There is a very insightful megathread relating to Bitcoin that has given me a lot to think about. I am inspired by that thread and I am curious what the Eve community thinks about the current real-world push to reduce carbon emissions. I read a lot of informative articles from climate scientists that basically tell us that there are some significant problems with Earth’s atmosphere. All of these articles end with the same conclusion: “We must reduce our carbon emissions.”
I really struggle with this because I am not a climate scientist and I have no way of doubting or refuting what they say is the science in this case. But their solution makes no sense to me - and I know that climate scientists are no more qualified than a layperson when it comes to solving global problems. As far as I can tell, there is no way to reduce humanity’s carbon emissions in any meaningful way. Yet, the policymakers seem eager to spend mountains of money on half-cocked carbon reduction schemes that have no chance of contributing any meaningful change in the carbon emission trends.
I think this topic obeys the forum rules, so long as we do not get into a heated political debate about which sock puppets should be making the rules.
Global warming may screw things up somewhat for mankind, but I hate all this talk of ‘saving the planet’. The reality is that life thrived during the Cretaceous era, when temperatures were waaay higher than now and there was zero ice at the poles at all. As George Carlin said…the planet is doing just fine…we aren’t. An even bigger irony is that as the Sun gets hotter ( by 10% every billion years or so ) the result will be carbon leaching…carbon taken from the atmosphere and locked into rocks at a higher rate. So much so that life on Earth will die out from lack of carbon long before the Sun gets too hot. So ironically, by adding carbon to the atmosphere we are actually making life on Earth last longer. We likely just wont be around to appreciate it.
In the 1970’s they called it Global Cooling. In the 1990’s they called it Global Warming. Now they call it Climate Change. They will change the name of it to whatever they need to in order to further their agenda that particular day. We didn’t end up having an Ice Age, so they changed it to Global Warming. We didn’t end up on fire, so they changed it to Climate Change. Well, I’ve got news for you. The climate has been changing on it’s own for millions of years before man even walked the Earth, and it will continue to do so for millions of years after we are gone…
I wouldn’t argue that global warming isn’t a problem for humankind. But heck…we are only 18,000 years into an inter-glacial period that we have no idea how long will last…that followed 200,000 years of ice with a mile thick of ice extending as far south as London, New York, etc. It would be ironic if we were actually staving off the next ice age.
First it probably helps to separate what the science says and what is just corporate media and politics.
The basic cause of global warming is pretty simple. During the day, visible light from the sun comes mostly unhindered trough the atmosphere and warms the earth. The earth then radiates that energy back into space in the infrared spectrum. The atmosphere however has gases that while transparent to visible light, they block infrared, which means they reflect part of the energy back to earth.
If we did not have this gases we would probably freeze to death, as the average temperature without this would be quite lower than what we have today. The problem starts when we change the composition of the atmosphere by introducing more and more of this gases mostly CO² and Methane into the atmosphere, from fossil carbohydrate deposits (oil, natural gas, coal). This will trap more and more infrared radiation and prevents the earth from cooling off over night, it will essentially increase the average temperature.
Consequences of this will be changes to weather patterns, sea level rise, more extreme weather events (because more energy is in the system), which will in turn cause food shortages, relocation and mass migration of people.
Scientists try to predict the changes to global climate with models which are quite complicated as they have to account not only for atmospheric composition, but also for albedo changes of the earth (ice caps melting, deforestation), sun cycles, galactic cycles, etc…
They don’t generally say what has to be done about it except for recommendations on what would have the most impact and what the models predict depending on our actions or lack thereof. This is in general communicated with the IPCC report. If you want to truly see for yourself what science communicates without corporate media distortions, I recommend reading that.
Yeah unfortunately, despite the pretty clear science that there is an issue we need to urgently address, almost all of climate action taken by politicians is just nothing more than role playing the environmentalist to their voters and then giving out new oil drilling licenses in their daily business.
Our whole civilization is simply addicted to this fossil carbohydrates. Energy multiplies the work a single human can do, hence availability of cheap energy is almost directly proportional to personal comfort and wealth. The tragedy is that we are buying this comfort with a finite energy depot that has accumulated over millions of years, and not only causes changes to the climate, but that will eventually run out.
If you would measure the advancement of a civilization by the amount of energy they can produce and consume, we would currently be disqualified for cheating, as we don’t actually have earned the amount of comfort this level of consumption gives us, as we do not produce it in a sustainable way.
The only hope I have is that Europe now finally wakes up and rebuilds their whole energy infrastructure with renewables to make themselves more independent. It’s a bit tragic that this move got started by another war and not by the science about a pretty big problem we know for over half a century.
No, that is actually a crass misrepresentation of the science. There have been papers about global cooling, but even when that paper was published, the majority of climate scientist already published papers about global warming.
All climate models talk about issues way in the future. No one said that we should already be on fire.
Yes, but back then there wasn’t a civilization of 8 billion people we need to feed, with settlements mostly in coastal regions. The issue isn’t that the world will end, but that climate change causes mass dislocation of people and changes to weather patterns that will impact farming basically everywhere.
The concern isn’t the world being on fire, but famine and masses of refugees.
This is actually all accounted for in the climate models. The problem is that this cycles are incredibly slow, over tens of thousands of years, but we create changes in the atmosphere that have effects in decades.
There is a way. It is natural way of shortages and increased value for things that people dont have enough.
With time fosil fuels, who are main source of co2 emission will be in such a short supply that people will be reducing the impact on atmosphere, by not using them. This time comes during next 50 years.
We will only have to switch to renevables and reduce the amount of humans on earth, while also reducing our every day comfort in the highly developed areas. People will have to learn to enjoy simple things, small things, less things, more physical activity. Basically we will have to get back to 1800’s for most part in individual and group transportation. Animal and human strength used to move vehicles. No long trips, remote work.
The most bothering part is the speed in which we are emitting this co2 from burnt fuels now, that is the most dangerous for humans part. Not the co2 itself, as we have been discovering that earth was in some times even 25 degrees celsius warmer on average in past. co2 got trapped, but we are freeing it too fast now.
just because it seems insurmountable doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, the difference is very dramatic especially when you look at before and after pictures of the air before this movement gained speed.
it’s always been about money, if you have some seed money you can form a shell corporation, get your allowance of carbon emissions credit, don’t use them because you’re a shell corporation then sell most of your credits to another corporation so they can continue polluting and you also put politicians or relatives and friends of said politicians on your “corporation boards” which are also no show and they get paid and kickbacks go to politicians in the form of political contributions, etc.
The consumption will be less anyway, if people want it or not. People have to accept it that they have to ride bicycles and not buy things, and government will have to deal with it by introducing order and regulations, making everyone happy. Panem et circenses!!!
I am not. You will get used to it. The days of everyone having enough power as they would have 70 people working on them daily are over. Now everyone will have to be happily cycling every day.
--------
--------
