Azaran on 6/7/2023 at 16:34
(
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/05/world/hottest-day-world-climate-el-nino-intl/index.html) This week saw the hottest temperature ever recorded in history.
Clearly, global warming is becoming more and more serious, and the powers that be won't do more than spouting platitudes about 'reducing emissions by X date', almost insinuating that the planet will return to normal by a certain year, to gaslight the masses into thinking they're doing something.
At this point, I'm 100% in support of (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injection) drastic geoengineering to fix this. So far, attempts to do this have been blocked, with the pretext that things might get worse if the process was stopped, and the usual 'we shouldn't be messing with the climate'. Yet, we're messing with the climate as we speak, by continuing to pump pollutants into the atmosphere.
I understand we can't just stop polluting overnight, but it's to a point where even if we did, the planet would continue to warm up for another century or so, on account of all the carbon in the atmosphere. I think at this point, geoengineering is the only way to halt warming.
PS: I'm against carbon taxes on citizens. It's not up to me or you to give up our hard earned cash to supposedly fix the mess; it's up to politicians to actually do something themselves, instead of watching the world collapse from their air conditioned mansions.
demagogue on 6/7/2023 at 18:35
Time to trot out this meme.
Inline Image:
https://i.ibb.co/nPgP7wS/7rqcnb.jpgA more ominous one says:
> This is the hottest summer of my life.
> This will be the coolest summer of the rest of your life.
Reducing carbon emissions is still orders of magnitude cheaper and more efficient than drastic geoengineering. I haven't researched it very deeply though, so I'm open to hearing out different options.
A carbon tax isn't "giving up" anything. It's "paying the cost of production", which is a negative externality that needs to be internalized into the market price of goods like any other cost of production. There could be several ways to internalize the costs, a tax, litigation, a social insurance fund, etc. But sooner or later it has to be done in one way or another. The costs have to be paid, and it's either by the producers, consumers, or victims, and the victims are the most innocent.
Azaran on 6/7/2023 at 20:34
Quote Posted by demagogue
Reducing carbon emissions is still orders of magnitude cheaper and more efficient than drastic geoengineering.
Main issue I have is that no one alive today will benefit from that method. If it yields any results on the planet, they'll only be felt in a century or two. and who knows what will happen in the meantime.
Unless we somehow invent new tech that can clear the atmosphere of all that carbon within a few years.
Right now, a lot of talk of carbon removal just sounds like environmental tokenism to me.
Quote Posted by demagogue
Time to trot out this meme.
A more ominous one says:
> This is the hottest summer of my life.
> This will be the coolest summer of the rest of your life.
You wanna see ominous? :p
Inline Image:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FeGZCmdUUAEX8UR.jpg
Starker on 6/7/2023 at 21:28
Nobody alive today will see the worst effects of global warming either. And none of it is affecting the wealthy and the powerful, who would actually have a chance to make a difference, but are (
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich) already doomsday prepping and proudly declaring that they will "probably be in charge or at least not a slave". Rishi Sunak, for example, is considering rolling back one of the key climate pledges, according to a leaked memo.
Nicker on 7/7/2023 at 05:33
“Blessed is he who plants trees under whose shade he will never sit.”
Cipheron on 7/7/2023 at 22:13
Yeah, and let's also release some cane toads in Australia to deal with the cane beetle problem.
That's the issue.
When you wrote "the pretext that things might get worse if the process was stopped", that seems to include a couple of logical fallacies - a false dichotomy and a strawman argument. First it assumes that the geoengineering will merely "stop" the warming with no other side-effects, and that this is the argument of the opponents. Neither is true.
To focus on the actual measures ... when people say "drastic" measures they're usually talking about things other than simply scrubbing C02 out of the atmosphere, which would be the simplest and safest means.
So what are we talking about as drastic? launching a solar shade, or seeding the atmosphere with sulfur dioxide? Both have clear problems that don't really need to be spelled out. The solar shade will reduce photosynthesis as the cost of reducing the temperature, so we could have issues with growing food, and hell, end up lowering the supply of oxygen. And sulfur dioxide is the best and simplest atmospheric coolant, however it has the downside of raining concentrated sulfuric acid. I brought these two up as examples of real proposals but which both have obvious negative side effects.
We can also do something like seeding more plant life, but this is perilous too:
(
https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/video/nutrient-runoff)
Quote:
The use of fertilizers in agriculture has increased the productivity of our farms. However, this increase has come with a price. Fertilizers and other chemicals end up in our streams and rivers, and eventually in our oceans. The run-off from these chemicals creates algae blooms that result in dead zones and destroy our corals, fish and mangroves. Watch this video and learn what you can do to help!
Any attempt to "geoengineer" CO2 levels down by seeding more plant growth would need to be orders of magnitude greater than the amount of fertilizer run-off that's causing havoc with coastal regions already. Sure, the best minds would plan it all out, but could they REALLY model and anticipate everything that could go wrong, when we can't even solve the algal bloom problem that's already been caused inadvertently by our attempts to increase the carrying capacity of plant life (for farming)?
BTW the real reason we're not building CO2 scrubbers: they cost money, but you could also use that money to pay people not to emit CO2 in the first place (subsidize renewables). The subsidized renewables cost a lot less per unit of CO2 that is prevented vs engineering CO2 scrubbers. People selling the
idea of CO2 scrubbers are only doing so to line their own pockets: their arguments have nothing to do with whether it's the most cost-effective method.
Sure, they could argue that we need to be net-negative to get the CO2 back out of the atmosphere so we need scrubbers, but the fact is that that doesn't make any sense until you've spent the money to reduce emissions everywhere where it's more cost-effective to do that, which is almost all of them. Politically, we're probably never going to agree to spend that much money, so we may never hit the spending levels at which CO2 scrubbers become the next low-hanging fruit.
heywood on 11/7/2023 at 15:04
Quote Posted by Azaran
Main issue I have is that no one alive today will benefit from that method. If it yields any results on the planet, they'll only be felt in a century or two. and who knows what will happen in the meantime.
I think we know what will happen. The changing climate will change the landscape, displacing people and economic activity, making some places prosper and leaving others for dead, causing waves of migration, resource conflicts and wars. We'll be spending more public money on rebuilding after disasters and resiliency, rather than infrastructure to support economic growth. Also, the goal of returning to 20th century global temperature levels is relevant to those of us who grew up in the 20th century because it's our baseline. To future generations, who are starting off with a warmer baseline, it's going to look arbitrary. By the time atmospheric CO2 does peak, there might not be anyone left around who remembers what the climate was like in the 20th century. The desire to return the Earth to that state will fade with our memories of it, and it will seem like a daft idea to go through climate change again in reverse to revisit the historical climate that humanity enjoyed during industrialization.
I'm not a fatalist about it. I do want to fight for every degree. But realistically, humanity is in the damage limitation stage and will adapt to a new normal climate. We are never going back.
I think solar geoengineering should be developed as a tool in case one of those doomsday positive feedback scenarios plays out. But the unpredictable effect on weather patterns is likely to create problems in as many areas as it helps.
Azaran on 11/7/2023 at 15:32
Quote Posted by heywood
To future generations, who are starting off with a warmer baseline, it's going to look arbitrary.
I see that already here. Younger people complaining on how long and cold the winters are, when I grew up on 90's winters that were nearly 2 months longer, far colder and snowier - we'd have 6 feet of snow banks along the sidewalks until April. These days, even when there's a huge storm, most of it melts within 2-3 days.
Quote Posted by Cipheron
When you wrote "the pretext that things might get worse if the process was stopped", that seems to include a couple of logical fallacies - a false dichotomy and a strawman argument. First it assumes that the geoengineering will merely "stop" the warming with no other side-effects, and that this is the argument of the opponents. Neither is true.
The argument was that things might get worse if the geoengineering process is stopped midstream, not the warming itself. Yeah there might be side effects, but will they be worse than the continued surprises we're getting every year on account of warming? That's what we may never know unless we try it
Nicker on 12/7/2023 at 18:35
[/Sarcasm]Well thank the stars that this has absolutely nothing to do with too many people making too many demands on the earth, as we decisively established in some other thread...[/sarcasm]
Meanwhile, at the bottom of a Canadian lake...
(
https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/crawford-lake-anthropocene-1.6902999) If you are still waiting for the Anthropocene Era, you are seventy years late to the party.
Quote:
Because of that, scientists began proposing that the start of the Anthropocene should be marked by evidence of nuclear weapons tests in the 1950s, such as radioactive plutonium, which is detectable worldwide.
"It's a very clear marker," Waters said.
But it also coincides with increased burning of fossil fuels, use of industrial fertilizers and other human impacts that leave a clear scientific signal — together called "The Great Acceleration" by environmental historian John McNeill.
In another sense, even our over estimation of our destructiveness is human hubris. Sure we could lose all the marvellous knowledge we have accrued over the centuries but the world will go on without us. Also our species and its descendants are likely now a permanent fixture in the biosphere, on every continent, having established a resilient body plan, unique cognitive capabilities and, most importantly, highly effective social adaptations.
Is that falalistic?
Tocky on 14/7/2023 at 02:15
Can it really be any more fatalistic than not doing a damn thing to correct our own behavior in regards to clime shifting? The south will be the new Mexico in the US and nobody will do a damn thing. Nobody will. The idiots here argue with me on just adding solar to the electrical grid. Never mind the fact no fossil fuel energy is subtracted. Addition of solar is a communist plot.
On the plus side Canada is looking better all the time.