[Discussion] Climate Change

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

Fusion ignition!

Promising results.

Probably want to throw covid in there too.

Stele wrote:

Fusion ignition!

Promising results.

Three peer-reviewed papers is a good sign that this is real. Here's hoping it leads to some results (and that those results aren't buried to protect fossil fuel industries).

NASA pics of Lake Mead

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

Pretty good look at what's in the "Inflation act" and the impact it could... should have assuming its not looted by bad actors or anything.

Europe’s rivers run dry as scientists warn drought could be worst in 500 years

In places, the Loire can now be crossed on foot; France’s longest river has never flowed so slowly. The Rhine is fast becoming impassable to barge traffic. In Italy, the Po is 2 metres lower than normal, crippling crops. Serbia is dredging the Danube.

Across Europe, drought is reducing once-mighty rivers to trickles, with potentially dramatic consequences for industry, freight, energy and food production – just as supply shortages and price rises due to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine bite.

Driven by climate breakdown, an unusually dry winter and spring followed by record-breaking summer temperatures and repeated heatwaves have left Europe’s essential waterways under-replenished and, increasingly, overheated.

With no significant rainfall recorded for almost two months across western, central and southern Europe and none forecast in the near future, meteorologists say the drought could become the continent’s worst in more than 500 years.

“We haven’t analysed fully this year’s event because it is still ongoing,” said Andrea Toreti of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre. “There were no other events in the past 500 [years] similar to the drought of 2018. But this year, I think, is worse.”

He said there was “a very high risk of dry conditions” continuing over the next three months, adding that without effective mitigation drought intensity and frequency would “increase dramatically over Europe, both in the north and in the south”.

Welp, sounds like more inflation for Europe as the drought and heatwave woes disrupt logistics and power generation, let alone the environmental crises it will be wreaking on ecological systems dependent on fresh water flows.

This may sound silly coming from an Aussie but what is going to happen if water supplies really dry up? Over here we've got very expensive desalination plants (currently mothballed due to record rainfall) to fall back on.

Bfgp wrote:

Welp, sounds like more inflation for Europe as the drought and heatwave woes disrupt logistics and power generation, let alone the environmental crises it will be wreaking on ecological systems dependent on fresh water flows.

This may sound silly coming from an Aussie but what is going to happen if water supplies really dry up? Over here we've got very expensive desalination plants (currently mothballed due to record rainfall) to fall back on.

Whenever I think of a question like that I think of this rant. The question isn’t whether most humans will survive (we will). The question is what will we do to survive if we’re not even willing to entertain dramatic change as a society and as an economy (across the global North).

150%.

CC is going to cause a lot, a LOT of devastation, and the people it's going to hit first and worst are the people living around the equator, who are, y'know, mostly brown. They are not going to simply sit home and die, and will attempt to migrate, in increasingly massive numbers, to other safer climates.

there are two ways to prevent this. One, take CC seriously and attempt to mitigate its damages and impacts for everyone immediately. Or just build enormous walls and happily accept that most of those people will (and should) die.

Its not just at the equator Pred. You've already seen the devastating pictures of Lake Mead.
It may be more highly concentrated at the equator but it is already affecting many places in the US.
Some place it will be water. Others will be power. And others will be pest/agriculture related. Heaven help the places that will be hit by more than one

Hell, the West is looking at tapping the Mississippi because the Colorado River doesn't have enough water left in it (though it never did).

Nevin73 wrote:

Hell, the West is looking at tapping the Mississippi because the Colorado River doesn't have enough water left in it (though it never did).

Yes, we are suddenly learning quite quickly that Las Vegas and Los Angeles really aren't supposed to exist where they are, at those sizes, aren't we?

Prederick wrote:
Nevin73 wrote:

Hell, the West is looking at tapping the Mississippi because the Colorado River doesn't have enough water left in it (though it never did).

Yes, we are suddenly learning quite quickly that Las Vegas and Los Angeles really aren't supposed to exist where they are, at those sizes, aren't we?

The West doesn't want to have the hard conversations about grandfathered water rights.

We honestly shouldn't be allowing farmers take however much water they want to grow crops like almonds and alfalfa that they mostly export.

There is a group in California's Central Valley that is tackling this issue, for what it's worth. They have to deal with the old, legally established distribution rules, so they are creating a sort of second tier of voluntary shifts of water rights that changes each year as the situation changes. Apparently it's held together for a few years now...

But overall the policies have to change. Big time.

Yeah, the cities actually don't use as great a portion as you think. It is mostly agriculture.

I am curious how much a toll wildfire firefighting efforts take on water supplies.

20 years ago was the time for alarmism and "extremist" measures like the recently passed legislation to head off catastrophic global climate change.

Now is the time for actual extreme measures the likes of which heavily capitalist nations (aka de facto oligarchies) simply will not accept, and it's not even to prevent catastrophic climate change anymore (because that's already happening) but to try to prevent the absolute worst case of catastrophic climate change -- the stuff that goes beyond the watered-down "worst-case scenario" that the IPCC has been able to agree to publish.

Don't take my word for it. The trickle of despairing climate scientists has turned into a steady current, which should frighten all of us into action.

I’m Utah agriculture uses about 80% of the water supply.

In Australia, a lot of land is not croppable, or if it is, at best it might be used for wheat and barley, perhaps canola. It's why we have so many heads of cattle and sheep - they make do on native feed that can withstand the desert like landscape.

However, in riverina areas, we have a substantial agricultural presence in water intensive crops like cotton, rice and sugar. The land is abundant, and as water rights aren't exactly well managed here, the water is relatively cheap and available for those crops. That has been so to the detriment of water flows for decades. Amazingly though, with record rainfall due to a confluence of two major weather systems (the ENSO and I think it's called the negative Indian dipole), heaps of rain has mostly spread across inland Australia. Native fish stocks and bird life is rebounding as catchments overflow.

It seems we're in for a 3rd consecutive year of above average rainfall at the cyclical expense of droughts in Africa, India and the US West coast.

Aside from recently being hit with "one in 500 year" floods within the span of months and trying to recover from these floods, nobody has really turned their minds to what happens when those two major weather systems reverse, taking all the rainfall with them back to the opposite sides of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Then we'll be back to the cycle of rampant bushfires as all that undergrowth fed by the rainfall will inevitably dry up.

That is to say, just as we have thought we could not bear the droughts any further, rain relief has come in time such that macroeconomic reform to water use and rights has been unnecessary beyond certain restrictions.

However, it seems to my untutored eye that the situation in Europe and the US West coast might not get that needed relief in 6-12 months which would make it rather dire. Infrastructure projects take years to pull off - and one may not have the luxury of time to await their completion.

I feel as though the world has woken up to the problem of fossil fuel energy generation but is yet to properly acknowledge the impact of water scarcity and food security. If the overall trend is volatility and cyclical droughts / floods, more work needs to be done to retain moisture and capture runoff. This, and more responsible water use e.g. grow climate appropriate crops and water efficient sources of calories.

In a tldr way I wonder if it's not just unbearable heat (or rising ocean levels) that drives mass migration from the tropics but also a simple function of water and calories.

I recall reading that when white settlers first came to AU, it was in a time of relative plentiful rain and various parts of the country were settled for agriculture. Then a few decades later, when the weather patterns turned, they all became dustbowls. People have short memories. This should be a time of rebuilding of our river systems, restoring the water table, setting up a sustainable water rights system... The rains won't last forever.

We've already had one huge climate migration in the US, when less than 2% of the US population relocated from the Dust Bowl, and that migration left a *huge* impact on three generations. What's going to happen when people begin to flee the Central Valley and the LA Metroplex and even Northern California? All the Western states are going to take a hit over the next 20 years and we don't even seem to be talking about it...

Dan Carlin on his Common Sense podcast predicted years ago that water rights will be the next major thing nations fight wars over. While the climate change impact is new, the fight over access to potable water is not.

I wonder if resources shouldn't be put into major desalination plants to process ocean water.

Yes, and that's been a feature of IPCC and other analyses for decades. What I mean is that we have not, as a country, made plans for the kind of internal migrations that will follow the drought and flood effects on large areas when they have increased in frequency enough to damage or destroy critical infrastructure.

There was a story just a week or two ago on nightly news about a family moving from CA to MN after having to evacuate for wildfires and not wanting to put their kids through that again. But definitely talking about future climate, more fires, etc.

Nevin73 wrote:

I wonder if resources shouldn't be put into major desalination plants to process ocean water.

The two biggest issues with any sort of large-scale desalination are the energy cost -- which is very substantial -- and the waste brine left over. Merely pumping that brine back into the ocean at the scale of desalination to put a real dent into the water needs of the US West would create an ever-expanding toxic deadzone in the ocean.

Then there's the other issue which is central to basically all our natural resource scarcity solutions so far: these kinds of solutions don't actually solve the real problem, which is that we need to reduce our natural resource demands by reducing populations in areas ill-equipped to deal with the demands. Instead, each time we engineer these ways around the natural limitations of a region, we're basically just adding lanes to a road -- sure, it eases the problem temporarily, but in the long run we end up with even greater problems because it just encourages even more migration to these already-stressed regions.

Vegas keeps growing. Phoenix keeps growing. Salt Lake City is too. And plenty of other ill-advised locations in the US West. These areas need to start shrinking, not growing, if we're to have any hope of recovering a semblance of natural resource balance there.

Robear wrote:

We've already had one huge climate migration in the US, when less than 2% of the US population relocated from the Dust Bowl, and that migration left a *huge* impact on three generations. What's going to happen when people begin to flee the Central Valley and the LA Metroplex and even Northern California? All the Western states are going to take a hit over the next 20 years and we don't even seem to be talking about it...

We live in the one pocket of the Southeast that will have a (elevation) buffer from the worst of climate change, but the above coming great migration and current political trends has us shopping for land in Vermont and Maine.

All that salt can go into sodium ion batteries
Either that or the Salt Flats will be saltier.
Or it will be like the sugar industry where even more salt will be in everything and we will have an epidemic of high blood pressure...

A salt lick on every table!

Salted Caramel milk for the kiddos!

8 year old me wants you to know that salt licks for cattle taste funny. That is all.