Can We Stop Climate Change While Still Living Comfortably?

[Idlemessiah]

Sure we can, but it will have to be by force, and governments who force people to do shit don't get votes. But it is so easy.

Tax the hell out of urban driving and get everyone in cities on public transport or bicycles.

Create a food/health/price imbalance. Make bread, eggs, milk, meat and greens cheap. Make fizzy pop, crisps, chocolate and ice-cream expensive.

And the computer thing is easy. Sustainable energy. Then we won't have to worry at all about the amount of juice our 4x Titan rigs are using up.

The problem however is;

The London office jockey who commutes into the city in a Land Rover, buys enough food per month to feed 5000 people and who thinks a tidal energy plant across the Thames will ruin the city's commerce.

You know, the sort of people that vote.

 

[FogHornG36]

Define recently? industrial revolution?

Do you seriously need to ask? No, really. I honestly can't tell if this is intended as a rhetorical question. It feels like it is since you apparently know the answer already. Yet, you don't go anywhere with it.

Tell you what, I'll just bite. Yes, the industrial revolution. Your turn.

just trying to figure out if you thought something like 200+ years was "recently"

 

[Haru17]

If we don't act our standards of living will certainly plummet.

 

[EiMitch]

I fail to see how any context was missed here. The statement I made in part was about the massive amount of energy these very high populous nations will be seeing an increased need of as they further industrialize and prosper (which in part would help alleviate the very things you mentioned) causing an increase in the amount of man made climate change. The point i made is that as quality of life improves in these places they will will need and consume more energy, food and everything else that is driving climate change. Now the big families will get smaller as quality of life improves (maybe, the one child rule was not exactly effective in China, we also cannot fully account for cultural differences in the context of a couple of forum posts) but that will be a period of time down the road and in the meantime the slice real estate i am sitting in at this moment will slip under water. A new coal fired power plant is going up every 2 weeks in China and it's not one of the modern human friendly ones either. these things are old style, dirty things that blacken lungs for many miles around them in addition to adding massive carbon in the air. The solution is not condoms and prosperity. we are way past that.

My mistake apparently...

...is which piece of context you missed. You're worried that other developing nations are following, and will continue to follow, the filthy leads of China and India. The thing is: no they won't. As I've been saying throughout this thread, the economics of fossil fuels vs renewable energy as they've been drilled into our heads for decades are not true anymore. Let go of those familiar talking points. They're obsolete.

India and China have significant coal reserves, making them outliers in the industrial pollution scene. Meanwhile, us Americans have more coal reserves than any other nation. Yet, we're subsidizing the heck out of coal, by billions of dollars per year. (it helps if you also count tax breaks) Put that information together and ask yourself how attractive does coal actually appear to the rest of the world? Spoiler alert: petroleum is barely looking any better.

Meanwhile, the cost of renewable energy has gone down significantly while efficiency has improved. They've proven to be very cost-effective. Do you really think developing nations aren't taking a serious look at wind turbines, photovoltaics, and solar-thermal? Do you seriously doubt countries of all sizes are investing in renewables right now to spare themselves the rising costs of fossil fuels? Especially with the artificial scarcities oil companies frequently like to make?

As implied by the "artificial" qualifier, scarcity isn't the reason fossil fuels are so costly now. Its all about the effort it takes to get them. The stuff that's easy to dig up and refine has been burned long ago. We've got lots of reserves, but they're increasingly difficult to tap. And the solutions aren't cheap. We subsidize them to keep prices artificially low. An illusion to maintain the complacency of developed countries with old habits.

Its naive to assume that the past is the future, that the same story will keep repeating with each developing nation. The economics simply won't allow it.

 

[EiMitch]

just trying to figure out if you thought something like 200+ years was "recently"

Compared to 5000+ years of recorded history? Yes, that is recent. And that's without discussing human pre-history, which dates us back 200,000+ years that we know of. A century or two is recent. But enough of that. Whats your point?

 

[Tarfeather]

@Metadigital: Thanks for taking your time to post here. It's good to see some reasoned thought on this, rather than just the usual bullshit.

That being said if you think about what humanity has done to this planet in the context of the history of Earth; its nothing, its like a cold, or a small indigestion.

It's closer to one of the mass extinction events, which is no small thing at all. In fact, we've had such an effect on the planet that we're starting to call our current geological era the Anthropocene [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene].

1 - In practice, such pessimistic hand-wringing becomes an excuse to do nothing. You know this to be true.

The problem is interpreting this as pessimism. Instead, it's merely stating that a plan to alter GDP by a small percentage with the goal of not discomforting human life isn't going to cut it. Focusing entirely on global warming is also only going to perpetuate climate change in general. Let's not confuse accepting the scale of the problem with pessimism.

Well, it's realism. It is realistic to assume that humanity at this point is going to fuck itself over. All data points this way. He's not criticizing you for being pessimistic, but he's criticizing you for not being optimistic, because only an optimist could believe with any sort of certainty that we(as in the people actually having any idea about this, not the pop in general) can do anything to fix this.

What you seem to be saying is that at this point, if we want to ensure a sustainable economy for the next couple thousand years, we need to apply such drastic changes that they would be considered "extremist" within the current political system. I fully agree to that.

It's not going to happen. But I think your argument and suggestions are the more correct ones. We can try for some sort of compromise so that we might push the disaster back a bit; As the "saner" people have been doing and are still doing. Or we can demand full compliance with the goal that in a thousand years our grandchildren will have a decent place to live. Personally, I can only accept the latter, and I will not support anyone who does not have this goal. I think at this point, the best bet to work in that direction is to find out how many people share that idea, and whether we can somehow join forces to actually have an effect. I don't think it's very likely, but reading posts like Metadigital's makes me more hopeful of this.

 

[Metadigital]

Oh please, I haven't seen such a naked No True Scotsman in a long time, and I'm a fucking Scotsman. Where the hell do you think the various Green parties are getting their policies from, the fucking Ether? Who do you think are creating or inspiring groups like Take the Flour Back in the first place if not the academics and philosophers who generate and advance the various strands of environmentalist thought? We're done here, you're evidently not interested in actually engaging in the discussion.

You probably shouldn't invoke a fallacy that you don't understand. The No True Scotsman fallacy applies groups which have no formal definition - such as being a Scotsman. There's no unifying theme there. It's a granfaloon [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granfalloon] to borrow Vonnegut's handy moniker.

For philosophical frameworks (say environmentalism or feminism), there are formal definitions. You can either belong to a group that is compatible with those philosophies or are can not. The Green Party doesn't follow the basic philosophical principles of environmental thought. They're a political organization that has primarily economic goals in mind (look at these new resources we can exploit for money - think of all the jobs that can be created!). Political groups often don't represent the people they claim to. This is certainly true in the US (where the Democrats claim to represent liberals despite being conservative and where Republicans claim to represent conservatives despite being an extremist group).

Finally, it's a bit ironic that you hand wave away everything I've said so far because I'm not interested in "actually engaging in the discussion", don't you think?

@Metadigital: Thanks for taking your time to post here. It's good to see some reasoned thought on this, rather than just the usual bullshit.

Thanks.

It can be frustrating because environmental thinking requires some pretty different ways of understanding the world than many people are comfortable with. As a result, talking to others (especially on the internet) about the limitations of strategies like in this article (and again, in the Green Party) ends up more often than not being incomprehensible to a lot of others. For me, being trained in geology was the start of my ability to see the world as I do now, as it forces you to think of time on a geologic scale rather than just within my own lifetime. That's one of the first major stumbling blocks, especially here in the US, where a surprising chunk of the population doesn't think the Earth even exists on a geologic timescale. Then you have to think of natural environments in terms of trophic systems [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_flow_(ecology)] or food webs [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_web]. You've got to see the world as composed of materials flowing through systems and cycles instead of as linear paths from standing reserve [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gestell] to final product. It's a lot to take in. I can only hope that someone takes note of what I say or clicks on the occasional link I post to start educating themselves on the issues so they don't either fall for predatory pseudo-Environmental institutions or gain anti-environmental sentiments like the poster above, because all that will do is rush us, and many other species on the planet, into extinction far sooner than it otherwise would have.

 

[nodlimax]

"Can We Stop Climate Change"

There is one simple answer to this: NO!

Climate will always keep changing. Climate has never been the same over a longer period of time. It gets warmer and colder based on specific influence. High sun activity? Temperature goes up - more warm related "incidents". Less sun activity - temperature goes down - cold related incidents.

If one of the super vulcanos on this planet goes active again, I want to see you try stop the more than likely ice age that is going to follow.

Can we please stop with these kind of bs headlines? If you want to talk about "climate change caused by humanity", then call it what it is. Btw. the science behind the carbon dioxide related global warming is dubious at best...

 

[Ark of the Covetor]

Quick aside because I think Alex gets far too much stick over the oil stuff; the projections being used by the SNP weren't pulled out of their arse you know, they largely came from the UK government's Department of Energy and Climate Change and the oil industry itself. As it turns out of course all the predictions were wrong at least in the short term, but the perception that Alex Salmond was pushing a "land of milk & honey" vision based on ludicrously unrealistic oil predictions was essentially created out of nothing by the BBC and the OBR(you remember them, the guys who're essentially a government-sanctioned Tory thinktank ), the latter of whom's record on predicting things is...well, lets be charitable and say "not awesome".

As for the Greens and Bennett; she's better than most recent Green leaders, but sadly that's not saying a lot(I still rate Patrick Harvey of the Scottish Greens above her, but he's not devoid of drawbacks either). I'm not against redistribution of wealth in principle, but then I'm not an ideological capitalist; I do however think that there are solutions out there which are sadly being ignored because people are far too entrenched in the tribal divides - left-right, environment-industry etc etc. A prime example is redistribution via taxation; despite the fact that a policy like Land Value Rating should please both the left AND the right - by extracting a rent on ownership of land based on its unimproved value as a substitute for taxing income, you can generate enough revenue to support substantial social services, perhaps even more substantial than at present, which should please the left, and at the same time all earned wealth remains in the hands of those who generate it, and meaningful development of land is encouraged over speculation or hoarding, both of which would drive economic activity and so should please the right - but both the left and the right whinge about the policy for different reasons which are also the same reason; it's not the policy they currently advocate, and advocating the policy that fits the respective sides' narratives have become more important to them than actually achieving the end results those policies are supposed to be enabling.

That's the same issue the Greens have been struggling with; GM crops and nuclear power, properly used, would make it actually practical to achieve their supposed objectives, but because they don't feel right to environmentalists used to seeing scientists and industry as the enemy, they'd rather just shove their fingers in their ears and shout "LALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU OVER THE SOUND OF HOW ORGANIC I AM LALALA". It's fucking maddening - so many people in politics, or even just among the voting public, would rather achieve nothing in the "right" way than actually obtain their goals in the "wrong" way.

Interesting answer, I think the OBR comment is a bit harsh, it is an independent body, there's no doubt Alec picked the most optimistic predictions he could find, I guess not unexpectedly. Also he didn't rely on the Department of Energy and Climate Change figures he compiled his own, I seem to remember? The DoE's were "gloomy" according to the Guardian: http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/mar/11/alex-salmond-scotland-oil-boom

As you say, it's hard really to judge to some extent, as you say no one predicted the current low price for oil, pretty funny googling around and seeing pretty much everyone got it wrong!

Fully agree with the nuclear and GM comment, I know what you mean about politic inertia rather than actually doing something. I struggle with auto "shut down" myself on many topics, only as I get older I force myself to at least listen

He did compile his own, or rather he worked with a panel of economists to compile it, but it did include the DoE&C figures as part of a composite with industry figures. The result was actually pretty much in the middle, a little higher than the median because the OBR's oil forecasts were an outlier relative to the others, but nowhere near as high as some of the oil industry bodies were predicting. Salmond trained as an oil economist remember, and whether you like him or not(I much prefer Nicola myself) he was a canny git, he knew not to pick the best estimate from those already available or he'd get slaughtered by the press - of course it seems he didn't count on them just running that narrative regardless. Frankly I think that was the biggest mistake the Yes campaign and the SNP made in the referendum campaign; they totally failed to predict the entire media, even the supposedly-anti-establishment and supposedly-impartial aspects of it, throwing their weight four-square behind the British State. I think they honestly thought they'd have the Guardian and the Sun on-side by the last few months and that the BBC would have been much less partisan than turned out to be the case.

I like that phrase, political inertia, I might pinch that If you struggle not to switch off for politics in general, spare a thought for us Scots, we have to deal with the mumbling bumbling idiocy of the Labour party's local branch office - listening to Margaret Curran or Jimmy Murphy prevaricate and dissemble for five minutes will have you reaching for the sleeping pills to end it all.

Oh please, I haven't seen such a naked No True Scotsman in a long time, and I'm a fucking Scotsman. Where the hell do you think the various Green parties are getting their policies from, the fucking Ether? Who do you think are creating or inspiring groups like Take the Flour Back in the first place if not the academics and philosophers who generate and advance the various strands of environmentalist thought? We're done here, you're evidently not interested in actually engaging in the discussion.

You probably shouldn't invoke a fallacy that you don't understand. The No True Scotsman fallacy applies groups which have no formal definition - such as being a Scotsman. There's no unifying theme there. It's a granfaloon [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granfalloon] to borrow Vonnegut's handy moniker.

For philosophical frameworks (say environmentalism or feminism), there are formal definitions. You can either belong to a group that is compatible with those philosophies or are can not. The Green Party doesn't follow the basic philosophical principles of environmental thought. They're a political organization that has primarily economic goals in mind (look at these new resources we can exploit for money - think of all the jobs that can be created!). Political groups often don't represent the people they claim to. This is certainly true in the US (where the Democrats claim to represent liberals despite being conservative and where Republicans claim to represent conservatives despite being an extremist group).

What on earth are you on about? You're literally No True Scotsmanning your own No True Scotsman, fallacy-ception, crikey.

I don't get how you can be so obtuse as to claim that a political party founded with the express purpose of achieving the goals of the environmental movement, which attracts the votes of pretty much every environmentalist for whom that is their primary concern and who votes, who's manifesto includes dozens of policies which are not economically-optimal because of they will advance the ideals of environmentalists, and who's politicians and staff are former/current environmentalist academics and activists are somehow not environmentalists, are focused on economics, and as a group are incompatible with environmentalist philosophy. I don't know what it's like over there in Yankland, but in Europe the various Green parties and their EU Parliament group are extensions of the environmental movement, you don't just get to say "lol politicians, they don't count" because it's convenient for your argument.

Finally, it's a bit ironic that you hand wave away everything I've said so far because I'm not interested in "actually engaging in the discussion", don't you think?

I addressed any of the points you made which even vaguely approached reality, you dismissed my response out of hand even after I posted multiple examples with links to back them up, who the fuck is hand waving here again? Get a grip pal.

 

[Grey Edwards]

It's essentially too late to change anything. We might be able to slow the change with drastic measures, but it's too late to stop it. Here, this clip sums up our chances nicely.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CXRaTnKDXA

 

[Metadigital]

...you don't just get to say "lol politicians, they don't count" because it's convenient for your argument.

You'll notice that my criticism of the posted article applies equally to Green Party politics, so I'm not really sure why you insist on lumping me (or the view I'm expressing) in with that.That would be even less consistent than what you are trying to accuse me of.

 

[spartan231490]

sounds crazy to me. For one, many experts believe that 2 degrees is in the danger zone, we need to keep the warming under 1.5 if we want to not kill the environment and ourselves. For two, he makes mo mention of the fact that increasing crop yield by 40-60% without using more land is counter-productive to the other goals. Low land farming is based on diesel fuel on every level, it requires huge amounts of diesel.

 

[DrunkWithPower]

Space. You can cry foul all day but nothing will change so invest in space travel. Or wait for the thing to become a real problem then someone will step up with a plan. Or we're doomed.. either way, something happens.

 

[Atrocious Joystick]

Space. You can cry foul all day but nothing will change so invest in space travel. Or wait for the thing to become a real problem then someone will step up with a plan. Or we're doomed.. either way, something happens.

There is just no way that we could move anything even close to a even a tiny portion of the human race off this planet, even if we discover some sort of miracle technology tomorrow that lets us go all star trek within the decade. Even with commonplace and advanced space travel and even with off world colonies the majority of the human race will live on this planet. And both you and I know off world colonies actually resembling anything in science fiction is too far off to be a solution to climate change now.

Space is just not a solution to climate change and the fact is we could still be done in by climate change here on earth even if spending a year as a miner on Mars before university becomes the latest fad.

 

[Nimcha]

I never really see a need to 'stop' anything. If we already influence it this much by not even trying, with a little effort we could easily make changes as we desire.

 

[Atmos Duality]

And Chernobyl was shoddy in both design and staffing.

"Shoddy" is an understatement.
What happened at Chernobyl was akin to playing Russian Roulette with an auto-loader.

IIRC, it was an electrician, not a nuke tech, that ordered ALL the critical safeties and failsafes disabled for "stress testing". They then dialed the reactor up past super-critical with the predictable result.
To this day, I have no idea why nobody stopped them.

On the design end of things: Chernobyl's reactor used graphite as a control medium instead of doped water (like everyone else). See, once ignited, graphite doesn't stop burning for a very long time (weeks if not months).
While it's very hard to get graphite to actually burn in the first place, it turns out that nuclear fire is up to the task.

The fires at ground zero, besides being a hazard on their own, contributed to lofting out activated material from what was left of the reactor core containment creating a greater range of local exposure.

When USSR workers discovered that they couldn't douse the fires, they resorted to burying everything under some absurd amount of concrete, increasing the cleanup time and thus the exposure time of the workers. (many of whom died or went on to experience complications from exposure)

Just that one detail carried major consequence due to poor design choices.

So yeah...that's all human error. It all could have been easily prevented at one point or another.

 

[Idlemessiah]

Create a food/health/price imbalance. Make bread, eggs, milk, meat and greens cheap. Make fizzy pop, crisps, chocolate and ice-cream expensive.

What the hell does junk food have to do with climate change?

Not so much about the food (although a healthier population is going to put less strain on the healthcare industry) but more about production cost and waste. i.e. All dat landfill.

 

[EiMitch]

"Can We Stop Climate Change"

There is one simple answer to this: NO!

Climate will always keep changing. Climate has never been the same over a longer period of time. It gets warmer and colder based on specific influence. High sun activity? Temperature goes up - more warm related "incidents". Less sun activity - temperature goes down - cold related incidents.

If one of the super vulcanos on this planet goes active again, I want to see you try stop the more than likely ice age that is going to follow.

Can we please stop with these kind of bs headlines? If you want to talk about "climate change caused by humanity", then call it what it is. Btw. the science behind the carbon dioxide related global warming is dubious at best...

Ah, another denying that carbon released into the air by human activity is affecting the climate.

First of all, the notion that sunspot activity is causing climate change has been debunked so many times, its ridiculous. There is no correlation between sunspot activity and the rising average global temperature.

Second, I specifically said "average global temperature," because that average is what everyone who is actually paying attention care about. Of course there are fluctuations here and there. That's why you should pay attention to the overall trend, not the momentary chaos. For at least ten thousand years, before recorded history even, the climate has been relatively stable with a fairly predictable pattern of warming and cooling. But whats happening now is not part of that pattern. We were supposed to be at least decades into an overall cooling trend right now.

Third, you only brought up super-volcanoes for purely argumentative bs. Don't equate an unlikely (and therefore unpredictable if it ever does happen) natural disaster with a predictable human-made disaster that's already in progress.

And finally, nearly all climatologists agree that human-made carbon dioxide emissions are changing the climate. They cite all sorts of peer-reviewed data to back it up, with more coming in all the time. In fact Richard Muller, a former darling of "climate skeptics," conducted a Kock brothers funded study in an attempt to disprove human-caused climate change. But instead of confirming his beliefs, Muller found that he was wrong. And its not like he simply reviewed other people's research. He did plenty of data collecting of his own.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?x-yt-cl=85114404&v=kTk8Dhr15Kw&x-yt-ts=1422579428

So exactly what part of the science of climate change is dubious?

...

**watching the clock until I'm reminded why I prefer to focus on economics these days**