Export thread

"Record Arctic blazes may herald new ‘fire regime’ decades sooner than anticipated"


Guys, I'm going to be honest. I get severe anxiety from news like this. Not only anxious, but utterly hopeless and powerless. I've gotten so anxious thinking about this that I've honestly contemplated suicide at times. Because I don't want to be around to watch the world go to hell. The current heat wave going on in Nova Scotia (and other parts of the world) isn't helping. We haven't had a good rain storm in weeks. There are places, like around my yoga rock, that are bone dry more than I've ever seen it before.

And I just...I don't think we can turn this around. Not with the way the world is. Not with the way our society is built. Not with the leaders that run the world.

I feel the same a lot of the time

40 days of 110F+ heat.

No thanks, one day at 110F was enough. I didn't move further south for a reason. Now I'm wishing that maybe I'd moved north instead. Or found a really cheap island somewhere.

I have many things I want to contribute to this thread, but none of them are encouraging, so I will not.

—Patrick

Your reusable tote won't save the planet after all.

DarkAudit said:

Your reusable tote won't save the planet after all.

Click to expand...

Yup, "re-usable" and "organic" etc are not at all always good things.
Re-usable straws for example are almost universally much worse for the climate than regular old plastic ones.
Of course, for both straws and tote bags and many other things besides, we're not replacing them because of climate concerns, but because of environmental concerns. The two are, sadly, often at odds. Cotton tote bags won't end up in the ocean, killing seals or whatever. Iron or bamboo straws won't choke seagulls.

In Belgium, so-called "exploding" chickens (chickens that quite literally explode from growing too fast if they're not slaughtered in time) are being phased out because of animal cruelty concerns. Awesome, these animals are a super-inbred type made entirely for the meat industry and whatever.but, as the meat industry answered...For the same amount of meat, growing a chicken over 90-120 days instead of 25 days as now, will take four times the amount of feed, produce four times as much crap, take about 6 times as much water, and will in general be a whole lot worse for the planet in a variety of ways (and soy products containing the same amounts of protein consume almost 20x the amount of water and power). Climate, environment, animal welfare, sustainability, and human life quality, are all noble goals...but often directly at odds with one another.

DarkAudit said:

Your reusable tote won't save the planet after all.

Click to expand...

The article is actually about the over-production of cotton totes. These aren't the durable reusable totes that you make/buy and are meant to last for years (or decades if they're from LL Bean ), these are the cheap ones you're given for free with a store brand on them, or for donating to some charity, or whatnot. Or the little cotton bags used as unnecessary packaging (I've noticed those becoming a thing). Cheap, unwanted cloth bags are definitely a nuisance.

There should also be an investigation into the complete waste of resources in all those unwanted free calendars I'm sent every year (and no way to opt out of them). I do not need ten calendars, so they go directly into the recycle bin.

I highly recommend almost any book by Bjorn Lomborg, but in particular False Alarm. I think it came out a year ago, so it's pretty up-to-date. To be clear, what he's saying is false is not climate change, it's the alarm about climate change. The world isn't going to hell in a handbasket, we're not at an extinction-level threat, this isn't the end.

He is qualified - he was a scientist on the IPCC, and he understands climate change in a profound way that most of us don't. His view is primarily that climate change is real, and it's a concern, and we should do things to mitigate it (carbon taxes, etc)- but it isn't the world's top problem, and our solutions shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater so to speak. It's a very level-headed look at the issue.

Eh…

Lomborg has been thoroughly discredited by almost every environmental scientist for dishonesty, cherry-picking data, exaggeration, and misrepresentation of the truth.

That doesn’t mean we should overreact or not approach the issue with a level head, but his work is not a good example to use.

Tress said:

Eh…

Lomborg has been thoroughly discredited by almost every environmental scientist for dishonesty, cherry-picking data, exaggeration, and misrepresentation of the truth.

That doesn’t mean we should overreact or not approach the issue with a level head, but his work is not a good example to use.

Click to expand...

That's not really accurate. Only one official body discredited him a long time ago, and that decision was repealed that having ironically been found overwhelmingly not objective. If you follow his bibliographies, his numbers are pulled from the same papers and studies other environmentalists use. I think the biggest divergence is where he uses more economic studies than most environmental scientists do.

I'm actually of the idea that we're probably already too late. Yes, we're technically still able to stay below the 2° warming limit. On the other hand, we're already seeing far more of the large-scale sudden environmental calamities than most studies predicted. The recent rain fall in Greenland was a good example: because of global warming, for the first time in recorded history, there was a heavy rainfall on the highest areas of Greenland, instead of snow. So what, right, it's still water...Except the reflective characteristics of ice, snow and rain are very different, and this single event is already expected to add Billions of gallons of sweet water to the ocean, and cause extreme further melt-off.
The oceans are warming faster than we thought, causing an unexpectedly large die-of of seaweeds and plankton...Which are responsible for a much higher amount of carbon lock-in than all of the rainforests of the world combined. Etc.
It seems more and more likely that even if we completely reduced human CO2 output to 0 by 2030 (which will never happen unless we commit genocide on a never-before-seen scale), we've already set in motion self-sustaining natural systems that would continue to spiral out of control.
Maybe we'll find technology to save us all. I'm not holding my breath, though.

On a global level, I'm pessimistic about whether humanity has the will to make the changes necessary to halt climate change, and I also strongly suspect we're past the tipping point.

On a personal level, the weather's getting hotter and that pisses me off.

I'm pretty sure humanity is supremely fucked, and there's not a lot we can do about it at this point. There is no convincing the selfish to fix it. It only makes angry that the people who will have to suffer through it aren't at fault for the horrors to come.

I wonder how many more heat domes and towns destroyed by fires there have to be before we're alarmed.

Europe, WTF dude?

DarkAudit said:

Europe, WTF dude?

European carriers are flying thousands of near-empty planes this winter just to keep their airport slots

Airlines in the EU have complained that other regions and continents are not imposing such requirements.

www.cnbc.com

Click to expand...

Well, we can't control loss of buying power, but maybe we can lower prices on vacations to practically nothing!

Alaska snow crab season canceled as officials investigate disappearance of an estimated 1 billion crabs

"...the Alaska Department of Fish and Game has, for the first time in state history, canceled the winter snow crab season in the Bering Sea due to their falling numbers.
...
"An estimated one billion crabs have mysteriously disappeared in two years, state officials said. It marks a 90% drop in their population."

The cause is not known, nor is it known if the crabs died or migrated.

Last I heard, leading theories are either disease or mass migration to colder water.
I know amphibians are used as an indicator of environmental change because they are, as a class, more sensitive to environmental fluctuations than other species.
I can't remember whether crustaceans have been shown to be similar "leading indicators" in open water. I know there are theories about this, but I can't remember if there's any actual proof.

--Patrick