Climate: Il fait VRAIMENT CHAUD (fka un petit)

[Luzifer's right hand]

I think some people here will be pleased to hear that the Austrian police prevent a similar act of vandalism in the natural history museum in Vienna. 

A great success because they had some bad press in recent months because of allying with anti-vaxxers(including telling a doctor who received death threats that it was her own fault for being vocally pro-vaxx. Said doctor committed suicide not long afterwards). Their track record of ignore female victims of violence especially if the are immigrants has been stellar. Just recently they did jack shit while a sex worker was being murdered despite the fact that her friends called the police multiple times and gave them the address. But the natural history museum calls because those vile environmentalist are threatening items and the show up asap. 

But objects have value unlike people(especially female identifying ones) and the environment.

[felice]

22 hours ago, ThinkerX said:

4) Hence, IF the above points are true, and the situation does not change, then in fifty years the populace of the developed world drops by about half. The decline in China is likely to be even steeper, and Russia, well...not good.

Your forgot some people in your calculation. The population will only drop by 50% in 50 years if the under-40s have NO children, which is certainly not the case in reality. If the under-40s don't have enough kids to replace the dying over-40s, then population will drop, but it might be by less than 1%. You can't estimate the degree of decline without know how far short of the replacement rate the birth rate is.

[ThinkerX]

45 minutes ago, felice said:

Your forgot some people in your calculation. The population will only drop by 50% in 50 years if the under-40s have NO children, which is certainly not the case in reality. If the under-40s don't have enough kids to replace the dying over-40s, then population will drop, but it might be by less than 1%. You can't estimate the degree of decline without know how far short of the replacement rate the birth rate is.

You are correct.

If the 'under 40' couples have but two kids each on average, then that will suffice to replace the dying 'over 40' generations. That said, if the 'under 40' generation opts to have an average of one child, then a dramatic population decrease on the order of 25% is possible. (which seems to be what is happening in China).

 

[The Anti-Targ]

Speaking of deforestation of the Amazon, is anyone surprised that cattle laundering is happening in Brazil?

How the beef industry conceals its destruction of the Amazon rainforest - Vox

Quote

On paper, the Brazilian Amazon is one of the most protected ecosystems on the planet. There are thousands of protected areas, in addition to rules that safeguard forests on private lands.

More importantly, big meatpacking companies that buy cattle — the largest driver of deforestation, by far, in the Amazon — committed more than a decade ago to only buy cattle from land without forest loss. This commitment was supposed to prevent any additional losses.

Yet year after year, satellites that monitor changes in forest cover find the same thing: The Amazon is shrinking. Between August 1, 2018, and July 31, 2021, more than 34,000 square km (8.4 million acres) disappeared from the Brazilian Amazon. That’s an area larger than the entire nation of Belgium, and a 52 percent increase compared to the previous three years.

It doesn’t add up. Assuming satellites don’t lie, someone is hiding deforestation.

Over the last decade, scientists and environmental advocates have begun to uncover those missing hectares, and their research points to a concerning practice in the beef industry: “cattle laundering.”

In a cattle laundering scheme, ranchers move cattle from “dirty” ranches, which contribute to deforestation, to ranches that are “clean,” with no recent forest loss. By the time those cattle arrive at slaughterhouses, the path they’ve taken is obscured, as is the damage they’ve caused.

Clearly it's a very poor assurance scheme if a "de-forestation free" scheme doesn't track cattle from birth to ensure they were never raised on [recently] deforested land. So the scheme itself would appear to be disingenuous by having been designed from the outset to be easily circumvented. Obviously a cattle blockchain was always necessary.

[Luzifer's right hand]

It's easy because people love swallowing comforting lies when it comes to meat. 

The market for fake "grass fed" beef and butter is gigantic in the USA for example and people can even pretend they care about animals.

Not that grass fed beef or butter is a good thing when it comes to climate in the first place as the scale of animal agriculture is the main problem not how the animals are kept. Just a massive waste of land that should be returned to nature. Edit: How the animals are kept is only important if you consider it relevant to reduce their suffering.

[Which Tyler]

Wait, what?

 

[ThinkerX]

A bit of good news on the climate change front - or more accurately, less horrible news. Global temperatures may only go up 2-3 degrees C by century's end instead of 5 degrees as was feared - a 'downgrade' ('upgrade?') from 'apocalypse' to 'really bad weather.'

Beyond Catastrophe: A New Climate Reality Is Coming Into View - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

You can’t take these projections to the bank. But they have already put us on a different path. The Stanford scientist Marshall Burke, who has produced some distressing research about the costs of warming — that global G.D.P. could be cut by as much as a quarter, compared with a world without climate change — says he has had to update the slides he uses to teach undergraduates, revising his expectations from just a few years ago. “The problem is a result of human choices, and our progress on it is also the result of human choices,” he says. “And those should be celebrated. It’s not yet sufficient. But it is amazing.”

Matthew Huber of Purdue University, the climate scientist who helped introduce the idea of a temperature and humidity limit to human survival, likewise describes himself as considerably less worried than he used to be, though he believes, drawing on inferences from the deep history of the planet, that a future of two degrees warming is less likely than a world of three. “Some of my colleagues are looking at three degrees and going, oh, my God, this is the worst thing ever — we’re failing!” he says. “And then someone like me is saying, well, I used to think we were heading to five. So three looks like a win.”

A very bruising win. “The good news is we have implemented policies that are significantly bringing down the projected global average temperature change,” says the Canadian atmospheric scientist Katharine Hayhoe, a lead chapter author on several National Climate Assessments and an evangelical Christian who has gained a reputation as a sort of climate whisperer to the center-right. The bad news, she says, is that we have been “systematically underestimating the rate and magnitude of extremes.” Even if temperature rise is limited to two degrees, she says, “the extremes might be what you would have projected for four to five.”

 

[Rippounet]

I have to admit, for a few minutes, I did consider the possibility of this being good news, before understanding what the report actually says.

From the UN website:

Quote

According to the report, the combined climate pledges of 193 Parties under the Paris Agreement could put the world on track for around 2.5 degrees Celsius of warming by the end of the century.

In other words, as Le Monde puts it (they publish articles in English now):

Quote

[...] the net-zero emissions commitments made put the planet on a warming trajectory of 2.5°C by the end of the century – and this is only in the best-case scenario.

Which means that Wallace-Wells's overall optimism is quite surprising. For instance, he writes:

Quote

Two degrees is not inevitable; both better and worse outcomes are possible.

Given the above, I don't see how one can conclude that there are better outcomes possible... This sentence is misleading, if we're being generous. Also, not sure why +2,5°C turns into +2°C throughout the article... Seems sloppy... or worse.

To be fair with Wallace-Wells, his entire article is rather balanced. Crucially, he does acknowledge that

Quote

At this point, they are mostly paper pledges, few of them binding enough in the short term to look like real action plans rather than strategies of smiling delay.

Nonetheless, he inexplicably goes on to write:

Quote

And yet it still marks a new era for climate action that a vast majority of world leaders have felt pressed to make them — by the force of protest, public anxiety and voter pressure, and increasingly by the powerful logic of national self-interest. What used to look like a moral burden is now viewed increasingly as an opportunity, so much so that it has become a source of geopolitical rivalry. As prime minister, Boris Johnson talked about making the United Kingdom the “Saudi Arabia of wind power,” [...]

Having to take a declaration of Boris Johnson at face value to be optimistic isn't exactly good news. Macron's declaration of the "end of abundance" is also hilariously taken out of context btw.

I guess one way to look at it is that if you really super-badly want to be optimistic at all costs, you can always find reasons to be. But they'll be terrible reasons.

I guess the "news" is that it's totally possible for humanity to avoid the apocalypse if everyone makes good on their promises. Or, to put it differently, that we'll probably not turn Earth into Venus after all.
Well, I guess that's something... ? Maybe-ish? Having perused the UN report itself, there does seem to be the beginning of a plan to avoid the very worst-case scenario, which is, let's remember, making the planet uninhabitable to humans.

Not that I'm not too pessimistic about the long-term survival of humanity or the planet's biosphere either, for much darker (but much more realistic) reasons myself. But ending the article on the idea we're "halfway there" is grotesque. We're only starting to talk about what needs to be done to avoid complete collapse by the end of the century. That's not being halfway up the hike and more like having finished packing.

Writing that "[...] we have cut expected warming almost in half in just five years." borders on disinformation. We have done no such thing ; our leaders have only promised to do so. I personally hope we can do better than trusting the likes or Johnson or Macron.

[ThinkerX]

The two biggest plusses I saw - both of which I had been wondering about for a while now - was the decline in coal and the increase in 'green energy,' both of which have 'bent the curve' away from the worst-case scenario. And that is with these trends only really taking for less than a decade now. Keep it up for another decade...and it'll be ugly, but not humanity ending ugly.

[Wade1865]

Brothers in Christ -- how serious is the climate situation?

Hear me out. We could "introduce" democracy to the PRC; butcher the state and portion it up into more manageable bites; then, ban their use of fossil fuels, new construction, other development, et al. Moreover, we could also reestablish their one-child policy, expediting its inevitable population implosion and ending their growing conspicuous consumption. Not only would this marginalize our one remaining competitor, it would buy the earth more time; if we're serious enough. In other words,

两只鸟一块石头

[The Anti-Targ]

Probably only really kills one bird, which (spoiler alert), would not be the climate change bird. And I'm not entirely sure what the other bird is that you are trying to kill. Though killing it might have a flow on effect that causes a global collapse which may end up reducing GHG emissions. So maybe it will kill two birds but in a different way than planned, perhaps?

[Wade1865]

8 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

Probably only really kills one bird, which (spoiler alert), would not be the climate change bird. And I'm not entirely sure what the other bird is that you are trying to kill. Though killing it might have a flow on effect that causes a global collapse which may end up reducing GHG emissions. So maybe it will kill two birds but in a different way than planned, perhaps?

The Anti-Targ -- nah; it would decisively kill both birds, subject to enforcing the stated policy of forced primitivization. US combat power could de-industrialize the state entirely and, of course, leave some of the rest of the world in the same position, which would be an added bonus in this context. Couple this with Uncle Joe's dedicated intent to move the US away from fossil fuels, and the world would eventually see a substantial net decrease in pollution. 

Of course, this is an extreme measure; faceitious, in case it wasn't obvious; but, if the situation is as dire as some people believe, let's do it ... in time, nature will heal.

[The Anti-Targ]

But Joe can't afford to have the climate deniers return to legislative power, which seems reasonably likely in 2022, and then further cemented by gaining executive power in 2024. So that means not only imposing external authoritarian control over China in place of the CCP authoritarian control, but also, and possibly more urgently, imposing benevolent dictatorship and an end to [the facade of] democracy in the USA, which would also be needed in Europe, though possibly less urgently(?). Russia seems to be imploding all by itself, so perhaps can be left to its own devices for the time being.

Basically what's needed, if shit is really going sideways, is the establishment of a global environmentalist totalitarian hegemony. If not this decade, then perhaps within the next two. 

[Wade1865]

4 minutes ago, The Anti-Targ said:

...which would also be needed in Europe, though possibly less urgently(?)... 

The Anti-Targ -- don't worry about Europe, they'll do just fine this winter

[Varysblackfyre321]

11 hours ago, Wade1865 said:

Brothers in Christ -- how serious is the climate situation?

Hear me out. We could "introduce" democracy to the PRC; butcher the state and portion it up into more manageable bites; then, ban their use of fossil fuels, new construction, other development, et al. Moreover, we could also reestablish their one-child policy, expediting its inevitable population implosion and ending their growing conspicuous consumption. Not only would this marginalize our one remaining competitor, it would buy the earth more time; if we're serious enough. In other words,

两只鸟一块石头

So if climate change is so serious why don’t we kill ourselves in a nuclear war with China?

[Luzifer's right hand]

Here in Austria on the 30th of Oktober it did not cool down below 20°C at a weather station at 1113 m above sea level. At another station at 1767 m above sea level they measured 25,1 °C during the day. Unprecedented temperatures for this time of the year. A fitting end to the hottest October on record(also a very dry one). Thing started blooming, trees are growing leaves again and mosquitoes are breeding. 

[Ring3r]

Money talks.  The obscenely wealthy listen.  They seem to be talking out of the sides of their mouths, and nobody in academia can get a research paper funded unless it supports the message. No surprise that the approved research all says one thing.

I would probably pay a lot more attention to this topic if all of the highest prestige people on the planet, regardless of politics, didn't keep buying beach-front property.

That's all nonsense, of course.  Science, research, expert opinions....they're all completely immune from influence, regardless of the dollar value attached

It's not like we just finished a 20-year war in a country with the largest lithium deposits ever discovered (for real, go to Afghanistan, the whole place smells like a battery).  That's completely unrelated to powerful people trying to push the whole planet towards lithium-based batteries. Nobody in power could possibly try to subvert the truth to try and profit.  People are just too nice for that to happen.

 

/S

[Liffguard]

2 hours ago, Ring3r said:

Nobody in power could possibly try to subvert the truth to try and profit. /S

A perfect encapsulation of the forces behind climate change denialism, and yet you've somehow come to the exact opposite conclusion. Amazing.

[The Anti-Targ]

I thought a war was mostly being fought in Aghanistan before the Li battery - EV craze took off, and if I'm not mistaken the people who were in control of Afghanistan before the war are... back in control of Afghanistan, so...

[Larry of the Lawn]

6 hours ago, Ring3r said:

Money talks.  The obscenely wealthy listen.  They seem to be talking out of the sides of their mouths, and nobody in academia can get a research paper funded unless it supports the message. No surprise that the approved research all says one thing.

I would probably pay a lot more attention to this topic if all of the highest prestige people on the planet, regardless of politics, didn't keep buying beach-front property.

That's all nonsense, of course.  Science, research, expert opinions....they're all completely immune from influence, regardless of the dollar value attached

It's not like we just finished a 20-year war in a country with the largest lithium deposits ever discovered (for real, go to Afghanistan, the whole place smells like a battery).  That's completely unrelated to powerful people trying to push the whole planet towards lithium-based batteries. Nobody in power could possibly try to subvert the truth to try and profit.  People are just too nice for that to happen.

 

/S

The fucking oil companies have recognized anthropogenic global warming since at least the 70's.  

Thinking that the US acting ahead of time to secure the next valuable non-renewable resource as the world churns through petroleum is some kind of argument against global warming is myopic.  

The companies extracting lithium are in bed with the oil companies, and sometimes are the oil companies themselves.