The affects of this on third world country are even worse. Here in Algeria we are having the worst drought in over 20 years. What I fear, is that if this continues to happen, people could literally start dying from thirst again. I wonder how good is desalination of sea water technology and if we could see some startups that explore this field, certainly a lot of people's lives to be changed.
It isn't technology that holds back water desalination, it is energy availability/cost. Even the most promising desalination tech is only a small efficiency boost over simpler established methods. Yeah efficiency gains certain help over the long term, but the overall energy costs are still enormous and nearly require dedicated power plant for any significant amount of clean water.
The best bet in actually desalinating population scale levels of water would be investment into nuclear power. And the desalination could double as a buffer for the nuclear plant so that it could be run at peak power and efficiency nearly full time.
Wouldn't solar be much better for powering desalination than nuclear power? It is way cheaper per energy produced than nuclear, especially in those countries, which need desalination most. Also, it doesn't take a decade to set up. Not even mentioning proliferation issues.
Yes, solar is dirt cheap energy and you wouldn’t need much of a battery (or any?) in this case, since you can store the excess product water in a tank.
I power my water maker with about 1400 watts and can make 35 gallons an hour. The panels, electronics and water maker were ~ $5000. I did the work myself at a slow pace, so not sure what the labor costs would be.
I set my system up in about 2 weeks. The requirements are a bit of time, seawater access and some capital.
For context, according to CEIC data [1], the average salary in Algeria is about $300 per month. That "dirt cheap" project of yours is more than a year's worth of labor.
Locally priced goods may be cheaper, but the US does benefit from a more direct shipping line with China (where most of these products come from, especially cheap solar panels). There's repair costs to be taken into account and if these become a necessity, you'll also have to take into account some kind of protection for when those without the means to buy one of these setups become desperate.
It's true that solar is relatively safe and cheap compared to other power sources, but projects like these are difficult to map to places where they can make a life-or-death difference. If things were that easy, we'd probably cover a patch of Sahara desert with solar panels and power the entire African continent for decades, with power to spare to export to other continents.
Yeah, it’s tough out there. I think the capital cost might be around $15 to $40 a month depending on how generous the lender is.
Evaporative is interesting too, but solar isn’t too bad to maintain. Most of the maintenance would probably be keeping the filters, pumps and membranes in working order.
That seems like a lot of cost and complexity for a rural installation in a 3rd world country. How does the water output compare with, say, spending $1000 a simple evaporation design? The size of the evaporation pool would be larger than 1400W worth of solar, but it's much simpler and easy to repair.
I agree there is more complexity, but it may be worth it. Making electricity buys a good deal of versatility. If you have a bit extra, you can run an inductive burner, charge your phone/laptop or charge a house battery (if/when you can afford one).
I think in either system, teaching the locals to setup the system and maintain it themselves is important for keeping the costs down.
$1000 would buy a pretty large solar still and you can spend the extra $4000 on a solar phone charger if that's something the locals need. Meanwhile there's little that can go wrong with a solar still and if something does go wrong, they can likely fix it (even if temporarily) with duct tape. Losing their cell phone charger and cooktop to electrical failure sounds like less of a problem than losing their water source.
An inductive burner, cell phone charger, desalinator, etc all sound great on a $200,000 boat where the owner is wealthy enough to keep it maintained and probably keep spares. But putting expensive and complicated electronics in a village so remote that they don't even have reliable water seems like a mistake.
I wouldn’t discount people’s ability to do some basic electrical repair. And maybe the neighbors can lend you some water till you get back up and running.
You might be right though, if it’s remote enough and you have room, perhaps a solar still is the cheapest and simplest option. It seems like it would have to be very large to give comparable amounts of water. Do you know someone selling such kits?
In any event, maybe this gives folks some ideas for lowish cost options.
Solar doesn’t provide nearly as much energy and for desalination you need a surprising amount.
Nuclear is a great use-case since the problem with nuclear is it needs a constant water source. If you’re desalinating you’ve got that problem covered.
Solar doesn’t provide nearly as much energy and for desalination you need a surprising amount.
That statement doesn't make any sense to me. If you need more power, install more panels. Space certainly isn't an issue in like northern Africa. It is cheaper to order a gigawatt or more of solar panels than building a new nuclear reactor, and faster to set up too. Even Germany today has way more solar capacity than it ever had in nuclear, and it is less a great place for solar than Africa.
The vast majority of our freshwater comes from sources that cost us effectively zero in energy: the water cycle moves water towards higher elevations and it flows down towards our populations. Worst case scenario, water in ancient underground reservoirs is pumped to the surface.
If we had to desalinate all that water and actively distribute it instead, it'd be a significant fraction of our current global power consumption. The power sources need to be concentrated near the desalination plants and at least half the world lives 100km+ away from a coastline. At 3 kWh per m^3 of water[1] and ~3.5 m^3 per person per day [2], that's an extra ~3800 kWh per year, which would increase per capita energy consumption by 25-30% [3] in the United States just for desalination.
We have enough challenges replacing existing power infrastructure with solar and wind. Placing the burden of desalination on top of that is unrealistic, especially since the NIMBY fight over solar installations of that size would probably be just as fierce as for a nuclear reactor.
I have never claimed, that we would replace all fresh water used on this planed by desalinated water. This certainly is neither feasably nor necessary. At best, it can be an important contribution to water supply in many regions.
I was only answering to the original post which suggested we would build nuclear power plants to desalinate water. There I commented that solar would be cheaper (and more environment friendly) for the same task.
I don't know what you mean by "much", but Germany has a peak power capacity of 56 GW of Solar. On good days the output comes close to the nuclear output of France, which is mostly nuclear in power production. German wind power occasionally eclipses French nuclear power production.
Nuclear power is severely restricted and building a nuclear power plant in a country dealing with active terrorist movements is probably something to be avoided.
Solar is relatively inefficient, but it can't be used to build a dirty bomb or worse. With large patches of uninhabit{ed,able} desert, many African countries have more than enough space to build large solar farms if they can find a solution to the sand blowing onto the panels.
Does nuclear need fresh water? I'd imagine salt water would wreck all the equipment, and you probably don't want to use up all the fresh water you generate...
The water is just there for thermal mass to conduct waste heat away from the condenser. The water that gets heated by the reactor core and turns the turbines is isolated and highly purified, since many of the internals can only be accessed during refuels. Some designs go further and separate the reactor coolant system from the steam generator to prevent contamination, but AFAIK there isn't a single commercial design that allows outside water to feed into the reactor cooling or power generation systems. The parts of the condenser that touch the external body of water are basically just blocks of metal that have to be scrubbed on the outside from time to time.
The turbines do but you can recycle much if not nearly all of that water by cooling the steam and condensing it, which you could use sea water to heat exchange to for it.
Not really. Pure heavy water along with pure uranium and pure CANDU reactors are imported components. The quality of cooling water and feed water doesn't matter much.
Remember, nuclear power plant is merely a very large heat engine. The main problem is terrorism there.
> Solar doesn’t provide nearly as much energy and for desalination you need a surprising amount.
Are there numbers for this? One one hand solar might provide more energy than nuclear if you're only interested in heat generation, but on the other hand using heat to desalinate (ie. boiling water) is also less efficient than using reverse osmosis.
That's true from an engineering standpoint, but many of the places which are short of fresh water also lack the capital and industrial infrastructure to support large nuclear plants. Solar power seems more realistic from an economic and political standpoint, even if less efficient.
If it’s extremely hot, using solar energy should IMO be the first choice.
I don’t find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_desalination an easy read, but I think it says using PV to get electricity and that electricity to drive reverse osmosis is one of the best solutions.
Certainly, given that solar power is cheaper than nuclear (in the current political climate), nuclear can’t be the better choice for peak loads, which happen when there’s a lot of sunlight.
There's also a capital investment problem - good equipment is expensive to set up, even leaving aside the operating costs problem.
Achievable, yes, but only for the rich for now. eg Gulf Arab states and Israel are early adopters, the latter with some EU subsidies to defuse water rights as an point of conflict in the Jordan watershed.
I have never believed this. The energy cost of operating a modern (or even moderately old) desalination plant is far, far lower than the cost of water in the Bay Area. It’s not even close.
> The best bet in actually desalinating population scale levels of water would be investment into nuclear power.
FWIW on several occasions we came lose to losing the North American Great Lakes to nuclear accidents, the second largest freshwater stores in the world.
This isn't technically accurate, we have access to abundant long term (multi-century) reserves of natural gas which can be used to provide power needed for desalinization. Nuclear is in no way a "blocker". Certainly, cost is a substantial barrier especially in less wealthy nations.
Gas burns and makes CO2 which increases temperature which increases the likelihood of more dehydration events in future. This is the wrong choice. Actually the long term right choice is not to burn gas anymore.
Letting people die is obviously the wrong choice too.
When all choices are wrong we must find another choice that can be right. Somebody wrote solar energy, somebody wrote nuclear energy, somebody argued that both are wrong. I don't suggest a solution but I point out that limiting ourselves to binary choices is the wrong way to think.
Which could completely destroy modern civilization over time. Once certain tipping points are crossed most of the earth could become uninhabitable for large parts of the year.
I'm not celebrating people dying of thirst, but I also think that's the only thing that will get the world properly focused on the issue. We need to make big structural changes to the global economy to fight climate change, and those changes are going to have an outsized negative impact on today's wealthiest and most powerful people. They aren't going to let change happen without a fight.
People dying is what it's going to take to muster up enough of a fight to make the actual change. But the sooner we can hit the panic button and get people focused on the magnitude of the issue, the less people that need to die to get the population properly motivated.
China is also the world's leading producer of solar cells (over 70%) and the world's leading user of solar power (about 33% of global solar power).
China is also, by far, the leading producer and user of electric cars with almost half of the production and sales (more electric cars are sold in china than western europe + US combined). Half of all EV's in the world are driving around in China.
Further, chinese people use a fraction of the electricity that north americans do. Canada: 14,600 kWh/yr, USA: 12,150 kWh/yr, China: 5,300 kWh/yr.
In terms of CO2 emissions, it's the same story: USA: 17.6T/yr, Canada: 15.7T/yr, China: 6.4T/yr, on a per capita basis.
It's hard to remember what with the shiny new tier 1 coastal cities, but try not to forget that, on average, china is still quite poor with only 1/4th to 1/5th the per capita income of the richer advanced economy nations like the US, Sweden, UK, Germany, Japan, etc. China is on par with Mexico, Malaysia, Panama, Russia, or Bulgaria.
IMO, per captia measures only matters for countries that allow unrestricted internal movement.
China strictly controls how many people are allowed to migrate from the countryside to work in the cities, so it is, in some respects, multiple distinct economies with a centrally controlled standard of living.
France would react. If people start mass dying in Algeria, many of them will try to get to Europe.
Algeria being a former French colony, being close by, and already having a large population of Algerian descent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algerians_in_France says there are 10 million people of Algerian origin in France. That’s over 10% of the population), France probably will be a major destination.
Before The Brexit vote, the UK prime minister David Cameron went to Europe to get a "better deal" for the UK. What he came back with didn't answer the people's problems with sudden mass migration.
What should have been proposed was a unified Europe border force. Where each member state takes its share and also send resources to help manage the southern border.
Leaving the problem to Spain, Italy and Greece is the worst approach. The 1 million migrants in 2015 really was a dry run for what will happen when Africa is too hot.
The EU needs to plan now for receiving these people, because you can't send them back.
Frontex is exactly such kind of a unified EU border force[1][2][3]. They occasionly use forced "pushbacks"[4] on migrant boats on Southern sea borders, leading to a lot of criticism and accusations of EU lawbreaking.
Guess what Algeria's first three main export products are? Crude petroleum, petroleum gas and refined petroleum. They're trying to diversify but it's too litlle, too late.
Plastics and polymers certainly aren't going away anytime soon so its not like a renewable energy world would just kill them. I don't expect plastic production to actually contract until long after we have made the grid renewable/sustainable and have extra energy for active carbon sequestering. Disposable plastic from grocery bags and simple wrappers are easy to reduce and eliminate but how many consumer devices are made of just metal or wood now and aren't 95% plastic? Plastic is still replacing tons of metal piping and ducts and on cars and everything else. When is the last time anyone has seen a wooden handled screwdriver for sale?
> I'm not celebrating people dying of thirst, but I also think that's the only thing that will get the world properly focused on the issue
Millions of people die from AIDS, malaria, and the lack of potable water and food each year. But most of those deaths happen other continents, so nothing is done about it.
The transmission of HIV could be virtually ended in the US with drugs like PrEP that have been on the market for a decade, halting a 30+ year AIDS pandemic. That didn't happen, and PrEP's price in the US rose from $1200 to $2400 for a 30-day supply in 2019, despite costing ~$40 retail in other first world countries. Now that one formulation recently became generic, it costs $1400 retail, or $600 with coupons, for a 30-day supply. As of 2020 there is a program for those without insurance, but if you're a working adult with insurance, you aren't eligible.
As long as there is money to be made, people dying will be acceptable to those in power.
>People dying is what it's going to take to muster up enough of a fight to make the actual change.
No it wont. If anything it will just start a war and/or a(nother) refugee crisis. Plus dead people. I think hoping for disasters to catalyst change is a sadly naive worldview.
> but I also think that's the only thing that will get the world properly focused on the issue.
Or, that will just get the rest of the nations of the world to focus on preventing climate refugees from entering their nation, and perhaps use their militaries to secure remaining resources.
What will force the issue isn't people dying, but rather masses of climate refugees fleeing countries that are no longer habitable and moving toward the poles.
People dying will not change the minds that need changing.
The people who profit from the current state of affairs need to be convinced to modify their plans. Perhaps there are other ways to persuade them, but fear of something worse than not profiting from their current investment plans is the only thing I can think of at this point.
How do we know this is the result of climate change? It's meant as an honest question. Though it is largely ignored in the mainstream discussion, I've heard for years to be careful about making a distinction between weather and climate. Are you thinking this is not weather, but climate? How does one tell the difference? If there's a record winter of cold temps, would it be evidence that the climate is cooling?
There are actually scientific methods for attributing specific events to global warming or not, probabilistically. I.e. although you can never say with perfect certainty "this heatwave was caused by global warming", you can say: with global warming this heatwave has a probability 0.1 (once in ten years), but without global warming it would have a probability of 0.001 (once in a thousand years).
We seem to be having several "once in a thousand years" heatwaves per decade these days.
I don't mean to be dismissive, but simple statistics. A record winter by itself is just a freak incident. As is a record hot summer. But what are the probabilities? One record cold day broken after 80 years? Improbable but not downright implausible. Year after year after year of record highs? Just coincidence?
For the same reasons we make fun of climate-change deniers who say "look at this record cold winter; there's no global warming" means we can't use a historic heat wave to say "look globaal warming".
> For the same reasons we make fun of climate-change deniers who say "look at this record cold winter; there's no global warming" means we can't use a historic heat wave to say "look globaal warming".
We make fun of the climate change deniers in this scenario because the cold winter often is evidence of climate change. Record heat waves can also be evidence of climate change.
A heat wave (like other weather) by itself isn't evidence of global warming, but extreme weather events like this (and like extreme winter storms) are made more frequent by global warming. You should expect to see more "once in a millenium" weather events as the planet continues to warm.
A highly efficient multi-stage solar still has been developed at MIT [1].
An alternative to desalination is capturing humidity from the air, e.g. by isothermal membrane-based air dehumidification [2] or passively using condensation [3].
I’m involved in building a fund to invest in startups in this and other areas related to biosphere resilience, and would love to get in touch with people taking such technology to the market.
My guess is we will be needing adaptive measures sooner than most people expect.
Vast quantities? LOL, their plant in hawaii does only 128 tons a day. Americans use 3 tons a day. Each. Even relatively thrifty nations use over a 1 ton a day per person.
Hardly "vast quantities". And it's not cheap, they're currently using "reclaimed" solar panels to provide power. At scale, this not possible and not cheap.
More to the point, their main goal is to plant and grow trees, not provide fresh water.
I think current desalination methods either use massive amounts of energy or massive amounts of space.
Some suggested nuclear power, but I think there are better forms of energy production, especially since you don't need base load or capacity, so solar and wind are much better here.
Of couse solar space conflicts with desalination itself. You could just use the sun to evaporate the water in the first place.
Most desalination methods are unfortunately quite energy intensive, and produce a concentrated brine that has environmental/disposal concerns such that it can't just be pumped back into the ocean, really.
It presents a difficult problem for entrepreneurs to tackle. Definitely the potential to change people's lives for the better, though.
Most desalination plants do just pump the brine back into the ocean. That isn't ideal from a marine conservation standpoint but if the outflow pipe runs out deep enough then it's not too bad.
If it's not ideal right now, how well does it scale if more and more desalination plants come online to meet freshwater demands, and dispose of their brine in the same manner?
The global water cycle is the embodiment of scale and even though engineers would learn a lot of interesting new things and make mistakes in the process of implementing desalination at scale, the brine problem is trivially solvable with existing technology like longer pipes and flow control (changing the exhaust concentration based on ocean currents and seasonal factors).
The problem is the criminal mispricing of water in most of the world. Anything that interacts with saltwater - especially brine - is in a completely different class of infrastructure that requires constant maintenance, something that most political systems are especially bad at. It's compounded by the artificially low price of water and accompanying lack of funds.
Humans have built over three million kilometers of natural gas and oil pipelines globally. The longest undersea pipeline is over 1,200 km long, which is at least twenty times longer than the longest pipelines we'd need to build for ideal brine dispersion in the worst case geographies. For better or worse, the problems with desalination are economic and political, not technological. We just need to spread out our impact so that it's within the margin of error of ocean currents and evaporation.
This statement could mean just about anything. My understanding is that desalination plants often have a fairly-sizable fairly-dead-zone around them, taht the salinity is a pretty pronounced local issue.
Sea-water is about 3.5% salt by weight. Are you saying that the brine water coming out is 3.5 * 1.025% salt, or that it's 5.5% salt? Do you have anything you can cite? What % of the water that goes in the inlet makes it to the "brine" outlet?
Yeah the local imbalance is what worries me. I have a mental image of a big long 'soaker hose' style brine dumping pipe rather than a single outlet, that way the brine is further diluted. Wonder how much that helps.
Lithium, magnesium and other minerals can be extracted from sea-water / brine. Currently it's not economic, but this is a technology to watch.
For instance, according to a recent research paper[0] from Saudi Arabia, sea-water yields hydrogen, chlorine and lithium all from a single multi-stage process. These are all useful materials for industry. I imagine the process is both energy and capital intensive, but SA would be a good place to begin something like that.
I just know that Israel are pioneers in this field. Water scarcity has always been a problem in Israel. (the chief solution to this has been, unfortunately, to starve the Salt Sea of water.)
First we deny (which costs energy/money), then we wall the problem off (which costs energy/money) - the moment it overwhelms us, we have neither energy nor money left.
All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?
Maybe it's time to start talking about ways humanity can geo-engineer our way out of this instead of just sitting here waiting to suffer. The US Air Force has been interested in this topic for decades, but there's no way to know how viable any of that research actually is. Some of the speculative documents I've read propose using carbon black dust as a way to artificially reflect heat, like https://web.archive.org/web/19970429012543/http://www.au.af....
The technology I'm most excited about is advances in radiative cooling. Basically with materials science we can create perfectly reflective surfaces which emit Infrared energy out to space through the atmospheric window. It's both a local mitigation in that it could keep us cool as shit gets out of hand, while also getting the excess energy out of Earth's system. I feel like with industrial scale it could be feasible and get us off of energy-heavy AC and replace some of the lost albedo from the ice caps. 10C below ambient is super impressive IMO.
"All the CO2 that is produced by burning one liter of oil can be sequestered by less than one liter of olivine." [1].
Given that formulation I assume that the amount of olivine needed is the same order of magnitude as the 1 liter of oil to produce the CO2.
The world is consuming 97 Mio barrels of oil per day [2]. I doubt we can mine that amount of olivine on a daily basis. Is it even available in that quantity?
How is olivine considered an adequate option to reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere?
We can muster whatever we want if there's sufficient need/desire.
In energy-tech, a useful metric is energy-return-on-energy-investment -- a saudi oil well returns 40 units of energy for each unit of energy required for extraction, tar sands are something like 3:1, solar panels are something like 5:1.
Taking that mindset, what's the ratio of CO2-sequested-for-CO2-required-to-mine? Yes, we can get better numbers if we electrify all the heavy machinery and power it with solar, but given that heavy mining trucks are largely fossil fuel powered, where are we today?
"The primary component of the Earth's upper mantle, it is a common mineral in Earth's subsurface,[...]".
This sentence, also from that same Wikipedia article, seems to suggest that availability wouldn't be the problem. But, whether the whole process is practical/reasonable, is another question entirely.
In the best case, one ton of oil/coal requires a few tons of olivine to neutralise it right?
So we need to go olivine mining at a greater rate than we have done oil extraction... Will there be millions of olivine rigs, olivine pipelines, olivine wars?
Ocean thermal energy conversion plants [1] is another possible technology that could give us fine grained control over the weather. These types of technologies are more promising than technologies which only have a goal to fix climate change, because they propose something that would be useful to do independently of climate change.
The new nonprofit founded by Aubrey de Grey https://viento.ai/ works on this issues.
Sounds like the precursor idea to Snowpiercer. Then again, I can easily see Jeff Bezos operating a train like that in the movie, so maybe it was less fiction than I thought.
I haven't had the opportunity to look up the humidity in BC, but certainly it is far greater than what you would see in death valley. Death valley is a very dry area. The Pacific Northwest is wet and the humidity just adds to the misery of the heat. In my area we saw almost 110° at about 35% humidity. I have experienced 120° in 5% humidity and I have to say the 110 felt hotter! Definitely more miserable!
As pointed out below it’s a pretty arid geography, but things just got worse for Lytton - an evacuation order for the village has been ordered[0][1] and “the whole town is on fire”[2] according to the mayor.
I think about 40% of the country has been 'signaling' pretty hard. 30% are actively pushing for more emissions/denial. And the rest are sick of the infighting.
Take the bipartisan infrastructure 'agreement' (not final). Republicans refused to do anything but support more cars...
It's easy to blame political leaders, but they are (mostly) elected by the general population. Here in the US ~50% of the people vote for climate change deniers, so they are the ones you need to convince.
Unless things have changed recently, 41% of USA inhabitants (58% of white evangelicals) believe the second coming of jesus will happen by 2050 [1] [2]. Such a belief would also seem to cancel voter motivation to combat climate change.
India emits less than half the CO2 that the US does, and almost an order of magnitude less per capita. The US has a long way to go toward getting its own climate policy in order before it should be telling India to make changes.
International agreements is one of the solutions which climate advocates are calling for. USA voters probably have more power then anyone in calling for such agreements and that they would be enforced.
Yes, the solution to climate change has been obvious for a while - hit fossil fuels with increasing taxes until emissions come down to acceptable levels.
Of course, that involves giving up one’s pickup trucks/SUV, international vacations, and 3k sq ft detached single family homes on quarter acre lots.
So…not going to happen. Blaming politicians is a waste of time, it is the people as a collective that have chosen the path.
Any citation on the portion of American voters who vote for federal politicians who deny climate change? I suspect it’s nowhere near 50%, even if 50% of elected officials deny climate change. Representation is ludicrously disproportionate in the United States federal government.
The Republicans have won the larger percentage of the popular vote once in the last seven elections. Most Americans prefer the non-denialist party but they are denied equal representation at the state and federal levels of government.
I hate to rain on your parade, but any solution that doesnt lean heavily on nuclear is not a solution.
50% of the population may be climate deniers (need a reference though), but there is a large group of progressives that loved the green new deal also, which did not include nuclear energy, so there is blame on both sides.
Yes, we should pour money into nuclear power, not so much because it's efficient or necessary, but because unless we give the denialists this sop they won't play ball. It's the price of cooperation.
I'm serious. If wasting money on nuclear is the price we have to pay, we should pay that price. The key word there is "if". In reality if the people treating the issue seriously get behind nuclear the goalposts will move again. Al Gore's shoe size or entrees or thermostat will prove it's all a liberal hoax and we'll roll on just as before but considerably warmer and with a few energy companies a bit richer.
I hear this kind of rhetoric all the time. 15 years ago it was “any solution to world hunger that doesn’t lean heavily on GMO is not a solution.”. The lack of food security was/is not a problem of production but of distribution. GMO may produce more nutrient rich food, but has failed to do so at scale (also so does better soil management and more crop variety).
Today, people are instead advocating nuclear power as the unproven solution to a real crisis. The problem is not of technology, but of policy and political will. Renewable energy has been a real option since the 80s. Lithium Ion batteries were invented in the 90s, and proliferated less then 15 years later (and are arguably the wrong solution for large scale energy storage). If we would have gotten behind renewables in the 70s—like we should have—the technology would be even more favorable. However in the 70s we went all in on nuclear and it failed. Nuclear has failed to scale to be the dominant power generation method in the past despite political will and ample funding, and we have no reason to believe it will be different this time around.
There is also more to the climate disaster then just polluting power generation. There is a genuine lack in green infrastructure. Highways and airports are the favorable transportation infrastructures, even though they are the most polluting. Buildings keep being made out of polluting cement, water is wasted on inefficient agricultural practices to grow unessisary crops in arid places, etc. It is as if there is a genuine lack of interest from the political class in tackling the climate crisis. As if the climate crisis is not a problem of technology but something else, like say policy.
Amazingly, the GOP just last week formed a Conservative Climate Caucus with something around 60 members. They even explicitly admit climate change is man made
The problem is that we have elected leaders that only care about being in power. They will happily watch the world burn unless a majority of the voters want them to move.
Sadly I don't think most people are ready to make the necessary sacrifices to stop climate change. At least not yet. And I think we will pass the point of no return before people are ready to make those sacrifices.
The problem is not technology or scientific, the problem is human nature.
Eh, here's the thing: politicians will use whatever crisis is available to them to cynically further their own agendas.
I'm sure plenty of them are tweeting away about how this heatwave is a clear sign of climate change (because that's what their constituents want to hear), and yet any meteorologist worth their salt would be hesitant to make that connection - weather is not climate. Climate is a meta-phenomenon.
When they use climate as cover for whatever policy agenda they intended to pursue anyway, it cheapens the discourse - political opposition that agrees on the facts likely disagrees about the solution set, particularly if it is ideologically-driven, and lumping people into childish categories like "climate deniers" only serves to harden positions.
And yet - a lot of these so-called "climate deniers" will happily buy an electric F-150 because Ford has made an attractive product that makes good choices easier. No need for a rancher in rural Montana to downgrade to a Prius to signal that he cares about the climate.
In the end, politicians are not even the right vehicles for this type of change - there's no good evidence that nation-states can achieve a game-theoretically stable set of climate policies given the harsh economic consequences of taxing the crap out of your country's industrial output. Far better results can be obtained through good old-fashioned free market capitalism.
When good choices are easy to make, those choices will be made. The market will abide.
Why? They're often part of the same ownership class that stands to make a lot of money from the status quo. Even if the world goes to shit, they're wealthy enough to insulate themselves from the fallout, and probably wouldn't mind being lords of the ashes.
Perhaps in the same way the civil engineers signal to south Florida condo boards that their buildings are about to collapse? It's the same problem, really. Collective action by a political body controlled by older people who are trying to just hold on to their wealth until they die is impossible. We need new political structures to write down the capital loss on all the junk we built in the 20th century that has no purpose in the 21st, and the political will to tell a handful of people that yes your underground mineral rights are being expropriated.
How much of that has actually been environmentalists and not a result of intentional deceptive tactics and undermining of public education by fossil fuel companies?
Most of the effective opposition has come not from environmentalists per se, but rather from NIMBYs who don't want to live near a nuclear plant. After the incidents at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima it's difficult to convince local residents that newer designs are inherently very safe. Even if they support nuclear power in principle they want it built somewhere else.
My friend’s mousepad fused to his desk and he had to scrape it off with a butter knife.
I’ve had to build makeshift doors to isolate a tiny cooled room in my house. I haven’t worn pants in days. My partner and I went through a 1.5L spray bottle misting ourselves in the couple hours leading up to midnight (!)
Now we’ve just gotta hope that nobody lights a match in this giant, extremely windy basket of bone-dry fuel. The fact that there is a fireworks stand open on the main road in my town right now is, to put it mildly, very unsettling.
I wish I knew more about meteorology. It must be incredible (and maybe a little harrowing) to be in that profession these days.
Does anyone have any idea how this heat wave will conclude? Does all that energy just fade out into a nice polite rainstorm, or should we expect something more dramatic to cap it off considering the unprecedented circumstances?
For future reference, check out weather.gov and read the forecast discussion - it's written by your local meteorologist and is THICK with jargon and interesting stuff to google. It's sort of the 'root' for weather information and you pay for it anyways through taxes. It's great.
On the Pacific NW coast where this is happening, cool marine air will push in and eventually overwhelm the system holding in the heat. The change can be quite abrupt, as the two systems wrestle for dominance, I've felt it (in Seattle) is as a sudden breeze followed by what feels like turning the AC on - literally a 5-10deg temp drop in minutes and can drop 30deg in a couple hours. It doesn't generally end with full-on rain but with cool coastal clouds rolling in.
In this case it was a 40-50 degree (Fahrenheit) swing from the record high to the overnight lows as the air compression from sinking air off the mountains dispersed and marine air came onshore: https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/06/even-more-extreme-ext...
Check out Frankie MacDonald, he's an autistic savant meteorologist. Not saying that in any disrespectful way, I know some people get a bit butthurt when using those words.
I don't know if he's commented on it yet, but if he has, >99% chance he's correct.
If someone ACTUALLY is a savant with Asperger's or autism, is it disrespectful to point that fact out when you are gauging the importance of their predictions?
The huge waves of human migration caused by climate changes will not only lead to suffering and death of millions, it will also bring us to the new brink of a new world war.
Whole regions becoming unlivable will affect us all. We can't wait around until some invention saves us. We need to act now. We can turn this around with WWS alone.
It's already happening but barely anybody notices because it's so politicized.
Syria for example has been in over a decade of civil war, refugees spilling over deep into Europe affecting local politics, as the ME region was already saturated with displaced people trough Afghanistan and Iraq.
Yet most peoples take on Syria is a regurgitated: "The Syrian people rose up against an evil dictator regime! Arab Summer!".
When in reality the people in Syria went trough a 10 years period of drought [0] prior to "shit hitting the fan". A combination of the climate getting hotter while water is getting more scarce in the region, as Turkey controls the majority of freshwater inflow into Syria and large parts of Iraq [1]. An inflow that's steadily getting smaller, as Turkey is expanding its own agricultural infrastructure projects, with plenty of dams, in Southeastern Anatolia.
In 2008 Syria sought more drought support from the UN, and particularly the US. The cable can be found on Wikileaks [2] and the warnings by the Syrian UN representative and minister of agriculture read pretty much prophetic in hindsight.
I personally would not buy property or a home south of the 45th parallel. I know people moving from Oregon to Texas because they disagree with how Oregon handled the pandemic. I think they are nuts in more ways than one.
I am from Pakistan and have quite a few cities there were temperature goes up to 50 degrees Celsius. I am living in UK these days and feel that UKs cold will kill me. Summer is the only one or two months when I feel alive.
My mom grew up in Guddu for part of her childhood and her cousins lived down the road in Daharki at same time. I wonder if those get as hot as Sibi/Jacobabad
To be fair, even the UK natives feel miserable with their weather. But also try to see things on the bright side, at least you will not get arrested for complaining about the weather like in Kuwait :)
I wonder if this heat dome effect contributed to Venus' eventual fate. My #1 fear is we're just going to get into some runaway cascade of warming and turn into something like Venus much faster than we realize.
The Earth has had 2,000+ ppm CO2 concentrations in the past and hasn't turned into Venus.
And more or less we're going to dig up all the dinosaurs and plants that died and turned into oil/carbon and put them back in the atmosphere and return to that if we do nothing. But we have a record of what that looks like and its not Venus.
That's also a very silly things to "fear" since to turn into Venus you gotta do things like melt all of Antarctica, Greenland and the Himalayas first which will take a couple hundred years. There's an awful lot of thermal mass in all that ice.
Disruption to agriculture and food production though doesn't require turning the Earth into Venus.
The planet has been ice-free in past interglacials, e.g. the last interglacial (before the current Holocene) was warmer than the current. Earth becoming like Venus would take far more terraforming than it would take to turn Mars into a new Earth, probably comparable to turning Venus into an Earth-like planet - i.e. it is not going to happen. In "a few thousand years" [1] the temperature will drop precipitously and we'll be heading for the next ice age if the pattern from the last ~2.5 million years holds. In other words, enjoy the warmth while it lasts, it is sure to get very cold again sometime in the future...
[1] which can mean anything from "soon" to "100.000 years" depending on who does the talking
A carbon level of 1,000-2,000 ppm will prevent that interglacial from happening and will melt Antarctica by that point in time.
For the past 1,000,000 years, through many interglacials, the carbon level has never exceeded 300 ppm.
If you look at what "should" be happening right now then we should be cooling. The last interglacial ended 10,000 years ago and the fast Milankovich cycle caused by oscillations of the axial tilt is in a cooling (decreasing tilt) trend. If prior ice age cycles held we should be seeing cooling and the formation of continential glaciers in northern Canada. That natural cycle has been decisively broken.
Well, looking at mars, solutions like "keep slamming it with ice comets till the weather improves" are on the table. On earth we'd have all the NIMBYs whining about impact craters spoiling the view or something.
In the US, at least, air conditioning is somewhat common from what I know. It was as hot as +35 in northwest part of Russia last week, for several days, with sun barely coming down at night, and that felt like a torture at times. Some historical records were broken.
> In the US, at least, air conditioning is somewhat common from what I know.
Afaik that depends on the specific region in the US. Some states have hot regions where AC is common, but plenty of others don't because heat didn't used to be as common as it's now, thus the sudden need for cooling to such a degree that even public cooling shelters are a thing [0]
Another factor, even for places with AC, is that their infrastructure and AC is built to certain heat expectations, if the weather goes outside these expected then the infrastructure can't cope. A version of that was the Texas electricity grid failing during the sudden high demand of a "real" winter.
Whoever is building and selling ACs these days, I think these companies are a good investment right now. Summers in Europe are on track to become unlivable without air conditioners in individual homes; I give it few more years before everyone and their dog will want to buy one.
I'm from a 3rd world country and its the first time in Canada it's as hot as back there, with the difference people here don't have AC, so lots of people are dying from the heat.
To some seeing records such as these fall is heartbreaking. It’s agonizing and vexing when you wonder what can you do to help slow down climate change? The reality is we aren’t doing nearly enough to slow it down and the Earth is gradually destabilizing. We see insane cold snaps such as those that impacted Texas this winter, and at the opposite end of the spectrum heat waves unlike anything humans have ever experienced before. The worst part is these will continue to get worse year after year while greenhouse gas emissions rise. Imagine the record high temperatures falling this week and year. In 5 years or 10 years they might seem to be distant memories as we continue to see records broken and the planet becomes less livable.
The worst part of this is Earth is all there is for us. There is no where else to go. We are this tightly interconnected ecosystem where all beings are completely bound to one another. Our home is surrounded by darkness for millions of miles. There is no option B. There won’t be, that’s just the way it is. Mars won’t be option B. Don’t kid yourself. If we don’t right the course on greenhouse gas emissions with urgent changes to limit emissions now, then we will have lost the habitability of Earth. I can envision us having to live inside year round without being able to go outside. Does this feel so much like a remote possibility now? It seems year over year temperate days become more elusive. Fires. Droughts. Extreme weather events. Floods.
The destruction and extinction of entire ecosystems hangs in the balance. The crazy thing is we can stop this. But only with urgent individual and societal actions and sacrifices now to address the climate crisis.
As an individual, there isn't really anything you can do. Going vegetarian doesn't help. Recycling doesn't help. Using your shower for 5 minutes doesn't help.
As a society, we've chosen to manage resources via capitalism. If you use less water, what that means is water is cheaper so some corporation can afford another few acres of almond trees. If consumers cut their waste in half, the slack would be picked up at the corporate level.
I genuinely believe the only answer is violently enforced regulation. Set a standard like the Geneva convention that says how much pollution and waste you are allowed to generate on a per-area basis, and actually go to war against countries that don't meet the goals. Throw executives in jail that increase profits by migrating production to countries with less regulation around emissions and waste.
This is a tragedy of the commons problem, and you aren't going to fix it by having even a large percentage of the population agree to be respectful of the commons. You have to declare war against those that aren't respecting the commons. I don't see another path that will actually result in meaningful change.
A dictatorship[1] of the proletariat could do that!
> I genuinely believe the only answer is violently enforced regulation.
I would like to point out that 'violence' is not _strictly_ necessary, except as a defensive measure. An internationally-organized working class could simply refuse to work on destructive projects (new oil pipelines, etc). Unfortunately, people in power tend to react with increasing violence when their power is threatened (see for example the police response to DAPL protests), so you do have to be prepared to respond to violence one way or another during the transition of power. i.e. better organized = less violence. Unfortunately we are very disorganized currently, and organizing is (in my experience) hard. Better get on that.
[1] This word makes the whole term sound undemocratic but actually refers to the proletariat as a whole enforcing their will (which must by definition be determined in a democratic way) despite the will of the existing ruling class without the need for negotiation.
You need violence because the US and China stepping up to stop pollution doesn't fix things if the Philippines refuses to take initiative. The Philippines alone contributes almost 1/3 of the plastics in the ocean despite having only about 1.5% of the world's people.
I agree that we need regulation. We need to force the majority not to freeload on the efforts of others. That's what regulation will achieve. But that being said, regulation will work because it will get more people to do the things you say will not work. If everyone voluntarily used less resources -- ate less meat, bought less virgin plastic, drove smaller cars less often for shorter distances, etc. -- that would produce the effect of regulation.
There are things we can do as individuals, but we need all the other individuals in the high-consumption parts of the world also to do these things.
One drop of rain doesn't carve a river but water does carve rivers.
This kind of argument is often made, but it is wrong.
>> As an individual, there isn't really anything you can do. Going vegetarian doesn't help.
These words are expressed as absolute. "isn't really anything" ... "doesn't help"
Yet the reality is such activities are positive in a small way. They may be far from sufficient, but they are not nothing.
To be clear I am not arguing that individual action alone will be sufficient, nor am I against collective action enforced by rules where appropriate. It's just the tenor of your post is wrong. We can have both individual and collective action. And individual action alone, even if insufficient, is certainly not nothing. Less GHG emitted is better than more. Even at micro-scale this remains true.
Humans psychologically keep an internal karma counter, this has been established in scientific studies. People who performed small acts of kindness earlier in the day were less likely to take responsibility during bigger problems later in the day.
We can apply that to global warming. If you do your part by recycling, this makes you less likely to feel the need to participate in bigger discussions around controlling emissions.
If you are going to spend energy every day on climate change, spend it in pursuit of bigger wins. We aren't going to solve climate change without bigger wins, and if we do get the bigger wins we probably will solve it without the smaller efforts
Thanks for replying. I thought that might be your reasoning.
Without agreeing or disagreeing with your rationale, for me it would be better if you'd make this more clear from the outset.
Something like: individuals can only make very limited positive impact, which in many instances is confounded by psychological factors driving behaviour in the wrong direction.
Your understanding is better than your initial communication.
There are in fact aspects of your argument that I disagree with concerning the Overton Window, but we needn't go there for now.
Wars are not exactly beneficial to the planet. And it would be a nice joke if your righteous war to save the planet from climate change ends up leading us into a nuclear winter.
Neither violence or authoritarianism are necessary to solve the problem. We who live in democracies "just" have to elect governments sufficiently not corrupt that they will impose the required environmental restrictions on industry, and use strong economic pressure on other nations that don't get their houses in order.
> Wars are not exactly beneficial to the planet. And it would be a nice joke if your righteous war to save the planet from climate change ends up leading us into a nuclear winter.
Fully agree. War is worth avoiding at all costs.
> We who live in democracies "just" have to elect governments sufficiently not corrupt that they will impose the required environmental restrictions on industry, and use strong economic pressure on other nations that don't get their houses in order.
I may be overly cynical but I just don't see this happening. But I would absolutely rejoice if it did work out that way.
> We "just" have to elect a government sufficiently not corrupt that it will impose the required environmental restrictions on industry, and use strong economic pressure on other nations that don't get their houses in order.
This is essentially the operating definition of "authoritarianism" in Washington, though. If you can't be bought, you must be anti-freedom.
You could just say enforced. The violence is implicit.
I think an infinite metadata approach also gets you there.
It appears that culture becomes homogenized in a direct relationship with information transfer.
So if we continue on the path of generating metadata for EVERYTHING, we will arrive in a world where we can obtain detailed supply chain information just by virtue of the fact that a thing exists.
Transparent supply chains and homogenized culture seems like a good recipe for internalizing externalities without regulation per say (rather propaganda).
I mostly agree with what you say, but I don't think any other economic/political system would do better than capitalism. The problem isn't really with which system you use, no known political/economic system can handle greedy/selfish entities, be it people, groups, companies or countries.
And enforcing rules like the Geneva convention will not work for the same reason. There will always be entities that bend or circulate the rules. (Example: Geneva Convention and the US and China (Not bashing the US here, just stating facts)
There will never be any saving the climate unless the US and China are onboard, and currently they are not. I might see that the US could be in the future, but currently China is hell bent on being the number one super power and they are ready to break some eggs on the way.
I agree with you but as it stands the dominant ideology of the USA-led "international rule-based order" is Liberalism (i.e. the individual is the authority). Until there is an ideological revolution in the West, this is "just how it is".
Every scientifically-correct, readily-implementable strategy to address this crisis will be killed at some point for infringing on sacred "individual liberties". Look at Biden currently doing huge damage to the international solar industry as a byproduct of Washington's floundering ideological crusade against "authoritarianism" [1].
You should have specified that. Sure, big media ops like Greenpeace are anti-nuclear. However, many actual scientists like James Lovelock is staunchly pro-nuclear [1].
Let’s not forget about big rocks falling from the sky, volcanoes and the Sun killing this planet inevitably in about 1b years from now. There better be a planet B at some point.
One thing I want to mention is that it is not known if this heat wave is caused by climate change or not. A UW professor named Cliff Mass, who specializes in climate science and has written books about the weather of the Pacific Northwest, has specifically said (https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/06/incredible-temperatur...):
> Is global warming contributing to this heatwave? The answer is certainly yes. Would we have had a record heatwave without global warming. The answer is yes as well.
He also said in the same article:
> Let me end with the golden rule of temperature extremes: the bigger the temperature extreme the SMALLER the contribution of global warming. Think about that.
Throwaway as well because I've worked with Cliff Mass and am not interested in being at the receiving end of the retaliation that he's known for doling out.
Cliff is kind of a pariah among meteorologists and climate scientists. He _loves_ that fact, and revels in this idea that he's the lone genius who got it right while the rest of the community got it wrong on climate change. But he's not viewed as someone who makes credible statements, particularly as they pertain to questions about climate.
Many of his blog posts are deliberately misleading or contain incorrect information. Others I'd categorize as "You're not wrong... you're just an asshole." He has a decent understanding of some of the meteorological phenomena that are unique to the Puget Sound region, but even there I take every word he writes with a grain of salt. Sure, read his blog to understand how the snow is going to be this weekend at Crystal. But I'd leave it at that.
Yes, it's backwards. The most common way this is quantified is using Fraction of Attributable Risk (FAR) [0]. Even if the mean of the temperature distribution is just shifted slightly upward with no change in shape, the higher the threshold, the larger the fraction of risk that is attributable to the change in mean. This holds for all but pathological distributions, and doesn't even require increased variability or anything like that.
Thank you. This makes sense now and seems to me the right way of looking at the matter.
I think I now understand what Mass was doing. Something like:
"The bigger my overall remuneration (salary + bonus) the smaller the relative contribution made by my fixed salary."
> But he's not viewed as someone who makes credible statements, particularly as they pertain to questions about climate.
Based on what evidence? Cliff Mass is a tenured professor of Atmospheric Science at UW, has written the definitive book on Northwest climate (https://www.amazon.com/Weather-Pacific-Northwest-Cliff-Mass/...), leads the University of Washington Mesoscale Analysis and Forecasting Group, is the chief scientist of the Northwest Modeling Consortium, and is a fellow of the American Meteorological Society.
Your comment seeks to discredit him in the very space he is broadly recognized for as an expert. I can't accept a vague attack on him that provides no supporting evidence. It comes off a lot like the attacks made by extremist climate activists when Cliff Mass corrects their understanding and brings them back to a balanced reality of what is going on.
The thing is, this is a chaotic effect of the jet stream going into tighter oscillations. Think of a river in a flat area meandering more and more until oxbows form. It's an analogous phenomenon with the jet stream and pressure.
The jet stream tends to follow warmer air, which means increased temperatures overall give a "flatter" plain to meander on, to return to the analogy.
Obviously, like anything, it's far more complex than the analogy permits.
It was very bad in Seattle, most building AC systems couldn't even keep up with the load. Lots of wildlife certainly died, there were so many heartbreaking posts about finding dead cats and birds.
Here in Australia I am certain that the last couple of years of summers have been drastically cooler than previous. From memory alone, I remember having weeks of 30c+ weather with multiple days above 40c.
I feel like extreme weather is right up there with super moons and other astronomical events when it comes to generating headlines, so I did a time constrained Google search for "heat dome" and here's what turned up:
2020-07-10 - "How a ‘Heat Dome’ Forms—and Why This One Is So Perilous (A massive, intense heat wave is settling over the continental US. The ravages of the Covid pandemic are going to make it all the more deadly.)"
2019-07-29 - "What exactly are heat domes and why are they so long-lasting and miserable? (Since late June, bouts of extreme heat have scorched both the United States and Europe. To blame are large, stagnant zones of high pressure known as heat domes.)"
I don't mean to make light of important meteorological events, especially as they relate to climate change, but can anybody with better knowledge tell me if this is a significant incident, or just another "super blood worm moon to appear larger than it has since 1944"?
I mean, it was 108 degrees in Seattle on Monday. The previous record was 103. Not sure what more information you need to determine significance-- it's literally never been hotter
If the same headline comes up every year then it's easy to construe it as headline-generating pandering.
But the facts are, that the earth is warming more and more every year, and if you are under 40 then you have never experienced a year of below-average temperatures. The headlines are repeated because we break new records every year.
The same headline is not coming up every year, at least with regards to the weather event the article is about. Seattle's previous record was from 11 years ago in 2009. Seattle also hit triple digit temperatures two other times, in 1941 and 1994. Source: https://www.seattlepi.com/local/weather/article/10-years-ago...
> The ravages of the Covid pandemic are going to make it all the more deadly.
Yeah... um... call me skeptical on that claim. So far as I can tell, Covid didn't break anybody's air conditioners. It didn't (so far as I know) leave people more susceptible to heat. That article seems like attention-grabbing nonsense. (I'm not blaming you, just commenting on what your search turned up.)
I agree it's probably just attention grabbing nonsense, but I'll note there are a bunch of communal shelters being used by people who don't have facilities otherwise to get out of the dangerous heat levels. Bringing a bunch of strangers together into a communal heat shelter isn't ideal in a pandemic.
I'm concerned how this article speaks about setting records. Setting new records aren't always a good thing. Setting a new record in climate change destroys uncountable organisms affecting the nature system, and eventually humans. By staying ignorant of our impact on the nature system, we dig our own grave.
Problem with that, especially in the US I think, is that the majority of people will not like what you are doing. The only way to enact change is to get the majority of people on your side. What you suggest will only antagonize people though...
What you suggest has only ever worked through history when protesting slowly enlightened people and the majority of people chose to support the protestors over time.
I think the US is so divided and fed up from BLM and the election chaos at the moment, so enacting change that way is a hopeless cause.
Some will die, some will always survive this. That doesn't really change - so that's barely what this is about.
We need to make an effort to stop climate change. If we can stop climate change in a good way it can give us a better quality of life. Less conflict, less resource scarcity, investing in a prosperous future.
I don't understand the downvotes. These tweets are documenting record droughts/floods and crop losses in the last year and people are dying of starvation and the numbers of people starving will only go up.
On the one hand, it is easy to see the direct link.
OTOH, you can't blame a person - or company - for playing according to the rules of the game.
It comes down to: "Why should I eschew a car and take 250% longer to travel places on COVID infested public transport, when my neighbour Bob jumps in his BMW SUV and drives."
We need leadership from lawmakers or nothing meaningful will happen.
Anyone who thinks they are going to make a difference by abstaining from driving their car is woefully misinformed.
We have cargo ships right now that are burning dirty oil and producing massive amounts of pollution. It has been estimated that just one of these container ships, the length of around six football pitches, can produce the same amount of pollution as 50 million cars.
Note that this is pollution as measured by a few specific pollutants and explicitly _not_ CO2. While this is definitely a problem, if you care about climate change the cars are still a big deal.
A bit off topic, but: COVID should not be a reason we eschew public transportation; we already have enough of a stigma against it in the USA.
I think last year was understandable why some would shy away from it, but if you'll ride in an airplane I don't see why you would be unwilling to take the train.
I love the idea of public transport. The reality doesn't match the idea though. Same as "drive vs not drive" for climate change, the rules have to change for most people to consistently prefer public transport over using their own car.
Plane vs train? Two different use cases which people would rate differently depending on benefit vs risk/cost.
I can easily see people happy to use a plane to travel long distances with a known set (to the carrier) of people but not want to use a public train with strangers getting on and off at each stop.
Here in Australia where we have limited number of COVID+ people and track'n'trace is feasible it makes a huge difference.
If you are trying to persuade people to your point of view, I don't think this method works.
First, skimming the article for the causes of "heat dome" I am not seeing connections to climate change. Maybe I didn't read carefully enough so let me know but this could just be a "thing".
But more importantly, short of that connection it looks like you are trying to appeal to guilt and fear and that's just not something that attracts mentally healthy people. Nobody is interested in that emotion so if it's warranted you have to work much harder to make a case.
The earth isn't dying, the earth will be fine, it will recover over time, humanity on the other hand needs to be reduced.
If it isn't climate change, an epidemic or something else, then it will be war over resources some time in the future.
On the other hand, climate change will probably lead to war anyway, since resources like water and places to live will decrease from that, so war is probably in the future anyway, since world population continue to rise, especially since the Chinese seem to allow 3 children moving forward.
The point of view expressed here somewhat ironically show a severe lack of humanity. If anything it seems more humanity is needed here.
It’s not uncommon to hear people talk about various types of population control/reduction while being seemingly oblivious to just how tragic and psychopathic the point of view is.
If you find yourself agreeing with, say, Thanos, and also think it’d be great to see half the world’s population reduced by half, I think that’s a pretty strong signal that you need to really think about what you’re saying and if something can be done to increase your ability to empathize with people in need.
Another approach, that doesn’t involve letting people die, directly or indirectly, through our (lack of) action, would be to address issues that cause long term high population growth, in addition to for instance developing technologies and making cultural/lifestyle changes to accommodate more people on our planet to the extent that’s needed.
Population reduction advocates never seem to argue that themselves committing suicide would be the moral choice, which reveals they are valuing the preservation of their own current lifestyle over the lives of the "others".
In practice, it seems like the majority of people who call for population reduction are white/western supremacists who lack empathy for humans born with less privilege.
Birth control should be freely available to every human on the planet. Beyond that, I don't think there is any moral policy available to reduce population.
I didn't really mean to suggest population control, even though I wrote just that. The problem as I see it is that everybody tries to approach the problem as if it will be solvable by technology.
The only way I see that we can solve a climate crisis or the survival of humanity long term is to actually work together. Which I'm pretty certain will never happen, since there will always be greedy and selfish people.
I agree. I believe reducing wealth inequality is the best path towards stable global population. Nearly half of the countries in the world are already below the population replacement rate - and it seems birth rates are inversely correlated with wealth to some extent.
My point is that there's no need for population control. The problem will eventually solve itself.
I think humanity is doomed as long as there are egotistical and greedy people and there's nothing you or I can do as individuals.
The problem is lack of resources, so I don't think the problem is solvable with with technology.
And just for reference, I actually am very successful in a field where you do have to empathize with people to be successful. That's actually what makes me bitter, I empathize and all I see is greed and selfishness. It's human nature, and that can't be solved with technology or science.
This is high school level knowledge. Where does this meme that human population is growing out of control come from? I keep seeing it repeated here and it is puzzling.
We would still consume too much resources even with population decline.
Sure, lets say we fix climate change. I think the only viable way to actually do that is for everybody agree to live as people did a few hundred years ago.
People seems to believe that we can solve climate change with technology. I think that's a pipe dream.
I also think that it's a pipe dream thinking that the world will band together and "solve" the climate crisis together. I think Covid-19 has showed us that humanity does not band together in a crisis, each country and even each individual will use the crisis to make moves to benefit them.
And it doesn't matter what you do as a individual, most resources are consumed by large corporations anyway.
Huh? Communist China was (and still is) aiming to have LESS children. Before 2015 they didn't allow more than 1 (one!) child per family. Currently they are allowing 2 (two) children which is below sustainability threshold of 2.4
Current news suggest that they are upping the threshold to 3 children trying to stimulate population growth due to needing to increase their available work force in the future.
These measures are not as extreme as the last time they stimulated their population growth, which lead to the one child policy. We'll see if they feel that this stimulation is enough or if they will try to increase the incentive even more if they don't feel as if it is enough.
I think you are half right. The earth isn't dying, it will be fine.
We should have a human focus, because it's a global common ground.
We should bother because this is all about what kind of life we will have in the future.
Some will die, some will always survive. That doesn't really change. But if we can stop climate change in a good way it can give us a better quality of life. Less conflict, less resource scarcity. That's why it's worth bothering, to build prosperity, invest in the future.
It's actually not a science/technology problem. The problem is human nature, and that's not solvable with technology. If it was, then everything would be rather simple...
I think it's a problem of politics, just like you say, it's not about technology, of course. But it's an issue at the cross section of science and politics.
Maybe you can also see why the young climate activists use banners with "system change, not climate change": They don't believe, either, that our current sociologial systems are capable of solving this, the "system" needs to change.
Yes, I agree. The question is what the system need to change into?
I'm not an expert, but it seems that all known political and/or economic systems fail in the face of greed and selfishness. Or maybe greed is the effect of a failed political system, either or all known systems are a failure from my perspective.
I think capitalism balanced by laws has worked best so far, but you seem to need so many laws that it creates loopholes. I.e blacklists doesn't work that well, especially not a complex blacklist. (And I'd even suggest that the blacklist has been trojaned by lobbyists and other agendas.)
