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Is Climate Change Impacting Your Long Term Planning?


Maithanet

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12 hours ago, Rippounet said:

Yeah, I got that. You don't want to openly deny climate change, but at the same time you wish the media didn't talk about its consequences so much.

No, I merely want them to report things which have been validated at least to some extent as scientifically valid. Instead, they're talking about things which have a greater impact on most people, but quite possibly have practically nothing to do with climate change.

12 hours ago, Rippounet said:

Just as you won't deny climate change, but still think humans are bad at predicting things 25 years into the future... Or that there's absolutely no way to say what will happen to individuals. anyway..

There's a pattern in your interventions, you see? You may think you're being subtle, but you're not.

Sure, there's a pattern -- I don't like to make claims which aren't verified and I don't like it when the media does the same thing. Do you honestly believe that you can predict what effect climate change will have on you 25 years from today?

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4 minutes ago, Altherion said:

Sure, there's a pattern -- I don't like to make claims which aren't verified and I don't like it when the media does the same thing. Do you honestly believe that you can predict what effect climate change will have on you 25 years from today?

Right, which is why you said Trump was better than Clinton because he might change things. Cause ya know, that was so verifiable. 

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On 3/7/2019 at 8:51 PM, Kalbear said:

Right, which is why you said Trump was better than Clinton because he might change things. Cause ya know, that was so verifiable. 

I never said it was verifiable. In fact, I'm pretty sure I always prefaced all of my opinions on this matter with a statement that I don't know what's going to happen and I don't place a high probability on it being anything good.

16 hours ago, HelenaExMachina said:

How can you expect to see this verified anyway when you don’t trust these studies and such in any case?

I think it's safe to trust scientific studies which are sufficiently universal. If the US, Russia, China, the EU, Japan, etc. all agree on something, it usually reflects the best understanding humanity has of that thing -- otherwise somebody would have pointed out something wrong with it by now.

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1 hour ago, Triskele said:

I'm pretty much there with you, and there's a thought that I have somewhat regularly and I struggle a bit with it on the "am I a dick?" front which is this:  when I hear about other people having kids there's a part of me where I want to ask them "are you sure this is the best idea given where we're headed and all?"  I definitely never actually do ask anyone this, but it's a thought that I have.  

Now I know that there are indeed parents out there that are well-aware that this is real and it could get bad and don't have their heads buried in the sand.  And it's not as if parents haven't had to grapple with tough thoughts like with nuclear war and all that in terms of pondering kids, but I wonder if even for these savvier folks it's such an abstraction that it's hard to really grapple with the implications.  

This is such a bizarre way to think about it. Yes, in the worst case scenario where fossil fuel use continues unchanged (this doesn't look likely), children born today will have to clean up this mess... but relative to what children born in past centuries had to deal with, this is a fairly minor thing. For example, unless the parents oppose vaccines, children born today are not subject to a long list of debilitating (and possibly fatal) diseases. This alone more than offsets any possible impact of climate change for children born in North America... and it's just the beginning. With today's technology, pretty much everyone has powers fairy tales typically reserved to very select individuals with powerful artifacts -- we can cross oceans and continents in less than a day, we can come to a city we've never been before and know exactly how to get to our intended address, we can see and speak with each other even when the group is split across several different continents... I can go on, but the point is that even with the threat of climate change, children born today are still much better off than their counterparts from any time in history.

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Its doubtful that the world will be hosed so quickly and badly that my kids will be the last generation. They may have the curse of doing worse than I did, but honestly my early life sucked, so I think they're gonna be okay. 

Now their kids, that's another story. 

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6 hours ago, Triskele said:

there's a thought that I have somewhat regularly and I struggle a bit with it on the "am I a dick?" front which is this:  when I hear about other people having kids there's a part of me where I want to ask them "are you sure this is the best idea given where we're headed and all?"  I definitely never actually do ask anyone this, but it's a thought that I have.  

Just my opinion, but that would seem way too forward behavior were you to ever actually go ahead with such a conversation unsolicited.

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3 hours ago, DireWolfSpirit said:

Just my opinion, but that would seem way too forward behavior were you to ever actually go ahead with such a conversation unsolicited.

If you are 30+ and in a stable relationship with no kids people will solicit your opinion all the time anyway. Well not your opinion they will ask you out of the blue when you are having kids. ;)

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Projections 25 years into the future (taken as gospel by conservatives as well):

-Social Security will be bacnrupt

-The US will be a majority minority nation

-Europe will become 'Eurabia'

These are projections based on assumptions of current demographic trends, growth and birth rates etc. They also have important consequences for how policy is made (well, just the first one maybe)

For climate change, the models are not terribly different in concept, most of them try to figure out if the increased water vapor in the air will lead to high lying or low lying clouds, with the higher amounts of vapor being caused by increased CO2. Of course as a scientist I am skeptical of the models being entirely accurate, but 'sh*ts going down' is a pretty robust conclusion at this point.

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On 3/7/2019 at 5:29 PM, karaddin said:

I still think the strongest illustration of the difference between the natural climate variation and the current warming trend is the xkcd timeline. This change is happening too fast for most organisms to evolve in response, so we're getting mass extinctions that are only going to get worse.

For those that have never seen it, its this one

https://xkcd.com/1732/

To me, this is BY FAR the scariest part of climate change.  Though I don't think mass extinction is due to warming climate alone (pollution, pesticides, etc) but it certainly is a contributing factor.  In my mind this is the one thing that makes climate change a truly existential threat because the food chain relies on many of these organisms, and once they are gone they are GONE and it will not matter if we've all got electric cars or have perfected carbon capture and sequestration.  All of the other climate disasters I think will be slow-moving enough to be mitigated, but if we collapse the food chain we are in very serious trouble.  It's the one aspect that legitimately scares me.  

 

Re: having kids.  Obviously everyone should make their own decision about this and any and all reasons are valid, but there's also the idiocracy argument.  If @Triskele and @Relic take themselves out of the gene pool that's a couple less smart kids with conscientious parents to help carry us into the future.  If everyone who was really worried about this opted to not have kids, in some ways we're conceding the planet to the people who don't believe or don't care who are gonna keep on pumpin' out babies and putting smokestacks on their pick ups.  I don't have kids either, for the record, and I don't know yet if I will, just something I think about sometimes.

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17 minutes ago, S John said:

To me, this is BY FAR the scariest part of climate change.  Though I don't think mass extinction is due to warming climate alone (pollution, pesticides, etc) but it certainly is a contributing factor.  In my mind this is the one thing that makes climate change a truly existential threat because the food chain relies on many of these organisms, and once they are gone they are GONE and it will not matter if we've all got electric cars or have perfected carbon capture and sequestration.  All of the other climate disasters I think will be slow-moving enough to be mitigated, but if we collapse the food chain we are in very serious trouble.  It's the one aspect that legitimately scares me. 

To me, by far the scariest thing about climate change is feedback loops.  It is really hard to measure and determine, but it is looking more and more that there are a couple of really dangerous ones that could be catastrophic (the science on this is really challenging to model). 

The first is permafront thaw - as permafrost in Alaska, Canada, and Russia melts, it creates new swamps which release methane.  Methane has a global warming potential that is 25X that of CO2.  This methane increases climate change, which increases temperatures in Alaska, Canada and Russia, which leads to more permafrost melt and the cycle goes on and on. 

The second is similar, but with reflectivity of snow.  Snow is white, and it reflects the sun's rays back into space.  If that snow melts, the ground (which is dark) instead absorbs those rays, contributing to warming.  Which leads to less snow cover, which leads to more warming, etc.

The idea that climate change could become self sustaining is terrifying.  Obviously, those loops won't go on FOREVER - there's only so much snow and permafrost to melt.  But you could be looking at warming that starts accelerating instead of slowing, even if anthropogenic emissions decline.  Which would be...so incredibly bad.  Human extinction in the next 100-200 years would definitely be on the table. 

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6 hours ago, S John said:

To me, this is BY FAR the scariest part of climate change.  Though I don't think mass extinction is due to warming climate alone (pollution, pesticides, etc) but it certainly is a contributing factor.  In my mind this is the one thing that makes climate change a truly existential threat because the food chain relies on many of these organisms, and once they are gone they are GONE and it will not matter if we've all got electric cars or have perfected carbon capture and sequestration.  All of the other climate disasters I think will be slow-moving enough to be mitigated, but if we collapse the food chain we are in very serious trouble.  It's the one aspect that legitimately scares me.  

Yeah that's pretty much where I'm at. The worsening weather disasters and resource scarcity and unpleasant weather might make the planet a hellscape, but humans as a species are very resilient and the species would survive. Complete biosphere collapse due to cascade effects from mass extinctions of pollinators etc is the thing that could actually threaten our species survival.

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49 minutes ago, Triskele said:

The feedback loops are part of why I think there's a a real reason for serious pessimism.  It's not that I think that hell on earth is guaranteed in my lifetime, but it makes me think that it's something that is on the table.  It also is a mental model that makes me think there's no great to really handle this from a traditional climate-modeling standpoint.  Someone please correct me if they know I'm wrong about that.

What I'm saying is that the climate scientists seem pretty sure that these feedback loops like permafrost and methane burps can legit happen.  But is there any way to really guess at how bad they'll be or at what rate they start happening once it kicks in?  

How incredible that one day we could be praying for a super volcano eruption to cool that planet.   

More like trump will drop a nuke in an active volcano to see it will help.

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Two articles today: sea level rise is now being studied in conjunction with storm surge and the result is that the risks are much much worse than anyone ever suspected—and this study is already too conservative as their top sea level rise of two meters is now both outdated and too low

https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-california-coast-storm-damage-20190313-story.html

 

and second, a new and severe weather occurrence has just birthed itself over the midwestern United States, as hurricane force winds will combine with a snow blizzard. Climate change.

https://www.vox.com/2019/3/13/18263630/bomb-cyclone-2019

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Here’s a climate change question. Say ten years from now, successive droughts and severe storms have wrecked agricultural production in various places around the globe and lead to widespread famine events, 1.5 billion people are starving, and not just in Africa, but in China, the United States, parts of Europe etc. food prices more than double, governments panic and then panic harder when their paltry attempts at international food aid trigger massive domestic riots.

there is more than enough land around the world to grow enough food to feed the world and break the famine, but we can’t do it without  outlawing the use of agricultural land for alcohol production.

is 1.5 billion people starving worth cutting off the worlds alcohol supply, or is that a bridge that we can never cross no matter the cost?

or if global warming is couched in terms of how it affects alcohol supply, does that actually cause people to act and take global warming personally?

(obviously the global black market would be insanely high!)

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1 hour ago, lokisnow said:

there is more than enough land around the world to grow enough food to feed the world and break the famine, but we can’t do it without  outlawing the use of agricultural land for alcohol production.

is 1.5 billion people starving worth cutting off the worlds alcohol supply, or is that a bridge that we can never cross no matter the cost?

or if global warming is couched in terms of how it affects alcohol supply, does that actually cause people to act and take global warming personally?

I think we could sacrifice alcohol if we had to, but I don't see a scenario under which doing so would make a meaningful difference -- alcohol doesn't actually use up that much of our agricultural output.

If it became necessary to curtail some dietary intake, the prime target would almost certainly be meat. Not only are the ethics of its consumption already disputed, but its production consumes a massive amount of land and grain and there's a pretty good case to be made for eating significantly less of it than, for example, Americans currently do based purely on its impact on human health.

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On 3/5/2019 at 9:29 AM, Week said:

But but FASTER PLANES!!*

*As long as you are flying with the jetstream ... 

I never brought up the jetstream, I just responded to it with actual facts.

Regarding NEEM - with 14 degrees F higher temps than the highest projections today, I don't understand how anyone can conclude that CO2 emissions/etc/whatever are responsible alone for the earth warming.  It did so before, many times in the last 100k years, based on the only scientific test/modelling I've ever seen done using an actual scientific method (NEEM), and not just a bunch of subjective guesswork. 

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