https://www.drawdown.org/

I went to a sustainability conference the other day despite knowing that it would likely adversely affect my mental health. It went as predicted with everyone talking about electrifying their transportation systems, selling green proucts, and fighting windmills (get it?) with a vague sprinkling of 'yeah it's bad' and a generous generous dose of hopium.

The keynote speaker was the editor of the above linked book. Has anyone heard of this or looked through it? I am still looking through it, but I am super skeptical especially because he spent a good chunk of time talking about fusion lmao.

Also anything climate.

It doesn't matter. AOC is in charge and you're just shouting from the cheap seats.

Also, I find it ironic that the same people who promote "clean, green energy" are almost always opposed to nuclear energy, the cleanest, greenest energy available.

[not necessarily the guy you're talking about who wrote the book about the thing]

The argument is always so awful. It's just two people screaming two sets of facts at eachother about how there are externalities in nuclear that make it more carbon intensive and expensive, and someone else yelling about how there are new reactors and how their data takes those things into account, but neither will budge or read the other references. It's ****ed.

Meanwhile, it turns out recycling is a myth.

So many huge companies tout their "green" but still sell everything triple-wrapped in boxes, bags, and clamshells, the worst type of packaging ever invented. I swear you could cut the plastics industry in half if you could get rid of the bottled water industry and fix consumer packaging. Why can't I buy laundry detergent like I buy gas? Just pump it into containers I already have? Same with dish soap, dishwasher soap, shampoo, conditioner, etc. Why does my bar soap come in a plastic bag and in a cardboard box? And when I buy in bulk each bar is wrapped in a plastic bag, and then in a box, and then multiple boxes are then wrapped in plastic again.

I ordered two "bags" of liquid laundry soap from amazon after reading a news article about their new eco-friendly packaging designed for e-commerce. One arrived fine but the other one was leaking. It rendered the box it was shipped in un-recyclable. And I'm not going to order it again.

I like shopping at costco but omg their clamshell packaging .... arrghhh.

You guys are talking about big stuff (nuclear power) but it also seems like a lot of small things could be done if people would just stop and think for a minute. I live in a pretty rural area but they're super liberal around here and everyone really wants to live like we are in a big city. So they vote higher property and gas taxes to increase public transportation. So we have these huge gas (or diesel or natural gas or LPG or whatever) -guzzling full-size buses running from one side of the county to another, back and forth, all day long, empty, for decades. And I'm sure we're not the only place like this. This can't be good for the environment. They should buy a fleet of stupid priuses and run these during the day and only run their stupid huge buses when demand warrants it.

Also, have you seen this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darvaza_gas_crater

Since at least half the enfranchised voting populace here in America seems to be crying itself to sleep in anger and confusion over its own convenient lies, I'd say that enough of humanity deserves to suffer the full consequences of climate change and then some.

I mean, after all, if y`all wanted us to show you the proof, would actually experiencing it for real be enough to make it a bigger priority for you to care about relative to pressing issues such as transgender bathrooms and four Americans who died in Libya half a decade ago? Or would you rather prefer to vacillate between amateur climate scientist and conspiracy theorist just enough to assuage yourself that it's all a mirage? Because, what's the point of ramming through another judge in hopes of saving future babies from Roe v. Wade when they're not going to live very long outside the womb? Or is it just the brown children overseas that deserve to die. Shining city on a hill indeed?

I mean, I think I kinda get it now: terrorism might not be a bigger threat than climate change when you scale out to humanity as a whole, but "solving" the former and not solving the latter is the optimal course of action if you want to maximize the livelihood of one or two generations of Americans at the expense of pretty much everyone else on the planet.

When you think about it, it really comes down to shameless doubling down on the petroleum-political complex in the red districts. I don't really have a solution for getting them to vote against their own near term economic interests, but their outsized political influence pretty much is threatening to take down the entire human race down the road.

The unfortunate part of electrifying personal transportation is that, well, it does very little.

The only people who both own cars and find electric vehicles useful are people who live in suburban areas. And the issue with this is.. well, the carbon emissions from their car is only a small part of the waste of suburbia. Heating/cooling homes, maintaining lawns and other landscape, delivering power to a sparse area, energy costs of dealing with garbage, etc, all make the very idea of suburban living *inherently* wasteful. It's not about making inefficient systems slightly more efficient, it's about changing the systems we use to be more efficient. This basically means more urbanization and public transportation.

Ultimately though it's pretty hopeless. People have no real concern for climate change, and with the amount of people on the planet and prisoner's dilemmas with pollution and nation states trying to grow economically, it will take nothing short of a massive ecological catastrophe to get anyone to *truly* start caring. Even then, for people to know what to even do they need to expand their knowledge of economics, physics, chemistry, etc so that they can even comprehend what the issues are.

The reality: it's time to accept what's really going to happen. Humanity is going to go extinct. We're just a bunch of stupid apes which opened Pandora's box of industrialization without any legitimate concern over how we are effecting our living space. Once you sober up from the opium pipe dreams of traveling in space multiple light years of distance (rofl), you have to accept that we are basically stuck here on this planet and utter ****ing morons are calling the shots. Nothing else is a logical conclusion from humanity but the most banal, stupid death to our own intelligence.

Very good point!



Is there really no ecological niche for a small band of humans, post-collapse? I know that changing climate certainly could well put us outside what we are adapted to biologically and culturally, but I mean we've lived in different climates before. I think you'd have to argue that we'll be seeing the extinction of all life on earth, short of the assumption that humans have become helplessly fragile. Or is this the part where I am supposed to start stockpiling ammunition and twinkies? I suppose I can see how the conservative mind works a bit.

BTW, it's been pointed out before that the evolutionary record suggests intelligence is a lethal mutation. From estimating the volume of brain cavity as a proxy for intelligence, it's pretty well estimate that most intelligent species don't last very long.

Persistent species of animals are the ones which are most mutable and simple. This is why bacteria will never go away on a short time scale. Humans, though, we are very contingent upon the other forms of life around us.

My hypothesis on this is that intelligent species become too adept at exploiting their environments and overpopulate too rapidly, causing a collapse of former ecosystems and then self-destruction. This is probably what will happen to humans. This is what people never seem to grasp about survival of the fittest. Being dumb can be better than being intelligent on a long enough time frame if it keeps the local ecology more stable.

Just watch any nature documentary of the 2010s and see how long it takes to mention how the habitat of the subject species is threatened by economic growth. It's a near-universal everywhere, lol.

In any case, I am just ripping this off from Chomsky so:

Well I have no idea what the future holds long term. I mean, in some sense extinction is an absolute, assuming the current laws of physics hold. The universe is continuously receiving dark energy, someday the amount of energy will be so strong it will overcome the strong force and atoms will literally be ripped apart. So permanent species existence is physically impossible. The best we could hope for on any time line is a long existence (multiple millions of years).

In any case, we might not see a *total* extinction of humans. But at the very least we're probably going to see massive disruptions of ecosystems, leading to mass starvation, leading to mass migrations, wars and genocide. It won't be pretty when climate change makes the places people live untenable. This would precipitate a massive loss of human life and leave the rest of humanity in a shaky place. It's not impossible for human life to persist, but you're challenging it pretty hard.

Also I'm more thinking in the timeframe of thousands of years from now, I'm not expecting a movie to happen in 2035 or something. We'll all (probably) live our lives pretty contentedly.

So basically mutations for intelligence at the species level are like cancer at the organism level. It would certainly explain why the left always commits suicide and lacks the fitness properties that are apparently exhibited by conservatives.

I think there's a vast difference between human civilization and human species. Before agriculture we were tiny in terms of numbers, I believe. The only question is whether or not biologically we are even adapted anymore for our environment, given that even tribes seem to be unable to escape the influence of industrialization.

This also raises an interesting question about what makes us human. I am not sure that most humans really care about the survival of the human species. There are some things that really make us unique, like language, but I'd hazard a guess that when people lament the potential loss of the "human race" they are talking about human society that resembles modern life.

lol, how did we get all the way to dark energy. I'm just talking about whether or not you think that the human race is *presently* (within the next couple millennia) going to become extinct, which seems rather dubious to me, short of a wider extinction that extended to all primates (which itself is nevertheless plausible, given, e.g., that larger mammals themselves only found an ecological niche following the extinction of the dinosaurs).

Evidence for this today: antipathy toward other "races".

famous last words

FWIW: My mom works in climate journalism & thinks this book is good

Isn't that already one of the causes of the war in Syria? At least I read something to that effect. So in a way we already are living in this stage.

I also read of the pretty plausible conspiracy theory that the reason most of the rich ****s don't do anything about climate change is that they think that we're long beyond the point of no return so they do what they can to ensure their own survival.
So the USA will be pretty well off, once society starts to collapse. But all the third world countries are pretty much done for.

But who will till the fields?

The US had a solution for that about 200 years ago.

Ah **** my long reply didn't post, will redo in a bit

Admittedly I just skimmed the posts as usual but, unless I missed it, I'm surprised nobody balked at the notion of "reversing" climate change.

er, it's a dynamical system. Like compound interest, it's continuously changing trajectory based on the initial data from the previous state. It may or may not be too late if we decide to stop feeding worse and worse initial data to the system every year.

I don't think we talk enough about the relationship between the global wealth inequality gap narrowing and CO2 emissions. Emissions have doubled in the past two decades, while the US has decreased its emissions; developing countries struggling to move out of abject poverty has been a large driver behind global climate change. It's a tricky problem.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/04/climate/outsourcing-carbon-emissions.html


I'm not sure the US even deserves mention for reducing their CO2 emissions when they've really just moved their factories to other countries.

Okay but climate change is the normal state. It is changing regardless of our activity and exactly what that change would be is incalculable. Even if it were, nothing can be done to "reverse" it. I haven't looked at the link so I don't know if Spook's use of the word is an accurate summary but that's why it stands out to me.

citation needed

Doesn't need one. Common sense. What part of it do you believe would even need a citation?

What part of this video needs a citation?



Common sense :downs:

I don't think that's how arguments work

You go $200k into debt. Does paying off $50k prevent a spiraling debt crisis that ultimately leads to bancrupcy? Of course not. Does it make it happen later in time? Absolutely.

Imagine as well that the reason for having the $200k of debt in the first place is temporarily, and due to external factors, you expect to be relieved of $100k of that debt at some point in the future. Knowing this, do you think it will be a good idea to max out your credit cards in the mean time?

You don't "reverse" a differential equation, whether we're talking about compound interest or the crude model of global temperature over time: time only moves in one direction. What's significant is how our inputs to the system can accelerate things that would have only happened later in time, if at all.

If it's not painfully obvious what I'm getting at by now, you conservatives moaning that you can't stop polluting the atmosphere sounds a lot like an alcoholic on the verge of liver failure who can't give up the bottle and retorts that it's too late anyway, and then kicks the bucket two years (or maybe two decades, who knows?) early.

14% is actually far less than I would have guessed. Though recent CO2 reductions are almost entirely the result of the expansion of the natural gas industry. We'd already exported our most pouting industries some time ago.

I don't quite have time to re-respond to everything else yet but:

The term climate change does not refer to any natural variability in the climate, it refers to the increase in average global temperature and resulting alterations to the climate forced by the introduction of previously sequestered carbon into the atmosphere by our burning of fossil fuels. Levels of CO2 (to set aside other GHGs for the moment) have fluctuated within a relatively narrow band during the entire time that humans have been on this planet, and only recently has it increased above the 300-350ppm range, a condition that probably should have been termed something like climate damage rather than global warming or climate change.

The fact that the primary driver of climate damage is our growing emission of fossil carbon means that 'reversing' it is sequestering this carbon again and returning to <350ppm CO2 equivalent concentration in the atmosphere. The term reversing is from the title of the book and is the focus of the research compiled within it. I am pretty skeptical about the viability of completing a complete reversal of the amount of carbon we have reintroduced into the carbon cycle without some sort of magical free energy contraption and some big changes to human culture and physiology, but there are certainly viable methods for sequestering carbon in varying amounts and for varying periods of time.

To be fair, the editor did say during his keynote that he was also apprehensive about the title after it was suggested by one of his colleagues, but decided to go with the provocative title. Personally, I'm more upset by the word comprehensive because it seems to include very few solutions related to the ocean which are suffering catastrophic consequences and storing huge amounts of heat due to the warming brought on by all this.

Note also that we aren’t just releasing CO2 from burning fuels. 2.5% of our emissions are liberated from limestone during the manufacture of Portland cement. These are CO2 deposits that were sequestered literally BILLIONS of years ago, and have no natural mechanism to liberate. This is CO2 from a period in earths history where it was completely uninhabitable except for a handful of extremophiles that... sequestered carbon in calcium carbonate as a byproduct, making the planet cooler.

So unless you’ve developed a new knack for breathing volcanic gases (literal ones, not the metaphorical hot air from a Fox) I propose that you probably don’t want a return anywhere near earths climate circa it’s formation.

It didn't seem to bother Picard too much!



Fox News trigger warning: contains evolutionist propaganda

You're absolutely right, and I probably should find a way to explain our emissions somewhat more holistically.

Thanks Spook. That cleared things up. I mean, yeah, the wording is poor but it makes sense within the context you put it.

To the good Reverend, do you realize that you outlined a pretty good case for agreeing with me in your argument against my post?

Haha, I probably did. A lot of us who are sympathetic toward efforts to stop the delirious effects of dumping carbon in the atmosphere probably also recognize how complex and likely futile the problem is. And as a disclaimer, I am pretty ignorant about the actual proposals and science, which is exactly what this thread is about, so I should probably actually read Spook's links instead of blathering on about this.

But I mean, just praying that the symptoms of climate change are NBD is a bit like the (possibly apocryphal) story that by spurning modern medicine in the face of a (curable!) form of pancreatic cancer, Steve Jobs basically killed himself with the idea that going on a vegan diet alone is an adequate alternative to immediate surgery. And over on Fox News, it would be all about how cancer isn't actually a disease at all, but a conspiracy of doctors on behalf of drug companies to profit off of the terminally ill.

It seems like most climate change denial involves pointing out that local climate conditions are not monotonic.