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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/
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.
So not reversible on anything approaching a convenient timescale.
Do you think you and your pals can hole up at Galt's Gulch for a few thousand years?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
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.
If you believe those were actual scientific predictions you're just listening to hyperbolic rants from climate science deniers, not any actual scientific predictions.
I'm a meteorologist but I've listened to enough geology and paleontology seminars to have a basic understanding of the climatic conditions many millions of years ago. You're correct that carbon dioxide levels have been substantially higher than in the present day and that life flourished under such conditions. The Earth has transitioned between two primary states, an icehouse state and a hothouse state. You can think of these as two equilibrium points in Earth's climate about which there are small oscillations. Displace the climate a bit from one of those equilibrium points and it tends to return back. It's much harder to push the climate to the other equilibrium point because a much larger displacement from the current equilibrium is required.
We're currently in an icehouse Earth, with long periods of glaciation and some brief interglacial periods. We're in one of those interglacial periods right now. Releasing enough greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and triggering other feedbacks in the climate system might push the Earth to the other equilibrium point. Such a transition might, indeed, be permanent due to the shifting habitable zone on geologic time scales.
I see two potential problems with this. One is that while the hothouse Earth might be conducive to supporting human civilization as it presently exists. The second is that such an abrupt transition period would be incredibly stressful for life in general. We're not currently seeing mass extinctions, but such a severe transition in climate could certainly trigger such an extinction. It seems likely that Earth would recover and life would thrive again in a hothouse Earth. However, in the previous mass extinctions, the recovery has been somewhere in the range of 2-10 million years depending on the severity of the event. The Permian-Triassic extinction came close to wiping out life on Earth and it's not entirely clear what caused this mass extinction.
We humans depend on the ecosystem beneath us to support human life. I don't believe anyone really knows where tipping points are. There's limited geologic evidence of many past transitions and mass extinctions like the aforementioned Permian-Triassic extinction. Even a less severe extinction event would have massive consequences for humanity. We don't really know what it takes to trigger a mass extinction event, but the geologic evidence we do have says it's something we dare not mess with. While I said it's likely life would recover, there's no guarantee it would include us.
We're not seeing mass extinctions and we don't really know what it would take to trigger such an event. Life can certainly thrive on a hothouse Earth, but that's little consolation if humans don't survive the transition. And mass extinctions aren't very kind to apex predators like what humans are.
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.
Yeah thats kind of what frusturates me about the "Its been super hot before and things lived!" talking point. Sure it has, but unless your a serious misanthrope that doesn't want people to exist, it really does well to remember that life also exists around sulphur plumes at the bottom of the ocean, but not people! Hell, theres a good chance we could bio-engineer primitive life that'd cope on venus, maybe even mop up some of the atmosphere a bit so in a few thousand years we could live there. But for the time being, bad for humans.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
+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
Supressing the urge to laugh hysterically at how flawed this is, and giving you the benefit of the doubt that you may have meant something else, do you want to try and clarify that point just a bit? Because as it stands, that conclusion does not follow from the premise unless you believe that humans can travel backwards in time.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
... 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.
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.
What we should not worry about is runaway heating, because history has shown some built-in feedback mechanism that eventually reverses the trend. The next ice age is probably inevitable; we might as well enjoy the temperate climate while we can.
It's not some built in feedback mechanism that has been driving the cycle of glaciations/interglacials lately. Milankovitch cycles are the apparent triggering mechanism for the changes. After that then feedbacks do have an effect on the magnitude of the changes but it's not a feedback that initiates the changes. As far as the end of our interglacial and the start of the next glacial period climate scientists have calculated that CO2 levels would have to drop down to around 240 ppm for that to happen. So as long as CO2 levels are above 300 ppm we don't have to worry about the next ice age.
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.
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.
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.
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
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...
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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...
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.
Now, you raise a different question, namely whether a rapid rise in global average temperatures by 4-5C would lead to mass extinctions. There have been many such temperature increases in the past, and they were not usually associated with mass extinctions. Mass extinctions are extremely rare and seem to require multiple factors to coincide.
We ARE currently living in the middle of a mass extinction event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
We have limited information about the cause of past extinction events, but we've got some good evidence that climate change played a major role in some of them. When the ocean heats up and stores more CO2, it gets more acidic, and shells get weaker for many sea creatures. That can lead to extinctions at the bottom of the food chain, and those can quickly propagate through the rest of the ecosystem. In the case of the Permian extinction, 96% of all species went extinct. And we've got some good evidence to suggest that climate change was a major contributor to that event.
Summary: http://www.iflscience.com/envi...
Some real science: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...
No, china is NOT adding 1600 new coal plants. It is over 700 of the 1600 TOTAL that they are adding.
Apparently, Japan and Europe continue to sell coal plants to other nations as well. America no longer does. Nor have we built any in something like 10 years.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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.
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?
"only fucking idiots like you..."
It seems weird to me that somebody who has a signature lamenting a supposed lack of honor today communicates like you do.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
.... 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!
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
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.
"...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'.
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.