Occasional Thoughts on Climate Change

[LibertyBell]

 

[LibertyBell]

Govt aint going to do shit, it's people like Musk who will finally end our dependence on fossil fuels, his new assembly line will build a new EV every 10 hours

 

Elon Musk believes he can radically change how cars are put together with Tesla's Giga Press / Twitter

[etudiant]

34 minutes ago, LibertyBell said:

Govt aint going to do shit, it's people like Musk who will finally end our dependence on fossil fuels, his new assembly line will build a new EV every 10 hours

 

Elon Musk believes he can radically change how cars are put together with Tesla's Giga Press / Twitter

So we need lots of electric generating capacity to power all those cheap electric cars.

Is that why the price of coal has gone way up recently?

[LibertyBell]

8 minutes ago, etudiant said:

So we need lots of electric generating capacity to power all those cheap electric cars.

Is that why the price of coal has gone way up recently?

Richard Branson has a way of doing it by filling skyscrapers with solar panels (doing it to the Empire State Building first) and then people would be able to use those to recharge their cars for free.

 

[Typhoon Tip]

16 hours ago, LibertyBell said:

Richard Branson has a way of doing it by filling skyscrapers with solar panels (doing it to the Empire State Building first) and then people would be able to use those to recharge their cars for free.

 

Despite the many turns of phrases ...and the protracted philosophies in excoriation, cynicism of outlook and visions of destruction that ranged into excessive lengths and thread hijacking - ha... 

It all boils down to, 'where there's a will, there's a way'

Which concomitantly means, there's been less will to date. 

Things are changing ... if too slowly, okay - but there is momentum gathering in the right direction.  What do we expect ...with 7.5 billion human beings, not hailing from the same perspectives on matters, ... blah blah blah, we've hammered it enough - there is a race of sorts:   does the momentum gather in time -

 

[LibertyBell]

24 minutes ago, Typhoon Tip said:

Despite the many turns of phrases ...and the protracted philosophies in excoriation, cynicism of outlook and visions of destruction that ranged into excessive lengths and thread hijacking - ha... 

It all boils down to, 'where there's a will, there's a way'

Which concomitantly means, there's been less will to date. 

Things are changing ... if too slowly, okay - but there is momentum gathering in the right direction.  What do we expect ...with 7.5 billion human beings, not hailing from the same perspectives on matters, ... blah blah blah, we've hammered it enough - there is a race of sorts:   does the momentum gather in time -

 

This was pretty amazing to witness, one of these tornadoes touched down right in my town and we lost power for 3 hours.  Long Island had never had a tornado in November before (records go back to 1950) and never more than 3 in one day at any point in the year before this.  Climate change related (much warmer SST than normal).

 

The animals were hightailing it out of here and so were people lol (there was a long line of cars jamming the roads, which was puzzling for a Saturday afternoon.)

 

 

[LibertyBell]

26 minutes ago, Typhoon Tip said:

Despite the many turns of phrases ...and the protracted philosophies in excoriation, cynicism of outlook and visions of destruction that ranged into excessive lengths and thread hijacking - ha... 

It all boils down to, 'where there's a will, there's a way'

Which concomitantly means, there's been less will to date. 

Things are changing ... if too slowly, okay - but there is momentum gathering in the right direction.  What do we expect ...with 7.5 billion human beings, not hailing from the same perspectives on matters, ... blah blah blah, we've hammered it enough - there is a race of sorts:   does the momentum gather in time -

 

and hopefully we do stabilize the population at 10 billion by 2050, 10 billion seems to be the carrying capacity of our planet for humans.

 

[raindancewx]

Cure is worse than the disease for the near future. That's why the opposition remains.

https://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2021/10/fossil-fuel-shortages-shrink-world-gdp.html#.YZdFk-jMLrc

After COVID-19 disrupted the regional economy of Southeast Asia in July and August 2021, we're seeing a new factor behind recessionary forces affecting the Earth's GDP: fossil fuel shortages.

China has been coping with shortages of both coal and oil since August 2021, with now widespread power outages disrupting its economic output from September 2021 into October 2021. Since the country is the world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide by a very wide margin, the impact of its forced blackouts are already showing up in the measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration at the remote Mauna Loa Observatory in the Pacific Ocean.

Using the default value of a -0.18 parts per million to account for the change in the rate of growth of atmospheric carbon dioxide since June 2021, we find the equivalent net loss to global GDP attributable to the spread of COVID in southeast Asia and to China's fossil fuel shortage is $6.0 trillion. Going back to the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, the reduction of 0.65 part per million in the rate at which carbon dioxide is being added to the Earth's air corresponds to a net loss to global GDP of $21.6 trillion.

Realistically, what's the point of changing how food and energy and products are delivered if we destroy ourselves in the process by over reacting?

If you look at actual history, and adjust for inflation, the costs incurred by old exploration companies like the Dutch East India Company in the 1600s were about the same as the costs to go on a Virgin Galactic flight to Space in the modern world. By the late exploration period, say 1750-1850, the costs were low enough for poor people to travel across the oceans at about the cost of a flight from LA to NYC, depending on the exact route. Personally think it's simpler, cheaper, and less delusional to subsidize space travel and colonization than to do what climate scientists advocate at a societal level. I'm sure initially the abandonment of Europe by the colonists was pretty difficult emotionally, but they got over it. Same thing would hold with space. I fully expect to be able to afford space tourism or travel at least by the end of my life in the absence of government interference with that market (30-50 years from now). 

[LibertyBell]

It's like chemotherapy to cure cancer, the longer you wait the tougher it will be.

 

[LibertyBell]

Dutch and British East India Companies were horrible, they exploited native people, stole their land, etc, the first multinational corporations.  Their greed and the horrors they did is the stuff of legend

[Typhoon Tip]

20 hours ago, raindancewx said:

Cure is worse than the disease for the near future. That's why the opposition remains.

https://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2021/10/fossil-fuel-shortages-shrink-world-gdp.html#.YZdFk-jMLrc

After COVID-19 disrupted the regional economy of Southeast Asia in July and August 2021, we're seeing a new factor behind recessionary forces affecting the Earth's GDP: fossil fuel shortages.

China has been coping with shortages of both coal and oil since August 2021, with now widespread power outages disrupting its economic output from September 2021 into October 2021. Since the country is the world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide by a very wide margin, the impact of its forced blackouts are already showing up in the measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration at the remote Mauna Loa Observatory in the Pacific Ocean.

Using the default value of a -0.18 parts per million to account for the change in the rate of growth of atmospheric carbon dioxide since June 2021, we find the equivalent net loss to global GDP attributable to the spread of COVID in southeast Asia and to China's fossil fuel shortage is $6.0 trillion. Going back to the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, the reduction of 0.65 part per million in the rate at which carbon dioxide is being added to the Earth's air corresponds to a net loss to global GDP of $21.6 trillion.

Realistically, what's the point of changing how food and energy and products are delivered if we destroy ourselves in the process by over reacting?

If you look at actual history, and adjust for inflation, the costs incurred by old exploration companies like the Dutch East India Company in the 1600s were about the same as the costs to go on a Virgin Galactic flight to Space in the modern world. By the late exploration period, say 1750-1850, the costs were low enough for poor people to travel across the oceans at about the cost of a flight from LA to NYC, depending on the exact route. Personally think it's simpler, cheaper, and less delusional to subsidize space travel and colonization than to do what climate scientists advocate at a societal level. I'm sure initially the abandonment of Europe by the colonists was pretty difficult emotionally, but they got over it. Same thing would hold with space. I fully expect to be able to afford space tourism or travel at least by the end of my life in the absence of government interference with that market (30-50 years from now). 

It's not going to be easy. This is essentially a species level event crisis, ... really perhaps the first legit test of the KS level 1/ 'planetary manipulation' - unforgiving exam where you failure can mean extinction.  Here?  - to ween a 7.5 billion-ballasted momentum, off of multi-generational adaptation to a FF matrix as primary energy extraction method? 

There is no easy pathway to that vision - not lecturing you per se...speaking to the strawfolk reader here...

There is going to be duress at multiple scales of civility ... Could even culminate in war(s). There is probably going to be hording.  The specter of dystopia may become overwhelming, causing regression tendencies.  It's a race... it's quite ironic, that technological advancements got us into this mess; we are now so inextricably dependent that technological advancing has to play a pivotal role in how that race ends. Meanwhile, some ecological failures could mean food problems. Future Pandemics? get used to it.  Species migration do to habitat stressing co-mingle biophagic agents where there are no defenses. Yeeah.  Say, if the ocean phytoplankton C02-02 cycle crashes... pretty much anything over 50kg that requires warm blood, that doesn't have tech to make O2 the other way... can't breath. Probably we won't run out of air.. but that combined with other factors becomes insurmountable toxic cocktail.  We cannot survive if X-number of species eradicate below a codependent threshold... and those that believe we can out live a mass extinction are basically Walking Dead.  Any of this endless list is a dystopian Sci Fi novel - the good kind. Good because it's eerily plausible if not likely.

We've been covering this in long winded prose, in this particular thread for several months at this point.  Probably a bit much to read outside of cover-to-cover couch and tea engagements.  Most in here are too Twit and/or quick textual in attention span - understood.

The ultra short version, there are two choices for the humanity future:

1        Hardship, .. how much or little depends. It certainly can be ameliorated via cooperation, which begins at acceptance - which we are just barely now getting the mass of those that accept over the fulcrum. 

2       Death

Pick

[LibertyBell]

3 hours ago, Typhoon Tip said:

It's not going to be easy. This is essentially a species level event crisis, ... really perhaps the first legit test of the KS level 1/ 'planetary manipulation' - unforgiving exam where you failure can mean extinction.  Here?  - to ween a 7.5 billion-ballasted momentum, off of multi-generational adaptation to a FF matrix as primary energy extraction method? 

There is no easy pathway to that vision - not lecturing you per se...speaking to the strawfolk reader here...

There is going to be duress at multiple scales of civility ... Could even culminate in war(s). There is probably going to be hording.  The specter of dystopia may become overwhelming, causing regression tendencies.  It's a race... it's quite ironic, that technological advancements got us into this mess; technological advancement is not going to have to play a pivotal role in how the race ends. Meanwhile, some ecological failures could mean food problems. Future Pandemics? get used to it.  Species migration do to habitat stressing co-mingle biophagic agents where there are no defenses. Yeeah.  Say, if the ocean phytoplankton C02-02 cycle crashes... pretty much anything over 50kg that requires warm blood, that doesn't have tech to make O2 the other way... can't breath. Probably we won't run out of air.. but that combined with other factors becomes insurmountable toxic cocktail.  We cannot survive if X-number of species eradicate below a codependent threshold... and those that believe we can out live a mass extinction are basically Walking Dead.  Any of this endless list is a dystopian Sci Fi novel - the good kind. Good because it's eerily plausible if not likely.

We've been covering this in long winded prose, in this particular thread for several months at this point.  Probably a bit much to read outside of cover-to-cover couch and tea engagements.  Most in here are too Twit and/or quick textual in attention span - understood.

The ultra short version, there are two choices for the humanity future:

1        Hardship, .. how much or little depends. It certainly can be ameliorated via cooperation, which begins at acceptance - which we are just barely now getting the mass of those that accept over the fulcrum. 

2       Death

Pick

This kind of makes his point of space colonization seem like something we will need to do regardless.

 

[LibertyBell]

So I decided to read a piece that I know would be full of lies and excuses and it's laughable how dismissive this guy is of climate change, going so far as to say "there has been no increase of wild fires since 1985"  I mean wtf....  his case for climate change "realism" is vastly unrealistic

 

The Case for Climate-Change Realism | National Affairs

 

 

[chubbs]

On 11/19/2021 at 1:51 AM, raindancewx said:

Cure is worse than the disease for the near future. That's why the opposition remains.

https://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2021/10/fossil-fuel-shortages-shrink-world-gdp.html#.YZdFk-jMLrc

After COVID-19 disrupted the regional economy of Southeast Asia in July and August 2021, we're seeing a new factor behind recessionary forces affecting the Earth's GDP: fossil fuel shortages.

China has been coping with shortages of both coal and oil since August 2021, with now widespread power outages disrupting its economic output from September 2021 into October 2021. Since the country is the world's largest emitter of carbon dioxide by a very wide margin, the impact of its forced blackouts are already showing up in the measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration at the remote Mauna Loa Observatory in the Pacific Ocean.

Using the default value of a -0.18 parts per million to account for the change in the rate of growth of atmospheric carbon dioxide since June 2021, we find the equivalent net loss to global GDP attributable to the spread of COVID in southeast Asia and to China's fossil fuel shortage is $6.0 trillion. Going back to the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, the reduction of 0.65 part per million in the rate at which carbon dioxide is being added to the Earth's air corresponds to a net loss to global GDP of $21.6 trillion.

Realistically, what's the point of changing how food and energy and products are delivered if we destroy ourselves in the process by over reacting?

If you look at actual history, and adjust for inflation, the costs incurred by old exploration companies like the Dutch East India Company in the 1600s were about the same as the costs to go on a Virgin Galactic flight to Space in the modern world. By the late exploration period, say 1750-1850, the costs were low enough for poor people to travel across the oceans at about the cost of a flight from LA to NYC, depending on the exact route. Personally think it's simpler, cheaper, and less delusional to subsidize space travel and colonization than to do what climate scientists advocate at a societal level. I'm sure initially the abandonment of Europe by the colonists was pretty difficult emotionally, but they got over it. Same thing would hold with space. I fully expect to be able to afford space tourism or travel at least by the end of my life in the absence of government interference with that market (30-50 years from now). 

This is a good argument to speed up the transition away from fossil fuels. The fossil fuels of the past 100 years are not the same as the ones that are left. The giant oil/gas fields we have been using are increasingly depleted. We have an "energy" crisis because fossil fuels deplete making the supply unreliable without ongoing investment. The oil industry cut investment as prices plunged in early 2020 and now we are short on supply, even though global oil demand still lags the pre-covid peak. Its the classic boom/bust oil and gas cycle. Fracking makes it worse, because capital costs are large, economics marginal, and fracked wells deplete rapidly.  A tired, worn-out horse to harness your future to.

 

 

[BuffaloWeather]

Out of the last 21 years we have had 4 below normal winters, 4 normal winters, and 13 above normal. We've had 6 straight above normal temp winters here in Upstate New York...

 

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• Quote

[Typhoon Tip]

7 hours ago, chubbs said:

This is a good argument to speed up the transition away from fossil fuels. The fossil fuels of the past 100 years are not the same as the ones that are left. The giant oil/gas fields we have been using are increasingly depleted. We have an "energy" crisis because fossil fuels deplete making the supply unreliable without ongoing investment. The oil industry cut investment as prices plunged in early 2020 and now we are short on supply, even though global oil demand still lags the pre-covid peak. Its the classic boom/bust oil and gas cycle. Fracking makes it worse, because capital costs are large, economics marginal, and fracked wells deplete rapidly.  A tired, worn-out horse to harness your future to.

 

 

While yet there is an even better argument than that -  (just ranting here ...not directing this at you )

It's call extinction    mmm yeah.  While we're busily divvying up the remains ... like we have a choice in the matter.

No one believes that, of course.  

But hell, we are at least heading in the right direction. What used to at minimum be met with majority in-deference, has now made its way all the way to ' stop alarm sounding.'     At least in this latter, there has to be some omission somewhere in there that there is at least a real concern. Lol

 It's like after 30 years of denial, we are now ready to accept, "Yeah, Okay, but it's not as bad as that ...I bet "   

(Psychologists refer to that as 'bargaining,' an evasive tactic that offers soothe over an otherwise painful truth - it's not real acceptance tho)

The truth is ...  IT IS THAT BAD.  

Despite all conceits and/or qualitative achievements as a species, we are really only a tick better than any other form of life form on this planet. Those "lessers" are wholly dependent on tactile registry to sense danger and motivate.

We, on the other hand, are supposed to use fore-spectrum-based proactivity.  It's really like we run "forecast models" that predict within errs of tolerance ... of course, what the future will be, inside our heads.  You know, for all the posits there are that attempts to explain the difference between us and them ... that may be it.  As the reality of language becomes better defined, it is clear that birds f'ing talk to one another - yes, that's right.  Bird brains!   Speaking of which, crows use tools.   Or, Capuchin Monkeys use heavy rocks to crack open nuts ... so that blows the tool usage away, too.   So what do we have left... the use of fire.  

Let's examine that for a moment:     We are sentient of the future, uniquely.  Taming fire really for that ability. Observance lends to working on the dynamics of the propagating system in such of way to force an outcome.  That may really be our defining characteristic that separates us from all other living things on this planet: it's the ability of cause-in-effect forecast modeling that all humans are gifted with ... (some more than others, be it in punchlines or practice but there are exceptions to every rule), but only doing so along a spectrum where we are alone at this level.

Yet, despite this intrinsic advantage, we are still too far in a way more willing to motivate if and only if the 'perception' of threat is being registered in:   Sight, sound, smell, taste or touch.   These are what move people off the train tracks - merely telling them the train is coming?  They'll look up and down the track to make sure first.  

Global Warming and climate change's disadvantage always was that it is impossible to perceive changes in ambient temperature, when that range is mere decimals over the scope of a year's records. Therefore, we're looking up and down the proverbial tracks.  GW/CC has no advocate that appeals.... Meanwhile, the chemistries of life DO respond to minute changes in nature, that are in those deceptively irrelevant scales.  

It's just another example of how the extraordinary evolutionary leap that brought humanity the gift of foresight and innovation forecasting, may ironical have been an arbiter of its extinction.   Now that is a interesting twist...  It's like the moment Arthur C. Clark's ape picked up the burning stick with a pensive connection, that was the moment the end began - and everything since is far more academic than we could ever imagine. 

[rclab]

15 minutes ago, Typhoon Tip said:

While yet there is an even better argument than that -  (just ranting here ...not directing this at you )

It's call extinction    mmm yeah.  While we're busily divvying up the remains ... like we have a choice in the matter.

No one believes that, of course.  

But hell, we are at least heading in the right direction. What used to at minimum be met with majority in-deference, has now made its way all the way to ' stop alarm sounding.'     At least in this latter, there has to be some omission somewhere in there that there is at least a real concern. Lol

 It's like after 30 years of denial, we are now ready to accept, "Yeah, Okay, but it's not as bad as that ...I bet "   

(Psychologists refer to that as 'bargaining,' an evasive tactic that offers soothe over an otherwise painful truth - it's not real acceptance tho)

The truth is ...  IT IS THAT BAD.  

Despite all conceits and/or qualitative achievements as a species, we are really only a tick better than any other form of life form on this planet. Those "lessers" are wholly dependent on tactile registry to sense danger and motivate.

We, on the other hand, are supposed to use fore-spectrum-based proactivity.  It's really like we run "forecast models" that predict within errs of tolerance ... of course, what the future will be, inside our heads.  You know, for all the posits there are that attempts to explain the difference between us and them ... that may be it.  As the reality of language becomes better defined, it is clear that birds f'ing talk to one another - yes, that's right.  Bird brains!   Speaking of which, crows use tools.   Or, Capuchin Monkeys use heavy rocks to crack open nuts ... so that blows the tool usage away, too.   So what do we have left... the use of fire.  

Let's examine that for a moment:     We are sentient of the future, uniquely.  Taming fire really for that ability. Observance lends to working on the dynamics of the propagating system in such of way to force an outcome.  That may really be our defining characteristic that separates us from all other living things on this planet: it's the ability of cause-in-effect forecast modeling that all humans are gifted with ... (some more than others, be it in punchlines or practice but there are exceptions to every rule), but only doing so along a spectrum where we are alone at this level.

Yet, despite this intrinsic advantage, we are still too far in a way more willing to motivate if and only if the 'perception' of threat is being registered in:   Sight, sound, smell, taste or touch.   These are what move people off the train tracks - merely telling them the train is coming?  They'll look up and down the track to make sure first.  

Global Warming and climate change's disadvantage always was that it is impossible to perceive changes in ambient temperature, when that range is mere decimals over the scope of a year's records. Therefore, we're looking up and down the proverbial tracks.  GW/CC has no advocate that appeals.... Meanwhile, the chemistries of life DO respond to minute changes in nature that is in those deceptively irrelevant scales.  

It's just another example of how the extraordinary evolutionary leap that brought humanity the gift of foresight and innovation forecasting, may ironical been the arbiter of its extinction.   Now that is a interesting twist...  It's like the moment Arthur C. Clark's ape picked up the burning stick with a pensive connection, that was the moment the end began - and everything since is far more academic than we could ever imagine. 

Good afternoon Tip. Actually I thought it was when Mr Clarke ape picked up the stick and realized it could be used as a weapon. Either interpretation  is fine as it relates to extinction. I still feel the belief that the beginning of sentience occurred  when the curious creature looked up at the night sky and wondered, has merit. It seems we forgot/abandoned what’s around us when we started to look up and beyond. At any rate, thank you Tip for the grey matter workout. I once responded to a dark forky post by saying some believe the glass is half full, others believe it’s half empty but he ( forky) shatters it. Your well thought out missive, on the way to our end, give all the above a chance to occur. As always ….

[raindancewx]

On 11/19/2021 at 11:51 AM, Typhoon Tip said:

It's not going to be easy. This is essentially a species level event crisis, ... really perhaps the first legit test of the KS level 1/ 'planetary manipulation' - unforgiving exam where you failure can mean extinction.  Here?  - to ween a 7.5 billion-ballasted momentum, off of multi-generational adaptation to a FF matrix as primary energy extraction method? 

There is no easy pathway to that vision - not lecturing you per se...speaking to the strawfolk reader here...

There is going to be duress at multiple scales of civility ... Could even culminate in war(s). There is probably going to be hording.  The specter of dystopia may become overwhelming, causing regression tendencies.  It's a race... it's quite ironic, that technological advancements got us into this mess; we are now so inextricably dependent that technological advancing has to play a pivotal role in how that race ends. Meanwhile, some ecological failures could mean food problems. Future Pandemics? get used to it.  Species migration do to habitat stressing co-mingle biophagic agents where there are no defenses. Yeeah.  Say, if the ocean phytoplankton C02-02 cycle crashes... pretty much anything over 50kg that requires warm blood, that doesn't have tech to make O2 the other way... can't breath. Probably we won't run out of air.. but that combined with other factors becomes insurmountable toxic cocktail.  We cannot survive if X-number of species eradicate below a codependent threshold... and those that believe we can out live a mass extinction are basically Walking Dead.  Any of this endless list is a dystopian Sci Fi novel - the good kind. Good because it's eerily plausible if not likely.

We've been covering this in long winded prose, in this particular thread for several months at this point.  Probably a bit much to read outside of cover-to-cover couch and tea engagements.  Most in here are too Twit and/or quick textual in attention span - understood.

The ultra short version, there are two choices for the humanity future:

1        Hardship, .. how much or little depends. It certainly can be ameliorated via cooperation, which begins at acceptance - which we are just barely now getting the mass of those that accept over the fulcrum. 

2       Death

Pick

Everything you write is ridiculous. The world has already warmed up. We're already seeing rapid declines in both population growth and the acceleration of emissions. We've already had mass extinctions. There is already massive resource stress with COVID, and yet everything keeps chugging along just fine, albeit less efficiently than before. Whether you like it or not, the hard part is over. There aren't many places left like California that will see a 100 fold demand increase on limited water or any other resource availability in the next two centuries like we just saw from 1820 to 2020. You can pretend that California or Spain will have 4 billion people in 100 years if you really want to, but it's just not real likely. You sound like a dumber version of Paul Ehlrich, except even he doesn't buy into human extinction either, and he's the "England won't exist in 1971" guy / "millions of Americans will die from starvation" etc etc guy with that stupid Population Bomb book because he had no idea a single person like a Normal Borlaug could do so much alone with the Green Revolution. It's a failure of imagination.

Ehrlich was so stupid that even when it was unequivocally clear what Borlaug had accomplished in the 1970s, he kept with his asinine forecasts.

Mann certainly thinks it's an idiotic position that humans will go extinct from climate change. You can find at least 25 other scientists in the climate field saying some variation of this from a single Google search.

https://www.livescience.com/climate-change-humans-extinct.html

"There is no evidence of climate change scenarios that would render human beings extinct," Michael Mann, a distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State and author of "The New Climate War: The Fight to Take Back Our Planet" (PublicAffairs, 2021), told Live Science in an email.

Here is a simple example of why humans won't be extinct: I personally own land that can produce food. I have at least 400 pounds of meat stored, that doesn't even include my stock of non-perishable food, and the water I have on my properties. I could easily live for at least three years just off my possession in the absence of any food produced anywhere in the world ever again. Now imagine that there is also abundant food in store houses, grocery stores, farms, ranches, military bases, and so on. Now scale it for billions of people, and remember that we produce enough food to feed 10 billion people a year., even if it isn't distributed super well. There are over 40 fruit producing trees within three blocks of my house, and I live in a ****ing desert. I also have generators, and a deep knowledge of electrical systems to maintain the power supply to build an irrigation system if I had to. My property also includes buildings that were built underground with lead lining, since New Mexico is a likely target in nuclear war, given our capabilities locally. I would easily survive for years even after a nuclear incident. Others surely would too, with airplanes, space travel, subs and so on. You don't have the imagination to understand resiliency, you're pretty dumb.

Prediction of Earth running out of resources and various other types of doom have been wrong for literally decades at this point. Whatever you think of global warming, it's ****ing dumb to predict the end of the world from a resource shortage triggered war, especially in an era of emerging space travel for civilians. Every war in history has been over resources, of course it will happen again. If cavemen could survive the ice age, you need to have a little faith in the current sophistication of our species. 

Here are a couple examples of Ehrlich-isms: https://reason.com/2000/05/01/earth-day-then-and-now-2/

"By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people … If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000." Ehrlich, 1971.  https://tinyurl.com/9zf5hs55

"Most of the people who are going to die in the greatest cataclysm in the history of man have already been born," wrote Ehrlich in an essay titled "Eco-Catastrophe!," which ran in the special Earth Day issue of the radical magazine Ramparts. "By…[1975] some experts feel that food shortages will have escalated the present level of world hunger and starvation into famines of unbelievable proportions. Other experts, more optimistic, think the ultimate food-population collision will not occur until the decade of the 1980s." Ehrlich sketched out his most alarmist scenario for the Earth Day issue of The Progressive, assuring readers that between 1980 and 1989, some 4 billion people, including 65 million Americans, would perish in the "Great Die-Off."

Since 1970, the amount of food per person globally has increased by 26 percent, and as the International Food Policy Research Institute reported in October 1999, "World market prices for wheat, maize, and rice, adjusted for inflation, are the lowest they have been in the last century." According to the World Bank's World Development Report 2000, food production increased by 60 percent between 1980 and 1997. At the same time, the amount of land devoted to growing crops has barely increased over the past 30 years, meaning that millions of acres have been spared for nature--acres that would have been plowed down had agricultural productivity lagged the way Ehrlich and others believed it would.

In January 1970, Life reported, "Scientists have solid experimental and theoretical evidence to support…the following predictions: In a decade, urban dwellers will have to wear gas masks to survive air pollution…by 1985 air pollution will have reduced the amount of sunlight reaching earth by one half…." Ecologist Kenneth Watt told Time that, "At the present rate of nitrogen buildup, it's only a matter of time before light will be filtered out of the atmosphere and none of our land will be usable." Barry Commoner cited a National Research Council report that had estimated "that by 1980 the oxygen demand due to municipal wastes will equal the oxygen content of the total flow of all the U.S. river systems in the summer months." Translation: Decaying organic pollutants would use up all of the oxygen in America's rivers, causing freshwater fish to suffocate.

Of course, the irrepressible Ehrlich chimed in, predicting in his Mademoiselle interview that "air pollution…is certainly going to take hundreds of thousands of lives in the next few years alone." In Ramparts, Ehrlich sketched a scenario in which 200,000 Americans would die in 1973 during "smog disasters" in New York and Los Angeles.

So has air pollution gotten worse? Quite the contrary. In the most recent National Air Quality Trends report, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency--itself created three decades ago partly as a response to Earth Day celebrations--had this to say: "Since 1970, total U.S. population increased 29 percent, vehicle miles traveled increased 121 percent, and the gross domestic product (GDP) increased 104 percent. During that same period, notable reductions in air quality concentrations and emissions took place." Since 1970, ambient levels of sulfur dioxide and carbon monoxide have fallen by 75 percent, while total suspended particulates like smoke, soot, and dust have been cut by 50 percent since the 1950s.

In 1988, the particulate standard was changed to account for smaller particles. Even under this tougher standard, particulates have declined an additional 15 percent. Ambient ozone and nitrogen dioxide, prime constituents of smog, are both down by 30 percent since the 1970s. According to the EPA, the total number of days with air pollution alerts dropped 56 percent in Southern California and 66 percent in the remaining major cities in the United States between 1988 and 1997.

Since at least the early 1990s, residents of infamously smogged-in Los Angeles have been able to see that their city is surrounded by mountains.

Paul Ehrlich warned in the May 1970 issue of Audubon that DDT and other chlorinated hydrocarbons "may have substantially reduced the life expectancy of people born since 1945." In his "Eco-Catastrophe!" scenario, Ehrlich put a finer point on these fears by envisioning a 1973 Department of Health, Education, and Welfare study which would find "that Americans born since 1946…now had a life expectancy of only 49 years, and predicted that if current patterns continued this expectancy would reach 42 years by 1980, when it might level out.

"Why has air quality improved so dramatically? Part of the answer lies in emissions targets set by federal, state, and local governments. But these need to be understood in the twin contexts of rising wealth and economic efficiency. As a Department of Interior analyst concluded after surveying emissions in 1999, "Cleaner air is a direct consequence of better technologies and the enormous and sustained investments that only a rich nation could have sunk into developing, installing, and operating these technologies." Today, American businesses, consumers, and government agencies spend about $40 billion annually on air pollution controls.

"We are prospecting for the very last of our resources and using up the nonrenewable things many times faster than we are finding new ones," warned Sierra Club director Martin Litton in Time's February 2, 1970, special "environmental report." Ecologist Kenneth Watt declared, "By the year 2000, if present trends continue, we will be using up crude oil at such a rate…that there won't be any more crude oil. You'll drive up to the pump and say, `Fill 'er up, buddy,' and he'll say, `I am very sorry, there isn't any.'" Later that year, Harrison Brown, a scientist at the National Academy of Sciences, published a chart in Scientific American that looked at metal reserves and estimated the humanity would totally run out of copper shortly after 2000. Lead, zinc, tin, gold, and silver would be gone before 1990.

Of course this didn't happen. The prices of all metals and minerals have dropped by more than 50 percent since 1970, according to the World Resources Institute. As we all know, lower prices mean that things are becoming more abundant, not less. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that at present rates of mining, reserves of copper will last 54 years; zinc, 56 years; silver, 26 years; tin, 55 years; gold, 30 years; and lead, 47 years. What about oil? The survey estimates that global reserves could be as much as 2.1 trillion barrels of crude oil--enough to supply the world for the next 90 years. These reserve figures are constantly moving targets--as they get drawn down, miners and drillers find new sources of supply or develop more efficient technologies for exploiting the resources.

Worries about declining biodiversity have become popular lately. On the first Earth Day, participants were concerned about saving a few particularly charismatic species such as the bald eagle and the peregrine falcon. But even then some foresaw a coming holocaust. As Sen. Gaylord Nelson wrote in Look, "Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct." Writing just five years after the first Earth Day, Paul Ehrlich and his biologist wife, Anne Ehrlich, predicted that "since more than nine-tenths of the original tropical rainforests will be removed in most areas within the next 30 years or so, it is expected that half of the organisms in these areas will vanish with it."

There's only one problem: Most species that were alive in 1970 are still around today. "Documented animal extinctions peaked in the 1930s, and the number of extinctions has been declining since then," according to Stephen Edwards, an ecologist with the World Conservation Union, a leading international conservation organization whose members are non-governmental organizations, international agencies, and national conservation agencies. Edwards notes that a 1994 World Conservation Union report found known extinctions since 1600 encompassed 258 animal species, 368 insect species, and 384 vascular plants. Most of these species, he explains, were "island endemics" like the Dodo. As a result, they are particularly vulnerable to habitat disruption, hunting, and competition from invading species. Since 1973, only seven species have gone extinct in the United States.

What mostly accounts for relatively low rates of extinction? As with many other green indicators, wealth leads the way by both creating a market for environmental values and delivering resource-efficient technology. Consider, for example, that one of the main causes of extinction is deforestation and the ensuing loss of habitat. According to the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, what drives most tropical deforestation is not commercial logging, but "poor farmers who have no other option for feeding their families than slashing and burning a patch of forest." By contrast, countries that practice high yield, chemically assisted agriculture have expanding forests. In 1920, U.S. forests covered 732 million acres. Today they cover 737 million acres, even though the number of Americans grew from 106 million in 1920 to 272 million now. Forests in Europe expanded even more dramatically, from 361 million acres to 482 million acres between 1950 and 1990. Despite continuing deforestation in tropical countries, Roger Sedjo, a senior fellow at the think tank Resources for the Future, notes that "76 percent of the tropical rain forest zone is still covered with forest." Which is quite a far cry from being nine-tenths gone. More good news: In its State of the World's Forests 1999, the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization documents that while forests in developing countries were reduced by 9.1 percent between 1980 and 1995, the global rate of deforestation is now slowing.

How did the doomsters get so many predictions so wrong on the first Earth Day? Their mistake can be handily summed up in Paul Ehrlich and John Holdern's infamous I=PAT equation. Impact (always negative) equals Population x Affluence x Technology, they declared. More people were always worse, by definition. Affluence meant that rich people were consuming more of the earth's resources, a concept that was regularly illustrated by claiming that the birth of each additional baby in America was worse for the environment than 25, 50, or even 60 babies born on the Indian subcontinent. And technology was bad because it meant that humans were pouring more poisons into the biosphere, drawing down more nonrenewable resources and destroying more of the remaining wilderness.

We now know that Ehrlich and his fellow travelers got it backwards. If population were necessarily bad, then Brazil, with less than three-quarters the population density of the U.S., should be the wealthier society. As far as affluence goes, it is clearly the case that the richer the country, the cleaner the water, the clearer the air, and the more protected the forests. Additionally, richer countries also boast less hunger, longer lifespans, lower fertility rates, and more land set aside for nature. Relatively poor people can't afford to care overmuch for the state of the natural world.

With regards to technology, Ehrlich and other activists often claim that economists simply don't understand the simple facts of ecology. But it's the doomsters who need to update their economics--things have changed since the appearance of Thomas Malthus' 200-year-old An Essay on the Principle of Population, the basic text that continues to underwrite much apocalyptic rhetoric. Malthus hypothesized that while population increases geometrically, food and other resources increased arithmetically, leading to a world in which food was always in short supply. Nowadays, we understand that wealth is not created simply by combining land and labor. Rather, technological innovations greatly raise positive outputs in all sorts of ways while minimizing pollution and other negative outputs.

Indeed, if Ehrlich wants to improve his sorry record of predictions and his understanding of how to protect the natural world, he should walk across campus to talk with his Stanford University colleague, economist Paul Romer. "New Growth Theory," devised by Romer and others, shows that wealth springs from new ideas and new recipes. Romer sums it up this way: "Every generation has perceived the limits to growth that finite resources and undesirable side effects would pose if no new recipes or ideas were discovered. And every generation has underestimated the potential for finding new recipes and ideas. We consistently fail to grasp how many ideas remain to be discovered. The difficulty is the same one we have with compounding. Possibilities do not add up. They multiply." In other words, new ideas and technological recipes grow exponentially at a rate much faster than population does.

"I'm scared," confessed Paul Ehrlich in the 1970 Earth Day issue of Look. "I have a 14 year old daughter whom I love very much. I know a lot of young people, and their world is being destroyed. My world is being destroyed. I'm 37 and I'd kind of like to live to be 67 in a reasonably pleasant world, and not die in some kind of holocaust in the next decade." Ehrlich didn't die in a holocaust, and the world is far more pleasant than he thought it would be. It is probably too much to hope that abashed humility will strike him and he'll desist in bedeviling the world with his dire and consistently wrong predictions. He's like a reverse Cassandra --Cassandra made true prophecies but no one would listen to her. Ehrlich makes false prophecies and everyone listens to him.

[LibertyBell]

Hey the green revolution was awful and the reasons why were detailed in a 2 hour documentary on PBS Borlaug himself specifically stated that it was only a short term goal and in the long run it was NOT the answer.  The term "green" is also a misnomer as there is nothing "green" about using harmful pesticides and fertilizer to destroy the soil, which is what the farmers in vastly overpopulated and overpolluted nations like India are now finding out.  Yes the population is supposed to stabilize at 10 billion according to the UN and that is barely livable as it is, but it should NEVER have been allowed to get to that point.  Borlaug's "technology" has depleted and destroyed the soil in third world nations and they are going back to organic farming as they should have been doing all along.  People should NOT be allowed to reproduce like viruses even if that means putting contraceptives in the water, because they also pollute like viruses.

 

[LibertyBell]

also there is a mass extinction underway right now, I dont know where you get your data from but it's definitely wrong.  They were right worrying about humans overpopulating and destroying the planet and yes it's slowed down in developed nations but we also have to worry about nations in Africa and polluting nations like India and China and also in South America where tropical rain forests are being burned or chopped down.  These nations need to be severely punished for their transgressions even if that means cutting them off from the rest of the world like we did with NK and Iran.

 

[LibertyBell]

air pollution is still the number one shortener of life on the planet, so tell that to places like India where they are now shutting down coal plants because people in Delhi can no longer breathe.  On top of that technology is no panacea as it often harms the environment in the long term as the so-called green revolution did.  The math is inexorable, you have a planet of finite size you cannot have one species multiply infinitely no matter what.  It will destroy the planet and if you dont think the planet will fight back like every other time one species has dominated it you are sadly mistaken.  

But go ahead with your view point because it will just make humanity get destroyed faster-- and that will be a great thing for the planet.

 

[LibertyBell]

Good news/bad news. Most of the world will have stabilized population by 2100 but Africa will still be experiencing exponential growth.  We need to severely punish these nations if they continue to destroy tropical rain forests and drive species to extinction there.

 

https://twitter.com/i/events/1461759673590329445

 

How Africa will become the center of the world’s urban future

Growing at unprecedented rates, and shaped by forces both familiar and new, dozens of African cities will join the ranks of humanity’s biggest megalopolises between now and 2100. Several recent studies project that by the end of this century, Africa will be the only continent experiencing population growth. Thirteen of the world’s 20 biggest urban areas will be in Africa — up from just two today — as will more than a third of the world’s population.

GIF via @washingtonpost

[LibertyBell]

Lagos, Nigeria, holy shit, I would rather not be born than be born in what that city will turn into by 2100.

 

It's already on the way there

 

 

[rclab]

On 11/21/2021 at 5:04 AM, LibertyBell said:

Good news/bad news. Most of the world will have stabilized population by 2100 but Africa will still be experiencing exponential growth.  We need to severely punish these nations if they continue to destroy tropical rain forests and drive species to extinction there.

 

https://twitter.com/i/events/1461759673590329445

 

How Africa will become the center of the world’s urban future

Growing at unprecedented rates, and shaped by forces both familiar and new, dozens of African cities will join the ranks of humanity’s biggest megalopolises between now and 2100. Several recent studies project that by the end of this century, Africa will be the only continent experiencing population growth. Thirteen of the world’s 20 biggest urban areas will be in Africa — up from just two today — as will more than a third of the world’s population.

GIF via @washingtonpost

Good morning Liberty. A sobering thought. Perhaps the birthplace of sentience and likely the place where it ends. As always ….

[Vice-Regent]

There's no way not a chance without the supporting pillars of globalization African development will stall with the rest of the world.

Overpopulation is not as easy as you think.

[LibertyBell]

10 hours ago, Vice-Regent said:

There's no way not a chance without the supporting pillars of globalization African development will stall with the rest of the world.

Overpopulation is not as easy as you think.

they'll basically suffocate under the weight of their own population and pollution like is happening in India right now

 

[Typhoon Tip]

On 11/20/2021 at 9:51 PM, raindancewx said:

Everything you write is ridiculous. 

 

If one wants to spend as much time and energy drafting a response like that which you did or I imagined borrowed, it is probably unwise to begin with that particular sentence right there. Lol  - just a suggestion. 

At least not if one actually expects the target reader to engage. 

[Vice-Regent]

 

[bluewave]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/10/15/reframing-climate-change-story-human-evolutionary-success/

The narrative we’ve grown used to on this subject is one of blame, casting humanity as a virus destroying an Earth that now needs saving (from us). But there is a very different story we can tell, one that recognizes climate change not as a marker of shame but as a story of an astonishing success that has led humanity to a moment of great peril, yet also of profound possibility.

This new narrative emerges from interdisciplinary studies connecting humanity’s project of civilization with Earth’s own multibillion-year project of life and evolution. The central point is that climate change is the dire but unintended result of our species’ thriving. Humans are not a greedy plague on Earth but simply the latest experiment in planetary-scale evolution. Any species that flourished to the extent we humans have would have to seek out energy sources on a massive scale — and in doing so would change the global ecosystem. It took centuries for the downsides of carbon-based fuels to become apparent. But now that we have figured that out, it’s incumbent on us to change course, and do so quickly.

 

That’s not an anti-business argument. Nor is it even an indictment of humans’ initially developing an economy around oil, before we knew about the implications. By stripping away the self-flagellating rhetoric and reorienting the story in this way — a longer timeline, a broader canvas — new alliances in the fight become possible.

Some climate change activists are already rethinking their rhetoric; they’re debating, for instance, whether to use the phrase “climate catastrophe” or “climate crisis,” recognizing that harsh rhetoric may push people not to action but to desensitization or even despair. But the narrative revision I’m talking about is far more sweeping.

The first implication of a planetary-scale view of the problem is that humans shouldn’t be considered as a force set in opposition to nature. From the “blue-green bacteria” that created a breathable oxygen-rich atmosphere on to dinosaurs, grasslands and large hairy mammals, our planet has been relentlessly inventing new versions of itself. Humans, and our globe-spanning civilization, simply represent the latest round of innovation. We are who’s at-bat right now — and that’s largely an accident of fate and evolution. When it comes to living organisms changing Earth, humans are not fundamentally different or special. This has happened before.

A second implication, the most contentious, is that climate change is not our fault. Don’t get me wrong: Human activity absolutely has caused the rise in temperature that our scientists are hard at work documenting — and without doubt, those who continue to drive climate change denial are deeply and profoundly worthy of blame. I mean, rather, that all human history is the attempt to harvest new forms of energy to power our cherished project of civilization. We triggered climate change by mistake when we tripped over fossil fuels as part of that long effort. It wasn’t because we are evil or unworthy.

 

From a planetary science perspective, global-scale technological civilizations and climate change go together. Any society as successful as ours, emerging anywhere in the universe, is going to have a hard time not triggering climate change. That’s just how planets work when you harvest buckets of energy from them. Viewed that way, changing a world’s climate marks the end of your civilization’s adolescence. At that point, you then face a very strict planetary driving test. Pass it — build a long-term sustainable version of your civilization — and you can go anywhere. Fail and you might die.

So, yes, we changed the atmosphere of the entire planet. Not bad for a bunch of hairless monkeys. Now we must meet the existential challenge that success has created.

Thinking about climate change in the context of eons of evolution, and as a curse of success, makes the burden of guilt hovering over every individual daily action (paper towels or electric bathroom hand dryers?) seem beside the point. Once humans recognize that triggering climate change was an inevitable consequence of a civilizational project we began 10,000 years ago, it follows that combating climate change, too, must also be a collective process, requiring all the ingenuity our species can muster.

By shifting from blame to possibility, people are freed to imagine climate change as a challenge full of risk andpossibility, rather than just a death sentence from accrued guilt. Many people who don’t consider themselves environmentalists get more engaged when the conversation turns to human success and capacity for innovation, I find. Skeptics don’t suddenly “convert,” but space for conversation opens up.

Stressing human ingenuity in this context carries risks, for sure. Focusing on our technological prowess — on an evolutionary timeline as well as in the present — risks steering the conversation toward “solutions” like geoengineering, whose unintended consequences may well be even worse than the unintended climate change we drove with fossil fuels. The true game-changing point of the planetary perspective is to convince people we are not above the biosphere — we’re part of it. Our complex global project of civilization must be rewoven into the complex global network of life in ways that allow both to thrive, in new and as-yet-unimagined ways.

Left vs. right, Democrat vs. Republican, corporate capitalism vs. socialism. All these polarities of public life and public debate were built before Earth began responding to our civilization-building efforts. Each in their own way carries the baggage of a 19th-century smokestack world whose imperatives don’t align with the urgencies and possibilities of a world in which the climate is changing. The cliche is that history repeats itself, but humanity has simply never been here before.

That means we will need to invent something new. New technologies and new policies are one front in that fight, from local-scale projects protecting freshwater sources to investment strategies that ensure capital makes it quickly to technologies such as large-scale energy storage (essential for the full switch to renewal power). But stories were humanity’s first technology. For any of the new approaches to become fully deployed and fully effective, they will have to be grounded in a new way of understanding ourselves and Earth. And if some people question whether a story is enough to move the world, one can ask: What else ever has?

[Vice-Regent]

Nothing would be more glorious than instead of passing the torch to someone somewhere else we could instead tone down our expectations. A high-yield energy intensity is not necessary for happiness and as we have seen and documented extensively, the process of technological slavery of which all people's are impacted and all are guilty of imposing on others has now run it's course.

Ultimately it's your decision to walk away. I am getting my list together consider it a modern version of a very familiar list. Let the real work begin.