- cross-posted to:
- environment@chat.maiion.com
- cross-posted to:
- environment@chat.maiion.com
In short, we aren’t on track to an apocalyptic extinction, and the new head is concerned that rhetoric that we are is making people apathetic and paralyzes them from making beneficial actions.
He makes it clear too that this doesn’t mean things are perfectly fine. The world is becoming and will be more dangerous with respect to climate. We’re going to still have serious problems to deal with. The problems just aren’t insurmountable and extinction level.
The news;
Don’t even know what to believe anymore. All I know for fact is what I can see and trend myself. I know about 7 years ago or so I definitely noticed more wildfires than I ever have. Never had I had memories of every summer being smoked out. This summer I’ve felt autumn chill in some mornings when I normally would not have. Heat domes… Didn’t even know why that was until last year or the year before.
I think shits fucked.
pretty sure we’re fucked.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/30/world/antarctic-sea-ice-winter-record-low-climate-intl/index.html
when the AMOC goes, we’re gonna see ecosystems collapse. When the ice shelf breaks off into the sea, we’re gonna see sea levels climb rapidly.
can human civilization survive? perhaps if we can get everyone to work together. ww2 levels of mobilization and federalization of resources.
I think this would require the UN to have a no-bullshit-session with the worlds top climate and systems folks, then each and every country declaring a national emergency to address the climate crisis. Which means we’re going to finally have to get the assholes rolling coal in their giant pickup trucks festooned with trump flags to give up their bullshit. And everyone will have to cut their energy consumption and face changes to their lives and diets that will help us prepare for the really hard times ahead and feed the starving that are already resulting from mass drought & the war in Ukraine.
I doubt we’ll ever get the rolling coal big truck assholes to give up their bullshit, so… No, we’re fucked, we’re going to die badly in most cases, and it’s almost entirely our own fault. I let the last few generations off because they didn’t enjoy the excess, they’re simply going to get stuck with the bill.
Cheers, hope I’m very very wrong.
…Changes which will never happen and will themselves cause untold suffering and millions of deaths, so no one will ever support them.
What we need is a method that would not negatively impact human standard of living. Human expansion into space would do it; we’ll require the energy and resources up there to geoengineer in a non-stupid way and get the energy and resources to get off Exxon-Mobil’s oily cock and undo ocean acidification anyway.
So let’s do that instead. We can prevent the civil war that would erupt from climate austerity too.
Dude - I’m really sorry, an escape hatch for the rich people who can pay to be onboard isn’t a solution. We’ve been living unsustainably - this, by definition, can’t be sustained. We need to change now so we can make that change as comfortable and human as possible; otherwise we’re going to be stuck reactively responding to each successive disaster, or crop failure, or ecosystem collapse, or climate migration wave etc.
We need to get ahead, now.
Human expansion into space is anything but that and the idea that it is is just meaningless capitalist propaganda. Human expansion into space consists of:
Building space solar power stations (SSPSes) to beam power down to the Earth 24/7 to replace the coal plants
Mining calcium and magnesium from the Moon and near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) to bind with the excess CO2 in th oceans to stop and reverse ocean acidification
Mining rare-Earth elements from NEAs to mass-produce electric cars and batteries down here ln Earth to replace gas vehicles
Build O’Neill cylinders to preserve and rebuild ecosystems in safe places where poachers will never be able to reach
Among other things.
We don’t have time for that.
The way I see it, we have 3 main paths
We cut everything we’re doing, go local and human powered, and adapt to conditions as they change.
Super-intelligence and/or full automation (whichever comes first, we soon get both). It makes capitalism pointless, it lets us expand into space scaling geometrically, and it tells us exactly how we can change things here to maximize habitability
We keep doing what we’re doing until the “just in time” supply chains we use to minimize costs collapse. Either the US military’s plans for this are good and we minimize loss of life, or we starve. Industries collapse immediately, and maybe we lose the ability to produce higher technology - at the very least it won’t be nearly as common. Hopefully we can still work on AI and robotics or there’s no real way out of it
Path 1 is probably not happening. Path 2 and 3 are just a race between the next revolution in technology and the climate. It’s looking pretty close right now - so doing anything to tip the scales, however slightly, is a great idea
It would take 5, maybe 10 years at most to build a Lofstrom loop making it possible to send out unmanned mining craft en masse, and then have the craft process minerals in zero g and then dump the calcium into the ocean. Furnish the magnesium into rebar and run a current theough it when it’s stuck in the deep sea. We could even build nice seasteading islands at the same time with that approach – create more living space while undoing the damage we’ve done to the oceans. Win-win.
Governments are running experiments on SSPSes now, in no small psrt because of climate change.
We absolutely can and should take the space approach now while we still have time.
Speaking of time, we can and should launch a solar shade up there to immediately stop the warming to give us the time we need to decarbonize, and clean up the oceans and forests. A solar shade will cool the Earth without the baggage and environmental problems associated with dumping sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere as the U.S. and EU are considering.
Of all the options, the solar shade might be the most mandatory, and would be very doable cheaply with a Lofstrom loop.
we need to turn this ship around without altering course, lol.
sure thing buddy, that would be great. not gonna hold my breath on that.
IMO whether we’re fucked or not is not a constructive argument.
In either case, the interpretation of climate change can lead to the same conclusion: a) we’re fucked up to the point of no return. So we can keep our wasteful society as is until we extinct, because changing our society will not achieve anything. b) we’re not in that bad situation so we can keep our wasteful society as is until the situation gets really bad and requires change.
Anything could be used to justify not making changes and majority of society/indistry ppl in power are super resistant to it (which likely reduces their profit).
In reality, it’s not black and white. Even if the ‘no return’ scenario is real, we can still lessen the climate change effect or delay catastrophic end if we make changes now.
Climate change? Pfft. My fridge has been a steady 3°C for the past 10 years.
Most wildfires are caused by arsonists/accidents.
Most stupid comments are caused by typing before thinking.
How is it stupid? It’s true and not even contradicting OPs experience.
Its missing the forest for the trees. A bit like saying the main cause of shooting deaths in the US is due to bullets hitting people.
Lets assume that most wildfires are indeed caused by arson/accident. But first the environmental conditions must allow such activities to have the impacts they have. i.e. higher temperatures and drier dry-seasons caused by climate change, resulting in a more combustible environment.
Exactly. There might even be the same amount of arsonists/stupid people as in the 80s but it just burns better now. Incidents were no fire developed in the 80s can now spread to huge wildfires with a much higher chance.
Still the claim is true and probably has consequences for hikers, people who live in the woods, settlements near to forrests etc.
For US - https://phys.org/news/2017-02-humans-percent-wildfires-season-decades.html
And it’s the same for almost every country that is on fire now, like Greece for example or Italy:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jul/28/greece-fires-arsonists-extreme-weather
https://www.voanews.com/a/europe_arsonists-behind-more-half-italys-wildfires-officials-say/6209353.html
So your opinion is that as it gets warmer and drier, more people choose to set fires? And not that the same number of people behave in the same way, but the conditions changing is what makes the fires worse?
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I don’t think you actually read what I said. You are arguing a completely different thing. And your data is supporting my point, not yours. I was specifically saying that it isn’t more fires. That each fire is just worse because the conditions are worse. It’s drier and warmer causing the fires to spread faster. Global warming is indeed the cause of that.
I’ve linked BC wildfire stats case anyone is curious. The US might be an exception?
https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/safety/wildfire-status/about-bcws/wildfire-statistics/wildfire-averages
I’m not sure what kind of point you’re trying to make here. Obviously every wildfire ultimately originates from an ignition source, be that a human made fire, some glass focusing the sunlight, a cigarette or whatever other source you can think of. They don’t spawn into existence.
Drought caused by extreme heat makes it much easier for these small fires to spread into an actual wildfire though. It’s not mutually exclusive.
The point that we are not fucked as there is no significant increase in numbers of wildfires and most of them are not caused by climate change.
If there is one fire that set the entire Amazon on fire, that wouldn’t be a big deal because it’s only one fire?
The whole point is the severity of fires due to climate change has made it so we’re fucked. As you’ve said, the same number of fires are occurring, they are just significantly worse. I would argue that 3 small fires in a fairly wet forest that goes out relatively quickly is favorable to 3 enormous fires that burn a significant percentage of a forest over several weeks due to that forest being dried out (caused by climate change). Your position seems to be “well, it’s the same amount of fires, so it’s not climate change.” It doesn’t make any sense.
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