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Climate Change thread: UN Report: we need to take action (1 Viewer)

I have an electric car.  How am I contributing to the problem?
So to answer this question: IMO, you are contributing to the problem when you support political candidates who refuse to take any action to try and solve the problem. That is your biggest, perhaps your only contribution. Same for most of us. 

 
So if we instead don't sound any alarms, and just keep on keeping on, the planet would heal itself?
Yes
So, in that new equilibrium who will be the dominant race? Are the lizards making a comeback?

In all honesty (and selfishness) it is not about whether the planet would "heal itself" but whether the human race can survive as a species in the new world that's coming

 
All the more reason to get away from coal?
Yep.  My area is 58 MPG.  I’ll take that.

plus I charge partially off rooftop solar.  

If the worst case (pure coal) is still better than the average emission from and ICE, and the majority is a massive improvement, that’s a really good thing. That article seems to think they uncovered some amazing scoop.....ZOMG it’s not zero!!!!!

 
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Here’s a statistic I heard this morning: of the 20 worst fires in California history, 7 have taken place in the LAST YEAR!!!

How can anybody hear that and still doubt what is happening? You’ve got to be deaf dumb and blind. Why is this not the #1 issue being discussed? Surely mankind’s future survival has got to be more important than anything else...doesn’t it? 

 
Here’s a statistic I heard this morning: of the 20 worst fires in California history, 7 have taken place in the LAST YEAR!!!

How can anybody hear that and still doubt what is happening? You’ve got to be deaf dumb and blind. Why is this not the #1 issue being discussed? Surely mankind’s future survival has got to be more important than anything else...doesn’t it? 
The even worse part of that is that the fires themselves release more CO2 into the atmosphere, and more importantly, take away more of our natural CO2 sinks in the process (if/when they burn healthy plants along with the dead ones).

Global warming itself is a symptom of general pollution by humans - that's the core problem that needs to be addressed. That plastic dead zone in the Pacific, the oil and mercury in our oceans - these things are seriously disrupting food chains all over the planet. We've got to curtail/correct pollution or we're going to be in big, big trouble in a whole host of ways.

 
The even worse part of that is that the fires themselves release more CO2 into the atmosphere, and more importantly, take away more of our natural CO2 sinks in the process (if/when they burn healthy plants along with the dead ones).

Global warming itself is a symptom of general pollution by humans - that's the core problem that needs to be addressed. That plastic dead zone in the Pacific, the oil and mercury in our oceans - these things are seriously disrupting food chains all over the planet. We've got to curtail/correct pollution or we're going to be in big, big trouble in a whole host of ways.
“going to be”- I think we are. Yesterday Gov. Brown called this “the new abnormal”- that seems as good a phrase as any. He was talking about a cost of hundreds of billions- and that’s all based on this fire. There are more to come. 

 
“going to be”- I think we are. Yesterday Gov. Brown called this “the new abnormal”- that seems as good a phrase as any. He was talking about a cost of hundreds of billions- and that’s all based on this fire. There are more to come. 
True. But the worst is yet to come if we don't significantly change our ways.

 
Here’s a statistic I heard this morning: of the 20 worst fires in California history, 7 have taken place in the LAST YEAR!!!

How can anybody hear that and still doubt what is happening? You’ve got to be deaf dumb and blind. Why is this not the #1 issue being discussed? Surely mankind’s future survival has got to be more important than anything else...doesn’t it? 
Can't decide if you posted this while driving a Prius or driving a massive gas guzzling SUV

 
Can't decide if you posted this while driving a Prius or driving a massive gas guzzling SUV
Neither. But what’s your point? I can’t save the world by driving a Prius, or lowering my carbon footprint. Neither can you. I don’t care what you drive. 

We need federal laws. We need billions of dollars invested in new energy. We need to treat it like the Manhattan Project or the Space Program. And we need this yesterday. Politics be damned, there is no other priority. 

 
Neither. But what’s your point? I can’t save the world by driving a Prius, or lowering my carbon footprint. Neither can you. I don’t care what you drive. 

We need federal laws. We need billions of dollars invested in new energy. We need to treat it like the Manhattan Project or the Space Program. And we need this yesterday. Politics be damned, there is no other priority. 
Lead by example.  Start biking everywhere.

 
When after Sputnik we got our space program into gear, there was no political divide about it: Republicans and Democrats were unified. Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon were all on the same page. I don’t see why it can’t be that way again. 

 
Neither. But what’s your point? I can’t save the world by driving a Prius, or lowering my carbon footprint. Neither can you. I don’t care what you drive. 

We need federal laws. We need billions of dollars invested in new energy. We need to treat it like the Manhattan Project or the Space Program. And we need this yesterday. Politics be damned, there is no other priority. 
Like Solyndra ? 

 
Neither. But what’s your point? I can’t save the world by driving a Prius, or lowering my carbon footprint. Neither can you. I don’t care what you drive. 

We need federal laws. We need billions of dollars invested in new energy. We need to treat it like the Manhattan Project or the Space Program. And we need this yesterday. Politics be damned, there is no other priority. 
You could do your part

 
Less focus on automobiles, more attention to larger pollutants like CARGO SHIPS.  
This appears incorrect according to this

The true scale of climate change emissions from shipping is almost three times higher than previously believed, according to a leaked UN study seen by the Guardian.

It calculates that annual emissions from the world's merchant fleet have already reached 1.12bn tonnes of CO2, or nearly 4.5% of all global emissions of the main greenhouse gas.
and this

Transport is Europe’s biggest source of carbon emissions, contributing 27% to the EU’s total CO2 emissions, with cars and vans representing more than two thirds of these, according to the European Environment Agency (EEA).
and this

Our personal vehicles are a major cause of global warming. Collectively, cars and trucks account for nearly one-fifth of all US emissions,
A bit of math (sorry)

US emits 6.5 billion metric tonnes of CO2 - 20% of that is 1.3 bn metric tons. That alone is more than the entire emissions from the world's cargo fleet

If we would want to then we can add the EU, China India etc. share for cars on top

 
When after Sputnik we got our space program into gear, there was no political divide about it: Republicans and Democrats were unified. Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon were all on the same page. I don’t see why it can’t be that way again. 
Yes you do. 

 
We all share in the problem and we can all change our lives to reduce our carbon footprint, but we don't, because it's easier to blame it on someone else.    

 
"Tim from the Internet should walk everywhere then we'd be fine"
These guys seem to think it's amusing to try and paint me as a hypocrite. I guess anything is preferable to actually discussing the issue and exploring just how wrong the Republican party has been, and how responsible they are for the mess in which we find ourselves.

 
eat less meat
:greatposting:

We don't even have to go 100% vegetarian. Just eating meat once or twice weekly would change this world significantly, from carbon emissions to fish kills and drinking water issues associated with algae blooms and we can decrease the massive ecosystem damage ranchers do.

 
:greatposting:

We don't even have to go 100% vegetarian. Just eating meat once or twice weekly would change this world significantly, from carbon emissions to fish kills and drinking water issues associated with algae blooms and we can decrease the massive ecosystem damage ranchers do.
I only eat red meat once a week. I do eat chicken and fish more often. But that's not to fight global warming; I'm trying to lose weight.

Still, I really don't believe that this is something that can be solved, or even significantly affected, through individual effort.  And even the suggestion that it can strikes me as an excuse that conservatives can use to argue that the government should continue to do nothing. 

 
timschochet said:
I only eat red meat once a week. I do eat chicken and fish more often. But that's not to fight global warming; I'm trying to lose weight.

Still, I really don't believe that this is something that can be solved, or even significantly affected, through individual effort.  And even the suggestion that it can strikes me as an excuse that conservatives can use to argue that the government should continue to do nothing. 
Have you heard of this interesting new phenomenon called "voting" and "elections"? Before it actually takes place what happens is that a lot of individuals talk together, decide if they agree with various positions that others hold and then actively goes and does the "vote" thing. 

It's pretty fascinating, really. Imagine that if, after much such debate, many people, maybe even millions, decided to cut down on their consumption of red meat, of fossil fuel transportation, eat local vegetables etc. That might actually have a noticable effect...

(Obviously government action - in the right direction - is also a good thing and assists, it can even drive behaviour through implementation of taxes and such. But if everyone takes the attitude that it's not about their own habits, but everyone elses, you can see where it is going to end up)

 
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msommer said:
This appears incorrect according to this

and this

and this

A bit of math (sorry)

US emits 6.5 billion metric tonnes of CO2 - 20% of that is 1.3 bn metric tons. That alone is more than the entire emissions from the world's cargo fleet

If we would want to then we can add the EU, China India etc. share for cars on top
That’s only one form of pollution. Grab a dozen or so cargo ships and they will release more sulfur oxide and nitriogen oxide than all automobiles in the world combined easily. We are at the point now where I am sure it’s theoretically possible for a newer gas car to use less fossil fuel than an electric car.  This would depend on many variables, but it goes to show you that reources should be used on other areas rather than automobiles.  There are hundreds of millions of cars, but only a small handful of ships when compared to the automobile population.  It would be much easier to further regulate that.  The world has been significantly behind in getting cargo ships cleaned up for decades, as it is hard to regulate ships outside of international waters but is making progress.  The fuel is disgusting, it’s so thick it’s more of a thick jello or milkshake than a liquid.  

As the Artic shipping lanes continue to open up, I would expect this to get more exposure.  

 
That’s only one form of pollution. Grab a dozen or so cargo ships and they will release more sulfur oxide and nitriogen oxide than all automobiles in the world combined easily. We are at the point now where I am sure it’s theoretically possible for a newer gas car to use less fossil fuel than an electric car.  This would depend on many variables, but it goes to show you that reources should be used on other areas rather than automobiles.  There are hundreds of millions of cars, but only a small handful of ships when compared to the automobile population.  It would be much easier to further regulate that.  The world has been significantly behind in getting cargo ships cleaned up for decades, as it is hard to regulate ships outside of international waters but is making progress.  The fuel is disgusting, it’s so thick it’s more of a thick jello or milkshake than a liquid.  

As the Artic shipping lanes continue to open up, I would expect this to get more exposure.  
IMO regulations on SOx and NOx is coming by 2020. Just in case you weren't aware...

 
timschochet said:
Here’s a statistic I heard this morning: of the 20 worst fires in California history, 7 have taken place in the LAST YEAR!!!

How can anybody hear that and still doubt what is happening? You’ve got to be deaf dumb and blind. Why is this not the #1 issue being discussed? Surely mankind’s future survival has got to be more important than anything else...doesn’t it? 
Is that climate change or building and use patterns.

No need to wait for government when one can change their lifestyle today and can encourage or even help others to do so as well.

 
Ultimately Thomas Malthus may have gotten it right, but he looked at the wrong end of the problem.  Population may not outstrip production, but will produce such toxic waste that the earth cannot sustain itself.  We need to half our population and to half the use of the remaining population.

 
timschochet said:
I only eat red meat once a week. I do eat chicken and fish more often. But that's not to fight global warming; I'm trying to lose weight.

Still, I really don't believe that this is something that can be solved, or even significantly affected, through individual effort.  And even the suggestion that it can strikes me as an excuse that conservatives can use to argue that the government should continue to do nothing. 
I agree that our political leadership is really failing us, but widespread habitual change on the individual level would ALSO have a huge impact, and is easier to implement.  Delaying any action until the next opportunity for political change (two years) is not acceptable given the scope of the crisis.  Furthermore, I haven't seen a lot of prioritization from Democrats in this area, which demonstrates to me that change needs to begin at the individual level and then be reflected in future political decisions as citizens demand more.    

 
Ultimately Thomas Malthus may have gotten it right, but he looked at the wrong end of the problem.  Population may not outstrip production, but will produce such toxic waste that the earth cannot sustain itself.  We need to half our population and to half the use of the remaining population.
*halve

 
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/11/climate-change-sensible-approach-for-conservatives/

Conrad Black thinks President Trump “has not received adequately grateful recognition for withdrawing from the Paris climate accord and effectively scuttling the Clean Power Plan.” In the spirit of diplomatic disagreement, I have some thoughts on Black’s assertion that “man-made global warming” is a “complete fiction”; his argument that the idea of global warming is “not borne out by much evidence, and so has awkwardly largely given way to climate change — which is only a step from weather change”; and his revisionist history of the environmental movement.

The notion that the climate is changing as a result of carbon emissions, Black says, was “miraculously conjured” and remains “unsubstantiated.” But most of Black’s argumentative work is done via the insertion of the unestablished adjective, and his major gesture toward empirical evidence is this: “Using British Meteorological Office figures, global temperature appeared to rise more quickly in the last 15 years of the 20th century than the first 15 years of this century, although 2016 and 2017 were relatively warm years. Almost all tentative conclusions are within reasonable margins of error, and the mass of data is too ambiguous to support any of the more emphatic claims of factions in the climate debate.”

2016 and 2017 weren’t just “relatively warm years” — they were the hottest years on record. NASA and the NOAA put the five hottest years in the global record in the 2010s and the 20 hottest years in the years since 1995. As for the British Meteorological Office, it announced this January that 2017surpassed 2016 as the hottest year on record. See this NASA/GISS graph of global average temperatures since the NCDC record began:

Evidence is abundant that the climate is changing because of greenhouse-gas emissions. We have known about the greenhouse effect since Svante Arrhenius described it in the 1890s, and we have been modeling the climate since scientists at MIT, Scripps, Stanford, Columbia, and Exxon, among others, began doing so in the 1960s and ’70s. “Most of their approximate estimates of atmospheric temperature,” Alex Trembath of the Breakthrough Institute tells me, “turned out to be pretty accurate.” We know the Earth is hot and getting hotter, we know from ice-core data that atmospheric CO2 levels are far higher than they have ever been, and we know that the changing climate is affecting planetary biodiversity and melting ice at an accelerating pace. All of this, and more, is well established; none of it is that ambiguous.

Of course there are plenty of things related to climate change that can be debated, including the efficacy and wisdom of certain policies like the Paris climate agreement or the Clean Power Plan, the magnitude and temporality of the risks climate change poses, and the priorities of advocates who reject anything besides command-and-control policies. Oren Cass is a policy analyst who stakes out an alternative position on the issue, what many call the “lukewarm” approach. Cass accepts climate science but doubts the predictions of economic and humanitarian catastrophe that many politicians and activists advance, placing an emphasis instead on our adaptability. He deploys mainstream scientific forecasts to argue that the challenge posed by climate change is real but likely not catastrophic. From a policy standpoint, it’s just like any other issue: It doesn’t require a fundamental restructuring of public resources, or so goes the argument.

Here Cass differs from climate activists such as Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything: Capitalism versus the Climate, or Bill McKibben, who argues that we “need to literally declare war on climate change.” In their view, capitalist greed and an extractive ethic of domination are the root of the problem, which is soon to become a cataclysm. The only solution is to end global capitalism, institute a series of payments from Western countries to the global South, and resort to a sort of socialist communitarianism. They wave away potential fixes such as geo-engineering or a move to nuclear energy because these don’t sufficiently uproot capitalism. It might be objected that this position puts the political cart before the climate horse in a way that just so happens to align with its advocates’ preferences: If mitigating the threat of climate change is the desideratum, why prioritize an unlikely and arguably incoherent local–global movement over more-pragmatic incremental fixes?

But Black’s column is more similar to Klein’s and McKibben’s stance than to, say, Cass’s, attributing as it does sinister motivations to organic outcomes brought about by ordinary people. His history of environmentalism contains several dubious claims: that the global-warming idea originates from the Willach Conference (marginal compared with the birth of climate science at universities and energy companies); that the warming argument, on the verge of collapsing, gave way to the term “climate change” (scientists prefer that term because the effects of CO2 extend beyond planetary warming); that Norway developed the idea of switching to nuclear power for its cleanliness (the move came in reaction to the oil-price shocks of the 1970s); that Sweden’s nuclear push was the genesis of the modern environmentalist movement (that originated in the U.S. as a response to industrial and agrochemical pollution), or that the acid-rain provisions of the Clean Air Act were a “dress rehearsal for the global-warming myth” (the provisions were implemented by George H. W. Bush in response to a terrestrial pollution problem).

And his critique of Barack Obama and the Paris agreement is in tension with itself, mocking the idea that Trump’s pulling out of these programs could threaten the planet yet also declaring that it and the Clean Power Plan represented “an outright assault on American capitalism and economic growth.” Many conservatives have praised Trump for leaving the Paris agreement on the grounds that it was 1) a treaty not subject to the proper ratification process and 2) a nonbinding agreement that allowed countries to set their emissions goals and would therefore not have a meaningful practical effect. But the agreement cannot be simultaneously toothless and an existential threat to the global economy.

We shouldn’t cede reasonable ground in the climate discussion. It risks undermining those right-of-center political figures (such as Steven F. Hayward, Bob Inglis, Carlos Curbelo, Jay Faison, and George P. Shultz) who are tackling the issue with clear eyes. Against the idea that a restructuring of capitalism is necessary, yet unwilling to ignore the empirical evidence, several conservatives have developed compelling cases for funding geo-engineering technology and research, implementing market-based policies like a carbon tax or tax credits for carbon capture, and loosening regulations on nuclear power plants. In their work is the makings of a constructive agenda.

Yet conservatives interested in intelligent approaches to climate change are often met with charges of insincerity from a left-wing activist camp that sees our entire side as blinkered, conspiratorial, and unwilling to accept the reality of the debate. Rather than strive to make that caricature a reality, we ought to tackle the climate-change issue by acknowledging the unambiguous evidence that carbon emissions are changing the climate, and unleashing the adaptive ingenuity of human beings to tackle the problem.

 
Sen. Susan Collins‏ @SenatorCollins 45m45 minutes ago

We can't ignore the impact of climate change on our public health, environment, & economy. This should cause all of us, including the Administration, to take a harder look at the consequences of inaction & use what is known about risks to inform policy.

https://twitter.com/SenatorCollins/status/1067067646477246464

That all sounds very nice, Senator, but what do you intend to do about it?

 
Sen. Susan Collins‏ @SenatorCollins 45m45 minutes ago

We can't ignore the impact of climate change on our public health, environment, & economy. This should cause all of us, including the Administration, to take a harder look at the consequences of inaction & use what is known about risks to inform policy.

https://twitter.com/SenatorCollins/status/1067067646477246464

That all sounds very nice, Senator, but what do you intend to do about it?
And yet that is exactly what she's doing.  She's such a coward.  A tweet isn't good enough - Do something Susan!

 
Ok for you who are too obtuse to figure this out-

Increasing temperatures and decreasing rainfall is attributed to a warming climate. This dries out the environment. When a fire starts because of a downed power line or some other source it rages because there is lots of dry fuel to burn. 

Sunshine doesn’t start the fire you obtuse deniers. 

 
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Like Solyndra ? 
Solyndra is a case study in the problems with private for profit enterprise as much as it is government run investment. Solyndra misled the US Governemnt filing for the loan. Their misleading sales numbers cost taxpayers $500 million and private investors a $1 billion. Solyndra was part of a larger loan repayment guarantee program. The idea was to create a portfolio. Some would fail but those failures would be balanced out by successes. I believe there is still ~$40 billion worth in that pot of money that Bush created for the program. So we are still doing this kind of investing and still have a large pool of money allocated to continue it if government leaders so choose. 

 
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It is still funny to think that people believe that us small piddly humans can destroy the Earth.

 

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