Slashdot Mirror
More Than 15,000 Scientists From 184 Countries Issue 'Warning To Humanity' (www.cbc.ca)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBC.ca: More than 15,000 scientists around the world have issued a global warning: there needs to be change in order to save Earth. It comes 25 years after the first notice in 1992 when a mere 1,500 scientists issued a similar warning. This new cautioning -- which gained popularity on Twitter with #ScientistsWarningToHumanity -- garnered more than 15,000 signatures. William Ripple of Oregon State University's College of Forestry, who started the campaign, said that he came across the 1992 warning last February, and noticed that this year happened to mark the 25th anniversary. Together with his graduate student, Christopher Wolf, he decided to revisit the concerns raised then, and collect global data for different variables to show trends over the past 25 years. Ripple found: A decline in freshwater availability; Unsustainable marine fisheries; Ocean dead zones; Forest losses; Dwindling biodiversity; Climate change; Population growth. There was one positive outcome, however: a rapid decline in ozone depletion. One of the potential solutions is to stabilize the population. If we reduce family size, consumption patterns don't rise as much. And that can be done by empowering girls and women, providing sexual education and education on family planning.
So, other than driving a Prius and moving to a sardine can style apartment in the inner city, what realistically can people do as something against AGW? There is tons of talk, but all of it seems to just be blaming people.
It reminds me of the town I live in, where water rationing was killing property values, because the older oak trees were dying. However, it was found that the golf court down the road was using 75% or more of the water, so all the losses in dead trees and cracked foundations due to ground shrinkage did nothing. Similar with the rice paddies.
The people who can do something won't... and promptly blame it on the people who can't do anything about AGW.
If you actually look at some of the statistics published at COP25, you'll see that US and EU emissions are down but GDP is up.
The most rapid growth in emissions is in India, which still has less emissions per person than China does. The rapid increase in pollution, greenhouse emissions, and climate impacts is mostly due to China and India, but even if we reduce it now, some of the gasses take 100 years to clear out of the atmosphere, although other shorter lived gasses are more impactful but have shorter lifespans.
The most obvious other solution is not population growth, which isn't driving either of those top two contributors to the environment, but is literally faster phasing out of harmful energy and food usage including farming, by more efficient energy sources and cracking down on illegal overuse of pesticides and crop waste burning. Note that crop waste can be processed into stored fuel with minimal impacts, but the open burning of crop waste accelerates many other processes.
Solution for this means artificial price supports for crop waste, so that it is converted into appropriate fuel, and reducing all tax exemptions and exclusions for all fossil fuels.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
The reason is the observation that the lengthened basic education for women leads to the age of the first birth being higher. This leads to lower number of children, on average. Only a few years more education for women can lead to stabilization of the number of children per family to two, for example. On the other hand, some nations seem to be afraid of going extinct within a few hundred of years. So, for each according to their needs and solutions according to their problems.
Nope. If the theory disagrees with experiment, then it is Wrong. It doesn't matter how many voices sign the petition for the theory; it must still be rejected.
Among those included in this list of Climate Scientists:
Davis, Joanne - Australian
Daweti, Nokuthula - Student
de Clercq, Deon - Earthling
Hamilton, Ava - independent documentary producer/citizen scientist
Jara, Andrea - Colombian
Thapa, Lal - Asst. Professor of Alien Invasion
It is very hard to take this (or their agenda) seriously when they won't even do the basic science of vetting a list of "scientists".
http://scientistswarning.fores... I really wish reporters would link to the actual articles they talk about. Sort of like when they jump all over someone's statements but don't actually quote what the person said.
Solution for this means artificial price supports for crop waste, so that it is converted into appropriate fuel, and reducing all tax exemptions and exclusions for all fossil fuels.
And there you go, mixing your political position with the scientific conclusion. This is what causes science denial.
Does the science mandate your position? Are there better solutions available?
I strongly suspect that the best solution is to turn our attention to improvements in technology. This is already happening in the US with the onset of electric vehicles - this will reduce fossil fuel consumption considerably, and serve as a model and testing ground for other nations.
We then have to find energy sources to replace our current fossil fuel use.
I strongly suspect that the best solution will be rooftop solar. This is already happening in the US with the cost of rooftop solar dropping precipitously over the last 15 years.
Both of these solutions would dramatically reduce our carbon footprint, and both would benefit from improvements in technology.
Perhaps we should look to science to solve the problem, instead of identity politics?
The people and organizations who should care, because they have the money, power, and influence to do something about it: Rich people, global corporations.
Why they don't care: Short-term profits, keeping shareholders happy, is more important than what'll happen a couple hundred years from now. That's 'someone else's problem to deal with', and these people will all be dead and gone by then; why, so far as they're concerned, should they even care?
Who else is standing in the way of doing something about this: Dominionists, and fundamentalist religious organizations. So far as they're concerned, The Earth is a 'temporary' home for humanity, and is therefore expendable, as is all other life on it. Dominionists in particular are more interested in accelerating the destruction of the Earth, because they fervently believe that the sooner they can bring about the Apocalypse, the sooner Zombie Jesus will 'return' to the Earth to 'take them all home'. So anything they can do to make Earth uninhabitable faster is all to the good so far as they're concerned.
Then there's the Average Person; they're too busy just trying to deal with their day-to-day lives (and in some cases, too literally trying to stay alive) to even think about anything that's going to happen even 10 years from now, let alone several hundred years from now. Again, that gets waved off as 'someone elses problem', because they'll all be dead and gone before that even happens. Sure, they think about what their theoretical grandchildren may have to deal with -- so maybe they turn off the lights when they leave a room for more than a few minutes, or put off that errand they need to do until later. But it's all a drop in the bucket that really has no effect, not even if everyone does the same.
Overall there needs to be top-down actions taken, world-wide, in every country that creates a large enough fraction of the total problems. Seeing as we can't seem to get enough nations to agree on how to handle problems a fraction of the size and scope, good bloody luck with that. Add to that resistance the fact that The Rich, the aforementioned religious types, rich, influential religious types, and disinterested greedy corporations aren't going to be cooperative, and the likelihood that anything more than just 'feel-good', overall ineffective things being done becomes rather small. What we really need to have happen first, is a change of hearts and minds across the board; we need everyone to actually give a damn, right down to the core of their being. If someone's got a recipe to make that happen, I'm all ears.
Every thing the coal industry had has been stripped and sold. From profitable mines, to equipment, to river front real estate, to scenic valleys, to pension funds to ... every last thing the coal industry had has been stripped and raided and stolen and sold away.
The last thing remaining is the vote of these desperate people, stuck in a dead end job, too old to retrain, in isolated communities. A country as rich as ours should be able to take care of them. After all the coal industry built America, they contributed significantly to the wealth we are enjoying today. We should be able to buy any mine that is losing money, keep all the miners on the payroll to properly shut the mine down, cap off, and close it. Absorb them all into fish and wildlife service and park service and do conservation work till they all retire. There are not that many left, and we need their expertise to close the mines safely.
But that is not going to happen. Their vote is valuable, and keeping them angry and desperate is the way to get it.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
I see, it's always get rid of someone else's children, isn't it ? We can just "empower girls and women" in THOSE cultures to abort their babies.
It's odd that when an article suggests reducing the rate of population growth, a certain subset of radical conservatives immediately starts shouting "We need to abort their babies!"
What the actual article says is taking the step of:
So, why is it that you suddenly start shouting about abortion?
Do you want to actually reduce the rate of abortion? That turns out to be really simple: abortion rates decrease when people have access to birth control. Simple.
Boy, it would be really convenient of all these simple cultures would just stop procreating in the first place. Maybe the WHO could just pay some group to just sterilize them, like they did in Kenya? But you know what would really "eliminate" the problem? What if we just eliminated those humans, so they don't burn all those fuels without scrubbers, and pollute those lakes, and cut down the forests for fields to grow food? After all, those leftists are looking out for the "greater good", so it's ok if it's nonconsentual.
What part of "access to education and voluntary family planning" is it that you are referring to here?
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The Club of Rome published this book in 1972. It is based on a computer simulation of using resources and population to evaluate how long humanity can exist in this system. At that time the tipping point was about 2030. The model used has been re-evaluated many time since. The latest study has added social stability and things are not looking good.
Corporation and the rish have not done anything for the last 45 years, do you really think thay would do anything now "to reduce their profits"?