't have money for a house. They have more
| money to spend, and a large % will go to plastic, on
| average.
| slownews45 wrote:
| Not where I live. The trash from encampments is pulled up
| and down the shoreline (tons of bird and other life) with
| every tide. It's noticeable.
|
| Tons of plastic in ocean for sure, but less noticeable
| unless you are in asia where the rivers and coastal areas
| are crushed with trash at times.
|
| It's just weird our focus is on a plastic straw being
| disposed of in a restaurant. I mean, the amount of plastic
| bags in the shipping boxes I see on my street each trash
| day - mindboggling (airbags amazon and others use).
| emn13 wrote:
| Apparently the type of plastic is quite relevant; but
| whether straws are worse than air-bags for shipping...
| who knows.
|
| But perhaps more relevantly, however unsightly this whole
| plastic soup is, I kind of doubt the impact is anywhere
| near that of climate change, and I'm concerned these kind
| of issues serve as a kind of feel-good distraction.
|
| Maybe that's too pessimistic; maybe the world can deal
| with plastic soup and climate change and forever
| chemicals and animal welfare and whatever at once. I'm
| just not very confident of that.
| snarf21 wrote:
| I don't see it as political at all. It is simply NIMBYism.
| Everyone wants trash pick-up but not a landfill near them.
| They want sewer that always flushes but no water treatment
| near them. They don't want new malls because of traffic. They
| don't want new apartments because they are afraid of who may
| move in and their property values.
|
| The only reason straws caught on is because no one cared. We
| are all absolutely willing to give up straws since they don't
| require any _real_ change in our behavior. Most stores offer
| reusable bags but people (and lobbyists) would fight back if
| disposable bags were outlawed. We could charge for them but
| people would rather pay an extra $0.50 at the grocery store
| than change behavior. We are addicted to convenience. People
| hate change, more than the pieces of change, more than
| anything else. There is a lot of awful in this world driven
| specifically by people 's fear of change.
| matttproud wrote:
| The performative stuff has to stop. On the one vacation I am
| doing since this pandemic began, I saw a place in Northern
| Italy give out paper straws enclosed in plastic wrapping. You
| have to be kidding me. It's missing the point and
| greenwashing at its finest (unrelated to climate).
|
| You'll meet plenty on the left, especially scientists, who
| are in favor of nuclear. Where I live (Switzerland[0]), the
| biggest NIMBY against nuclear are the provincial nationalists
| who are going nuts about installation of a subterranean
| disposal site in their area (proposed because it is the most
| suitable site due to geological properties). My turning point
| with nuclear was about 15 years ago when learning about
| thorium. Very eye-opening.
|
| [0] - To the grandparent comment, natural born American who
| spent most of the adult life and all of childhood in the
| States. Emigrated a decade ago and still keep close tabs.
| This post is giving me serious flashbacks to the 1992, when
| Bush called Gore "Ozone Man". Was that a genesis of the
| contrarian political differentiation?
| beebmam wrote:
| It's important to remember that plastic waste is virtually
| unrelated to climate change. They both might be "green"
| issues, but plastic straws in our oceans aren't going to
| have any significant effect on warming the planet. They'll
| just end up causing ecological changes/damage.
|
| Malicious actors try to conflate the two. Carbon gas
| emissions pose an existential threat to the future of human
| society; plastic straws do not.
| slownews45 wrote:
| You don't have to be a malicious actors. The same folks
| are pushing both issues and will not talk proactively /
| positively about anything?
|
| Carbon capture? Hell no!
|
| Micro nuclear? Hell no!
|
| Ban straws? Yes!!
|
| We did the whole glass bottle use thing for milk etc etc
| - but at some point you realize some of these high
| profile enviro actions are basic hot air - we'd be better
| off with getting rid of them entirely and doing things
| like
|
| 1) Carbon tax on all sources of carbon emissions that
| then pays for ANY solution (carbon capture, solar +
| battery, mini-nuclear) that folks want to try.
|
| 2)
| timeon wrote:
| > You don't have to be a malicious actors.
|
| But with your nitpicking maybe you are?
| vimy wrote:
| In fact, the plastic replacements often cause more
| emissions. Because of production or because more trucks
| are needed for the same products with thicker packaging.
| Supermarket chain in my country changed their packaging,
| the same amount now needs 2 trucks instead of one. Also
| glass bottles or cardboard are heavier so more fuel
| consumption.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Reusable "bamboo" cups are a fun example. I'm not sure if
| they are considered biodegradable anymore and then the
| fact that some countries in Europe had them remove from
| market... Due potentially leaching melamine and
| formaldehyde...
|
| So I take it will take awhile for us to get these things
| right...
| vimy wrote:
| The solution would be to keep using plastic and set up
| garbage collection infrastructure in the countries who
| spill all the garbage in the ocean.
| samuli wrote:
| Are you sure it was a plastic wrapper and not e.g.
| cellophane?
| nerdponx wrote:
| Things I learned from Wikipedia as a result of reading
| your comment:
|
| Cellophane is not plastic.
|
| Cellophane is biodegradable.
|
| Rayon is the same substance as cellophane, but in a
| different shape.
|
| Cellophane and Rayon are often made using the "viscose
| process", which requires the use of carbon disulfide,
| which is toxic, and the process has toxic byproducts.
|
| I wasn't able to figure out if this process has more or
| less toxic byproducts than processes for making plastic
| films.
|
| I wasn't able to figure out if this process is more
| carbon-intensive than processes for making plastic films.
| Harvesting plant matter, pumping water around, etc.
| sounds energy-intensive. Is it better or worse than
| digging carbon sludge up out of the ground?
| Johnny555 wrote:
| _Their are claims of concerns about carbon emissions, but
| absolute opposition to any work around nuclear. If carbon
| emissions was the or a very important issue, you 'd be going
| full out on lots of ideas._
|
| It's a lot easier to find fault in a point-source danger in
| your back yard (even if the actual risk is low) than to be
| afraid of a much more diffuse danger will likely kill more
| people, but probably not you.
| potatolicious wrote:
| > It seems to be the left telling other people how to live.
| Heaven forbid folks live in smaller houses in the US
|
| This doesn't seem like an exclusively left-wing ideology -
| anti-housing sentiment is strong across the board across US
| politics. Try building an apartment building in a
| conservative part of town and you'll get much of the same bad
| faith opposition as anywhere else (and more often than not,
| apocalyptic caterwauling).
|
| NIMBYism is sadly a scourge that knows few political
| boundaries.
| lettergram wrote:
| I'm frankly less concerned about climate change - in reality we
| don't have enough data for super definitive answers. Further,
| we can and the world can fairly easily adapt. A few degrees
| over a hundred years is easily manageable.
|
| In contrast, insect populations are dropping like a stone.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_in_insect_population...
|
| We're going to have serious problems within the next 5-10 years
| if that continues. We also have declining water availability
| and increasing water usage in the western US. And we have a
| potentially massive issue with solar weather (which can
| theoretically wipe out all electronics).
| giantrobot wrote:
| > Further, we can and the world can fairly easily adapt. A
| few degrees over a hundred years is easily manageable.
|
| Adapt? Yes. Easily adapt? Not in the slightest.
|
| Higher average temperatures are leading to changes in
| rainfall patterns. Some regions see more torrential rain
| while others see aridification.
|
| Increased rainfall means regions that previously saw floods
| once a century will see them once a decade. Similarly regions
| facing aridification will see more and longer heat waves and
| less water availability.
|
| While those situations are survivable they're destructive and
| thus expensive. Even if no one died during such events they
| will still cause significant economic impact. People can't
| just pack up and migrate en mass to avoid flood zones or arid
| regions.
|
| Changes in rainfall also affect farming. A region with good
| soil may need increased irrigation to deal with
| aridification. Irrigation has its own set of problems it
| introduces even if there's some ready source of water to feed
| into the irrigation system.
|
| Even small increases in temperature also affect atmospheric
| and oceanic conveyors. Even single degree increases can
| change the thermal gradients enough to break them down for
| portions of the year.
|
| If money was infinite and humans acted without prejudice a
| lot of coming environmental issues would have _some_
| technological mitigation. Neither of those things are true so
| conditions in some places are going to get very bad.
| cool_dude85 wrote:
| >A few degrees over a hundred years is easily manageable.
|
| No it's not.
| lettergram wrote:
| It's already happened. The last 100 years.
| inetknght wrote:
| > _We're going to have serious problems within the next 5-10
| years_
|
| I'm having trouble reconciling your statement there with your
| first one:
|
| > _I'm frankly less concerned about climate change - in
| reality we don't have enough data for super definitive
| answers. Further, we can and the world can fairly easily
| adapt. A few degrees over a hundred years is easily
| manageable._
|
| So let me understand:
|
| 1. You think that insect population decline isn't related to
| climate change.
|
| Okay I can buy that. Humans have built a lot of roads and
| vehicles emit a lot of pollutants and pollutants kill
| insects. So what do you propose to do to solve that? Or do
| you think it's a different problem? Perhaps climate change is
| a contributing factor.
|
| 2. You think we have declining water availability.
|
| Indeed, we do. Many states have had more severe and more
| prolonged droughts that previously recorded. But, on the flip
| side, some states are getting inundated with more rain than
| ever before. It's almost as if the climate is changing. So
| anyway, how do you propose to solve the water availability
| problems?
|
| 3. Solar weather could wipe out all electronics.
|
| Yeah that's a tough one. It sure would be unfortunate if our
| planet's magnetic shield stopped working one day. But on the
| flip side there's not much we could do about it. So why
| worry? There's other things to worry about like climate
| change and the insect apocalypse.
| rayiner wrote:
| C'mon, man, be forthright. It's not a "boogeyman of 0.0001%
| overhead." I agree that conservative aversion to addressing
| climate change is a problem. But the other side isn't proposing
| minor tax increases here. A very vocal front sees this as an
| opportunity to do all the things the socialists and central
| planners wanted anyway, while spending tens of trillions of
| dollars. When climate change is tied together with everything
| from labor laws to racial issues, it's very hard for
| conservatives to trust the real motivation behind the measures.
| And that's a choice the left makes to do that.
| cloudfifty wrote:
| > A very vocal front sees this as an opportunity to do all
| the things the socialists and central planners wanted anyway
|
| What if they're right? Should we all go down with the ship
| just to maintain some sort of dogmatic pride in our preferred
| economic system?
| [deleted]
| lend000 wrote:
| Can't read the whole article, but how radically can the Gulf
| Stream really change? Isn't a current going in that general
| direction more or less mandated by the Coriolis effect? It's why
| I figured the west and east coasts of continents at similar
| latitudes (both in the Northern and Southern hemispheres) have
| similar climate patterns. (West coasts more temperate, east
| coasts more variable and humid).
| frankbreetz wrote:
| Barcelona and Washington D.C. are on the same latitude, the
| weather difference is caused by the gulf stream pushing warm
| air north, I would imagine it could stop doing that.
| wil421 wrote:
| Chicago is below Rome. My latitude puts me somewhere in
| Syria. Not sure what is worse the humidity where I live or
| Syrian Desert.
|
| https://matadornetwork.com/read/mapped-united-states-
| canada-...
| arethuza wrote:
| "Barcelona and Washington D.C."
|
| I don't think that's correct - a quick check on Google maps
| suggests that Barcelona is much further north - about Cape
| Cod or so.
| frankbreetz wrote:
| I don't think that changes the point trying to be made.
| Cape Cod and D.C. have essentially the same weather
| progbits wrote:
| For the first part of your quesition, to quote wikipedia (feel
| free to check the primary sources yourself):
|
| > Atlantic overturning is not a static feature of global
| circulation, but rather a sensitive function of temperature and
| salinity distributions as well as atmospheric forcings.
| Paleoceanographic reconstructions of AMOC vigour and
| configuration have revealed significant variations over
| geologic time [34][35] complementing variation observed on
| shorter scales.[36][14]
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_meridional_overturnin...
| chrisco255 wrote:
| Why would the AMOC be driven by atmospheric forcing? The
| amount of energy and heat stored in the ocean (due to
| specific heat capacity of water and sheer volume and mass of
| the ocean) dwarfs that of the atmosphere by orders of
| magnitude.
| the8472 wrote:
| The coriolis effect only applies to things in motion, it adds a
| perceived bend. Something still has to drive the motion.
| Currently that's the cold water sinking in the arctic. Fresh
| water influx from melting and additional warming can lead to
| stratification which prevents it from sinking. This will lead
| to overall less ocean circulation which will have more
| detrimental effects beyond just altering europe's weather
| patterns.
| sleepytimetea wrote:
| I was able to read only the abstract - "Rent or Buy article for
| $8.99".
|
| Brings up the question, what does "rent an article" mean ?
| ianferrel wrote:
| It says you get access to it for 48 hours.
|
| So, same thing as renting anything else?
| progbits wrote:
| I suspect some shitty DRM that gives you access for a while
| with attempts to limit your ability to save, copy or print the
| article?
|
| Scummy practice nonetheless. Sci-hub doesn't have this yet but
| I expect it to appear there soon enough.
| Miraste wrote:
| Sci-hub is not adding new papers as part of an attempt to win
| a court case in India.
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/scihub/comments/lofj0r/announcement.
| ..
| mikestew wrote:
| "Time-limited", as the explanatory text right below says:
|
| _Get time limited or full article access on ReadCube._
|
| I fear to ask what the DRM scheme is.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Too bad it's paywalled :(
| seacroissant wrote:
| Full article is downloadable here:
|
| https://www.researchgate.net/publication/269281476_Early_war...
| pvg wrote:
| That's a paper from 2014 with different authors
| _rpd wrote:
| This is a different paper.
| vimy wrote:
| Could we restart the Gulf Stream with some kind of technology? In
| theory?
| jacquesm wrote:
| Wait.
| raisedbyninjas wrote:
| I did some napkin math once for artificially replacing the salt
| content in the ocean where it is diluted by glacier runoff. It
| was on the order of all container ships in operation re-
| purposed to just dumping salt into the affected region.
| inetknght wrote:
| Where would you even get that much salt anyway? The ocean
| perhaps?
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