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Planet At Risk of Heading Towards Irreversible 'Hothouse Earth' State (vice.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: What we do in the next 10-20 years will determine whether our planet remains hospitable to human life or slides down an irreversible path to what scientists in a major new study call "Hothouse Earth" conditions. Hothouse Earth is an apocalyptic nightmare where the global average temperatures is 4 to 5 degrees Celsius higher (with regions like the Arctic averaging 10 degrees C higher) than today, according to the study, "Trajectories of the Earth System in the Anthropocene," published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Sea levels would eventually be 10-60 meters higher as much of the world's ice melts. In these conditions, large parts of the Earth would be uninhabitable. Cutting carbon emissions to limit climate change to 2 degrees C, as proposed in the Paris climate agreement, won't be enough to avoid a "Hothouse Earth," said co-author Johan Rockstrom, executive director of Stockholm Resilience Centre. The reality is that global temperatures aren't driven by human emissions of carbon alone, says Rockstrom -- natural systems such as forests and oceans also play a major role. If global warming reaches 2 degrees C it could trigger a feedback, or "tipping element," in one or more of our natural systems and drive further warming, Rockstrom told Motherboard. To put that into perspective, the recent heat waves and wildfires are being linked to climate change that has raised the global average temperature 1 degree C. The researchers conclude the study on a more uplifting note, saying: "We have the knowledge and ability to act. This is within our control." There are three main areas of action that need to be taken within the next two decades. "The top priority in the coming decade is to aggressively cut carbon emissions and decarbonize our energy systems as quickly as possible," reports Motherboard. "The second priority is to halt deforestation and conversion of nature areas into agricultural production. Forests and other natural areas currently absorb 25 percent of our carbon emissions and this needs to grow." The third action is "to continue to develop technologies to pull carbon from the atmosphere and safely store it for thousands of years." While this last action can be costly, we're starting to see some companies give it a try. A startup called Climeworks recently inaugurated the first system that captures CO2 from the air and converts the emissions into stone, thus ensuring they don't escape back into the atmosphere for the next millions of years.
US emissions are down whilst EU - and China, and India - emissions are up. I'm sure this will get down-modded since it doesn't pay homage to the proper models, but facts are facts: and when facts and beliefs/models collide - facts win.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
you have to take care of their basic needs first. In America 80% of us live paycheck to paycheck. When you're living hand to mouth you don't really care about 20 years from now.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
That so-called "apocalyptic nightmare" is actually the warm, wet, and mild conditions that existed through most of the past 50 million years, the climate that led to the spectacular success of mammals and primates. Not only is it "hospitable" to human life, it is more hospitable than the cold and dry climate we have had over the last million years and that climate activists want to perpetuate.
Short of global thermonuclear war, there is nothing we can do over the next 10-20 years that will have any appreciable impact on long term climate: there is no conceivable political or economic way that China, India, or African nations would agree to eliminating greenhouse gas emissions. On the other hand, developed nations are already eliminating dependence on fossil fuels as fast as possible for economic reasons.
in which the interior is as hot as molten lava
It was much warmer than this before. Then it cooled. Therefore the "irreversible" claim has already been falsified.
https://xkcd.com/1732/
Yeah, I know it's a cartoon and not precise scale but it's pretty blatant at the end of it, bad things are coming.
Combine this, with the recent discussion of methane finally escaping in siberia.
https://www.google.com.au/sear...
It's only a matter of time, we're well past the point of no return. I can't really fathom a good analogy, perhaps the titanic? Except 10,000 times larger and moving much, much slower but we're only 6 feet from the ice burg. We're gonna take a little bit to hit it, but rest assured we absoloutely will be hitting that ice burg.
Don't breed, having kids in the future that's coming is only more depressing.
The upside is it will be so obvious that Republicans cannot deny it's happening.
However, they'll probably blame it on Democrats somehow, maybe claiming that catering to LGBTQ made God angry, who then baked Earth as punishment. You think I'm joking, don't you?
Table-ized A.I.
If we actually are responsible for getting ourselves here, then we can definitely get ourselves out of it.
So tell us, which one of your doomsday scenarios have come truth yet? Ice Caps should have been melted like two times over, a couple of cities are supposed to be under water by now, and little baby seals should be clubbing themselves due to going nuts from all the extra heat they have to experience.
I can accept that there might be a climate problem and that we might have some hand in it, but this constant doomsday mealy mouthing is damaging the cause and driving wedges. And since they can't get their predictions right, there is no reason to trust their conclusions about the evidence either! If you were actually about saving the planet you would stop with the garbage.
This all smells like the same pseudo-science against fat and cholesterol from teh 1950's where a politician made a final decision to say its all bad, caused food mfg's to make fat free garbage and to begin substituting it all with sugars, corn syrups, and alternative food science calling milk bad and eggs death sentences in a bite!
Bigger cars and bigger houses with powerful air-conditioning on one side (which caused global warming in the first place), tropical heat on the other side of the divide.
Just more propaganda.
I don't believe a word of it. They have not proven themselves trustworthy nor capable of making such predictions with any level of confidence. I won't vote for anyone or any thing that is based on or gives credence to such unproven, unmitigated horseshit. I will combat this lunacy in every way I can.
It's horseshit because none of this crap is based on real science. It's political/ideological theater and propaganda with a "science-y" theme and window-dressing. It's no more hard science than the old TV toothpaste ads that had an actor wearing a lab coat and stethoscope saying "nine out of ten dentists agree".
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
I wonder if there was a Triceratops Malthus. I wonder if there was a Triceratops you.
It's a hoax started by the Brachiosaurs. So much for science.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The dinosaurs said the same thing about the Ice Age and they were just as wrong. Sure it wiped the dinosaurs out but the Ice Age eventually ended didn't it?!
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
US outsources not only production but also polution.
We've had 5-10 years left to save the planet for the last 30 years or so... The numbers may change, but the — unsubstantiated — message is always the same...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
While I would like to agree, we kind of bumbled our way into this one. While I dont think we are quite there yet, I'm not so sure we are ready to tackle a runaway scenario.
In 66 years, 1903-1969, we went from the first powered flight to landing on the moon. And the pace of scientific and engineering progress has accelerated since then. Much of that aerospace progress was made in the era of paper, pencil and slide rules. Our smart watches have more computation power than 1969 Apollo mission computers.
Even President W liked the umbrella idea. Definitely better than Cheney's moon mirrors.
But what happens when hackers get in and hold the planet hostage? What if Bruce Willis is too old to pass the pre-launch physical and can't save the planet?
We already have an alternate power source to avoid this - nuclear power. But rather than use this pre-existing power technology which solves the problem, environmentalists insisted that we dismantle that existing solution, and roll the dice on hopefully developing new and untested power sources in time to avert disaster.
Nuclear power doesn't have to be the end-game. All we need to do is to replace our fossil fuel power plants with nuclear plants to arrest CO2 emissions and buy us more time. Then we can develop renewables at our leisure, and use those to phase out nuclear power as they (and battery technology) become capable of handling our base load requirements.
The low range of the time estimate (10 years) is coincidentally about the amount of time it takes to complete construction of a large nuclear plant. Let's see if environmentalists read this news about the coming doomsday scenario, and take it a a sign to drop opposition to nuclear power. Or if they'd rather let all life on Earth go extinct, than let renewable power temporarily take a back seat to nuclear power.
It's only a matter of time, we're well past the point of no return.
Really? Well someone should have told that to the planet in the early Eocene then when temperatures were +12-14C above current levels . Somehow it reversed that trend and cooled down considerably.
Global warming is a serious problem and we absolutely do need to combat it because if we don't it will cause massive political destabilization as food production changes, populations move, water resources change, cities flood etc. However, claiming that it's the "end of the world" because it is irreversible and will make the planet inhospitable to human life is complete crap and counterproductive because it leads to dispair rather than action.
You don't reduce heat energy, you move it by radiating it to space and/or block it before it arrives from the Sun. The Earth is not a closed system.
In theory it is quite possible, in practice, well there's a lot of inertia in something as large as the Earth's climate and the odds of screwing up seem high.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
+1 for entropy (no pun intended), but I think a technical solution won't be about reducing the amount to heat people are generating. The sun is by far the dominant energy driver in this system; the heat generated by people is miniscule by comparison. Any solution will have to be one that alters the equilibrium point between energy absorbed and energy radiated. That's how we got here, and that's our only proven technology for altering the balance.
A republic cannot succeed till it contains a certain body of men imbued with the principles of justice and honour.
I've read that a human population with all modern technologies is fully sustainable to a limit of 500 million. How far past that sustainable limit are we now, and still living in denial of this 800-pound gorilla sitting on top of the solution to nearly all the problems of human civilization?
Good luck with that denial, people. The population reduction is coming one way or another....
The associated period of massive carbon injection into the atmosphere has been estimated to have lasted no longer than 20,000 years. The entire warm period lasted for about 200,000 years. Global temperatures increased by 5–8 C. The carbon dioxide was likely released in two pulses, the first lasting less than 2,000 years. Such a repeated carbon release is in line with current global warming. A main difference is that during the Paleocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum, the planet was essentially ice-free. However, the amount of released carbon, according to a recent study, suggest a modest 0.2 gigatonnes per year (at peaks 0.58 gigatonnes); humans today add about 10 gigatonnes per year. "Yeah we're screwed". Original article here
... the more plausible scenario. The reverse albedo effect is already taking effect and we're still adding to the carbon circle big time. Trumpistan and the wider world is still blissfully unaware of what's happening, as are the idiots here in my country dragging their heels with solar and driving ever larger luxury Audi's and Porsches and Daimlers, each and everybody on his own, at the same time.
The current heatwave in Germany beats everything we've seen so far. It feels like I'm on the equator. Today they forecast 37ÂC, the highest temperature yet in my region and it's only going to get worse.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
True that. Like in the old joke.
Two planets meet. Said the one
"You look terrible, what's wrong?"
"Oh, I have homo sapiens."
"Ah. Don't worry, I had that too. It's gonna pass."
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Umm... you DO know the law of entropy, yes?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Just read the comments here and realize we have arrived at stage 3 of the 4-stages of climate disaster denial:
1: "Oh, there is no such thing as a climate change!"
2: "What you see there is just a variation in weather, not climate!"
3: "Well, yes, there is a change, but it's natural, nothing human makes."
4: "Ok, the change is real and we're fucked, but it's too late to do anything anyway."
The great thing about any of those 4 steps is that you needn't change anything in your behaviour. The only thing that kinda bugs me is how quickly we arrived at 3, I was hoping that I'd at least be on my way out before we arrive at "we're fucked", because back in stage 1, I did actually care about the planet. In the meantime I stopped caring. What for? I am old. I have no kids. And if you can't be assed to keep this planet able to sustain life so your kids can live, why the fuck should I care?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I'd take a few Fukushimas for one not-apocalypse. Or maybe just end it already, there seem to be a lot more people who communicate the way you do every year and I'm not seeing a bright light. So yeah you're right.
I'll believe them when they stop using private jets and fueling their multiple McMansions. In short, I'll believe it's a crisis when the people who say it's a crisis act like it's a crisis.
Sorry to disappoint you, but temperature is proportional to fourth root of solar irradiation, space reflectors are about the most inefficient way to go about it imaginable.
Yes, we can do something to reduce solar irradiation but that doesn't do anything to slow down ocean acidification which may end up being as big a problem as global warming plus reducing solar irradiation will also reduce the amount of photosynthesis going on which doesn't help either.
China has a very low birthrate - well under replacement. India, in the last couple years, has become sub-replacement. Mexico is essentially at replacement. So I don't know which "high birthrate" countries you're talking about. Essentially the only countries with high growth populations are in sub-Saharan Africa plus a handful of poor oddballs around the world (Pakistan being the largest of these).
source - note that world average replacement fertility is 2.3, lower in rich countries, higher in poor ones.
I would take the climate alarmists more seriously if they would consider investigating climate engineering methods which could cheaply and quickly reduce world temperatures. But no, this is NEVER discussed. The only solution they ever suggest is the infinitely more expensive and painful "shiver in the dark". It makes you think their core motivation is for human beings to feel guilty for existing, not to actually solve the climate change problem.
Bullshit. Runaway warming is a risk. Risk = Damage X Likelihood. If the damage is an unlivable planet not likelihood is acceptable.
Human activity pushed the climate in one direction, it can push it in the other direction as well via science and engineering.
No, not necessarily because the climate isn't linear. Imagine a ball on top of a flat-topped hill. You can push the ball around with little energy and get it back to the starting point.
Now you give the ball just a bit too much energy and it rolls all the way down the hill. You might need several orders of magnitude more energy to get it back to the starting point now than you put in.
If climate is more like that, then there's no engineering we could achieve to move it back.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Plant forest When grown, cut trees and Burry deep in earth...
Too many nations refuse to cut their coal. Infact, we 100s more coal plants coming over the next couple of years.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
EU has gone down over the last 20 years. They have plateaued recently, but they are not growing.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Either way, life will continue, adapt, and evolve.
Haven't 'they' been saying if we don't act now it's too late .. since 2000?
https://goo.gl/x3G2Cy
Sure. Think we'll get any wiser just 'cause Summers get insufferably hot, tornados and hurricanes going haywire and island nations cease to exist? Of course you'll still hear it, we'll just be talking at a higher level. Of water, not quality.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Really? Go study thermodynamics full time for four years, then see if you grok the bullshit you mushrooms are being fed. Sadly the average Joe doesn't have the skills to see through the bullshit. Atmospheric adiabatic compression of the atmosphere by gravity causes the warmth attributed to "greenhouse gasses". Global warming funding should go towards solving the worlds real problems, like plastic polluting the worlds oceans or improving water quality in third world countries.
Really? that say more about your ability than anything else
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
there is no-one stopping you from innovating or creating new industries....
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
If shoppers were willing to pay the real price for things made in their country then there would be no need to outsource or use automation. The target is to make everything as cheap as possible for the masses.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
I hope so. If, and only if, the companies wanting to build those power plants also take responsibility for dismantling them after use. Now, that takes a lot of money that they maybe don't have yet, so here's a proposal: The money the power plant generates goes into a fund that's locked for cleanup purposes. Once that fund hits the amount of money needed to dismantle and dispose of that power plant, they can have the rest of the money.
I'm kinda tired of companies suddenly going poof whenever power plants reach their EOL and it's time to cover the cost of getting rid of that radioactive pile of junk.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Where the fuck do you get that bullshit from?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Yes, the earth had been warmer in the distant past. And yes, life did exist back then. No human life, but if that's not a requirement, you're absolutely right.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Yeah, same here, but I had to realize that being 100m above sea level is just too high up to see the seaside come to my turf any time soon. Still, I think it's a good idea to get a shotgun to make sure those that are 5m above sea level stay where they are when the tide comes in...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's always been stage 4 for me. You see my problem is not with climate change. Instead of a global initiative to reward clean non polluting countries with better trade deals, it's a bait and switch to ramp up plastic production in China with their powerful lobbying, and blame American consumers for the products that should never have been pushed on them, which serve no purpose that is of any benefit to them, or the Earth.
You see we could fix all this right now. The globalists have no interest in the environment. They see you as the pollutant.
You know what I'm gonna do?
I'm gonna get myself a 1967 Cadillac Eldorado convertible
Hot pink, with whale skin hubcaps
And all leather cow interior
And big brown baby seal eyes for head lights (yeah)
And I'm gonna drive in that baby at 115 miles per hour
Gettin' 1 mile per gallon
Sucking down Quarter Pounder cheeseburgers from McDonald's
In the old fashioned non-biodegradable styrofoam containers
And when I'm done sucking down those greaseball burgers
I'm gonna wipe my mouth with the American flag
And then I'm gonna toss the styrofoam containers right out the side
And there ain't a goddamn thing anybody can do about it
You know why, because we've got the bomb, that's why
Two words, nuclear fucking weapons, OK?
Russia, Germany, Romania, they can have all the democracy they want
They can have a big democracy cakewalk
Right through the middle of Tiananmen Square
And it won't make a lick of difference
Because we've got the bombs, OK?
-- Denis Leary - Asshole
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The world is always predicted to become hell in the lifetime of those who are making the predictions. You never hear about predictions that the world will go to hell in the next millennia and that we should prepare for it. It is like that anti-tiger rock in Simpsons that keeps tigers away. If you believe in it, when the world does not go to hell, you feel like the remedy worked, even though it might have cost you a trillion. Thus we averted skin cancers by closing ozone holes. We avoided a nuclear war which would have killed us for sure in the 70s. We postponed second coming of Jesus by repenting for our sins.
Heroes die once, cowards live longer.
George Carlin said it best. "Save the planet? The planet isn't going anywhere.....we are." https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
No, it's definitely the lack of pirates.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
This will continue as long as the US can force countries to sell for dollars. Remember Saddam? He sold his oil for Euros. The rest of the petrol exporting countries quickly learned that it's not healthy to do so.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Well, it would be a start if we at least got people to finally accept that we should do something instead of just keep moving towards the abyss.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
While it is true that EU emission rose and US emission are slightly more down, per capita the US emission per capita ~16t are slightly more than double the one per capita in EU ~7t (2014 numbers sorry, difficult to come back to all country 2017/2018 nubmers https://data.worldbank.org/ind...). That is the ONE measure which is far more telling than absolute change from years to years. 2% up to 7t*500 million is still vastly less than16*300 million even if that country emit slightly less CO2 due to change from coal to natural gas. Both really should be massively going toward renewable or nuclear. Unfortunately this does not happen to go that way, so our grand children and their children gen screwed. But yes saying that emission is down for the US and up for the other hide the very inconvenient fact that per capita the US is still vastly ahead.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I think the planet has prior art to this, so don't bother trying to patent that idea.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It is interesting that my comment was down modded.
The lowest CO2 per energy produced comes from nuclear power. If the threat is irreversible "hot house" Earth if we don't reduce our CO2 output now then we need nuclear power.
A quick look through the discussion so far and most every comment that offers a solution has been moderated down. Those comments that are up moderated tend to be those that exclaim just how fucked we are. This is quite odd for a site that carries "news for nerds". I thought nerds were the kind of people that like to solve problems, or at least marvel on how a problem was solved.
If the problem is too much CO2 from human activity then we should seek solutions to reduce that. What are our options? Wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, and nuclear. So why get moderated down for offering those as solutions? Seems to me that this is because people must not want to solve the problem here.
There's a lot of articles that make it to the front page describing the problem. I guess that's "news for nerds". What I'd like to see are more articles that offer solutions, and more people willing to comment on the pros and cons of the offered solution. Nope, I'm getting more people just dwelling on the inevitable death of all life on the planet instead of problem solvers that want to stop it. That's fine, I guess, better the nihilists talk to each other in this echo chamber than make another protest holding up those working on a solution.
Slashdot is not what it once was. Maybe all these goth types will kill themselves or wise up and we can discuss solutions here again.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Umm... you do know that plants (you know, the stuff we, and that other stuff we eat, eat) need sunlight to grow, yes?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Much as I disapprove of the tone of aliquis' contribution, I agree with the sentiment. We very much do need to get our shit together... and that means we do not have time for bullshit feel-good measures or false solutions, and a lot of those are coming from the left, at least where I am at. They seem to hate solutions that don't hurt. They love to go after cars, for instance. Should we implement their proposal to severely curb and/or tax the use of cars for personal transportation, with an enormous impact on our lives and our economy, for a projected 5% reduction in CO2 emissions... when there are much bigger and cheaper gains to be had elsewhere? No, for them the automobile remains the symbol of individual wastefulness, and it is first and foremost in any of their plans.
If they had their way, our country and sea would now be filled with windmills... the first-gen kind that are already end-of-life and are now being torn down because they are inefficient and far too expensive to maintain. And perhaps we do need new nukes, at least for a while. Ask the French how to do this. And while the world is moving towards gas, we are moving away from it, with a plan to have all houses heated electrically in a few decades, while we don't really even know how to do that efficiently yet. This will come at a massive cost to homeowners... if we can even find enough people to do the necessary work. Yeah, we need to do this eventually, but (like with these windmills), a more gradual shift is better since you get to develop the technology as you go along.
The few sensible measures proposed by the left were: subsidies on solar to encourage development and adoption, and the push to phase out coal plants in favour of gas and renewables. The latter proposal was sadly fought succesfully by the "idiot right", who greenlit brand new coal plants which were thankfully cancelled just before completion. Recently our left and right got together to come up with an energy agreement, and sadly again it's a whole lot of nothing. The left got their symbolic wins they were after, and the right to got keep a few dirty things, so it's all largely symbolic. We have the Paris agreement, what we now need is to translate that into a sensible and realistic long term energy transition policy. That won't be forthcoming anytime soon, I suspect, not until the right and the left shape up and get smart.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
That already happens. There is already a government mandated cleanup fund for every plant to be decommissioned, so no worries.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Not sure about China and India but the USA is not exactly clean with respect to the EU. We have doubled our coals sales to various EU nations.
So the US is dirty because they sell the EU the stuff which they pollute with?
Cute. What's that make the EU?
Odd. How comes, then, that there's always a tab left the taxpayer has to pick up?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Downig CO from 20 Bazillion tons per year to 19 Bazillion tons per year is no big feat when other contients with similar population only do 10 bazillion tons. Yes, this is no time for finger-pointing and yes replacing nuclear with coal is nothing to brag about for Chief Mommy Angie of Germany, but there is no place for bragging either and definitely not for "following the US lead" in this camp. Seriously not.
The world as a whole needs to turn and do it fast, we're halfway into FUBAR territory on a global scale as it is. ... ... Stop it. There's a plan right there. Then you have my officlal permission to brag.
Are you still using a private car? Flying?
I'm not getting an ICE car, I'll keep using PT, carsharing (when I absolutely must) and my bike. Maybe an electric one some day. And I'll probalby use the bus to do my surfing vacation I had planned this year. Yes, it will be a 20 hour trip, but my eco balance will be lightyears above taking Ryanair to Southern Portugal.
Everyone should start thinking stuff like this and acting accordingly. Like, now.
My 2 Eurocents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I dare say we cannot do this "right now", we don't have the technology for it, nor the capacity to launch such a project.
That may happen. It however doesn't happen on a human time scale. Earth measures its birthdays per million years. So yeah, sure, in a million years we'll slide into an ice age. I'm glad that's a comforting thought to you.
There's a good chance that there actually is no solution because we're already past the tipping point or will pass it in a few years.
Pretty sure this is why we don't see any other civilizations in the galaxy as well. They destroy their origin world before being capable of spreading elsewhere.
What the US should be doing is building nuclear power plants
Won't happen. Politically it's just a non-starter for a variety of well understood reasons. People are scared of nuclear power regardless of whether or not they should be. I think you'll only see heavy use of nuclear fission in places where political dissent can be suppressed (like China) or where it is use of nuclear fission is already dominant (like France).
Get rid of fossil fool use for transport.
I think this will happen fairly naturally actually though perhaps not fast enough. I just bought a Chevy Bolt recently and it seems obvious to me that electrification of automobiles is inevitable. Just too many advantages in it. More power, better fuel economy, less maintenance, etc. We also already know how to electrify rail as well though I think diesel locomotives will be with us for quite a while yet. Ocean freight and air travel will be harder nuts to crack but fortunately are smaller nuts too. Solar and wind are already starting to displace fossil fuels on the grid though again perhaps not fast enough. Battery tech is finally getting to the point where they can compensate for the variability of solar and wind too.
##PoundMeToo
That's completely false. China alone generates almost twice what we do https://www.ucsusa.org/global-...
Now per capita they generate much less which is pretty scary given the rate they're developing at and the number of people they have.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
Not the GP AC here but I've got to chime in on your toxic comment here. Aliquis literally stated "Gas the left" and you "agree with the sentiment". That alone disqualifies you from being taken seriously as an adult, and your pretentious, highly biased personal political opinion rant about possible solutions will be left unheard. My advice to you is to get some basic values back first before you write on public forums, maybe think a bit more about whom you agree with and what you write before posting, or otherwise people will never take you seriously and you'll be more and more treated like a crackpot without realizing why. That's not a path you want to go down.
Yup, we're boiling the Pepe slowly.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
That's too many times "wolf" has been cried.
20? The first "AAAAAHHHHHH!!!! THE WORLD WILL END IN 20 YEARS!!!!" predictions were made before I was born 40 years ago. There's at least one new one every decade I think. So far all seem to have been totally wrong, as we are not living in a Mad Max hellscape.
Irreversible? There's always nuclear winter.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
If they weren't buying, then the US wouldn't be mining.
Simple supply and demand.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
We already have an alternate power source to avoid this - nuclear power.
Solves one problem but causes others. And it is a political non-starter. Fortunately solar and wind + batteries can take up most of the slack if we push them hard enough.
But rather than use this pre-existing power technology which solves the problem
Have you solved the nuclear waste problem? Do you have a reactor design that cannot render a large area uninhabitable in a serious failure? Have you figured out how to get the cost down to competitive levels without requiring government insurance guarantees? Have you figured out how to restore areas contaminated by the occasional but inevitable containment failures (ala Chernobyl and Fukishima)? Have you proven that new reactor designs are safer/cheaper/reliable? I'm just playing devil's advocate here but there are some serious issues with nuclear power which you can't just hand wave away.
You're quite right that nuclear in theory takes care of a good chuck of the carbon emissions problems but let's not pretend nuclear power doesn't bring it's own set of scary problems to the party. I actually agree that it's probably the least worst near term option but there are some pretty serious downsides to it which render it politically impossible in most places. And it isn't just environmentalists who have a problem with nuclear plants. Nobody really wants them nearby. NIMBY is pretty strong when it comes to something that carries even a small risk of catastrophic contamination.
roll the dice on hopefully developing new and untested power sources in time to avert disaster.
??? Any nuclear reactor design that improves on existing reactors is by definition new and untested because they haven't been deployed. Nuclear power in general is pretty well understood but new (and hopefully improved) reactor designs that we would likely want to use are still just past experimental. If you are referring to wind and solar those aren't new and untested so it's not clear what you are talking about.
Nuclear power doesn't have to be the end-game. All we need to do is to replace our fossil fuel power plants with nuclear plants to arrest CO2 emissions and buy us more time.
Nice theory. Probably even correct. But since it won't happen what is your next option?
Oh man, for a moment I was unsure. I'm glad that some anonymous coward on Slashdot ruled out any doubts about possible negative consequences of climate change based on his extensive expertise on everything sciency, using a cogent argument like yours. Brilliant!
You have clearly - whether you're aware of it or not - implied that the world's population isn't growing. Perhaps you should start over?
Well obviously only per capita is a useful measure.
Otherwise global warming would be solved by splitting up the big countries into smaller countries.
What's the net loss? Presumably, as temperatures rise, some parts of the earth that are currently uninhabitable will be come habitable.
China has a very low birthrate - well under replacement. India, in the last couple years, has become sub-replacement. Mexico is essentially at replacement. So I don't know which "high birthrate" countries you're talking about.
The relevant measure isn't today's replacement rates -- babies generally don't crawl across borders. Looking at birth statistics for people now approaching 30, India's birthrate was 4.0, China's was 2.6, and Mexico's was 3.7. We'll be dealing with the hangover from that era for quite some time. And even today's rates show that the globe's net population growth is generally constrained to developing countries, so migration pressures aren't going away any time soon.
Quote from the click bait article: "If global warming reaches 2 degrees C it could trigger a feedback, or "tipping element,"
All you need to see is the weasel word, "could" No one KNOWS. So, fear mongers have been fear mongering for 50 years on this topic (after fear mongering for 30 years that the earth was headed towards an ice age, which would be 1000X worse than a heat age). Now all of this is rank speculation, based on models that have never accurately predicted anything (every IPCC model has massively over estimated warming trends since the first report).
In what other field of human endeavor, does one get to generate models that can't accurately predict anything, speculate disaster with no evidence, and still get listened too? I clearly need to change fields.
Remember 20 years ago when Al Gore warned us we only had 5 years to act before all of this crap happened? Now, in another 50 years, I'm sure the Alarmist will be all about warning us that we only have another 10 years to act...
I'm sweating my ass off in an office heated to cozy 35C, you can have my share of heat, thank you very much.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Then you misunderstand. The sentiment being that a start would be to “get rid of the left”, in the sense of holding them up as the keepers of all that is holy and true in matters of climate change. Not even the GP AC took that statement literally, but did infer that the left is somehow synonymous with the solution to climate change. That is what I addressed. So lighten up.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Please stop this childish bickering about who is the real boogeyman. Truth is, this is a global problem and it needs a global solution. Everybody has to start working together to fix civilization, or the planet will break us.
Yes, it's not about saving the planet, it's about saving human civilization. The planet doesn't care and will recover. Hundreds of thousands or millions of years aren't much in astronomical scales. Evolution will do it's thing, life will go on, but it will happen without us because we are not destroying the planet - we are destroying the environment that made it possible for humans to thrive.
There IS NO SUCCESS RATE. FAIL!
https://wattsupwiththat.com/20...
MANY more here:
https://www.google.com/search?...
I heard a great point anyone might give some thought to. A paraphrase- "We can't control the weather, but we believe we can control the entire planet?" Consider the difference in scales that must exist between factors both known and unknown when comparing local/regonal events and a global system.
Not possible to delete carbon development economically without enough people who can afford the Tesla driven economy to make an impact. What makes it "Mission Impossible" are politicians driving oil, coal and gas field development.
ReForest while Old Growth trees burn in CA (US largest trees)...sounds too much like " all you have to do" politics. Maybe there could be a subsidy on burnt wood forest product development.
Carbon Mining (aka recapture) will payoff. Naturally and commercially its what capitalism does best. There's money to be made and a resource ripe for the picking. There's a reason the seat of Gov't is named ' The Capital' and it knows how to incentivize resource mining.
Lets see. .04/nighttime kwh and .18/daytime kwh, we can not afford to NOT buy these.
Led lighting.
Electric powertools (i.e. mower, trimmer, etc are all electric).
We have a 10KW solar system on our house. We generate more than we use
We drive a tesla.
I added extra insulation to the house.
We put in Aerogel based windows in several northern exposures (others did not need it).
We will be buying both geo-thermal HVAC upon losing our AC or Furnace.
And when powerwall comes, we will pick up 2 of those. To be honest, with electricity at
I would say that my family is doing more than our part.
But ignore that. America, like Europe, has 1 real weakness, which is transportation. Right now, both Europe's and America's transportation emissions have gone up. Europe's because they have bought 10 years worth of diesel cars that were cheating. So, Europe's calculations for transportation emissions are showing low (which explains why OCO2 shows issues with Europe's reported numbers and what it sees; OCO2 can see that there is MORE CO2 in Europe and much more esp. in China, than what is being reported; just can not tell us how much. ). America's transportation emissions have gone up and Trump's recent action may be the first one that will actually make things worse. The one good news for America is that Tesla is coming on strong and will likely destroy a number of ICE car sales. If this really happens, then it will force all car makers to switch to EVs, which will really drop America's emissions again. As it is, America is in the tops for adding AE PER CAPITA. IOW, we add a LOT more AE than China relative to the population, which is why electricity emissions continue to drop faster than China's and parts of Europe.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Every single one of us needs to switch off our computers, go outside, plant some beans and chard,
go outside and build nukes
FTFY
Have gnu, will travel.
I'm not a climate denier, but what kind of damage are we talking about here?
From the article
"If the threshold is crossed, the resulting trajectory would likely cause serious disruptions to ecosystems, society, and economies"
How serious? I mean , I guess I'm not all that bothered if I see the collapse of society any more then my own death ( All socieites collapse and all people die) If by end of my lifetime and we wind up being hunter gathers again, as I can tell there is zero I can do about it.
More to the point, what do these folks expect to be done about it and by who? Should we all advocate one government take over the whole world and fix the problem? Even if you had a single dictator in charge of the Globe ( aka won't happen) how would they maintain control and drop the carbon footprint quickly enough? nuke india and china to decrease it's population?
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
Therein lies the problem. No one will work together as long as it is beneficial to offload costs to the commons for their own selfish interests and economic advantage. Those countries that do work together to clean up their act will be outstripped by cheap energy/polluting countries.
When you get right down to it the main problems are globalization and population. That you can "make" goods cheaper on the other side of the world and ship them to the opposite side of the planet "cheaply" completely ignores the environmental cost of all of the vessels used to provide that logistical train, fuel it, support it, etc.. Furthermore, that goods need to be shipped in to support the population of a certain area just means there are too many people in that area.
A globally competitive market destroys the world. Take a look at this map: https://www.marinetraffic.com/...
Zoom out if necessary, and really look at that shit. Its fucking nuts. It can't be sustainable.
I have a sneaking suspicion that if any other species in the history of this planet achieved "intelligence" similar to humans they realized their threat to the existence of life on the planet and quickly re-engineered themselves back into a state of balance with nature, self-consciousness ejected from the corpus like a possessing demon.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
And in reality, US emissions are UP anyway. What's down is actually EU emissions! (Althoug also partially due to outsourcing to China.)
Citation needed.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
This would be an example of an engineer not thinking the issue all the way through. 'Cause you left out another formula.
Solar irradiation = food.
You reduce the amount of sunlight hitting the Earth, then you reduce the rate that plants grow. Which means you reduce our food supply.
Earth is an incredibly complex system. Any time you're tempted to try to explain everything with one simple formula, you're going to be missing several other incredibly important "formulas".
Well if you can figure out a way to reduce regulations on nuclear power without the cost cutting resulting in corner cutting and eventually a catastrophe then please share.
It's not an either or situation; even if we reduce regulation to the point that we have one fukushima-scale disaster every decade it would still be better than the amount of harm we're causing with fossil fuels. This is a case of selective risk aversion; you would rather have more cumulative harm caused on a daily basis than have one really big disaster every generation or so. It's stupid.
Luckily we don't even need to lower regulation that much though; there are plenty of things which could be done to massively reduce all the regulatory and legal hurdles without compromising safety.
Nuclear power is heavily regulated because it's really f***ing dangerous if you aren't watching it very carefully. The problem with fission reactors is that even the safest designs we know of require considerable oversight and regular expensive maintenance by very imperfect humans.
This is simply not true. The safest designs we have all default to a failsafe mode which requires no human intervention whatsoever. We just haven't been building any of those. The ones which ARE currently being built aren't quite as safe, but still orders of magnitude safer than the designs we've successfully been operating for 5+ decades.
Not to mention the waste problem, the nuclear weapons problems, the insurance problems, etc. Nuclear has some great benefits but it has some serious problems too which cannot be easily dismissed.
Waste is a solved problem which is again only being held up due to idiotic bickering and bungling by bureaucrats. Yucca mountain was designated in 1987. It took 15 goddamn years for the government to finally approve it, only for Obama to shitcan it another 9 years later. We are now at the 21 year mark - that's 2 DECADES that we could have been safely storing waste - all derailed thanks to politics.
On top of that, existing "waste" can be used as fuel for new generation reactors. You don't even have to move it to yucca; you can literally build a new reactor at the same site as an existing one, do an in-situ decommissioning of the existing reactor, and start feeding the waste into the new reactor. Instead of wasting money moving and buying it you get free fuel for decades.
Weapons have no relevance to reactors, and insurance is a non-issue. If you think either of them is some big impediment you'll have to explain why.
Any more complaints?
Nuclear is the safest.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Please stop this childish bickering about who is the real boogeyman. Truth is, this is a global problem and it needs a global solution.
When you try to solve a problem, you have to identify the problem before you can solve it. Otherwise you wind up falling into the "do something" trap. Something is only useful if it is the right thing.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
No, I said that the fertility rate (which I called "birthrate") is below replacement in many countries. I also said that in some other places, like Africa, it is well above replacement. Overall, the world fertility rate right now is slightly above replacement.
Below replacement fertility does not mean population will drop immediately. It means that if the below replacement fertility continues, and lifespans do not rise drastically to compensate, then in the long term the population will drop.
if we don't it will cause massive political destabilization as food production changes
Why do you think more food production is a problem?
Because that is what you get with higher global temperatures. A vastly increased growing range and season. More CO2 helps plant life everywhere be more productive. Warming means more water vapor in the atmosphere from accelerated evaporation over the oceans which means more rain across the globe.
Why is it that you and other warming alarmists cannot understand these extremely simple facts of a warmer planet? The world will grow ever more prosperous even as you scream at every small variation in weather for a season, which in the end turns everyone away and you into a laughingstock. Is it any wonder voters and the masses no longer take you seriously nor care what new fresh hell you have imagined?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
In short, i'm sick of hearing people continuously whine about this shit, yet be unable to forward a viable, if difficult, solution.
Many people have been forwarding technically viable solutions since this problem was first posited back in what, the late 1800s? But the problem is political viability. It does no good to know how to fix the problem if you don't know how to convince those in power to do so. This is the problem with capitalism — by definition, capital controls the means of production. And unfortunately, production is the problem. If it's unsustainable, so is capitalism. And so it goes.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Conversion of energy from other forms into heat is not known to be reversible.
The earth is being continuously heated by the sun, the problem with CO2 is the increased capture of this heat. Climate engineering would likely involve well known concepts like more shade so there is less heat to be captured.
Umm... you DO know the law of entropy, yes?
Yes. You do know the problem with CO2? In help retain heat from the sun. You know what help counteracts this? Shade. As far as I know shade does not violate the law of entropy.
The malthusian failing has repeatedly been your concept of a symmetric steep hill from which there is no return. Through science and engineering we have repeatedly found that "steep hill" is quite flat on the other unseen side.
... but I expect some climate engineering will **also** be necessary. Best to get that on the radar earlier than later.
Malthus and his followers repeatedly fall into the trap of looking at one variable and *assuming* all other are held constant. Science and engineering often avoid malthusian disasters by operating on the other variables that are not really constants. With respect to climate engineering two such variables may be the solar energy reaching the earth and the amount of this energy that is reflected back into space. I suppose some might argue improvements in carbon capture and sequestration technology but I'm just going to stick with shade and reflection for now.
Again, to be clear, I'm all for conservation, increased efficiency, alternative energy (wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, nuclear, biofuels, etc)
You seem to assume climate is a symmetric linear system. It is not. It is non-linear and it could be much harder to reverse climate change than initiate it.
Actually history shows that global cooling is quite feasible, volcanic winters, periods of low solar activity resulting in mini-ice ages (1400s, 1600s), etc.
Or, we could use cheaper power sources, like wind and solar.
That's what the EU thought. They shut down nuclear and now are importing twice as much coal from the US. Wind and solar need backup and without nuclear that will be natural gas and coal.
4x the number of solar panels in the darkness or the shade doesn't really help. 4x the number of wind turbines in the still air doesn't really help. Storage would help but that's an evolving technology, its scalability unproven. The reality is that Europe has doubled their imports of coal from the US, and also increased natural gas imports from the Russian oligarchs/Putin, to help make up for the decommissioning of nuclear. A decommissioning that was largely driven by **politics** not economics.
And opponents of nuclear overlook a secondary benefit of modern reactors. They help clean up the mess left behind by the older reactors. We don't need to figure out how to safely store all our current nuclear waste for tens of thousands of years, much of it can be consumed as fuel in more modern reactor designs. That also needs to be part of the economic calculation of nuclear.
Which countries have open borders?
So are they wrong for not considering alternatives? Or wrong for considering alternatives?
What you are inadvertently saying here is the deep truth - that "they" were considering alternatives to cast fear for profit, that "they" were not wrong to move to screaming we should fear cold to screaming we should fear warmth, despite the fact warmth is life...
Global cooling had a lot more going for it if you were trying to control people through fear, since it would actually be dangerous. You stupid warming alarmists can't even bring yourself to consider how lucky we are there is warming instead of cooling... reversion to another ice age (which is inevitable) is the thing to fear and if we have pushed that out by a hundred or so years we would be damn lucky as a species.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
With superconductors, that problem is solved. Just build superconducting underground power transmission lines from the middle of nowhere to where the power is needed.
Transmission losses are not that big a deal even with superconductors. Plus you talk about high temp superconductors as if that is something we can suddenly waive into existence. We're certainly not going to use the sorts of superconductors available to us today.
After all, the United States has vast tracts of land with approximately zero people (with some small epsilon) living there, in states like Wyoming, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, New Mexico, etc. Let's put our nuclear power plants there, so that if things go wrong, we can just bomb and bury them.
If the risk is so bad that locating them away from population centers is necessary then I think it's safe to say that using them is a bad idea. Either make it safe enough to be near to the plant or don't use it. We have other options after all.
Likely no one will see this post since I'm so late to the party (over 600 comments at this moment), but I'll write it up anyway.
Let's face the reality about ourselves: Humans are, on average, huge procrastinators. The chances of our entire civilization going full-stop and deciding to make the major changes necessary to head this off? Highly unlikely. As a species, at this point in our evolution, don't seem to be able to make ourselves look down the road 100 years (or even 50 years for that matter) and do what's necessary to attain a goal for that far in the future. 1 year, 5 years? Sure. 10 years? Maybe. 20 years? Highly unlikely. So what's going to happen is things will get so bad that people can't live normal lives anymore, the 'inconvenience' will reach a critical stage where people are starting to panic over it, then people will demand that 'something be done about this'. Day late, dollar short, as they say. So what we've got to do now, is come up with the 'just in time' solution, if such a thing can even exist.
What I propose, for starters, is something out of a science fiction short story (written by Brenda Cooper? Not 100% sure). In this story an alien race covertly placed a massive number of small mirrors, self-positioning and remotely controlled, to reflect sunlight away from a planet they wanted to colonize, but that had a nascent sentient race already evolving on it. They caused an ice age on that planet, killing the dominant species. I propose that, given steady progress in space operations, we could do something similar with the Earth, reflecting a high enough percentage of sunlight away from us that over the course of decades, the planet would cool, and reverse the damage done. Or some variation on this theme to reduce the energy input from the sun. Might be enough. We'd have to develop the technology to do this, of course.
In the meantime we need to keep 'fighting the good fight' against the greedy, who don't care about anything other than amassing profit while they're alive ("Global warming is someone else's problem!") and the nutjob Dominionist types who want the Earth destroyed because they think they'll bring about the Second Coming of Christ that way (no, I'm not kidding, these idiots exist), and try to get people to reverse the damage we've already done.
Solar is mostly a "feel-good" solution; capturing a significant fraction of the US energy market with solar is dubious at best.
That's demonstrably false. Germany TODAY gets about 6-7% of their energy from solar and it's clearly possible to do more. Would be much easier to do in many parts of the US which are far sunnier and further south. Hawaii currently gets close to 1/3 of it's electricity from rooftop and grid solar. If you think upwards of 10% (which is very realistic) is not a significant fraction then I don't know what to tell you.
If the US were to try to entirely use solar + batteries for power we would need to cover an area the size of West Virginia with solar panels
It would take roughly a tiny corner of Nevada to power the entire US. Less than 1% of the US landmass. You could capture a good fraction of that simply by using existing roof tops which is already utilized and wasted space anyway and has the bonus of being at point of use. If you're going to argue against solar you might try starting with actual facts instead of made up ones.
Wind is a much better option - centralized power (think MW or 10s of MW) from one turbine
Wind is a great solution in some places and solar is a better option in others. It depends entirely on the local geography. We need and will use both. Centralized power is not necessarily an advantage and in fact distributed power systems can be much more robust if done correctly. The biggest limitation to either of them is the fact that fossil fuels are not required to pay for much of the pollution they generate so economically they appear cheaper than they really are.
A realistic solution is a mix of wind, advancing nuclear, and a dash of solar for the long-term.
A realistic solution is a lot more wind, a lot more solar, keeping what nuke plants we can running for as long as practical (we aren't going to build more). Unfortunately there is no viable solution that doesn't involve substantial fossil fuel use for another half century even if politically we could agree to move on the matter. But as long as we have politicians in the pocket of big oil and coal companies that is going to be hard to do.
Countries that are cutting back on nuclear power, particularly Germany and Japan, have largely escaped criticism. While both countries are making greater use of renewables, keeping nuclear plants running will eliminate CO2 emissions as long as they would otherwise burn some fossil fuels. If the situation is as grave as the report says, it's time for the green left, which has fought nuclear power relentlessly since the 1970s, to admit that maybe this was not such a good idea and push for nuclear in the mix.
1. Replace red meat (except bison) with mussels, clams, and other bivalves which store carbon in their shells, preferably grown amongst sea kelp or seagrass beds. Do this at least half of the time you would have eaten red meat.
2. Live in a city, close to your work.
3. Take high speed trains instead of flying, if you live in a First World Nation. (yes, that's what I said)
4. If you drive, get a plug-in electric truck or car and power it from solar, wind, or other renewables.
5. Put solar panels or wind turbines on your house. In a disaster, you can use those to provide enough power for essential things. Yes, even if you live in Canada. Or Alaska.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
ROFLMAO - sounds like the NRA, along with delusional religious nutjobs, white supremacists etc who all seem very far to the right
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
The real reason emissions are down in the US is that 22 states now require 10-50 percent of all new electricity comes from renewable energy, and require more efficient heating and cooling systems for commercial and industrial uses. Like the entire West.
We do. Everyone else whines and pays more for less efficient stuff because they like giving dollars to utilities instead of making money off of solar panels and more efficient electric vehicles.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Thanks Slashdot, I needed a laugh. I look forward to seeing scientists in white lab coats on street corners holding signs proclaiming the coming apocalypse.
-==- Buy a Mac and leave me alone!
Deny science all you want, it will still tell you things you should hear.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
false, the sun does that.
I used to be nuke fan, used to be engineer in plant. But nuclear power is not necessary any more.
solar panels are now efficient enough, and energy storage tech sufficiently advanced we can make that primary power. We can use fossil fuel plants to take up deficit for areas that have sunshine lapse (just as we use fossil fuel plants to take up deficit when nuclear plants are refueling). That would be less than 5% the fossil fuel use for energy production that we have now.
.... really look at that shit. Its fucking nuts. It can't be sustainable.
....
That map is an illusion. Those ship markers are large in proportion to the size of the oceans and land masses, but in reality the craft they represent are extremely small in proportion. Cross an ocean in a sail boat for 3,000 nautical miles and you'd be lucky to see more than two or three other vessels during the whole trip, even while in shipping lanes.
There is a similar map showing the location of most aircraft around the world. Zoom out the Flightradar24 map to show the entire world and the aircraft markers cover landmasses completely, yet very few aircraft collide and fall out of the sky.
Don't let your Marxist theology carry you away. The sky is not falling.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
Well said Sir,
An important step would be for general public to reach for data not to comport themselves but to search for the truth and most importantly not to rely on scientific opinions from people without scientific background. I heard that "climate change is a hoax perpetrated by scientists across the globe to enrich themselves", which is so absurd on so many levels, that it's really hard to answer.
How many Slashdotters do you think will actually be old enough to get a R&B reference?
Climate Researchers Warn Only Hope For Humanity Now Lies In Possibility They Making All Of This Up
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Wait, what? You think the size of the markers and collisions are the issues I am referring to? Why oh why do I even try?
Also, I'm the farthest thing from a Marxist. I'm a realist. I'm concerned with facts and what works, not with ideologies. Marxism doesn't work because some of it's basic assumptions contradict human nature and behavior.
Also, the sky is not falling. Externalizing of costs and over use of resources is creating a debt that we can't pay back. The Earth, it's climate, and it's energy systems, like all complex systems, are prone to cascades. You move the dials on the local parameters in one area and suddenly the foundation you assumed was bedrock is revealed to be not only unstable, but liquid, flowing into new forms at a lower energy level. It disintegrates and takes whatever was built on it with it. The cascade doesn't have to be climate related. It may show up in economics, or in political systems, or in a vital resource. It could be a crossing a threshold with a certain pollutant, or a combination of chemical factors. Possibly population, or even stability of borders could be the driving factor, but rest assured, one cascade will set off others, and when the dust settles the systems that have worked for so long will be irrevocably changed.
Tipping points aren't just for climate models. They work for all sorts of other complex systems. They're the opposite of emergence, and they're unpredictable in occurrence and outcome.
Really all I'm saying is: "Don't poke the sleeping bears!" But you know how well that admonishment works.
When the only tool you have is a claw hammer every problem starts to look like the back of someone's skull.
But what happens when hackers get in and hold the planet hostage? What if Bruce Willis is too old to pass the pre-launch physical and can't save the planet?
You keep it crewed and don't design in any remote control capability. If the crew goes rogue, or some shit goes wrong and the mirror points at us, have Chairman Kim send a missile up.
Way to miss the point to go off into something tangentially related. For as long as I can remember, it's always, "if we don't make changes now, in x amount of years catastrophe will hit!" I've lived through most of those x amount of years so far, and catastrophe hasn't hit. Despite the environmentally friendly initiatives that have been done over the years, global green house gas has risen year after year. I don't think it's too much to ask to get people to stop scare mongering. You cry wolf enough times and people stop giving a shit.
First, CO2 is NOT a pollutant, it is plant food and it is fertilizing the greening of the earth:
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/g...
Most biologists will admit that if they haven't sold their soul for federally funded research grants.
Second, it is the best and most economically and readily available energy source, even when it is recycled.
So, recycle it.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
They said this 20 years ago.
http://www.cnn.com/TECH/scienc...
I'll bet they'll say the same thing 20 years from now, no matter what happens with global average temperature :)
Sorry to disappoint you, but temperature is proportional to fourth root of solar irradiation, space reflectors are about the most inefficient way to go about it imaginable.
Sorry to disappoint you, but if the sun doubled its output and you think we'd only get 18.9% more Kelvins, u r dum.
Where do you think the extra radiation will go? Will it be deflected or reflected at a higher rate before it enters the atmosphere? Does every EM emission come with a tag that says "Xtra" for our Basic Bitches (magnetosphere, atmosphere, planet) to inspect and selective reject?
Correct.
At the tropics?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
China dropped its one child policy just a few years ago, how should they have a 2.6 birth rate?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Depends what you call a shipping lane.
There are plenty of places where the ships are lined up like pearls on a chain in a few miles distance.
Actually, last year two times a US navy destroyer tried to cross such a line and crashed into a commercial vessel.
Air planes hold different altitudes, depending on course.
East - West lines versus North - South lines are seperared by 3000 feet ...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
...and if we were talking about surviving a collision this would be relevant. The rate is what makes it hard to adapt to - if it occurred over 1,000 years we would not notice it much. However, having to adapt to rapid changes is something we can do. As I said it is going to cause a huge amount of disruption which is why we want to avoid it but that is nowhere near the same as claiming that human life will be impossible. Mammals very similar to us survived in the Eocene so there is no reason to suppose that we cannot survive a far smaller increase in temperature.
One-child didn't start until about 1980, and there were a ton of exceptions. LMGTFY link omitted.
Huh. That was not meant to be a simple equation. It was meant to be an arrow to show the relationship, but was swallowed by the HTML tag parser.
Let's try again:
Temperature <== Solar irradiation * CO2 levels
Anyway, to address your concern - the blocking would likely be positioned to happen mostly near the equator - where solar irradiation is at its maximum and food is rarely grown. But something could also be done at the poles to slow down melting.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
You really don't understand at all do you.
Start with one cent add a other cent every year. Also start with a million dollars and take away one cent every year.
How meaningful is the trend, an how long and at what level will they be in balance?
Or you're just trolling as usual.
What 50 year lie Windy?
Did people even bother measuring CO2 50 years ago?
Is this yet another lie to add to your constant stream of lies Windy?
You have clearly - whether you're aware of it or not - implied that the world's population isn't growing. Perhaps you should start over?
I have no idea of the numbers, but the logic still makes it possible to have a lot of countries with stable population and still have overall growth.
eg If 190 countries are flat or slightly negative growth, and the other 10-20 countries are up, then the net rate can be up (depending on the numbers).
And they will rise even more, even if we stop today. Think of an oil tanker, even stopping the engines now means that it keeps moving a few thousand miles before it stops.
The initiatives are exactly why the shit didn't hit the fan. But then again, I'm done caring. Fuck up this world, I'm on the way out anyway.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The initiatives are exactly why the shit didn't hit the fan. But then again, I'm done caring. Fuck up this world, I'm on the way out anyway.
I don't think that's true at all considering how we've exceeded those CO2 thresholds and global temperature thresholds that we should never get past. But please, tell me more.
Trends are for people like you and Windy to hide behind so you can pretend to be getting better without actually doing anything useful. looking at the level is also important, the trend is only a part of the story.
Perfect example is all the Tesla fanbois who think Tesla is doing good because they only lost 15k per car instead of 16k.
Look the trend is good. Is the situation good?
Or people who think the deficit isn't a problem because the budget trended from minus 2 trillion to only minus 1.99 trillion this year.
Trend means everything is ok right?You know it's not.
You need to look at the level not just the trend, otherwise you aren't really understanding the situation. (On purpose? )
Well, maybe we are already fucked and nobody tells us to avoid a panic. I really don't know. What I can see is that the climate gets less and less amiable every year, natural disasters get worse and worse every year, glaciers are melting and I need a new air condition 'cause the one I have can't really cool down my house anymore.
That's certainly just one data point and I doubt that it's gonna convince anyone else, but it sure convinced me that something's amiss.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I never mentioned high-temperature superconductors at all.
You didn't have to. Using current low temp superconductors is economically infeasible for long distances so the only way your suggestion would work is with some as yet undeveloped high temp superconductor. The cost of cooling the lines would be greater than the savings you'd get from current transmission losses over the kinds of distances we're talking about. You think it's cheap to cool and pump hundreds of miles of lines of liquid nitrogen or similar coolants? If it made economic sense then power companies would already be doing it today and they are not. You think the power companies haven't looked into this?
With normal cables, you're talking about 4–8% loss.
It's not about the energy loss. It's about economic efficiency. But that doesn't matter because you are missing the entire point. If operating a nuclear power station is so dangerous that we need to locate it away from population centers then we shouldn't be operating it at all.
Now whether the cost of the superconducting lines would exceed the cost of those losses is another question
It is definitely NOT a separate question. If it doesn't cost less then there is no point in doing it at all. The number of cases where currently available superconductors are economically more efficient is just a few corner cases today and likely to remain so until we can get high temp superconductors.
There are several superconducting transmission cables are in active use right now.
They are short lines right next to power plants. We're talking less than a kilometer. There are no long distance superconducting power lines in service today
How about this one (box to the left, click to enlarge).
https://geology.utah.gov/map-p...
Note how much warmer the Earth has been in the past.
Now, repeat after me: Another horseshit article because someone is chasing a fresh funding grant.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Nukes are no good. Fukushima and Chernobyl makes that very clear.
Only boring people are ever bored.
So how come we aren't working hard to go other places? These politics are a waste of time, money, effort, etc. Let's put that into insuring that our species survives by colonization everywhere.
And yet it's amazing how many people that totally believe in MMGW are buying up beach front property and property in Miami. If they really believed, they wouldn't be buying, even on a bet. Tells you something.
Your fixation on strangers on the internet fucking your mother nonwithstanding, you made some decent points. The problem with your first two points is that they are both literally "not all leftists", which is true. I'm a leftist, and I most certainly don't share those views.
Unfortunately it's also not a useful measurement tool either, because advocacy for these views is rather well documented in specific circles, usually overrepresented in certain strata of far left, which unfortunately has a massively outsized impact on political systems across the Western countries.
Reason for this can be found in historic examples were far left was most visible in their power grabs, such as Russian revolution of 1917.
Not sure about your last point. I personally spent several years during my early teen years earning money working on farms. I picked things like cucumbers, potatoes, strawberries, and wage back then was pretty good. Also got me a lot of contacts among the farmers in my region, as while I wasn't the best picker, I was good enough.
That is until the recent BS with thai, ukrainian and such pickers, who were shipped in to work on what is essentially a starvation salary, because in their countries, it was good pay. Here, it wouldn't pay for groceries and rent. Not shockingly, most young folks like me who worked there during summers had to go find new employment, as we liked being able to do something besides living in a tent, and we had no contacts among the East European mafia shipping those people and their food to them with the newcomers so they wouldn't starve. So I and people like me cleaned cruiser ships, probably got your mom's cabin a few times, you know that one where used condoms were everywhere. At least she's smart enough to use them when she was pulling another train of Muhammads and Jihads who were paid to go on these cruises by Swedish welfare state in hopes they would rape a bit less at home after getting their semen emptied into your drunk mom.
And the "labour shortage" can't be fixed by Norwegians. Norway is that place that is pulling Swedish, Finnish and Danish specialists. They can afford to pay. It's about salary related to cost of living in your native country. Not that you'd know, seeing how you sound like an inbred american who has never left his native country.
On the past point. You seem to genuinely believe that environmentalists want us to reduce pollution. That is patently false, observable in, for example, environmentalist rejection of nuclear power. It's equally found in same environmentalists rejecting improvements to filtration techniques of burners, something I personally witnessed on multiple occasions.
Environmentalist movement in its current form is overwhelmingly united by hatred of humanity (humanity is a plague upon this planet and it would be better without humanity) and worship of primeval nature (nature was so much better before humans spoiled it). I don't find any need to explain why former belief is deeply pathological. Latter is pathological because it's a religious belief that goes contrary to massive body of historic and scientific evidence, and because it demonstrated severe delusions of grandeur. It religiously rejects the obvious fact that humans are part of the environment, and instead elevates humanity to the position of Christian God. Creator, manager and someone who gets to decide the fate of the world.
"...scientific opinions from people without scientific background." are not necessarily wrong, so I'd be hesitant to throw out well argued opinions just because the person who presents them doesn't have a 'scientific background'.
I did read the link Windy and it doesn't mention 50 years. You just lied and made up that bit.
In fact they specifically mentioned 'since 2000'. And the graph only shows a difference from about 2005.
You are a complete dumbfuck Windy. Why do you constantly lie in completely obvious and easily checked ways? Is it some kind of mental condition, or do you just hate China that much, all sense and reason goes out the window?
Do you still really think I don't check before calling you a liar? You must know by now.
I hope they did check the comments. They would have found this lie that you just doubled down on after I questioned the truth of it and gave you a chance to come clean. https://slashdot.org/thread/57...
Kind of (in general) I would agree with your statement, however I assume you know what I was referring to. Let's agree that people should put more attention to verify information from reliable sources and not from sources, which just fit their ideology.
For your interest: http://www.geoba.se/country.ph...
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
No I didn't (but now I do) and yes, you're right.
Cool page of numbers. Any particular ones you wanted to point out?
The fact that China has no birthrate of 2.6 or what ever it was what the parent claimed :D
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I actually was the parent -- apparently one of the many things you didn't notice.
The link I provided does indeed say China had a birthrate of 2.6 thirty years ago. Today's alleged birthrate of 1.6 (under which, mysteriously, China's population nonetheless continues to increase per the stats you posted) is irrelevant to today's migratory pressures for reasons I explained.
If you're not going to bother reading either the data I linked or even my post, there doesn't seem to be much point in you responding other than to hear yourself talk. Enjoy the rest of your weekend.