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Uranium Phoenix posted:The tagline for the wired article ("Why the world won't end in 2012... or any time soon") is technically correct because the worst damage will take decades to hit. More specifically: It's technically correct because the people who read Wired are not the sort of people who are going to be dramatically affected by climate change, and their world is thus not truly "going to end." It'll push up food prices and make life more uncomfortable, sure, but it's not as though their nation is going to be flooded or everyone in their country will die because of some mosquito-born superfever or they won't be able to afford food and will straight-up starve to death.
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Aug 22, 2012 02:32
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McDowell posted:In Realpolitick terms I wouldn't be surprised if we see some attempt to unite the Americas economically. Forget Eurasia. This would be an ideal time to plan the phase out of most oil demands with the introduction of nuclear power generation and desalinization. Sadly, the increased focus on the oilsands and the advancement of natural gas in the United States means that you're not going to see nuclear power of any variety popping up in North America, barring something dramatic happening. India or China are far more likely to beat the Western world to the nuclear punch if they do at all.
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Aug 31, 2012 00:40
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Yiggy posted:Maybe it can be mitigated, but I think we all have to be honest that even as a mitigated disaster the consequences will be terrible. This is difficult to say with any real certainty because of the relative uncertainty of the models used. They all line up fairly well with the basic hypothesis (that anthropogenic climate change will cause increasing pressures on global populations), but there's no truly conclusive predictions as to the severity of the effects. Regardless of severity, it is absolutely, crucially important that efforts are continually made to mitigate, adapt, and reverse the effects of climate change. This is not the time for us to throw our hands up in the air. The issues facing the world are not issues of technology or research (because an absolute shitload has been done already with regards to this area), but of political will and action. Policy actions that can reduce the overall effects of global warming are more than possible, but require leadership and political will. Fundamentally, it is an issue of public perception: resources have not yet been mobilized sufficiently to convince voters of the severity of the problem before them. We do not know the level at which point our efforts will become untenable. We have guesses in the 2˚-4˚C range, but even these are based on imperfect computer modeling and on our incomplete knowledge of precisely how the climate functions and what feedback increasing warming will cause. To embrace nihilism - that there is simply "nothing to be done" based on present circumstances - is a terribly privileged position to take. It is a comforting position, because it absolves us of the responsibility of attempting to solve the complex and difficult problem at hand. It is also entirely the wrong position to take, because it only further contributes to to the conditions that have allowed things to get this far in the first place. To be blunt: There is plenty to be done. There is awareness to be raised, repeatedly and to as wide a base as possible, especially in North America. Opinion polls show strong support for climate change initiatives in countries such as China and Brazil, but little has been done to encourage political action. We are living in an age in which information is disseminated at an almost unimaginable rate, and through mediums that are no longer directly controlled by business interests. The potential to create effective community action is enormous, and is, quite frankly, the best hope for policy change. Our focus must be on the creation of a political and social climate that is focused around the collective future of our society, rather than our own individual desires. I do not in any way imagine that this is an easy task, but it is a necessary task. There is no magical technology that will solve everything, but there are combinations of policy initiatives, technological innovations, and adaptability strategies that, when combined, can help to significantly soften the blow of potential climate change. What is important here is that you are far more likely to see effective action at the local level than at the national level. Climate change policy in the United States, for example, has been driven largely on a state-by-state basis. Federal politics tends to have too many competing factors to make mitigation strategies tenable. The alternative is that we sit on our hands and embrace futility, which, frankly, is just as absurd as expecting a magical scientific discovery to save everyone. It will require far more than a piece of technology to mitigate the effects of global warming, but we are already developing (and have developed) policy that will aid the technological buffers in helping to reduce the deaths caused by climate change in the future. There are plenty of things in life that seem at the time intractable. The very idea that Europe could one day be devoid of kings with any real power would seem insane to anyone living before the early modern period. The abolishing of the trans-atlantic slave trade would have seemed untenable to anyone living in the 17th century. Civil rights for everyone, irrespective of gender, sexuality, or race, have been slow in coming but are increasingly accepted and welcomed in. None of these issues - absolutely none of them - were solved by the explicit actions of a government. They were solved from the bottom up: strident abolitionists; militant radicals; protestors and reporters; and everyone inbetween. If we do not grasp this opportunity by ourselves and propel it towards the national spotlight, then we can indeed expect to reap what we sow, and any disaster that shall happen in the next hundred years can be laid at our feet entirely. Any action is better than inaction.
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Sep 19, 2012 21:32
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Painkiller posted:Welp. There appears to be some division in the news media over what the purpose of the dumping was. This article claims that it was intended to increase phytoplankton levels to revive salmon fisheries in the area.
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Oct 16, 2012 22:14
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The problem is fundamentally one of influence. There's definitely impetus for change. Somewhat unsurprisingly, most of it seems to be coming from the global south rather than the north. Here's the Pew Global Attitudes Project take on it (2009):  This was a large survey, covering 26,397 interviews, so it fairly accurately represents global perceptions on global warming at large. As you can see, almost every major supporter of the proposition of global warming being dangerous is from areas thought of traditionally as the global south, while countries like the U.S. and Britain are decidedly more divided on the issue. Somewhat surprisingly, areas of rapid economic growth - China and India especially - are the most adamant supporters of protecting the environment to the detriment of jobs and growth. The two aren't entirely linked, as you can tell by the statistics (with the Chinese paradoxically being the least supportive of global warming as a vital issue while also being the second most supportive of sacrificing growth to protect the environment), but they do show broad overall trends of the general population believing in the problem of climate change and a majority willingness to sacrifice prosperity for the purposes of protecting the environment. The indication the statistics seem to give is that it is not some broad element of the population that opposes policy that would help to protect the environment and mitigate/reduce global warming, but rather interested elites who control the money supply and therefore the policy. I hate sounding like a broken record in every goddamn thread I post in, but the problem here is, once more, late capitalism and the obscene power of the current bourgeois oligarchy. Edit: Here's the one chart I forgot and which is highly relevant: Should higher prices be paid to address global climate change?  Again, very similar trends, although one starts to see the divisions between the global south and global north a lot more keenly. Vermain fucked around with this message at 21:08 on Oct 17, 2012 |
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Oct 17, 2012 21:00
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TACD posted:Please, convince me that this is wrong somehow, because I am very aware that this sounds like a completely overboard fringe opinion, but I just don't see how the current approach to this is getting any results. It's not wrong, but it is somewhat fantastical, as though every key political actor who has a lot to lose in the immediate short-term by supporting policy that is essentially focused on deindustrialization can simply be "ignored" and not debated with when they are the ones holding all the cards. Mitigation or resilience policy will likely come into play once climate change becomes too unbearable for modern global capitalism. If droughts in the corn belt start becoming yearly events instead of once-a-decade catastrophes, policy will necessarily shift towards trying to find some way to build up regional resilience. If New Orleans gets flooded again, policy will focus on either the construction of more solid seawalls or a redistribution policy focused on moving further inland. This, ultimately, is the problem of democractic-capitalist countries with regards to climate change: the hoarding of wealth prevents said wealth from being used to buoy nations that are otherwise pursuing policies of mitigation. As for eco-terrorism, it won't do a drat thing. Radical anti-Western groups - who are far more well-organized, well-funded, etc. than any current radical eco-terrorist groups - haven't accomplished a great deal of their agenda (Israel still exists; American incursions into the Middle East increased instead of decreased; etc.). The concept that bombing coal-fired plants or whatever would create effective political change - especially on a worldwide scale (because this is simply not a local issue anymore) - is a liberal revolutionary fantasy. The best possible thing to do is to actively pursue and support policy options that are tenable in the current political/economic environment, because we simply do not have the time for a worldwide eco-socialist revolution with how things are accelerating. Something like the development of a solid nuclear infrastructure would help to ameliorate emissions from coal-fired plants, at the least, as well as being relatively tenable due to the massive amount of employment that would be required in order to build and operate it. Renewables are gaining more traction, and though I doubt they can completely replace the current electrical infrastructure of any major Western nation, they do create mitigation. Focusing on helping to develop local resiliency - creating secondary food sources via personal or community gardens, for example - is probably the best "effective" thing that you can do at the moment, quite frankly. This is not to say that this is not a very dire situation and that it is going to cause an enormous amount of suffering and death in the world. It is, however, important to realize that we are individual people trying to deal with a problem that requires massive, coordinated, continental action. It is important that we continue to fight tooth-and-nail in order to create as best a future as possible, but it is equally important to not fall into the despair of giving up ("There's nothing to do; just have to sit back and watch the world burn") or of taking radical action without a great deal of thought as to what that radical action will even entail, or how it will help to solve one of the greatest challenges of human history.
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Nov 22, 2012 22:30
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Yiggy posted:"Do anything, do something!" doesn't guarantee efficaciousness. I've offered to the discussion what I think are potential policy options that can help to mitigate the damage caused by global warming. Nothing - not even nuclear power - is a panacea to this crisis, and it is doubtful there is anything that can completely negate what global warming would bring. Nevertheless, the potential options are there, and enacting them is surely better than not enacting them. I'm not sure if you've seriously misread what I've been posting here, but I am not hopelessly naive about what is happening. Neither, however, am I completely resigned to the idea that there is nothing efficacious that can be done. It is absolutely useless to navel-gaze about our own mortality when it is very clear that there are mitigation and resilience options available that can be implemented and in a manner that doesn't require a worldwide eco-socialist revolution. Dusz posted:As much as I cringe at the liberal approach offered in the post you quoted, I don't think you're one to criticize him. To discuss this point: I'm a terrible liberal, all things considered. I don't think that the "free market" or individual action or whatever is the best possible solution to implementing beneficial policy. This is something that requires an enormous, organized effort on the part of political actors and institutions, and is something that also requires a willingness to go against "popular" public opinion in order to implement these changes. I genuinely believe that the destruction of capitalism would be the "best" solution to further global warming, provided that it was followed up by a democratic/socialist political system that was able to implement the policy needed to help build resilience. The issue at hand is the seeming impenetrability of global capitalism, and the rapid rate of change we're observing in the global climate, which demands relatively speedy policy implementation. I'm open to other options pursuing resilience/mitigation that exist outside of (or in opposition to) the current capitalist climate, but it seems very difficult to implement them. Vermain fucked around with this message at 00:25 on Nov 24, 2012 |
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Nov 24, 2012 00:11
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Dusz posted:I agree, although if you read his posts you can see that he isn't advocating for an "eco-socialist revolution". His argument is that we should do nothing because we can't do anything. He thinks this because nothing is currently being done, which is a good argument for complete resignation in his mind. You're right - that last bit of my post was a bit of channeling on my part, since I see the "seemingly" indestructible nature of capitalism as the greatest mental barrier to looking at potential policy options. That is: I can understand if people at first believe there's nothing to be done, given how obstinate modern capitalism appears.
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Nov 24, 2012 00:23
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Splurgerwitzl posted:What can an individual do to prepare for this disaster? I'm seventeen and this thread has me scared shitless. Here's what you can do to prepare: Don't be scared shitless. It helps to have the perspective that having no health insurance or easy access to food without resorting to straight-up robbery is a daily occurrence for large swathes of the "developed" world, and is the norm in the "developing" world. Obviously, do what you can within the standard limits of a person without huge sums of money living in the United States (I'm assuming you're in the U.S. from your health insurance comment): keep money saved as an emergency fund, have a budget, learn how to make healthy, nutritious meals without blowing the bank on food, etc. If anything truly catastrophic happens (as in, the federal/state governments are unwilling or unable to provide any kind of aid), all the personal preparation in the world isn't going to help a great deal unless you want to literally become a survivalist. What's far more likely to matter is the community you live in and how well they can adapt to the circumstances, and that has a huge number of factors that are rather outside of your own control. In essence, don't worry about stockpiling food and water or building a survival vault or whatever. It is impossible to fully account for everything that can happen in the future (especially in one's own life), so take what comes as it comes.
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Nov 27, 2012 03:57
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Guigui posted:Does anyone know what the general consensus is amongst the population of European countries that already have invested a lot of money into renewable power generation - such as Denmark and Germany - in regards to the demand to enact legislation aimed at reducing further greenshouse gas emissions? This is from a Pew study I linked before: I often wonder if these studies don't end up creating a bias because of the mental framing put around them. Like, in certain countries, the concept of "paying more" to reduce climate change sparks in people's minds this fear of Soviet bread lines or the economy collapsing around them or whatever instead of a mild decrease in the standard of living. In reality, even if we look at it from a cynical neoliberal perspective, the transition over to renewable/nuclear energy sources and the creation of adaptation infrastructure (seawalls, etc.) is exactly the sort of "job creation" people seem to be looking for. Reducing GHG emissions doesn't necessarily have to mean "we have to shut down all the factories," but it does mean that the power for the factories has to be provided in some other way, and that necessarily involves investment (but also economic return as a result).
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Dec 8, 2012 20:28
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SSJ2 Goku Wilders posted:I've never written anything so melodramatic before in my life without trying to make a political point or something through exaggeration, and I might regret being this open later, but the entire idea that has been put into one's head about what life is has been thoroughly destroyed and it just leaves this big gaping hole of uncertainty, anger and angst. A good thing to keep in mind is that the disruption of people's standard "lifestyle" is already happening a great deal. Our lives can change dramatically at a moment's notice. What if, tomorrow, I lost my voice, or my legs? What if I suffered a serious brain injury? Suppose in five years I am unable to find a job and am living on meager scraps - what then? It's a terrifying thing to think that what we now enjoy may vanish, or that the way in which we comfortably live our lives might be disrupted, but it's a commonality in our individual lives that changes will happen that affect who we are and how we live. We ought not to live in terror of that very real possibility, however. Enjoy what is here now and prepare yourself mentally for the challenges ahead. Please note that I'm not trying to dampen the seriousness of what is going on, of course - this is an extremely important issue, and deserves our utmost attention and efforts - but having gone through about 12 years worth of anxiety and depression, dwelling on what may be leaves nothing but scars in its wake. It's better to accept that our lives will change and be filled with new hardships and move on from that while attempting to create a future that prevents as much of a catastrophe from forming as possible. Vermain fucked around with this message at 23:01 on Dec 11, 2012 |
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Dec 11, 2012 22:59
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I was at a talk with Gwynne Dyer recently, and he mentioned that it's nearly impossible to find actual scientists (that is, people with any kind of credible scientific background) willing to try and discredit climate change, to the degree that he's interviewing around 200 scientists claiming that climate change exists for every one scientist that denies its existence. An important thing he pointed out is that, by and large, the denialists do not actually produce evidence, in terms of scientific rigor - the claims are not falsifiable, or the evidence is very select and misrepresentative, etc. What they produce is doubt, and doubt is a very powerful tool, because it frees us of the reasonable duty to do anything. Ultimately, the only "real" rebuttal that can be given is that there is an overwhelming amount of data - hard, actual data using complex modeling - pointing towards both the gradual warming trend the planet is undergoing and the anthropogenic nature of it.
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Apr 5, 2013 04:28
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Paper Mac posted:What's Gwynne Dyer saying these days, anyway? Climate Wars had at least a tiny note of optimism in it, but I think at this point we're headed for some of his more dire scenarios. As far as I could tell, Gwynne's in the camp that, like it or not, some sort of geoengineering scheme is going to be appearing in the near future in an attempt to mitigate the effects of global warming. His essential argument is that emissions treaties like Kyoto are inevitably doomed to fail in the present day, since they tend to not take history into account (re: rich, already industrialized countries telling poorer industrializing countries they need to cut emissions by the same amounts). While there are alternative energy sources cropping up - solar, wind, geothermal, nuclear, etc. - they're cropping up at a rate that is far to slow to keep things below 450 ppm, and that arctic feedbacks are going to gently caress everyone over as a result. Mostly what's changed since he wrote Climate Wars was that scientists suddenly began talking openly about geoengineering schemes, whereas two years previous it was a rather taboo subject. According to Gwynne, a lot of the proposals, such as sulfate aerosol dispersion, would be cheap enough to implement that they don't require economic superpowers to do them - even Bangladesh could apparently afford it. It's some reasonably hopeful stuff, although my own research (and the research of a lot of others in this thread) indicates that the majority of them still have major kinks to work out (such as aerosol size and the frequency of dispersion), and are dependent upon some sort of reasonable international stability to work (since any stoppage of the aerosol injections, assuming an increase above 450 ppm and subsequent predicted feedbacks, would cause the temperature to skyrocket over a few decades). What I mostly got from his talk was not that there's technological quick-fixes to any of this stuff, but that international coordination and communication is more vital than ever. You can't create resiliency, nor implement geoengineering properly, nor reduce emissions unless there is significantly more hand-holding going on. duck monster posted:But its part of that whole failure to recognize expertise. It doesn't matter to the press that a geologist is about as qualified to comment on the matter as his accountant, he's still a "scientist" as far as the press is concerned, and he's the scientist reporting the story the chief editor wants to hear. One thing I'm actually curious about now - and I don't know if Pew has done another study on it for 2012 - is if global attitudes towards climate change have shifted much since 2009. The rhetoric over climate change seems to have shifted concretely, considering that even the government of the United States is starting to admit that it's a problem. Vermain fucked around with this message at 05:01 on Apr 5, 2013 |
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Apr 5, 2013 04:58
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TACD posted:(A reliance on China to suddenly decide to start drastically reducing emissions is yet another reason I am deeply pessimistic about the possibility of meeting the 2°C goal) I'm hopeful that they'll continue to drop. There seems to be growing dissent over the terrible air quality in China, and the aforementioned subsidization of the solar industry is promising. In addition, I think the Chinese government, more than anyone, realizes how tenuous their political position is going to be if the Yangtze dries up and they lose huge swathes of their agricultural production.
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Apr 23, 2013 02:49
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davidb posted:What else could be done to prepare? I mean, the essential part of it is that society needs to become more adaptive to the year-to-year reality that's going to be facing us. Our current stability relies on certain presumptions about weather patterns, rainfall cycles, etc., all of which can and are changing as a result of the gradual warming. This means things like:
*Building construction/retrofitting focused far more on insulation in order to prevent brownouts/blackouts as a result of inadequate power for heating/cooling. *Massive greenhouse designs intended to protect against sudden, severe weather (hail, heavy rain, etc.). *Water desalination (with, one would hope, non-carbon based power resources) and rain collection that's focused on long-term storage to counteract times of drought. The issue is mostly that the free market, the engine that runs our decision-making process, tends to be more reactive than forward-thinking (see: the Great Recession). These are the sorts of issues that governments need to tackle, not private individuals.
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Apr 24, 2013 01:50
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theblackw0lf posted:I've heard a couple of time about this individual who said that he's discovered either a type of soil or plant that when planted sucks up CO2 much more than most plants do, and if planted on a large scale could drastically reduce CO2 emissions. Has anyone heard of this, or how credible it is? All I've heard on that front is plans to genetically engineer tree varieties that would have a much higher CO2 absorption rate.
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Apr 24, 2013 19:51
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Dreylad posted:I'm weary of the argument too, because geoengineering wont save us. It'll help by keeping the temperature from activating positive feedbacks, but fundamentally we have to restructure our society and curb or outright eliminate consumer culture in order to cut emissions. Which will be a pretty significant economic kick in the pants. Even then, geoengineering (as it's currently proposed, anyways) has certain issues, mostly in terms of predictability of effects and the accuracy of the techniques applied. Sulfate aerosols, for example, might reduce overall temperature, but it may also adversely affect the monsoon in Asia, which would be devastating to agriculture that depends on it. I think the ultimate message to take away from it is that there's no clear "silver bullet" that can work. Rather - as with any kind of policy problem - there needs to be multiple systems working together in order to create an effective solution.
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May 15, 2013 15:53
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I'm trying to think of anything that could really be done about the permafrost issue. It seems like some sort of massive geoengineering to reduce Arctic temperatures is about the only "feasible" option. I know it's been countered that global aerosols would likely have several negative side effects (monsoon changes, the requirement for continual injection, and so on), but what about relatively "localized" aerosols that are intended to specifically target the Arctic? (I mean, in an ideal world, we wouldn't have to be thinking up weird science fiction schemes to keep the world climate from exploding, but here we are.)
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Jun 15, 2013 04:48
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Dreylad posted:It could exceed all our expectations and talk seriously about the inevitability of exceeding 2 degrees average global temperature, talk about temporary fixes and long-term carbon reductions and I still don't think it would mean much because he either wont actually implement any necessary policies or wont have the ability to push anything through congress. Yeah. I am, although, at least somewhat gladdened by the news, since it is a shift (a subtle one, to be sure) from "privately acknowledging the issue and not doing anything about it" to "publicly acknowledging the issue and not doing anything about it." I've stopped hoping for the sort of Marxist "revolutionary moment" where the collective light bulbs turn on or whatever. This sort of progressive understanding and the (hopefully) concomitant policy changes that result are seemingly the best that can be done.
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Jun 24, 2013 15:57
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The problem with a traditional sort of "revolutionary violence" to combat climate change is that we're necessarily confronting not a local issue (a bad dictator, or so on), but a global issue that encompasses every nation and is inextricably linked to the current worldwide economic system. The level of organization and funding it would take to actually effectively defeat, say, the United States military and police force and install a new political and economic system in a protracted, violent engagement is almost unthinkable, and the resources expended through such a conflict would, in all certainty, be better spent on addressing the actual issues of climate change. A far more realistic scenario is the organization and unification of a "new left" that is dedicated to tackling these particular issues through a reframing of the ideological debates (make it not about "jobs and the economy" but about the long-term prospects of social stability, for example) and a clear proposal of alternative ideas in both the policy and economic field (e.g., providing minimum incomes to coastal fishermen, alongside stringent enforcement of fishing limits, to mitigate the destruction of fish populations; centralized control of agriculture in order to reduce the development of "cash crops" and focus on food self-sufficiency; and so on). The future, I claim, is more centralized, not less, but whether this will result in an authoritarian or socialist backdrop is ultimately up to the left of today to decide. Inaction will fundamentally lead to a worse result.
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Jul 3, 2013 03:29
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I basically see the issue more as one of ideology than of anything else. During World War II, for example, the majority of people were very easily convinced to accept more meager living conditions with the idea that the amounts saved through rationing, etc. were being put towards the noble cause of fighting the War. Is this not the new sort of ideology that the left needs to find and articulate today? The sacrifice of a certain amount of economic power will be used to ensure a future societal stability and to protect our fragile ecological systems.
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Jul 3, 2013 03:58
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Paper Mac posted:The total destruction of half of the growing capacity of the Mississipi basin, drying up of groundwater sources across the South- and Mid-west and problems with irrigation, fertilisation, germination, etc elsewhere are certainly going to have a major effect on the lives of large segments of the population of the USA. It's absurd to argue otherwise. I'd argue a large part of this will depend upon adaptability. Modern agriculture is horrendously inefficient, and food waste is particularly endemic in modern Western culture. I think it's possible to avoid mass starvation, but it means something more akin to the good ol' days of rationing rather than the "buy thirty different kinds of organic cereals" conditions of today. It also depends heavily upon relatively rapid shifts to more efficient agricultural practices (tight water restrictions, more precise fertilizer use), which is part of the reason why I'm such a staunch advocate of nationalizing agriculture.
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Jul 31, 2013 05:08
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BONUS ROUND posted:After hearing about Near Term Extinction and then reading a lot of articles about Global Warming and Climate Change and finally ending up here I am sufficiently freaked out to the point of suffering a major anxiety attack continuously for the past 8 hours. With no end in sight. Is there any hopeful news to tell me? Is going to work tomorrow ultimately pointless? Please somebody hold me The actual future as it will turn out is almost completely unknown. Remember: All of the predictions being given aren't from a crystal ball, but from extrapolations based off of computer models that attempt to simplify a highly complex system down into a computational form. This isn't to say that we shouldn't be concerned over what is happening globally, but that creating some fictitious, horrible scenario in our minds where everything collapses isn't realistic given the uncertainty of what will actually happen. Frankly, this sort of daydreaming only paralyzes both thought and action, since the problem becomes insurmountably huge and seemingly inevitable; we become tempted to throw our hands up in the air and walk away from the matter entirely.
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Aug 30, 2013 04:57
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The New Black posted:-Any project like this would require global co-operation of a kind probably never seen before From what Gwynne Dyer said when he came to speak at my university, it's supposedly relatively cheap to seed sulfates - in his words, "Bangladesh could do it." I'm not sure of the veracity of this, but I think it's becoming more feasible that a single medium-or-large size country with a decent budget could pull it off unilaterally, which is why I think some kind of international agency is desperately needed. My current biggest concern with sulfate seeding is a handful of reports that mention the possibility of major disruption of the Asia-Australia monsoon with sufficient seeding, which has the potential to devastate agriculture in the region. It really highlights the need for a lot of serious research (and a truckload of backup plans for the worst case scenario of some kind of backlash) before any sort of geoengineering scheme is given serious credence. I do think it's worthwhile to investigate some kind of limited intervention to prevent arctic thawing (if this is at all possible), if only because the potential for methane clathrates to cause a feedback loop is still one of the big unknowns. Vermain fucked around with this message at 21:15 on Sep 4, 2013 |
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Sep 4, 2013 21:13
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Squalid posted:Even if it is true it doesn't necessarily mean there will be an increase in water available for agriculture/ecosystems, because there will be a concomitant increase in evaporation. There's also the big problem of the intensity of rainfall. This is frequently the situation on the prairies, where the rain can either come in a nice, steady way throughout the spring, or it can come in a massive dump that can obliterate crops and infrastructure. The extension of the potential "agricultural zone" northwards is also of limited benefit, given that there's nowhere near the developed infrastructure that actually makes large scale agricultural farming worthwhile. There might also be a fertilizer issue (and phosphorous/nitrogen stocks are another big agricultural bugbear no one seems to be talking about), but I'm not well-read enough on sub-arctic soils to comment thoroughly.
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Sep 18, 2013 02:34
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Salt Fish posted:Don't you think that discussing the fact that humans have the power to destroy all known macroscopic life is important? Not particularly - and I mean this in two contexts. The first is the broader "public" context: No one wants to read that article, and they probably won't, because the concept of this horrible apocalypse bearing down on their everyday life is not going to spur them to some kind of action nor move them towards a better lifestyle, precisely because it is apocalyptic. Time and again, fear as a framing mechanism ("You've got to do something or it's all over!") has proven to be a poor motivator. The mental function of disavowal will take over as soon as they step outside and see the green grass, birds singing, etc. The second is in the more narrow context of this thread: Is there anyone here who disagrees with the notion that climate change is a very serious problem that can and will have a direct impact on much of the life on Earth? Vermain fucked around with this message at 04:27 on Sep 19, 2013 |
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Sep 19, 2013 04:24
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a lovely poster posted:We can't afford to be talking about revolution or sustainable zero-growth economies. I think we can. If we don't start the political debate now and agitate thoroughly for change, we'll be almost certainly facing a new authoritarianism, and not one of benevolent dictators. The world as it stands under (comparatively) mild crisis already has many of the workings of the police state of the future (or what Zizek would call "Groucho Marx authoritarianism" ) in the interests of maintaining the privilege of capitalists. What will happen when the socioeconomic situation gets worse (and it will get worse, barring some incredible new discovery)? Yes, absolutely, it is good to do what is needed to mitigate the present harm to the environment, but it must always be with a caveat lurking behind it: that of a need for something far more radical to be done. Squalid posted:Has there been serious theorizing on how a zero growth economy might actually function? It seems like there must be something out there by green economists but I've never seen it... Nor anything by Marxian economists either. Enough is Enough posits some decent policy ideas. The essential idea is to try and balance human activity with the ability of the earth to absorb it (to ensure that natural/artificial systems can deal with the waste - whatever that may be - left behind by human activity in a way that doesn't exceed their capacity to do so), something which would require more centralized decision making bodies. The basic process would be something like: 1) Roughly model total output "capacity" - how much waste can be handled on a safe level? How much CO2 can we produce? How much phosphorous can we use? How many trees can we cut down? etc. 2) Use a mechanism to determine how potential inputs will be used, limited by the output capacity determined. There's a lot of potential ideas here, from a fully centralized authority (using an updated version of something along the Soviet Union/GDR lines) to a more decentralized "democratic market economy" (e.g., each citizen receives a certain quantity of "resources" which they can then sell in order to purchase goods or use for the production of their own goods). Vermain fucked around with this message at 23:46 on Oct 2, 2013 |
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Oct 2, 2013 23:37
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a lovely poster posted:I think our addiction to growth and resource consumption goes deeper than simply our political systems, it's just the reality of being a living organism. I'm sorry, but this is neoliberal ideology at its purset: the idea that humans have a drive to just "consume" endlessly with no prompting and no thought as to the consequences as a part of a biological identity (ignoring the tremendous economic structure that practically enforces consumption as a prerequisite to social being).
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Oct 2, 2013 23:55
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Trabisnikof posted:We don't need to change our economics to dramatically reduce the future impact of climate change. I wouldn't be so certain. Jevons paradox definitely still operates here, and there is always the lingering threat of a government backing off from its promises due to political pressure from major economic forces.
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Oct 2, 2013 23:58
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Trabisnikof posted:There is a big ethical fight within the climatology community over if the impacts of climate change should be exaggerated for policy impact. At this stage, I'd say the biggest problem simply is a lack of effective political pressure. Think about it from the old Communist perspective: You've had people in society for a hundred-some years fervently talking about the evils of capitalism, how we absolutely need to do something to stop this suffering, and so on, with very little effect. There's obviously a lot of widespread concern and outright fear over climate change already, but it hasn't formed into a concrete politics as of yet. Perhaps this is the space for a new Left to emerge?
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Oct 3, 2013 22:47
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Dreylad posted:Producing enough water from desalination plants to irrigate and water the agriculture of the entire Indus rivervalley without - interrupting or reducing agriculture production - would be a hell of an engineering feat. I expect you wouldn't need to replace the entire hydrological system, but rather just compensate for the loss from precipitation shifts. It's still rather tremendous, but I don't think it's necessarily unfeasible. I suppose we'll see, anyways, since a reduction in available freshwater is practically guaranteed at this point.
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Feb 21, 2014 16:47
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How much of the available freshwater comes from the moonsoon versus the glacier? This admittedly might be a bit of a moot point depending on how global warming fucks around with the monsoon.
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Feb 21, 2014 16:57
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Paper Mac posted:Predict what? Ice-free arctic, I believe.
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Mar 13, 2014 00:30
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Gamma Nerd posted:Dunno what sort of trend that indicates but it doesn't appear to be a good one. The research I've read indicates that it's mainly a consequence of media activity: when media saturation of global warming stories is high, interest is similarly high. Basically, if you don't have sustained media interest in the case, it's considerably harder to get people to pay much attention to it.
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Apr 24, 2014 02:49
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Duck Rodgers posted:Why have environmentalists been wildly successful at preventing nuclear development, yet have been able to do almost nothing to slow oil production? Blame the Cold War. Like, really, that's it: the spectre of nuclear war will continue to haunt it as an energy source until the majority of the Boomers are in the ground. Oil drives war, sure, but it isn't as sensationalistic as the idea of the absolute global destruction that a nuclear bomb carries. down with slavery posted:Public opinion has jack all to do with why we aren't seeing nuclear plants built today. This is only partially correct. There is certainly a strong economic component to a lack of new builds, yes, but this sure as poo poo hasn't stopped China, because public opinion is on the side of wanting to phase out coal as quickly as possible in order to improve air quality (in addition to China just being able to move much more quickly on key national policy issues due to its single-party nature). Vermain fucked around with this message at 22:45 on Jun 6, 2014 |
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Jun 6, 2014 22:43
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Radbot posted:Jesus loving Christ. This is the second time today SedanChair has corrected my post with something utterly depressing. It's one of the really common pro-carbon lines that completely ignores critical things like soil quality, access to freshwater, farming infrastructure, temperatures required for germination, etc.
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Jul 21, 2014 23:16
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Trabisnikof posted:So what if there were more local protests after Fukushima? That had nothing to do with shutting Vermont Yankee down. It's fair to say that Fukushima provided the political leverage in places where nuclear was already on the ropes (e.g. Germany, where the Greens were gunning to shut the plants down well before Fukushima), but, in the majority of Western cases, the reticence is a result of the massive startup and maintenance costs of nuclear power plants. China being the world leader in new nuclear builds isn't because their oligarchy can steamroll over Chinese anti-nuclear activists, but because their oligarchy has enough funds to build them and no public apparatus breathing down their necks over balanced budgets.
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Feb 16, 2015 21:09
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Greggster posted:Nuclear Power interests me a lot, would anyone be able to push me in the right direction regarding books to read and other sources discussing the effects of nuclear power, how it affects the climate (mostly interested in what happens with the fuel once it's been used) and anything else that might be of interest? Superfuel is an adamantly pro-nuclear book, and while it mainly focuses on thorium reactors, it gives a good general overview of nuclear power and the challenges, etc. inherent in it. To quickly answer your main question: spent fuel is permanently stored in underground containment vaults (though it can be stored for certain periods on-site using temporary vaults), which are built specifically to prevent seepage into the surrounding environment. Sites are chosen mainly on consideration of geological activity (e.g. no storage in a place where an earthquake could split the place open) and geological composition (again, to prevent seepage). The fuel is meant to stay there indefinitely, although it will become safe to remove and dispose of after a long period of time (generally on the order of 100+ years, depending on the type of fuel). The amount of waste generated by an average nuclear reactor is on the order of around 20 metric tons per year.
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Feb 26, 2015 01:27
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Anosmoman posted:Well we can't know if he could have made a movie that was more factual while still having a big impact. Probably, yeah. The critical thing is to have an effective means of taking action while the public's mind is focused on that particular topic (per Kingdon's Policy Streams model; the increased public focus on climate change, and the desire to "take action," is the policy window). To quote from a paper about the impact of Day After Tomorrow: quote:If stark images and words are to be used to inform the public and communicate risks associated with climate change, it is important to capitalize upon public reactions. As our study has shown, the effects upon the public psyche may be brief and quickly overtaken by more pressing day-to-day issues and we know that some forms of communication eclipse others in their ability to produce vicarious experiences (Bostrom, 2003). Thus, a more focused message in response to major news items and attention grabbing headlines is necessary. By understanding the characteristics of risk information, knowing what is important within that information and conveying these messages through the media of choice, a more efficient and effective use can be made of communication tools, either planned or opportune. Of equal importance, however, are systems to implement change following a successful communication strategy.
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Feb 27, 2015 00:15
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Pervis posted:They'll still grow some stuff, but it's a question of $$$ and lobbying and resistance to change. My current fear is that hungry industry eyes are going to start turning towards the North, where there's still a decent amount of non-exploited environmental (that is, freeflowing) water. Diverting it would probably be hella expensive, but the alternative (voluntary "degrowth") seems unlikely.
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Mar 15, 2015 21:07
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