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Is Climate Change Impacting Your Long Term Planning?


Maithanet

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Also, realistically - assuming we don't find some crazy moonshot that works - we are well past the point where serious dangers are inevitable, and chances are good that the best we'll be able to do is avert global ecological collapse. In that situation, aside from trying to avert the latter, what we probably need to do is think less about carbon emissions and more about dealing with the effects. We will have sea level rise that will affect islands, coastal areas, freshwater locations. We will have carbonization and acidification of the oceans. We will have more gigantic weather effects and weather related effects (like bigger fires, dust storms, etc). These are things that will happen, so we should plan on them happening and figure out how we can best mitigate and triage them. 

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5 hours ago, Kalbear said:

You're thinking the wrong way about it. And that really wasn't the topic anyway. 

No, you can't reasonably 'prep' for global warming. No go bag or 2 weeks of supplies is going to save you from repeated adverse climate events year over year. No, what you need to think about are things like location, governmental stability, access to somewhat sustainable, local resources, the types of climate events that can affect you, and your insurance plans.

If these things aren't on your mind you're probably just the kind of person who doesn't worry about anything and lets life punch you in the face. And hey, that's fine - some people are built to be the world's victims. They don't care that their house is on a floodplain, or that their metropolitan area is likely going to be hit by hurricane after hurricane and can reasonably expect their area to always be in a recession/disaster recovery. Or they live next to huge amounts of tinder and are just hoping they don't get set afire. 

The notion that climate change is gradual and incremental ignores the actual smaller-scale (like, say, state or city) effects. Yes, boiling water doesn't churn a ton at first, but if you look at one spot where cavitation is happening, that place is erupting in a crazy way. And as the water gets hotter, you get more cavitation sites, more eruptions, and more disaster. The overall temperature of that water and the overall calmness of that water isn't that big a deal, any more than the average temperature across the globe isn't that big a deal, but tell that to the fires in California or the hurricanes in Puerto Rico or Houston or North Carolina or the heat waves in Europe. 

But hey, enjoy your house in Miami. 

Sure, I agree with you. Location risk should be an obvious part of one's choice of area to live in. But I would add that ALL risks should then be evaluated equally. For example, an earlier poster talked about moving to Auckland due to climate change risk. The question then should be, is the risk of bushfires in your current location of bigger consequence than the risk of earthquakes and tsunamis in Auckland?

I don't know the answer to that, but the point is, each location would have a set of risk factors associated with it, and climate change arguably just contributes to that equation. To overly fixate on climate change to the exclusion of other potentially greater factors has a sniff of ideological motivation to it.

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12 hours ago, Altherion said:

I don't understand where you're seeing denial of global warming -- I'm about as confident in that as I am in established scientific results in physics. The thing I am not seeing is how exactly this constitutes a reason to panic for me personally (or my hypothetical descendants, assuming that they live in the same place). I can tell you that our politicians almost certainly don't believe this to be an existential threat because if they did, they'd be using all available means to avert it.

I read this as, "well I don't  really believe in physics either!". I guess given the choice between driving over a bridge built by a few experienced engineers using the principles of physics and one built by a few knuckleheads that got together, who had no clue as to what they were doing, you would be just as comfortable driving over the one built by the knuckleheads as the one built by experienced engineers. Cause, "anything could happen".

12 hours ago, Altherion said:

Consider this: for over half a century, we've had a way to generate colossal amounts of energy with practically no carbon released into the atmosphere and without any of the intermittency issues (and thus without the need for massive energy storage) that are inherent to solar and wind. If this was truly so urgent and so critical to the point where we need to reduce carbon consumption within a decade, I'd expect to see plans for using existing, proven technology to supply all our energy needs without burning fossil -- the reasons this hasn't been done yet are the not-in-my-backyard mentality and bureaucratic obstructionism. Thus far, I see nothing of the sort and instead the main proposals are to spend truly insane amounts of money on... well, I'm not actually sure what. And as a bonus, they're at the very least supported and at most crafted by the same environmentalists who are second only to the fossil fuel corporations themselves in being responsible for our continued dependence on fossil fuels for the past few decades.

I don't think in my entire life I've seen somebody be a Marxist, and then in the blink of an eye, do a 180 degree turn around and become an ultra libertarian.

So in other words, according to you pollution happens because largely of "bureaucratic obstructionism". Get rid of that and the market will do its magic.

One has to wonder why anybody even bothers with the concept of an externality. In other words, people have been internalizing the true cost of carbon based technology all along, taking into account it's cost to future generations, and if gosh darn it, the government just got out of the way, green technology would flourish. Can I ask, does "bureaucratic obstructionism" explain why other countries, besides the US, use carbon based technologies, rather than these other cleaner technologies or is it just a feature of the US? Also, I'd point out that even people like Robert Lucs, not exactly an anti-free market guy, thinks we need to alter the price of carbon.

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18 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

I read this as, "well I don't  really believe in physics either!".

Then you read it wrongly. I believe in physics (it would be rather weird not to after being a physicist for more than three quarters of my adult life).

20 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

I don't think in my entire life I've seen somebody be a Marxist, and then in the blink of an eye, do a 180 degree turn around and become an ultra libertarian.

So in other words, according to you pollution happens because largely of "bureaucratic obstructionism". Get rid of that and the market will do its magic.

No, not at all. You are not only misreading what I said, you are putting words in my mouth. There as absolutely nothing in that quote about the market and in fact, most of these solutions require some measure of government intervention.

33 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

Can I ask, does "bureaucratic obstructionism" explain why other countries, besides the US, use carbon based technologies, rather than these other cleaner technologies or is it just a feature of the US?

Most countries which are wealthy and technologically advanced enough have the same kind of environmentalists which leads to the same hysteria and eventually the same bureaucratic obstructionism. That said, most countries at the same level of development as the US do get a smaller share of their electricity from fossil fuels (scroll to the second table and rank them by "Sub-total thermal"), partly because they have more natural locations for geothermal and hydro plants relative to their size and partly because they're not as affected by the hysteria.

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14 hours ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

So I'm far from someone who is against prepping in general. I like being self sufficient, like to be prepared and can think of any number of bad things that can happen to us at any given time. Reasons for prepping, in my mind, would include economic collapse, breakdown of the social order, a natural disaster that knocks out critical infrastructure for lengthy periods of time (such as a massive solar flare, earthquakes, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions etc), a mass terrorist attack that achieves the same effect, a pandemic, and a bunch of other catastrophic incidents.

But all of these would have a fairly rapid, catastrophic impact on our daily lives, and thus require a measure of preparation. By contrast, I just don't see climate change in the same category, at least not in our lifetimes. It is a gradual, incremental phenomenon, and pretty much your best strategy to mitigate its impact on your daily life is to acquire an economically valuable skill, get a good job and earn enough money to shield you from its low intensity, but gradually increasing impact.

Now, in a worst case scenario climate change may indirectly lead to some of the more catastrophic social and economic catastrophes I listed above (if say escalating food prices lead to social unrest or recessions, or climate induced migration leads to a breakdown in the social order), but then you would be better focused to prepare for those specific issues, rather than for climate change in general.

In the meantime, lets hope Tesla achieves its goals (Elon Musk predicted that electric vehicles would exceed 50% of new car sales within something like 10 years). Now, assume that's normal Elon time and that the reality will be more like 20 years. That's still a good trajectory. And if the costs of renewable energy and battery storage continue to decrease, all the better.

But in terms of prepping for a disaster, I don't think climate change really warrants being near the top of the list.

 

At the bolded: 

1, this is a bad understanding of climate change science, a global averaging of warming is gradual (until we go from 1 degree to 2 in 1/20 the time it took to get to 1, and from 2 degrees to 4 in 1/200 the time it took to get to 2, and from 4 degrees to 8 in 1/2000 the time it took to get to 4–Stops being gradual like five years ago) But the extreme weather events are immediate, localized, severe and induce a whiplash cycle from one extreme to another (California in a five year long worst drought in history goes to California dealing with severe flooding every other year with rain volumes greater than a hundred year event like 93, and the worst wildfires in record during in between the floods). The whiplash at the local level makes it harder to plan and also makes the effects more acutely experienced. 

In California, there is no gradual about it.

 

2: Elon musk isn’t going to save us and electric cars aren’t going to save us. We could be at nearly 100% electric sales within five years if the government wanted to properly disincentivize the manufacture and sale of ICE vehicles via something as banal as imposing escalating fees on VIN registrations, but that would only help for the 10% of emissions that come from personal transit, freight trucking, freight trains, freight shipping account for much more than that, like 30%. Bigger ROI electrifying evey aspect of freight (or attempt to reduce freight volumes by localizing more production) than in electrifying every personal vehicle.  Additionally, even if we electrified every car, the cars still kick up fine particulate matter into the atmosphere which means we’re only going to eliminate about 80% of car induced pollution. And even in an all electric vehicle world that remaining dust/ fine particulate pollution will naturally increase as population increases, because more cars on the road and or more miles traveled per person will result in more fine particulate pollution even if they are not emitting. That’s why the long term goal is to figure out ways to reduce the Vehicle miles traveled per person, even after electrification, otherwise we will stall out in pushing transportation carbon numbers down. It will assuredly be vastly better than every car emitting carbon, but even electrifying everything isn’t going to result in net zero or net negative carbon from vehicle use.

 

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14 hours ago, Altherion said:

I don't understand where you're seeing denial of global warming -- I'm about as confident in that as I am in established scientific results in physics. The thing I am not seeing is how exactly this constitutes a reason to panic for me personally (or my hypothetical descendants, assuming that they live in the same place). I can tell you that our politicians almost certainly don't believe this to be an existential threat because if they did, they'd be using all available means to avert it.

Consider this: for over half a century, we've had a way to generate colossal amounts of energy with practically no carbon released into the atmosphere and without any of the intermittency issues (and thus without the need for massive energy storage) that are inherent to solar and wind. If this was truly so urgent and so critical to the point where we need to reduce carbon consumption within a decade, I'd expect to see plans for using existing, proven technology to supply all our energy needs without burning fossil -- the reasons this hasn't been done yet are the not-in-my-backyard mentality and bureaucratic obstructionism. Thus far, I see nothing of the sort and instead the main proposals are to spend truly insane amounts of money on... well, I'm not actually sure what. And as a bonus, they're at the very least supported and at most crafted by the same environmentalists who are second only to the fossil fuel corporations themselves in being responsible for our continued dependence on fossil fuels for the past few decades.

Care to unpack the bolded?  How are environmentalists responsible for fossil fuel dependence?

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1 hour ago, larrytheimp said:

Care to unpack the bolded?  How are environmentalists responsible for fossil fuel dependence?

I'm pretty sure he's arguing that environmentalists and the not in my backyard people have prevented us from adopting nuclear energy, which could have reduced our dependence on fossil fuels.  The US hasn't built a new nuclear power plant in many decades. 

 

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1 hour ago, larrytheimp said:

Care to unpack the bolded?  How are environmentalists responsible for fossil fuel dependence?

Up until around the mid 1970s, it looked like fossil fuels were on their way out for everything but cars, planes and some ships -- with those exceptions, the future was going to be nuclear powered. Then, the environmentalists fixated on the negative aspects of nuclear power and seized on some accidents to more or less kill this idea. They weren't entirely wrong, but the point that they missed was that there was (and still is) no way to generate the enormous energies we use that is 100% safe or clean. Is the Exxon Valdez spill or the Deepwater Horizon explosion any better than the Three Mile Island accident? As far as anyone can tell, the latter didn't actually hurt anyone or contaminate the environment to anywhere near the same extent.

Of course, the environmentalists weren't the main force behind the decline of nuclear power -- that distinction belongs to the fossil fuel (oil, gas and coal) companies which successfully influenced the foreign and domestic policies of several nations (by far the most important of which is the US) to make the post-policy price of fossil fuels cheaper than that of anything else. However, the environmentalists certainly helped this decline along without providing any functional alternative to fossil fuels so I would rank them as second in responsibility.

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There has been some very promising research into carbon capture and sequestration.  It’s a bit of a punt on the issue, but it might be enough to save our bacon in the short/ medium term assuming we can do it on a large enough scale.  It works though.  The primary negative being that, if effective, it’ll be used as an argument to keep on truckin’ using fossil fuels and disincentivize market change.  But if i prevents Armageddon, I’m down. 

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3 hours ago, OldGimletEye said:

I guess given the choice between driving over a bridge built by a few experienced engineers using the principles of physics and one built by a few knuckleheads that got together, who had no clue as to what they were doing, you would be just as comfortable driving over the one built by the knuckleheads as the one built by experienced engineers.

heh...

"Any idiot can build a bridge that will stand, but it takes an engineer to build a bridge that will barely stand."

-My old boss

I think he thought it was a dig at engineers. 

 

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13 hours ago, Kalbear said:

what we probably need to do is think less about carbon emissions and more about dealing with the effects.

We need to think more about dealing with the effects, certainly, but not less about carbon emissions! Yes, serious dangers are inevitable, but it's not a binary state change from "no dangers" to "dangers"; the more carbon we pump out, the worse the disasters are going to be. I strongly suspect completely ignoring the effects of climate change and instead putting all our resources into minimising it would do more to save lives, the economy, and the ecology in the long run than trying to deal with the symptoms.

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10 hours ago, Free Northman Reborn said:

Sure, I agree with you. Location risk should be an obvious part of one's choice of area to live in. But I would add that ALL risks should then be evaluated equally. For example, an earlier poster talked about moving to Auckland due to climate change risk. The question then should be, is the risk of bushfires in your current location of bigger consequence than the risk of earthquakes and tsunamis in Auckland?

I didn't say we were planning to move to Auckland due to risk of disaster events, we have considered that angle and if it was the primary consideration we wouldn't move - inner Sydney isn't at direct risk from Bush fires. The plan to move is due to the extreme heat and the extended heat will make living in Sydney miserable at +2C or more. We're rather familiar with the climate here having lived our whole lives here and it's already getting hotter than we like.

That said at least the risk of earth quakes isn't going to increase from climate change at least so those risk factors are at least known and relatively static - I'm more concerned that NZ will start getting hit by cyclones but that Sydney is more protected from that by ocean currents so we'd be making things worse with the move in that case.

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3 hours ago, Mudguard said:

I'm pretty sure he's arguing that environmentalists and the not in my backyard people have prevented us from adopting nuclear energy, which could have reduced our dependence on fossil fuels.  The US hasn't built a new nuclear power plant in many decades. 

 

 

3 hours ago, Altherion said:

Up until around the mid 1970s, it looked like fossil fuels were on their way out for everything but cars, planes and some ships -- with those exceptions, the future was going to be nuclear powered. Then, the environmentalists fixated on the negative aspects of nuclear power and seized on some accidents to more or less kill this idea. They weren't entirely wrong, but the point that they missed was that there was (and still is) no way to generate the enormous energies we use that is 100% safe or clean. Is the Exxon Valdez spill or the Deepwater Horizon explosion any better than the Three Mile Island accident? As far as anyone can tell, the latter didn't actually hurt anyone or contaminate the environment to anywhere near the same extent.

Of course, the environmentalists weren't the main force behind the decline of nuclear power -- that distinction belongs to the fossil fuel (oil, gas and coal) companies which successfully influenced the foreign and domestic policies of several nations (by far the most important of which is the US) to make the post-policy price of fossil fuels cheaper than that of anything else. However, the environmentalists certainly helped this decline along without providing any functional alternative to fossil fuels so I would rank them as second in responsibility.

I know there was a lot of push back on nuclear power from the 50's through the 70's, but didn't think environmental groups or environmentalists had been anti-nuclear energy since then (particularly after the 80's/early 90's and the green house gas concept going mainstream).  It's kind of a cop out to say that environmentalists gave us petroleum addiction.  The petroleum industry is pretty much entirely responsible for that.  Why are we so friendly with Saudi Arabia again?

Completely anecdotal but part of the reason I think this is that the bulk of my real-world friends are pretty hardcore environmentalists who advocate, you guessed it, nuclear power.  A couple of them even work decommissioning old nuclear plants and research sites.  The only 'clean power' I've heard any environmentalist or conservationist decry in the last 25 years has been hydroelectric for how it disrupts riparian ecology.  

There is a pretty substantial carbon outlay for building a nuclear power plant, but I'd be interested to see how many environmental groups have been against nuclear energy since we've known about global warming.  

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17 minutes ago, larrytheimp said:

I know there was a lot of push back on nuclear power from the 50's through the 70's, but didn't think environmental groups or environmentalists had been anti-nuclear energy since then (particularly after the 80's/early 90's and the green house gas concept going mainstream).

After the early 1990s, the US anti-nuclear movement wound down because, for all intents and purposes, they had won. The reactors that had been built were still operational and a couple (the long delayed Watts Bar pair started in the 1970s) were still under construction, but nothing new was coming -- and this has remained true to this day. The Watts Bar reactors were finally finished in 1996 and 2016, but except for those, no reactors have come online since 1993.

1 hour ago, larrytheimp said:

It's kind of a cop out to say that environmentalists gave us petroleum addiction.  The petroleum industry is pretty much entirely responsible for that.  Why are we so friendly with Saudi Arabia again?

As I said, the fossil fuel corporations are certainly the primary reason we're using fossil fuels rather than nuclear power. However, it's equally certain that the environmentalists helped this outcome along.

1 hour ago, larrytheimp said:

Completely anecdotal but part of the reason I think this is that the bulk of my real-world friends are pretty hardcore environmentalists who advocate, you guessed it, nuclear power.  A couple of them even work decommissioning old nuclear plants and research sites.  The only 'clean power' I've heard any environmentalist or conservationist decry in the last 25 years has been hydroelectric for how it disrupts riparian ecology. 

The energy we seek is on scales that are too large to reach without some measure of disruption to the environment. Even solar and wind have problems: solar takes up a lot of land and wind power kills birds (including rare ones). I guess geothermal is probably fine, but it's extremely location specific.

1 hour ago, larrytheimp said:

There is a pretty substantial carbon outlay for building a nuclear power plant, but I'd be interested to see how many environmental groups have been against nuclear energy since we've known about global warming.  

There's something of a split now because the more intelligent environmentalists have figured out that the clean technology to deal with global warming does not exist yet (remember the intermittency issues), but as far as I know, the big environmental groups like Greenpeace and Sierra Club are categorically against nuclear power to this very day (here's Greanpeace's statement on it and here's the Sierra Club's).

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12 hours ago, karaddin said:

I didn't say we were planning to move to Auckland due to risk of disaster events, we have considered that angle and if it was the primary consideration we wouldn't move - inner Sydney isn't at direct risk from Bush fires. The plan to move is due to the extreme heat and the extended heat will make living in Sydney miserable at +2C or more. We're rather familiar with the climate here having lived our whole lives here and it's already getting hotter than we like.

That said at least the risk of earth quakes isn't going to increase from climate change at least so those risk factors are at least known and relatively static - I'm more concerned that NZ will start getting hit by cyclones but that Sydney is more protected from that by ocean currents so we'd be making things worse with the move in that case.

Compared to Australia, sure, Auckland is a bigger earthquake risk. But as New Zealand goes, the further north you go you move from earthquake to volcanic. All the volcanoes around Auckland are dead, so they're not a problem. You'll feel earthquakes in Auckland but it's highly unlikely Auckland will get hit by a big one directly. Then again, no one thought Christchurch would get hit by a big one, so you never know.

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18 hours ago, lokisnow said:

That’s why the long term goal is to figure out ways to reduce the Vehicle miles traveled per person, even after electrification, 

Regarding measures beyond total electrification-

What ideas are being proposed to accomplish lowering vehicle miles traveled per person?

I can think of mass transit (bus, rail), carpooling, and at home occupations fairly quickly. But those are already current societal options, what beyond those measures are planners proposing?

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On 3/2/2019 at 12:39 AM, TrueMetis said:

There are only a handful of predictions, and they are all pointing in the same direction.

Heres another handful of predictions:

Cooler winters, Warmer winters

Smaller fish, bigger fish

More mosquitoes, fewer mosquitoes

Earth's spin speed up, Earths spin slows down

And the very worrying:

Grapes in Margaret river mature earlier, or later

The secret is predicting everything, that way at least one of them is right. Also, don't make any predictions time bound, that just makes them testable.

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6 minutes ago, Squab said:

Heres another handful of predictions:

Cooler winters, Warmer winters

Smaller fish, bigger fish

More mosquitoes, fewer mosquitoes

Earth's spin speed up, Earths spin slows down

And the very worrying:

Grapes in Margaret river mature earlier, or later

The secret is predicting everything, that way at least one of them is right. Also, don't make any predictions time bound, that just makes them testable.

I'm not even sure why I'm bothering, but... 

Several of those articles are looking at localized effects which can be simultaneously true. Ie yes it's possible for tuna in certain waters off Australia to become larger in the medium term, while simultaneously having generally smaller species of fish overall in the long term. And all of those are looking at the downstream, often very localized effects of the overall global climate warming, an incredibly complex system, and you're bound to get different results from different models, and as the models are updated with more information they will evolve.

A Doctor tells you that you have a brain tumor, you get a second opinion and you're told yes you have a tumor and it may effect your eyesight, and a 3rd opinion tells you that yes you have a tumor and it might be already causing loss of memory and fine motor skills. Do you disregard the initial diagnosis because they can't all tell you exactly what's happening and give you an exact time frame?

Frankly at this stage if you can't see warming is happening you have to be willfully disregarding the evidence.

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