[Discussion] Climate Change

This thread is just to post interesting news, thoughts, opinions about climate change.

Take a look at his academic career. He's smart, no doubt of it. International level debating champion, editor of the Harvard Law Review, Cum Laude graduations and Valedictorian. He *knows* the games he's playing.

Take a look at his academic career. He's smart, no doubt of it. International level debating champion, editor of the Harvard Law Review, Cum Laude graduations and Valedictorian. He *knows* the games he's playing.

Jonman wrote:
Stele wrote:
Robear wrote:

He went to Princeton and Harvard Law. He knows *exactly* what he's doing to pander to his base.

W went to Yale and Harvard. Doesn't prove anything about intelligence.

Yeah, but W's dad wasn't the Zodiac killer, so you know there was no legacy preference in play with Cruz.

/ sarcasm

Ted Cruz’s dad killed JFK. Cruz himself is the Zodiac killer. Get your facts straight.

iaintgotnopants wrote:

Ted Cruz’s dad killed JFK. Cruz himself is the Zodiac killer. Get your facts straight.

Off topic and I'm not even sure which thread I'm in.

Spoiler:

Look at this Sweet Summer Child not knowing about the Time-Paradox through which Trump surrendered the Presidency but prevented Total World War Ultimate! While He had to sacrifice His absolute and unquestionable electoral victory and the years of heavenly bliss under His reign before democrats triggered the WAR with the time-line that might leave a Solar System for His children to save in due time, at least He was able to issue pardons to His squadron of elite soldiers that fought bravely at His side in the Total World War Ultimate against the traitors and showed their Patriotism+ in trial by combat. These glitches are just a result of the loops this administration took to get to this outcome for AMERICA. Surely you remember the last few years taking longer than normal? Now you know why.

Things: Still going well!

The melting of ice across the planet is accelerating at a record rate, with the melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets speeding up the fastest, research has found.

The rate of loss is now in line with the worst-case scenarios of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s leading authority on the climate, according to a paper published on Monday in the journal The Cryosphere.

Thomas Slater, lead author and research fellow at the centre for polar observation and modelling at the University of Leeds, warned that the consequences would be felt around the world. “Sea level rise on this scale will have very serious impacts on coastal communities this century,” he said.

About 28tn tonnes of ice was lost between 1994 and 2017, which the authors of the paper calculate would be enough to put an ice sheet 100 metres thick across the UK. About two thirds of the ice loss was caused by the warming of the atmosphere, with about a third caused by the warming of the seas.

Over the period studied, the rate of ice loss accelerated by 57%, the paper found, from 0.8tn tonnes a year in the 1990s to 1.2tn tonnes a year by 2017. About half of all the ice lost was from land, which contributes directly to global sea level rises. The ice loss over the study period, from 1994 to 2017, is estimated to have raised sea levels by 35 millimetres.

The greatest quantities of ice were lost from floating ice in the polar regions, raising the risk of a feedback mechanism known as albedo loss. White ice reflects solar radiation back into space – the albedo effect – but when floating sea ice melts it uncovers dark water which absorbs more heat, speeding up the warming further in a feedback loop.

Article is six years old now but I assure you, nothing has changed for the better:

If we killed the richest 10%, we'd cut carbon emission by half, almost overnight.

The poorest half of the world’s population - 3.5 billion people - is responsible for just 10 percent of carbon emissions, despite being the most threatened by the catastrophic storms, droughts, and other severe weather shocks linked to climate change. These are the findings of a new Oxfam report, released during the ongoing climate talks in Paris, which also shows the world’s richest 10 percent produce around half of all emissions.

Just a friendly reminder that the neoliberal mantra of personal responsibility, when applied to climate change, is meaningless. Either the top 10% will survive climate change, or the bottom 90% will. Right now, the rich are winning.

Seth wrote:

Article is six years old now but I assure you, nothing has changed for the better:

If we killed the richest 10%, we'd cut carbon emission by half, almost overnight.

The poorest half of the world’s population - 3.5 billion people - is responsible for just 10 percent of carbon emissions, despite being the most threatened by the catastrophic storms, droughts, and other severe weather shocks linked to climate change. These are the findings of a new Oxfam report, released during the ongoing climate talks in Paris, which also shows the world’s richest 10 percent produce around half of all emissions.

Just a friendly reminder that the neoliberal mantra of personal responsibility, when applied to climate change, is meaningless. Either the top 10% will survive climate change, or the bottom 90% will. Right now, the rich are winning.

Does this mean burning the rich is another form of sustainable energy?

Soylent Peat?

fangblackbone wrote:

Soylent Peat?

Soylent Greenbacks

Composting is much more ecologically sound than burning.

Robear wrote:

Composting is much more ecologically sound than burning.

doesn't really have the same ring to it, though, does it

Here’s the thing, too: the grain of truth in this pleasant albeit slightly macabre jokes. I don’t want to kill the rich. I don’t want to kill anyone. But the rich have shown, over the last five or so thousand years, that they are not only willing, but excited to kill me and other poor people.

Not for their own survival.

But to maintain their audacious standard of living.

The rich want you to die so they don’t have to fly coach.

So there’s a whole lot more than a kernel of truth in these jokes.

There is a concept starting to float around (I dunno, maybe this isn't new) about slow vs fast violence.

As a species, we've built mechanisms for dealing with fast violence, such as trials with rules of evidence, incarceration, rehabilitation, etc. This is mostly on the individual level.

But what happens when slow violence, via things like climate change, are cooking the frogs over time? Do we, the frogs, have to put up with that so that the ruling class can have more of everything?

At what point does the collective look up and whisper, like Rorschach, a vengeful, hungry, "No."

This is in part what regulations are for; local, regional, national, international. And our problem in the US is that we've spent 40 years being told all regulations are bad.

We are in quite a bad position.

Seems a bit problematic to spend more energy on making digital money for a tiny handful of people than entire countries do to, well, exist.

IMAGE(https://i.imgur.com/o6cDqdC.png)

Yikes. At this point using Bitcoin as a speculative investment vehicle is basically just investing in coal.

Seth wrote:

Here’s the thing, too: the grain of truth in this pleasant albeit slightly macabre jokes. I don’t want to kill the rich. I don’t want to kill anyone. But the rich have shown, over the last five or so thousand years, that they are not only willing, but excited to kill me and other poor people.

Not for their own survival.

But to maintain their audacious standard of living.

The rich want you to die so they don’t have to fly coach.

So there’s a whole lot more than a kernel of truth in these jokes.

You realize that just by virtue of living in the United States that you are probably in that top 10% richest in the world, right? Definitely in the top 20%.

I loathe cryptocurrency so much.

LeapingGnome wrote:
Seth wrote:

Here’s the thing, too: the grain of truth in this pleasant albeit slightly macabre jokes. I don’t want to kill the rich. I don’t want to kill anyone. But the rich have shown, over the last five or so thousand years, that they are not only willing, but excited to kill me and other poor people.

Not for their own survival.

But to maintain their audacious standard of living.

The rich want you to die so they don’t have to fly coach.

So there’s a whole lot more than a kernel of truth in these jokes.

You realize that just by virtue of living in the United States that you are probably in that top 10% richest in the world, right? Definitely in the top 20%.

Tu quoque fallacy aside, I accept my own culpability in the current climate catastrophe.

tuffalobuffalo wrote:

I loathe cryptocurrency so much.

Same. It doesn’t even accomplish its stated goal of being a “currency” free from other currencies. It’s biggest use seems to be as an exchange vehicle for money laundering.

Otherwise it’s an investment untethered from any real value as far as I can tell. Except for the money laundering part.

The thing that gives it value is that it can't be easily controlled by governments. Individuals and countries, for instance, that are under U.S. sanctions can typically use Bitcoin to go around restrictions on wealth transfer. It's also super-popular in Venezuela because their government has no control over it, and it can be used by anyone with even a weak computer. It means that residents can partially protect themselves against the crazy inflation in Venezuela. Bitcoin, with its crazy instability, is a better option for an awful lot of their citizens.

It's not inherently good or evil, it's just hard for governments to control. Sometimes that's good, sometimes it isn't.

Regulations are coming, but meanwhile, there’s this...

Seth wrote:
LeapingGnome wrote:
Seth wrote:

Here’s the thing, too: the grain of truth in this pleasant albeit slightly macabre jokes. I don’t want to kill the rich. I don’t want to kill anyone. But the rich have shown, over the last five or so thousand years, that they are not only willing, but excited to kill me and other poor people.

You realize that just by virtue of living in the United States that you are probably in that top 10% richest in the world, right? Definitely in the top 20%.

Tu quoque fallacy aside, I accept my own culpability in the current climate catastrophe.

I generally agree with your premise, that the 'western' lifestyle, for lack of a better term, is built on the backs of poor people that are dis-proportionality affected. I disagree however that the 10% richest in the world are excited to kill poor people, since that basically would include almost everyone in the United States and western Europe.

It isn't tu quoque to point out when someone claims to be in one group when they are actually in another. If you had just said the 10% richest want to kill the other 90%, without falsely claiming to be in the 90% yourself, and I pointed out well aren't you rich? Then that could be tu quoque. Although I could ask does that mean you are excited to kill poor people since you claim the rest of us are?

cool

Seth wrote:

Yikes. At this point using Bitcoin as a speculative investment vehicle is basically just investing in coal.

Isn't it totally weird that "disruptive" technologies also end up doing bad things, just in novel ways?

Thousands killed by environment policies

The Trump administration deliberately harnessed racism and class animosity to push policies that caused hundreds of thousands of U.S. deaths, according to a scathing new report in the British medical journal The Lancet.

PDF

On environmental policy, the report noted that Trump rolled back 84 vital regulations covering everything from toxins in water to the way scientific research gets used by the federal government, with 20 more rule changes still in progress by the end of his term. The resulting increase in airborne particulate matter was the primary cause of the excess deaths, the authors concluded. But they also proposed that Trump’s climate change denialism would be the most enduring stain on his environmental legacy.
The report also emphasizes the racial disparities in health that grew under Trump, including the fact that most of the 2.3 million Americans who lost health insurance while he was in office were minorities. It also underscored the fact that Covid-19 has much more heavily impacted Black, Latinx, and Indigenous people.

Can they forward that report to Biden?

You know, a few posts back we were talking about the rule of unintended consequences regarding Bitcoin. By contrast, I would argue that these deaths were absolutely intended by the trump administration and by proxy every person who voted for him.

Seth wrote:

You know, a few posts back we were talking about the rule of unintended consequences regarding Bitcoin. By contrast, I would argue that these deaths were absolutely intended by the trump administration and by proxy every person who voted for him.

I'm reminded of that woman sobbing at the insurrection that the police were hurting the wrong people. Not that they were causing pain, but that they should be hurting other Americans, not them.

Just dropping a comment here - but as I perused the largely anecdotal comments of the first 10 or so pages of this thread, looking at the numerous anti-GOP comments - I thought it would be worthwhile to remind many of you that seem to forget - almost all major environmental milestones in the US were led by Republicans.

Father of Modern Conservations and Parks - Teddy Roosevelt (Wilson did do the Park Act)
Air Pollution Control Act - 1955 - Eisenhower
Clean Air Act - 1970 - Nixon
Clean Air Act Amendments - 1990 - Bush
Creation of the EPA - 1970 - Nixon
Clean Water Act - 1972 - Nixon
Safe Drinking - 1986 - Reagan
Superfund - 1986 - Reagan
Montreal Protocol (ozone) - 1987 - Reagan
Kyoto (not a fan of Kyoto and less so the 2005 version but was solid landmark) - 1997 - Clinton

I recognize that many of these were bipartisan efforts, but it is critical to point out that for decades the left has talked continuously on environmental issues and efforts, and the right has delivered time and again on final legislation. For instance - RCRA is a huge piece of legislation introduced by a Dem from WV and signed into law in 1976 by Republican Gerald Ford.

Please keep that in mind when you all spend pages labeling some of the nutjobs on the right as the standard, when in fact, reality and history prove otherwise. Few ignore on the right climate change...we simply say that the simple textbook explanations for it and how to fix it ignore reality of complex ecosystem systems and science.

Cheers