Climate Change

[BC.]

Yep. And conservatives everywhere are going to lose their minds when climate forced migration begins in mass towards northern zones.

UVM Daughter #2 is doing this exact research/fellowship with her professor this summer….

Ironic…on our hikes earlier this summer/ several families we stopped and talked with had all just moved to VT from out west…(or at least they said they did)

[SumJongGuy]

Yep. And conservatives everywhere are going to lose their minds when climate forced migration begins in mass towards northern zones. Amazingly the GOP is the ONLY political party in the developed world that still says climate change isn’t real. Even the new fascist parties in Europe acknowledge it. A vote for the GOP is a vote fuck the entire planet.

Climate change is what's already been fueling the violence over land and resources in South and Central America. it's the main reason people are fleeing that cesspool and coming across our southern border right now. It's all Biden's fault amirite??

[The SnowShow]

Why do I check this thread? [emoji15]

[AirheadD8]

Why do I check this thread? [emoji15]

It’s like driving past a roadkill…..Morbid curiosity 🙃

[Bunion 2020]

Yep. And conservatives everywhere are going to lose their minds when climate forced migration begins in mass towards northern zones. Amazingly the GOP is the ONLY political party in the developed world that still says climate change isn’t real. Even the new fascist parties in Europe acknowledge it. A vote for the GOP is a vote fuck the entire planet.

That forced migration is already in progress everywhere except on the southern border of the US. This fall when things cool down enough to make the journey illegal immigration will pick up and the GOP will totally lose their shit. If you are in a place that is no longer livable, what choice do you have?

[SnowMachine]

Yep. And conservatives everywhere are going to lose their minds when climate forced migration begins in mass towards northern zones. Amazingly the GOP is the ONLY political party in the developed world that still says climate change isn’t real. Even the new fascist parties in Europe acknowledge it. A vote for the GOP is a vote fuck the entire planet.

That's a pretty subjective opinion. I do think they tend to question the "science," but to be honest, both the GOP and DNC are for sale to the highest bidder. Follow the money. Remember, Al Gore said we'd all be dead by now (backed by "science")

Look, nobody has all of the answers right yet. There has to be a middle ground outside of "your ICE car is banned in favor of an electric car with battery materials strip mined in a third world country without environmental regulation." My mind is blown when I meet Tesla drivers that think they're saving the planet.

Compromises abound. You want clean energy? Nuclear. Oh, you don't want radioactive waste? Solar. Wait, you don't want massive solar fields that destroy ecology or degraded panels that cannot be recycled? Coal/fossil. Oh, you don't want to dig holes in the earth or create emissions? Hydro.... I do like hydro. Wind.... I like the concept, but I've lived in that failed project (Altamont) since I was a kid.

I'll be over here on the sidelines doing what I can (reducing energy usage, not flying any more than necessary, reducing my consumption and recycling what I can).

Will technology save us??

[skisurfmirth]

Surprised you gave hydro such an easy pass. It has multitudes of drawbacks and is crazy expensive. BC is on the hook for 16,000,000,000 for the site C dam and it flooded around 500 acres of farm land. That’s just one dam.


Sent from my iPhone using TGR Forums

[BCMtnHound]

Surprised you gave hydro such an easy pass. It has multitudes of drawbacks and is crazy expensive. BC is on the hook for 16,000,000,000 for the site C dam and it flooded around 500 acres of farm land. That’s just one dam.


Sent from my iPhone using TGR Forums

While Site C is not without issue, we are spending $30+ billion on twinning the TransMtn pipeline to move oil sands crude to the coast and ship via tanker overseas. Site C is a bargain in comparison.

[Stuntmonkey]

Surprised you gave hydro such an easy pass. It has multitudes of drawbacks and is crazy expensive. BC is on the hook for 16,000,000,000 for the site C dam and it flooded around 500 acres of farm land. That’s just one dam.


Sent from my iPhone using TGR Forums

Site C is rife with corruption and cronyism. The site selection itself was a total clusterfuck and it should've been veto'd at the first reading. There were and are better locations. Furthermore, BC Hydro is a shell of the solid company it once was, and is now a union breaking piece of shit that cares more about profits than doing what's its original mandate was.

I'm a strong believer in Canada's CANDU reactors, and having worked in depth with both Westinghouse and OPG I can whole heartedly say we are shitting the bed on not building more (expansion at bruce doesn't count). We could be building enough to power the entire country and become a export powerhouse, but unfortunately the boomer generation seems to still be scared of their shadows when it comes to nukes. We have some of the most optimal spent fuel storage locations in the world, and our governing agency is actually staffed with competent engineering faculty that support advancement.

It's not a Liberal thing, it's not a Cons thing, it's a stupid-fucking-uneducated-loud-mouth-dumbfuck generational thing.

[Cocximus]

We're not fixing anything until we find a way to manage corruption. It rots everything... hydro, wind, nuclear, healthcare, Ukraine...

[Stuntmonkey]

We're not fixing anything until we find a way to manage corruption. It rots everything... hydro, wind, nuclear, healthcare, Ukraine...

That starts with politics. Canadians (and Americans) have become way to comfortable with a win being the otherside losing. Even if it means gross amounts of corruption. (See: Trudeau and foreign interference, Trump and the endless lawsuits)

It's the dumbest shit ever, and we've been pitted against one another at the expense of ourselves, our economy and our way of life.

[altacoup]

That's a pretty subjective opinion. I do think they tend to question the "science," but to be honest, both the GOP and DNC are for sale to the highest bidder. Follow the money. Remember, Al Gore said we'd all be dead by now (backed by "science")

Look, nobody has all of the answers right yet. There has to be a middle ground outside of "your ICE car is banned in favor of an electric car with battery materials strip mined in a third world country without environmental regulation." My mind is blown when I meet Tesla drivers that think they're saving the planet.

Compromises abound. You want clean energy? Nuclear. Oh, you don't want radioactive waste? Solar. Wait, you don't want massive solar fields that destroy ecology or degraded panels that cannot be recycled? Coal/fossil. Oh, you don't want to dig holes in the earth or create emissions? Hydro.... I do like hydro. Wind.... I like the concept, but I've lived in that failed project (Altamont) since I was a kid.

I'll be over here on the sidelines doing what I can (reducing energy usage, not flying any more than necessary, reducing my consumption and recycling what I can).

Will technology save us??

“Science” in quotation marks let’s me know exactly where you stand. Al Gore didn’t say we’d ask be dead by now. The climate estimates that scientists made in the 80s are pretty much spot on for where we are right now. As many have pointed out already climate migration is already happening and conservatives are loosing their minds. The GOP was less of a climate change denying party a decade ago than it is now.

I’m all for an all of the above approach. Solar and wind are the cheapest way to produce electricity currently available. Probably need nuclear to fill in the gaps. Point is we need to start doing things on a massive scale that only governments are capable of doing as the private sector is too short sighted. In the US there’s only one party that refuses to do anything.

But go on and continue to play devils advocate and let the lack of a perfect plan prevent any action. We’ve got a decade to prevent the worst case scenarios, if the planet gets to 4c of heating the great majority of current life forms will be totally fucked. But I guess it’s just “science” 🤬

[skaredshtles]

<snip>Point is we need to start doing things on a massive scale that only governments are capable of doing as the private sector is too short sighted.

This. Doing things individually is a great thing... but will do fuck-all in the big picture. You need to vote for people who *acknowledge* the problem and are willing to do something about it.

Just reducing your own footprint ain't gonna cut it.

[Peruvian]

[J. Barron DeJong]

What’s the current thinking of geoengineering as a viable option? Saw this, though I take take any anything from Tabarrok or the freakonomics guys with a big dose of skepticism:

Geoengineering first came to much of the public’s attention in Levitt and Dubner’s 2009 book SuperFreakonomics. Levitt and Dubner were heavily criticized and their chapter on geoengineering was called patent nonsense, dangerous and error-ridden, unforgivably wrong and much more. A decade and a half later, it’s become clear that Levitt and Dubner were foresighted and mostly correct.
The good news is that climate change is a solved problem. Solar, wind, nuclear and various synthetic fuels can sustain civilization and put us on a long-term neutral footing. Per capita CO2 emissions are far down in developed countries and total emissions are leveling for the world. The bad news is that 200 years of putting carbon into the atmosphere still puts us on a warming trend for a long time. To deal with the immediate problem there is probably only one realistic and cost-effective solution: geoengineering. Geoengineering remains “fiendishly simple” and “startlingly cheap” and it will almost certainly be necessary. On this score, the world is catching up to Levitt and Dubner.

Fred Pearce: Once seen as spooky sci-fi, geoengineering to halt runaway climate change is now being looked at with growing urgency. A spate of dire scientific warnings that the world community can no longer delay major cuts in carbon emissions, coupled with a recent surge in atmospheric concentrations of CO2, has left a growing number of scientists saying that it’s time to give the controversial technologies a serious look.
“Time is no longer on our side,” one geoengineering advocate, former British government chief scientist David King, told a conference last fall. “What we do over the next 10 years will determine the future of humanity for the next 10,000 years.”
King helped secure the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, but he no longer believes cutting planet-warming emissions is enough to stave off disaster. He is in the process of establishing a Center for Climate Repair at Cambridge University. It would be the world’s first major research center dedicated to a task that, he says, “is going to be necessary.”

Similarly, here is climate scientist David Keith in the NYTimes:

The energy infrastructure that powers our civilization must be rebuilt, replacing fossil fuels with carbon-free sources such as solar or nuclear. But even then, zeroing out emissions will not cool the planet. This is a direct consequence of the single most important fact about climate change: Warming is proportional to the cumulative emissions over the industrial era.
Eliminating emissions by about 2050 is a difficult but achievable goal. Suppose it is met. Average temperatures will stop increasing when emissions stop, but cooling will take thousands of years as greenhouse gases slowly dissipate from the atmosphere. Because the world will be a lot hotter by the time emissions reach zero, heat waves and storms will be worse than they are today. And while the heat will stop getting worse, sea level will continue to rise for centuries as polar ice melts in a warmer world. This July was the hottest month ever recorded, but it is likely to be one of the coolest Julys for centuries after emissions reach zero.
Stopping emissions stops making the climate worse. But repairing the damage, insofar as repair is possible, will require more than emissions cuts.
…Geoengineering could also work. The physical scale of intervention is — in some respects — small. Less than two million tons of sulfur per year injected into the stratosphere from a fleet of about a hundred high-flying aircraft would reflect away sunlight and cool the planet by a degree. The sulfur falls out of the stratosphere in about two years, so cooling is inherently short term and could be adjusted based on political decisions about risk and benefit.
Adding two million tons of sulfur to the atmosphere sounds reckless, yet this is only about one-twentieth of the annual sulfur pollution from today’s fossil fuels.

Even the Biden White House has signaled that geoengineering is on the table.
Geoengineering remains absurdly cheap, Casey Handmer calculates:

Indeed, if we want to offset the heat of 1 teraton of CO2, we need to launch 1 million tonnes of SO2 per year, costing just $350m/year. This is about 5% of
the US


’ annual production of sulfur. This costs less than 0.1% on an annual basis of the 40 year program to sequester a trillion tonnes of CO2.…Stepping beyond the scolds, the gatekeepers, the fatalists and the “nyet” men, we’re going to have to do something like this if we don’t want to ruin the prospects of humanity for 100 generations, so now is the time to think about it.

Detractors claim that geoengineering is playing god, fraught with risk and uncertainty. But these arguments are riddled with omission-commission bias. Carbon emissions are, in essence, a form of inadvertent geoengineering. Solar radiation engineering, by comparison, seems far less perilous. Moreover, we are already doing solar radiation engineering just in reverse: International regulations which required shippers to reduce the sulphur content of marine fuels have likely increased global warming! (See also this useful thread.) . Thus, we’re all geoengineers, consciously or not. The only question is whether we are geoengineering to reduce or to increase global warming.

https://marginalrevolution.com/margi...ring-revisited

[Supermoon]

There are certainly some things that should be explored like carbon capture or other technologies, but those all come with big, unknown risks. We see what is happening when humans fuck with the climate so what’s to say we won’t do something even worse trying to fix this problem by blotting out the sun? But as the effects of climate change get worse the bigger risks we will have to take.

The only way to solve this problem is to massively shift the economy away from fossil fuels as rapidly as possible. We are also beholden to OPEC which creates all sorts of bad outcomes geopolitically, where the American economy is in large extent controlled by our enemies.

Nothing is perfect, and the risks of certain renewables should be discussed but it mostly seems like the anti-renewable rhetoric is all coming from people who don’t want anything to change

[altacoup]

What’s the current thinking of geoengineering as a viable option? Saw this, though I take take any anything from Tabarrok or the freakonomics guys with a big dose of skepticism:

Geoengineering first came to much of the public’s attention in Levitt and Dubner’s 2009 book SuperFreakonomics. Levitt and Dubner were heavily criticized and their chapter on geoengineering was called patent nonsense, dangerous and error-ridden, unforgivably wrong and much more. A decade and a half later, it’s become clear that Levitt and Dubner were foresighted and mostly correct.
The good news is that climate change is a solved problem. Solar, wind, nuclear and various synthetic fuels can sustain civilization and put us on a long-term neutral footing. Per capita CO2 emissions are far down in developed countries and total emissions are leveling for the world. The bad news is that 200 years of putting carbon into the atmosphere still puts us on a warming trend for a long time. To deal with the immediate problem there is probably only one realistic and cost-effective solution: geoengineering. Geoengineering remains “fiendishly simple” and “startlingly cheap” and it will almost certainly be necessary. On this score, the world is catching up to Levitt and Dubner.

Fred Pearce: Once seen as spooky sci-fi, geoengineering to halt runaway climate change is now being looked at with growing urgency. A spate of dire scientific warnings that the world community can no longer delay major cuts in carbon emissions, coupled with a recent surge in atmospheric concentrations of CO2, has left a growing number of scientists saying that it’s time to give the controversial technologies a serious look.
“Time is no longer on our side,” one geoengineering advocate, former British government chief scientist David King, told a conference last fall. “What we do over the next 10 years will determine the future of humanity for the next 10,000 years.”
King helped secure the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, but he no longer believes cutting planet-warming emissions is enough to stave off disaster. He is in the process of establishing a Center for Climate Repair at Cambridge University. It would be the world’s first major research center dedicated to a task that, he says, “is going to be necessary.”

Similarly, here is climate scientist David Keith in the NYTimes:

The energy infrastructure that powers our civilization must be rebuilt, replacing fossil fuels with carbon-free sources such as solar or nuclear. But even then, zeroing out emissions will not cool the planet. This is a direct consequence of the single most important fact about climate change: Warming is proportional to the cumulative emissions over the industrial era.
Eliminating emissions by about 2050 is a difficult but achievable goal. Suppose it is met. Average temperatures will stop increasing when emissions stop, but cooling will take thousands of years as greenhouse gases slowly dissipate from the atmosphere. Because the world will be a lot hotter by the time emissions reach zero, heat waves and storms will be worse than they are today. And while the heat will stop getting worse, sea level will continue to rise for centuries as polar ice melts in a warmer world. This July was the hottest month ever recorded, but it is likely to be one of the coolest Julys for centuries after emissions reach zero.
Stopping emissions stops making the climate worse. But repairing the damage, insofar as repair is possible, will require more than emissions cuts.
…Geoengineering could also work. The physical scale of intervention is — in some respects — small. Less than two million tons of sulfur per year injected into the stratosphere from a fleet of about a hundred high-flying aircraft would reflect away sunlight and cool the planet by a degree. The sulfur falls out of the stratosphere in about two years, so cooling is inherently short term and could be adjusted based on political decisions about risk and benefit.
Adding two million tons of sulfur to the atmosphere sounds reckless, yet this is only about one-twentieth of the annual sulfur pollution from today’s fossil fuels.

Even the Biden White House has signaled that geoengineering is on the table.
Geoengineering remains absurdly cheap, Casey Handmer calculates:

Indeed, if we want to offset the heat of 1 teraton of CO2, we need to launch 1 million tonnes of SO2 per year, costing just $350m/year. This is about 5% of
the US


’ annual production of sulfur. This costs less than 0.1% on an annual basis of the 40 year program to sequester a trillion tonnes of CO2.…Stepping beyond the scolds, the gatekeepers, the fatalists and the “nyet” men, we’re going to have to do something like this if we don’t want to ruin the prospects of humanity for 100 generations, so now is the time to think about it.

Detractors claim that geoengineering is playing god, fraught with risk and uncertainty. But these arguments are riddled with omission-commission bias. Carbon emissions are, in essence, a form of inadvertent geoengineering. Solar radiation engineering, by comparison, seems far less perilous. Moreover, we are already doing solar radiation engineering just in reverse: International regulations which required shippers to reduce the sulphur content of marine fuels have likely increased global warming! (See also this useful thread.) . Thus, we’re all geoengineers, consciously or not. The only question is whether we are geoengineering to reduce or to increase global warming.

https://marginalrevolution.com/margi...ring-revisited

The tech behind carbon capture is already proven and 100% will need to be used to keep the planet’s climate in the goldilocks zone. The issue is how to generate energy on a scale that can run the machines that capture carbon without introducing more carbon into the atmosphere.

If this actually pans out it could be a massive game changer.

https://twitter.com/alexkaplan0/stat...44616528453633

[Cocximus]

Carbon capture is and will continue to be like plastic recycling.

[altacoup]

Carbon capture is and will continue to be like plastic recycling.

Completely wrong. If we are able to get to zero emissions (which would be a massive massive win) we’ll still need to remove the carbon we’ve already put in the atmosphere. Many environmentalists are firmly against carbon capture because they believe it’ll allow carbon producers to continue on the same path. But that’s a similar mentality to those who say batteries and solar aren’t perfect so let’s not scale them up.

[skaredshtles]

The tech behind carbon capture is already proven and 100% will need to be used to keep the planet’s climate in the goldilocks zone. The issue is how to generate energy on a scale that can run the machines that capture carbon without introducing more carbon into the atmosphere.

Superconductivity at room temp sure would help things like this, I'd imagine.

ETA: see you've already linked the article from the science thread.

[old goat]

A friend of mine--a Lawrence Livermore Lab geophysicist--is involved in a massive carbon capture project, in Australia if I remember correctly. He thinks carbon capture could potentially remove about 10% of the needed carbon reduction.

Adding sulfur to the atmosphere seems like a bad idea--didn't we spend a lot of effort to reduce sulfur emissions (ie acid rain). To reduce CO2 without creating new problems will be very difficult due to the magnitude of the problem.. The problem is not the environmental damage caused by CO2, or solar power, or electric cars, or windfarms, or dams, but the damage caused by 8 billion people. The earth is not capable of sustaining anywhere close to that human population by any foreseeable technology.

[Trackhead]

In before people start posting alarmist shit from the media about this: I like this website. They find experts in the field of many things, ask opinions of studies, evidence, etc. Their summaries are superior to some shitty headline written by some douche with no relevant experience sitting in an office building in New York.

Google AMOC and look at all the bullshit clickbait headlines. I hate the media.

Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC)

[SumJongGuy]

Nuclear Winter would also do it..

[PB]

Nuclear Winter would also do it..

Or artificial vulcanism; no rads is better.

[old goat]

In before people start posting alarmist shit from the media about this: I like this website. They find experts in the field of many things, ask opinions of studies, evidence, etc. Their summaries are superior to some shitty headline written by some douche with no relevant experience sitting in an office building in New York.

Google AMOC and look at all the bullshit clickbait headlines. I hate the media.

Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC)

The pieces I read in the MSM emphasized the uncertainty and made clear a lot of experts were unconvinced. But yeah, the headlines. Even papers like WAPO and NYT have people--I'm thinking high school students to write alarmist headlines that often have little to do with the articles. Of course since most people never read past the headline . . .