Topic: Climate Change Discussion Thread (perhaps the most important topic of our times)

A place to share interesting information, thoughts, analyses on a topic that will determine the future of mankind. I'll kickstart with this recent, excellent talk by Al Gore. The coming years and decades will be crucial.

'If you doubt that we as human beings have the will to act, please always remember, that the will to act itself is a renewable resource.'

The thing is humanity has the will power and ingenuity to overcome all! In our shared history we have invented art, put a man on the moon and built the Pyramids so I have complete faith that after decades of warnings about global warming we will all come together united to use our ingenuity to create generic disposable entertainment to bitterly obsess over so we don’t notice global warming and through sheer force of will gaslight ourselves into not caring about climate change as it’s just a hippy fad.

Ultimately climate change is an economic and technology problem. The economic problem is that the costs are not aligned with those responsible. Basically the effects of climate change are delayed and global while the benefits of burning fossil fuels are immediate and local. Our economies aren't really capable of handling that

Which is where technology comes in. And I know, I know, huge surprise the biggest technophile on the forums thinks tech is the solution. But it kinda is. Improvements in renewable tech, batteries, more efficient hardware, electrified hardware etc, etc. All those things increasingly make economic sense because the tech is getting better. And that in of itself is an economic incentive for long term change

Does this mean we'll avoid the worst of it? I mean yes, also no. We should still be pushing for more. Ultimately it's a failure of systems rather than of individuals and physics doesn't wait for your technological revolution. And we're starting to hit some positive feedback loops so things won't be reversing any time soon. But our most powerful tool to fight it is probably going to end up being "cleaner thing be cheaper" rather than "governments put science above polls" or "corporations put morals above profits"

TL;DR (did not click the video)

Most energy sources are finite. The oil that runs most of our vehicles and makes our plastic is finite. Minerals (copper and gold) that go into making our technology is finite. Potable water constitutes a very small percentage of water on the planet. Eventually the world's economy will grind to a halt and nations will fight over what resources are left.

Just enjoy the here and now while the human race grinds itself into oblivion.

@Magician That is why I am hoarding bottle caps as it will be the currency of the future!!!

If we're being pedantic the elements themselves while technically finite are plentiful enough that it's not a huge issue. We can always expend energy to get more even if that means asteroid mining ultimately. But really, most of the technologies we need for these changes use iron, silicon, lithium, copper, nickel. These aren't particularly rare elements

The finite nature of fossil fuels is a bit of a different equation. We're not running out of carbon, there's a LOT of carbon. Carbon isn't what makes fossil fuels useful. What makes them useful is that the carbon is bound to hydrogen, with LOTS of bonds. Burn the stuff? You can break it down into water and carbon dioxide and a fair bit of energy. It's the energy we care about, not the carbon. After we burn off the hydrogen bonds the carbon is useless to us. It's no longer "easy carbon"

But you know what else has energy? That huge nuclear fusion reaction in the sky that lights up half the world. Lots of energy coming off that. Enough to light up half the world. Enough to have created that "easy carbon" millions of years ago. Will it eventually run out? Sure, but we've got a few billion years to work out what to do before then. Anyways, all we have to do to get it? Silicon, iron, copper, lithium, nickel. Please place your orders to Western Australia for all your iron, nickel, lithium, silicon and copper needs

Just stop buying our gas please

I think saying science and tech will save us is more hopefulness than practical, sure it will limit things to a degree but if you talk to most scientists they will say “Nah, bruv. You need stop burning that shiz like now as there’s no way around it.”.

In any case more and more scientists, techies and engineers are too busy helping billionaires develop spaceships, allegedly to commercialise space travel but to me it seems like they are developing plan B for when they have finished fudging up the planet. Funnily enough from global warming we have learnt how to create the atmosphere on planets and moons for our societal betters to live there now.

@skywake How renewable are all the silicon, iron, copper, lithium, nickel in the uses we put them to? Can they all be endlessly used and recycled without loss of performance, or do they eventually become unusable? I should know this already, but never got very deep into chemistry and metals.

@jump
I don't disagree. But also tech is how we get movement in spite of vested interests. Plenty of people will refuse change if it costs them. Less will refuse change if there's a measurable medium term cost reduction. Almost nobody will refuse change if it's immediately and obviously cheaper

Would movement outside of that be nice? Yes. And also what should happen. But I've long since given up on fast movement from government on this. The tech is driving change more at this point

@gcunit
They're recyclable but my point was more that it's a different kind of equation than it is for fuel. The only reason fossil fuel has value is because it's easy to access energy. With metals and minerals the a value is in the raw metal

I grew up in a rural/semi-rural setting, had various animals as pets, and developed a fairly environmentally-conscious disposition. I graduated university in an environment-related discipline, and have worked in the environmental sector most of my adult life. But I don't class myself as a 'greeny' particularly, and generally steer clear of the topic in social situations.

I can't remember the sequence of events / thought process, but roughly 15-20 years ago I think I became resigned to the reality that carbon/methane emissions were not going to be globally limited quickly enough to stop some potential undesirable feedback loops from kicking in. Here we are in 2023 and that reality is here - global emissions are still rising, things we'd like to be kept frozen are defrosting, water and food security is declining, extreme events seem to be increasing.

But as the UK political discourse over the past 8 years could be said to have demonstrated - there does just seem too many people who can be dissuaded from progressive socio-economic development for the sake of crude nationalistic ideologies, and too many people in positions of power & influence prepared to exploit that for their own individual gain.

We find out that global temperatures have risen faster than reasonably predicted not so long ago, and what does Sunak do? Approves more fossil fuel.

I don't know if the allegations are true or not, but I've seen various suppressed sources cite cases of people in the highest positions in our land (UK), during the COVID crisis when deaths increased and food shop shelves emptied, were busy setting up outrageously favourable PPE contracts for the gain of themselves and their contacts. More recently, there's the case of this asylum seeker 'barge' costing millions, for what benefit... political stunts to appease the immigration haters.

Politics of division and deception seems rife. How are going to get ourselves into a position where heads of state globally are responsible and trustworthy enough to make the sacrifices that seemingly need to be made and aren't just manipulating whatever they can for their own agendas?

What seems likely is that extreme events - flooding, drought, storms, fires, migration and pandemic, will put the global systems that so many rely on, myself included, to put food on our plates, clean water in our taps, and provide affordable, reliable healthcare, and maintain stable enough economies for us to continue earning a living, under more pressure than COVID ever did. Crop failure, mass migration, disease, ocean acidification, economic instability... these sorts of things seem necessary to happen before enough people will realise and accept the situation we could be in to change our political and economic systems.

The trouble is that the impacts of climate change are inconsistent, they're geographically variable, so it sustains the doubt and uncertainty about whether things are really going to go pear-shaped or not.

I still feel uncertainty over it myself. Could we just ride out uncontrolled emissions? There's 8 billion people on this ship, we can afford to lose a few, so if we just avoid panic maybe things will be spread out and inconsistent enough that we can adapt as changes arise.

But if you have an awareness of how stressed water supplies are, how stressed food production systems are, and how stressed societies are to disruption and crises... you can't help but think we could be in for a rocky ride, so what harm would it do to make the changes to emissions now, just in case?

@gcunit I agree with most of what you said but I don’t think people are being dissuaded from the issues, I honestly think a lot of folk don’t care to begin with and would rather celebrate their ignorance than know things.

I won’t go into detail but I grew up on a council estate and did better than expected in life. I’ve got a few fancy drinking buddies like lawyers, union leaders etc from posh backgrounds so I’m asked to translate why policies aren’t connecting with the poor underling class (because I’m still a street thug at heart apparently) as well as vice versa explaining what all this yuppie pretentious policies are about to my working class family and friends. Half the time it’s as simple as “why would they give a fudge about that though, it’s not a real thing to them”.

@jump Inflation is a real thing to everyone. Imagine what a few failed harvests, loss of fertile land, increased frequency in natural disasters, and general socio-economic, commerce and energy instability might do to inflation. There's a class of people who can absorb a lot of inflation still, and there's a class of people who I suspect haven't got much stretch left.

Re. political balance, if things hadn't become so polarised over the past 10 years, I think the growth in environmental concerns would be more evident in our politics by now. We could do with a pretty rapid swing back to centrist politics that allows the benefits of greener policies to become more self-explanatory.

It’s not about saving the planet; it’s about saving ourselves. The planet is billions of years old, humanity has been around for tiny fraction of that time. The entire human race could blink out of existence tomorrow and the planet would continue on regardless (it did for far longer when the dinosaurs roamed the Earth and for millions of years after that extinction event).

We as a species have a far too highly inflated opinion of ourselves and our importance to nature; our most powerful weapons are a candle flame to the power of nature’s destructive forces. The planet doesn’t need us to save it; what we have to do is to prevent enough damage to the environment to avoid rendering it incapable of supporting human life, so in fact we are doing it not for the planet’s sake but our own.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not nihilistic. Life is an extraordinary precious mixed gift of luck and circumstance that should be cherished and protected. Furthermore, as we have evolved to the top of the evolutionary pile we should try our best to protect and preserve other species incapable of doing so for themselves (but don’t expect nature’s gratitude). Regardless, if we go, life will go on as if we had never existed. After all life, uh, finds a way…

@gcunit oddly enough on self explanatory things and green policies, a few years ago I went to Isle Of Wight for the festival. I spent a day on their lovely beach and then got smashed seeing Prodigy, Blur, Fleetwood Mac 🤘so I decided to go back there a few weeks ago and jebus nailed onto a lower case t the beach stinks now because the Tories approved sewage dumping even if it’s a public beach. I was talking to a local about it as they were complaining about the sewage to me so I mentioned it was the Tories who passed the law to allow it to happen and they then started defending them saying Corbyn wouldn’t have done better. Its bonkers someone is standing in poop but don’t want to be peed off at the people who caused it.

I'm suddenly reminded of George Carlin bit.

eh

@Magician I don't know much about Carlin, seen a few of his bits over the years, but never gained a clear sense of what he was about.

That was an interesting piece, as quite a lot of it could be said to have been based on the populist politician's playbook, and left me wondering whether the contradiction at the end was deliberate or not.

The way he undermined 'environmentalists', a term that can be interpreted very widely (some might say I'm an environmentalist because I work in the environmental sector, even though I wouldn't say I was particularly - I'm sympathetic to environmental concerns and see environmental protection as more fulfilling than environmental exploitation, but I'm no tree hugging activist or anything) and thus sweeps up a massive subject with one broad brush, before oversimplifying pro-environment themes as just 'Save the planet' etc. was just the sort of thing that could be expected from someone like Jeremy Clarkson or Donald Trump.

As he goes through the routine he suggests 'environmentalists' i.e. those who think the welfare of the system/s that supports what's now 8 billion people should be protected and are prepared to dedicate resource to doing so, are self-interested, only care about themselves. That in itself is an obvious absurdity - every single human-being acts out of self-interest but for some reason we should be calling out environmentalists for it... wtf? Was he in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry when he wrote that?

Then he goes on to clarify that it's humans that are ****ed, not the planet, and we can't even take care of ourselves, before he closes his performance by telling the crowd to take care of themselves and someone else...?

If humans are ****ed because of the state of the environment, then wouldn't taking care of ourselves and others incorporate... improving our environment?

Which is why I have to wonder if the contradiction was there as a deliberate piece of irony. Cos otherwise the bit is basically, "Hey, I'm a funny guy, environmentalists only want to protect the environment for themselves, so thanks for paying money to come see me tell you how stoopid and self-interested they are, we're all ****ed, take care y'all! T-shirts and albums for sale in the lobby as you leave."

@gcunit to be honest I think Carlin is right, once we have finished torching the planet it will (probably) live on however we should still care about it. Also keep in mind he was a 70s comedian (not sure when exactly that clip is from though) when people thought of global warming differently and take it less seriously than now, even the right wing wind up troll merchants South Park have had to backtrack on their stance of climate change since the show began as so much has changed on the issue since.

Since we are on the topic of Carlin, I always liked his 7 words you shouldn’t say skit. I make sure to use all 7 every day!

@gcunit

"It's the people who're ******". I think in that moment he was speaking more to our nature than how it correlates with the state of the environment. We have the capacity to be kind, and in equal measure, we can be cruel. As a species we're more proficient with destruction rather than creation.

can someone explain why this thread was made?