Earth’s Sixth Mass Extinction Has Begun According to Scientists

Kwak

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I don't imagine for a second that the ocean's ecosystem is going to collapse before we manage plastic pollution the same way.
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tstorm823

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But, energy creates heat. Heat which is already having trouble escaping the earth. Now we would be introducing an extra source of heat to the system than what we already are trying to deal with.
.............. you understand, I hope, that amount of heat is a rounding error of a percentage of the energy coming from the sun, right?
 
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tstorm823

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Everyone please stop citing climate change. This argument started with the claim that we need to use less energy, including nuclear, because more energy would encourage more people to exist. People, and nuclear, can exist without uncontrolled manmade climate change.
 

Generals

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If you're going to appeal to authority, you're going to need a source. I expect a bad source, since that's the only kind that is going to validate your position. Natural disasters are not more frequent or more severe, with the single exception I've seen that tropical storms may travel further inland before dissipating.
What do you want me to do, link a dozen of studies linking specific types of natural disasters which are worse due to climate change? It is commonly accepted among the scientific community there is a link between some disasters and climate change. Which is why whenever actual scientists, not on the payroll of fossil fuel lobbies, discuss certain natural disaster they bring up the link with what we're facing nowadays and climate change.

"The number of disasters has increased by a factor of five over the 50-year period, driven by climate change, more extreme weather and improved reporting. But, thanks to improved early warnings and disaster management, the number of deaths decreased almost three-fold."

"The results should serve to increase confidence in projections of increased TC intensity under continued warming."

"Theoretical work published more than 30 y ago predicted that greenhouse gas-induced climate change would increase the thermodynamic upper bound on tropical cyclone winds and thereby lead to a higher frequency of intense storms."
 

Generals

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Everyone please stop citing climate change. This argument started with the claim that we need to use less energy, including nuclear, because more energy would encourage more people to exist. People, and nuclear, can exist without uncontrolled manmade climate change.
No, what has gotten a lot of people worked up is that you don't think we should worry about the current problems we are facing because you believe everything will magically get solved. And climate change is one of the problems caused by overpopulation and consumption, so it is very relevant.

I mean, the way you used "endlessly", anything can be a problem. But that doesn't make them problems worth worrying about. "What if we have too much gold, and it causes a gold avalanche and crushes us!?" Not a reasonable concern. People have expanded rapidly because we create more than we consume and solve problems faster than they present themselves. In 1894, the people of London were worried because the increasing rate of horse usage was trending to put the city under 9 ft of manure within 50 years, and then the car was invented and the problem never actually appeared. People have been worried for decades that we would hit peak oil and run out of energy, and we've repeatedly found more and invented replacements such that peak oil will be based on falling demand rather than supply. And the way things are going, the population is going to stop growing in short order, any problem you're imagining will be solved before it can even happen.
 

Gergar12

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That remains unlikely as the cost of getting it installed in the first place would be phenomenally expensive and we would need to find work-arounds for about a million problems. Anyone on that base would have to volunteer to spend the rest of their lives living in a bunker to protect them from the radiation of Mars' weak magnetosphere, eating whatever they could grow in gardens fertilized with their own shit like in The Martian, and never going outside, all in an environment with less gravity than our bodies evolved to work with. That's assuming we get microfusion to work as a source of renewable power.

I'm sorry dude, but the whole thing is just too cost prohibitive. It's not a viable alternative solution because the science and tech are still several generations away and the money just isn't there.
The money is there, it's called NASA, Musk, and Bezos. And remember the Mars trip having millions of people signing up to be volunteers when there was a startup that wanted to go to Mars. That will be the smallest problem here.

Also back to the topic of nuclear power. We could build thorium nuclear power plants, we could build mini-nuclear fission reactors. We could build Gen 4 nuclear power plants. But people on the left, and on the Greens hate it because of shit like the Simpsons, bad Soviet engineering, and bad placement in Japan.

And if we really wanted to blame it's not the US that is decreasing its emissions or the EU, a lot of it is China which is using up all of Earth's resources like building skyscrapers by using up all of the Masonry sand on the ocean floor.

I will stop using a big SUV, being in a big house, eating beef, and doing a whole bunch of carbon-emitting things when China stops spamming Coal fire power plants.

 

tstorm823

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What do you want me to do, link a dozen of studies linking specific types of natural disasters which are worse due to climate change? It is commonly accepted among the scientific community there is a link between some disasters and climate change. Which is why whenever actual scientists, not on the payroll of fossil fuel lobbies, discuss certain natural disaster they bring up the link with what we're facing nowadays and climate change.

"The number of disasters has increased by a factor of five over the 50-year period, driven by climate change, more extreme weather and improved reporting. But, thanks to improved early warnings and disaster management, the number of deaths decreased almost three-fold."

"The results should serve to increase confidence in projections of increased TC intensity under continued warming."

"Theoretical work published more than 30 y ago predicted that greenhouse gas-induced climate change would increase the thermodynamic upper bound on tropical cyclone winds and thereby lead to a higher frequency of intense storms."
"50 years ago, nobody knew or cared about people in 3rd world countries dying in floods, and now we do, therefore it's climate change's fault."

All of these things are subject to improved measurement and reporting.
No, what has gotten a lot of people worked up is that you don't think we should worry about the current problems we are facing because you believe everything will magically get solved. And climate change is one of the problems caused by overpopulation and consumption, so it is very relevant.
Well then they're worked up over their own imagination. I definitely did not say we should ignore current problems. What I'm saying is that we shouldn't avoid solving current problems out of fear of the ones we imagine down the road. Again, this started with the suggestion that we shouldn't use nuclear because it would encourage humanity to continue growing, which is to say we shouldn't address our current needs because we imagine a downside that may never happen indefinitely into the future. Like, that specific argument isn't new. There was a time when environmentalists were supportive of nuclear power because it was a clean alternative, and then people realized that clean energy was a threat to their movement as people wouldn't be interested in dismantling industry with them without the obvious pollution, so they started campaigns to associate nuclear power with nuclear weapons. All based on the idea that human prosperity is antithetical to nature. Which is nonsense.
 

Silvanus

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"Oh My God! Guys! Tstorm gave an example instead of a statistic! Obviously that means he's stupid and we can make up whatever we want him to believe."

Don't embarass yourself.
If you had provided anything more compelling than personal incredulity and anecdote in order to substantiate your dismissiveness towards worldwide ecological devastation, I would be more than happy to address it. Unfortunately, that's all you did provide.

"50 years ago, nobody knew or cared about people in 3rd world countries dying in floods, and now we do, therefore it's climate change's fault."
There is universal scientific consensus that extreme weather events such as flooding are made more common by anthropological climate change. If anything is "embarrassing", it's spitting in the wind on topics like this.
 

Buyetyen

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The money is there, it's called NASA, Musk, and Bezos.
Still not enough to make space colonization viable.

And remember the Mars trip having millions of people signing up to be volunteers when there was a startup that wanted to go to Mars. That will be the smallest problem here.
Volunteers with no qualifications, you mean. Sorry dude, it ain't happening like you wish it would.
 

Agema

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Everyone please stop citing climate change. This argument started with the claim that we need to use less energy, including nuclear, because more energy would encourage more people to exist. People, and nuclear, can exist without uncontrolled manmade climate change.
Using less energy - at least until we have reliable energy generation that doesn't create a load of problematic waste - is a jolly good idea. But decreasing consumption and waste isn't just about using less energy. It's about less pollution of many other types (e.g. fertiliser, industrial waste), less water usage, etc.
 

tstorm823

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There is universal scientific consensus that extreme weather events such as flooding are made more common by anthropological climate change.
No, there isn't. Global-scale flood assessments have reported both decreases and increases in future floods under global warming . Or how about Climate change may cause river floods to become larger or more frequent than they used to be in some places, yet become smaller and less frequent in other places.
Using less energy - at least until we have reliable energy generation that doesn't create a load of problematic waste - is a jolly good idea. But decreasing consumption and waste isn't just about using less energy. It's about less pollution of many other types (e.g. fertiliser, industrial waste), less water usage, etc.
I disagree entirely, I think trying to ration energy is a terrible idea. The issue at hand is "if we continue as we are, these things are going to cause major problems." Progress is the product of excess. If we ration back to subsistence, we trap ourselves on the path to the issues we want to avoid. It's better by far to commit to creating better options faster, which requires a prosperous society to do.

Using less energy than needed on a personal level is obvious of benefit and is practical in many ways, my argument is not against that, it is against the idea of restructuring society to some sort of minimalism out of fear that our success will kill us.
 

Kwak

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All of these things are subject to improved measurement and reporting.
So climate change and its effects don't really exist, we just started measuring things that were already there?
 

Generals

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You should read that first study in depth. It says in most places floods will increase, the exception being arid areas where water availability is very low. Availability which will become even lower because climate change will cause less total precipitation in those areas. People in these areas must be happy, climate change will reduce the amount of floods...but also the already scarce water supply.
Obviously the second has a good point, climate change will impact different rivers differently due to how they are "fed" and where they lie. But globally speaking we are still talking about more floods in the majority of areas and arid areas having even less water (drought is also a natural disaster...).

I disagree entirely, I think trying to ration energy is a terrible idea. The issue at hand is "if we continue as we are, these things are going to cause major problems." Progress is the product of excess. If we ration back to subsistence, we trap ourselves on the path to the issues we want to avoid. It's better by far to commit to creating better options faster, which requires a prosperous society to do.

Using less energy than needed on a personal level is obvious of benefit and is practical in many ways, my argument is not against that, it is against the idea of restructuring society to some sort of minimalism out of fear that our success will kill us.
Yes and no, our energy demand is de-facto going to increase, even if we do a little effort. Maybe if we produced less plastic we could still live good lives and we'd need less energy and create less pollution. I mean, someday we may be able to eat fish which doesn't contain micro plastics, who wouldn't want that? And let's not talk about recycling because it is well known plastic recycling is all but perfect.

Our success is killing is, air pollution kills, water pollution kills, climate change is/will be killing.

I also don't advocate for minimalism but that isn't the de-facto outcome of a change of paradigm.
 

Agema

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If we ration back to subsistence
Nobody said "subsistence".

There is a great deal of waste, be it absurd gas-guzzling cars, "fast fashion", that up to a third of agricultural production can be just thrown away, etc. I struggle to believe that critical progress is dependent on people wanting their packs of tomatoes to all be the same size and shape and having new T-shirts every three months just because cerise is in and puce out.
 
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Silvanus

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The first one there explicitly states that extreme precipitation is expected to intensify globally. The "decreases" that sentence refers to are specifically regional variations. In the paper, note that that sentence you've quoted is followed by four citations. Follow them up, and you'll find all four sources stating that globally, extreme events will significantly increase.

The second source you've provided shows river-flooding over 50 years in the US alone. I mean, it's not even talking about extreme events, it's not a scientific paper, and everything it mentions is well within the scope of minor variations that would be fully expected. I would just point you towards the difference between weather and climate.
 

tstorm823

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I would just point you towards the difference between weather and climate.
You... What? We are talking about specifically extreme weather events. Your claim is that it's a universal consensus that climate change increases extreme weather events.
 
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Silvanus

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You... What? We are talking about specifically extreme weather events. Your claim is that it's a universal consensus that climate change increases extreme weather events.
Indeed. D'you see how an analysis looking at relatively mild river flooding in one country has relevance for weather, but doesn't mean much for global climate or the global incidence of extreme events?
 

tstorm823

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Indeed. D'you see how an analysis looking at relatively mild river flooding in one country has relevance for weather, but doesn't mean much for global climate or the global incidence of extreme events?
Do you think one country in particular is the unique beneficiary of climate change, and everyone else gets boned? More flooding sometimes and less flooding other times is going to be true basically everywhere.
 

Silvanus

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Do you think one country in particular is the unique beneficiary of climate change, and everyone else gets boned? More flooding sometimes and less flooding other times is going to be true basically everywhere.
Except the "more flooding sometimes", when we're looking globally and over time, dramatically outweighs the "less flooding other times".

More common extreme weather events is obviously going to include variation. It would be utterly absurd to expect otherwise. This is like pointing to a 0.1 degree drop in one year as evidence that the globe is "getting warmer sometimes, getting cooler sometimes!", when the overall picture shows its obviously getting warmer more.
 

tstorm823

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Except the "more flooding sometimes", when we're looking globally and over time, dramatically outweighs the "less flooding other times".
In some projections. You have chosen a single possibility and declared it a scientific consensus.