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It's the End of the World: Climate Collapse


Dr. Pepper

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There's a very interesting side discussion about climate change happening in the US politics thread.  Thought it would be a good idea to bring it to it's own space since it's such a huge topic.

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2 minutes ago, Ormond said:

I think the droughts are inevitable. I think the wars and famines are not inevitable and will only happen when people are too terrified (or oblivious) to think about how to deal with the droughts in a way that minimizes their social impact. 

Just now, Kalbear said:

Can you explain Yemen, then? Like, right now? How does this fit into the model, and how would you solve it?

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My personal view is that climate change is not stoppable by humans at this point, and we should work not towards reducing emissions but instead work towards removing emissions and/or dealing with the ramifications of the climate change.

And we should be doing it soon, because it will be way too expensive to have a Houston-level calamity every few months, and that will be completely untenable in other parts of the world.

I also truly believe that a couple generations down the road we will have climate courts that try certain people for crimes against humanity for their part in perpetuating the climate disasters that we'll see. 

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I'm really worried about water pollution.  Oceans as much as fresh water. Seafood could he an incredibly healthy and abundant protein source but we've managed to make most of it inedible.  That trend doesn't seem to be reversing itself.  And we're only starting to see the tip of the iceberg of issues related to plastics and microplastics.  And then there's the seemingly inevitable mass extinctions that are already happening.  

I doubt humans will become extinct anytime soon but its disgusting to think what the planet will look like another couple hundred years.  

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Oceanographers and scientists say it's too late.  The ocean's already a toxic basin and poisoned beyond reversal.

Also, all those GMO crops, that produce infertile grain -- escaping into the fields where farmers are trying to still raise fertile crops --  it's happening and happening very fast.  

I've been following this ever since young adulthood.  It's never gotten better, only more rapidly worse.  For awhile I felt better because it looked as though the world across the board had learned its lessons about nuclear holocaust (into the idea of it happening to me personally I was born into with all my generation), but look where we are with that now again too.

 

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4 minutes ago, Zorral said:

Oceanographers and scientists say it's too late.  The ocean's already a toxic basin and poisoned beyond reversal.

Also, all those GMO crops, that produce infertile grain -- escaping into the fields where farmers are trying to still raise fertile crops --  it's happening and happening very fast.  

I've been following this ever since young adulthood.  It's never gotten better, only more rapidly worse.  For awhile I felt better because it looked as though the world across the board had learned its lessons about nuclear holocaust (into the idea of it happening to me personally I was born into with all my generation), but look where we are with that now again too.

 

Where is it happening? Not only am I not aware of an instance of cross contamination in any sort of significant amount without it being deliberate I'm not aware of any GMO crop that produces infertile offspring.

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Well, if it is hope you seek...

https://www.makechange.aspiration.com/articles/5-big-climate-change-problems-and-the-millennials-trying-to-solve-them

 

Much of those efforts appear to be focused in India, which corporate industrialization appears to have transformed into a sort of polluted hell-scape.  Necessity drives those efforts - necessity being the 'mother of invention and all.  

There are similar schemes afoot from the younger generations to at least reduce the pollution problem with the oceans.  one of several similar articles:

https://dailyplanet.climate-kic.org/cleaning-great-pacific-garbage-patch-begin-next-year/

 

These things take time, apparently a lost concept in this age of Attention Deficit Disorder and instant access to everything. 

 

So, yes, there is (some) hope on that front. But it'll rarely make headlines.

 

 

 

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4 minutes ago, ThinkerX said:

Well, if it is hope you seek...

https://www.makechange.aspiration.com/articles/5-big-climate-change-problems-and-the-millennials-trying-to-solve-them

 

Much of those efforts appear to be focused in India, which corporate industrialization appears to have transformed into a sort of polluted hell-scape.  Necessity drives those efforts - necessity being the 'mother of invention and all.  

There are similar schemes afoot from the younger generations to at least reduce the pollution problem with the oceans.  one of several similar articles:

https://dailyplanet.climate-kic.org/cleaning-great-pacific-garbage-patch-begin-next-year/

 

These things take time, apparently a lost concept in this age of Attention Deficit Disorder and instant access to everything. 

 

So, yes, there is (some) hope on that front. But it'll rarely make headlines.

 

 

 

Yeah, no.  It's not a lost concept that these things take time.  The issue is whether the slow pace of change will be fast enough to reverse the oncoming train.  This ocean plastic screen is great, but then it's taken to shore where not all of it can be recycled and we'll need something to deal with the microplastics that leech into our drinking water. Solutions need to be holistic and global or at least massive in scale, a near impossibility based on economics and politics.  

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13 minutes ago, Nasty LongRider said:

I could see climate change driving the movement of climate refugees, and as the world has proven lately, we don't deal well with refugees.  It's gonna be a disaster.

 

Oh for sure.  I read somewhere that Louisiana has already lost thousands of miles of shoreline.  That's huge!  Island nations are already preparing for their citizens having to move elsewhere.  So many millions in South Asia became displaced from the flooding this year, some temporary but many permanently.  It can cause tremendous economic, political and social havoc.  

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I think I'm going to give the Kook brothers a phone call and ask them if it's okay if I come over and sit in the air conditioning for awhile. In fact, I'm inviting everyone to their house. Let's sit in their air conditioning and drink up all their water.

On 12/5/2017 at 7:05 PM, Kalbear said:

My personal view is that climate change is not stoppable by humans at this point, and we should work not towards reducing emissions but instead work towards removing emissions and/or dealing with the ramifications of the climate change.

I don't know enough about climate science to have an opinion. But, at this time, it may be quite prudent to start planning for all the calamity that will happen latter.

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I’m fairly optimistic that it won’t be long before renewables are more than viable, they make more sense in every way.  Even in Texas, wind is already pretty big and with the amount of sunshine we get, a combination of wind and solar could power most of the state.  

I think that the biggest issue is really one of population.  There are too many humans.  Here, again, there’s somewhat of a chance of it sorting itself out as countries industrialize and it simply becomes more expensive to have kids.  We are probably too late for this to help in the short term, but it will eventually.

Personally, I just want to hit the lottery and buy 100 rural acres somewhere and live out my life in peace.  I think we are in for some tumultuous times.  

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We're going to have a Year of Calamity in the 2020s that will be an "awakening" point at which almost all of the US will start taking this a lot more seriously and hastily trying to fix it (while also rushing to build in adaptations at enormous cost). Of course, by then it will be too late to prevent a 3-4 degree Celsius rise in GMT, and we'll seriously be considering the "inject sulfate aerosols into the atmosphere to slow down the warming for a few decades" option.

Not sure what it will be. Probably a brutal heat wave in summer that seriously damages crops, followed by a really bad hurricane season (worse than this year) that leaves most of the Gulf Coast cities dealing with hundreds of billions of dollars (maybe over a trillion dollars) in damage and tens of millions displaced. That could have happened this year in Florida, with some slight changes in direction.

It's some comfort that the US is in a particularly good position to deal with climate change. We have a large land area with diverse climates in the continental US, and they won't all be affected by bad weather in the same way at the same time. That's good for agriculture, particularly if the Great Plains start to dry out again and we have to do a lot more farming in the Midwest, South, and Atlantic Seaboard states. The US will probably  never have a problem feeding itself even in the face of a global food crisis (such as the food price crisis in 2007-2008). Of course, we could secure that even more by re-establishing a national food reserve with regional stockpiles to go along with other strategic reserves.

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Prediction of sorts for the next couple of nasty hurricanes.

 

Conservatives will, of course, vehemently deny that man made climate change is real.  However, they will insist - loudly insist - that 'evil liberal scientists' are creating and controlling these storms.

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2 hours ago, ThinkerX said:

Prediction of sorts for the next couple of nasty hurricanes.

 

Conservatives will, of course, vehemently deny that man made climate change is real.  However, they will insist - loudly insist - that 'evil liberal scientists' are creating and controlling these storms.

It's God punishing the world for homosexuals, video games and Harry Potter.

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The one area that always gets more attention is emissions and the link to climate change. Now i do believe we have an affect on global climate, simply because we pour tonnes of crap into the air that simply must affect something, it doesn't just vanish when it goes up the chimney.
But even if we are not having a massive affect and mostly this is natural I do still believe that reducing emissions is still a worthy cause.
I mean look at India, China etc, places with horrendous air pollution issues. Even if all those emissions don't affect the climate they sure as hell do affect the poor bastards living in those locations. Reducing pollution from industry will safegard human lives, even if it doesn't change the inevitable climate shift.

So this is why doing things like going back to coal as Trump wants to is such a bad idea. It just goes against all logic to go back to something we know does harm to something, and is also an energy source we are trying to get developing countries to drop. And the funny thing is that now the whole world seems to be waking up a bit to this, yet the US is going backwards, thanks to your leadership.

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Massive consumer consumption and unrestrained capitalism is also part of the problem.

There are ways of reducing the problem: mobile phone companies releasing a new model every 2 or even 3 years rather than every year would help. Everything, by law, being either biodegradable or recyclable would as well. A mass movement to renewable energy powering non-polluting vehicles is already underway and the explosion of that is inevitable, which will help. The world population growth trend slowing and topping out by the early 22nd Century is also a good sign, although there's still an enormous amount of flex in that (9 billion is probably survivable, 11 or 12 billion is likely not). Moves to increase population growth, such as those by evangelical groups in the United States, should be firmly resisted.

I'm most worried about how we cope with this at the same time we will be struggling with the postcapitalist landscape where vast chunks of the population will not have any jobs to do. At that point - less than 50 years from now and likely a lot less - we may be staring some kind of societal existential crisis which may result in a large chunk of the world's population starving to death. Given how many governments have their heads buried in the sand about both climate change and postcapitalism, I am not hopeful.

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I have two main thoughts:

1) Climate change will lead to very bad outcomes for a lot of people and an ecological disaster for many plants and animals (though some will flourish, like jellyfish). But it won't be the end of civilization as we know it. People will adapt, and when things get bad enough they'll take more concrete steps to address the problem; even if they never acknowledge humanity's role in creating the problem.

2) I have faith in the march of technology helping to solve the problem, just like it's solved previous predicated "end of the world" problems (like the green revolution preventing mass famines). It doesn't mean we should sit back and do nothing, but it does mean the situation isn't hopeless either.

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As for the Yemen question directed to me:

I have not been keeping at all with whatever the present situation in Yemen is and don't have time at the moment to do any extensive research. But Yemen is a country which has had internal conflict for decades and where both meddling by the United States and Russia as well as Saudi Arabia and Iran has been going on for years. To attribute civil conflict in Yemen as being primarily due to a drought is a nonstarter for me. I really doubt if civil conflict in Yemen would be substantially less without a drought. So I don't see how that really is relevant to the general fear of war breaking out where there was none before which many people fear will be a result of water shortages brought on by climate change. 

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1 hour ago, Ormond said:

As for the Yemen question directed to me:

I have not been keeping at all with whatever the present situation in Yemen is and don't have time at the moment to do any extensive research. But Yemen is a country which has had internal conflict for decades and where both meddling by the United States and Russia as well as Saudi Arabia and Iran has been going on for years. To attribute civil conflict in Yemen as being primarily due to a drought is a nonstarter for me. I really doubt if civil conflict in Yemen would be substantially less without a drought. So I don't see how that really is relevant to the general fear of war breaking out where there was none before which many people fear will be a result of water shortages brought on by climate change. 

Ah, sorry; I thought you were saying that famines can be dealt with rationally, and Yemen is experiencing a massive famine right now. My mistake then. 

Syria is a much better example of war erupting when there wasn't, which was driven in part by drought. 

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1 hour ago, Ormond said:

As for the Yemen question directed to me:

I have not been keeping at all with whatever the present situation in Yemen is and don't have time at the moment to do any extensive research. But Yemen is a country which has had internal conflict for decades and where both meddling by the United States and Russia as well as Saudi Arabia and Iran has been going on for years. To attribute civil conflict in Yemen as being primarily due to a drought is a nonstarter for me. I really doubt if civil conflict in Yemen would be substantially less without a drought. So I don't see how that really is relevant to the general fear of war breaking out where there was none before which many people fear will be a result of water shortages brought on by climate change. 

Current or ongoing conflict in an area isn't going to negate the strife that occurs due to something like famine.  It might inform who is fighting and how the fighting occurs.  

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