climate change

Looking at current news on global warming and climate change I can't help, but feel pessimistic. I just read the comments section of those news articles. I am so depressed right now. How can we keep warming at the 4C point let alone the 2C point ? I don't understand how these people that are unwilling to act. How can they take that chance with their children's lives. What can I as a jedi do to convince both ordinary people and politicians to get off their ass and act? How can I as a scientist get those in denial to listen before it's too late to avoid the worst scenario ? Forget about the best scenario that ship has sailed. Right now it's about avoiding the worst scenario. What's worse is even if we succeed in the US. How can we get India and China to do what they will have to do to avoid the worst possible scenario for global warming ? However, I feel like I owe it to my nieces and nephews to try. What we do now will create the world that they have to live in.

Previously to Al Gore I'd just acknowledged the correlation between sunspots and ocean surface temperatures and discounted it as hysteria (I mean politics didn't work out so well for him... and the info was already out there for those interested prior to it becoming mainstream) while acknowledging the reality that local effects are strong, but system wide it was less likely to factor... but this is recently being challenged which is good. Let the truth set us free
:woohoo:
I don't like the personal attacks by some on people in the media who question the status quo, but to the question at hand I think the only way is to make it profitable.. which means leading by example here in the West/developed world. Just one Jedi's opinion
:side:

Adder wrote: I don't like the personal attacks by some on people in the media who question the status quo, but to the question at hand I think the only way is to make it profitable.. which means leading by example here in the West/developed world. Just one Jedi's opinion
:side:

I agree... but further, it would seem to me that the most efficient way to tap into the profitability motivation angle is to wake people up into the fact that existence itself is The Most Profitable Item On The Table... especially when we consider that the alternative is to NOT exist.

And while, I believe, most are awake to the fact (generally, for the most part), there is the apparently inherent human quality of, "Do I have to do it right now?" - so humanity watches those with the louder voices arguing and not agreeing on the facts, and thinks, "Well, if nothing concrete is agreed upon, thing's can't be irreversible yet, right?", and lifts nary a finger.

A complacent, lazy person, sitting comfortably on something that he is afterwards told is an electric hotplate that randomly turns itself on and off, WILL NOT move, until his ass is on *fire*.

Now, it isn't as though everyone on Earth is like such a person... just the vast majority of those who are continuing to muck the place up.

The overall disease is one of apathy, indifference, detachment... dispassionate lethargy... aloof lassitude.

Find a cure (or even a treatment) for that, and we're golden

It can drain us of hope... if we allow it to.

Perseverance is the key, as it always ever has been. After all, a hammer must strike the steel nigh uncountable times, before the metal can be forged into a useful tool.

To many industrial branches installing pollution filters and maintaining them is a cost. It is of course nothing compared to the gains they are getting anyway nor to the long-term benefits, but as businesspeople living in the moment they feel they are better off not investing into anything that won't give them anything back. That is one very solid argument against the pretentious "live in the now" talk places like this are so overly fond of that some of them keep teaching to forget about either the past or the future or both. But I digress.
So long as corporations think they need anti-environmental politics to prosper and so long as they remain prosperous and powerful to the point where they have influence over the people, climate politics cannot be expected to improve by much. This is especially the case when entities like that are allowed and encouraged to sponsor political campaigns rendering politicians in debt to these corporations and subsequently bowing down to their political demands.
Free market does not free politics make.

The problem is simple, as said in the Bible:

"The lust for money is the root of all evil."

The lust for money will never go away. It's ALWAYS been a problem, and it ALWAYS will be. Until the end of all things....

I've scoured the scientific literature looking for hope. Most of what I have read says there is no such hope. Most estimates for the societal collapse to happen are between 2025 and 2040. We have very little time to make the break throughs we need in science to have a chance and a whole lot of us are going to die. I may well be one of those, but there is some hope of slowing things down enough to give us the time to make those breakthroughs. It is ridiculously slim, but it's not zero. Doing nothing means the human race will die. Doing something means the human race may well still die, but at least we will have tried. Some of you may be old enough that you will die before that happens. I envy you. I will most likely die before I hit 50 years old. Assuming I don't die of starvation first I will watch everything I love die. I have spent the last week unable to sleep, unable to stop crying, my mother is deeply worried about me, but I can't stop. I looked around my university today at many of the students even younger than me and I still can't stop crying. Most of them have no idea what's about to happen. I sometimes wander if it wouldn't be easier to die sooner rather than later, but I can't do that. I choose to dedicate the rest of my probably short life to loving my family, loving others, and fighting climate change.

So instead of a giant meteor, it's going to be a giant icecap?

Sorry, but I really don't put too much weight into doomsayers words, not anymore.

Keladry wrote: Most of what I have read says there is no such hope. Most estimates for the societal collapse to happen are between 2025 and 2040..

That is way too soon IMO. For it to be in that range I'd imagine it would require some unforeseen new threat, such as a really bad virus, asteroid impact or outbreak of thermonuclear war. Things change fast, but they take a lot of time LOL
:pinch:

2040 is the point when our planet can't feed everyone anymore unless major scientific breakthroughs happen. This is ofc if we do nothing. If we do something and it would need to be on a massive scale we can prevent that. This is a more hopeful account, but still chilling. I for one am not sure that our population has the will power to do this right now paper on societal consequences of global warming . I get that this is a conversation no one wants to have. I understand the need to believe that more mild measures will work, but we are past that point. The current goal we are working for is 2C which has just been shown to already be to dangerous a target news article which includes a link to a pier reviewed study on PLOS One . It is just barely possible if we act on a global scale right now that we could keep global warming at 1.5C. http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/05/21/this-is-what-it-would-actually-take-to-keep . Unfortunately, both the 2C and 1.5C targets require negative carbon emissions in the later half of the century. They depend on technology that we do not yet have.
That means to meet that target we would have maybe 35 years to get those technologies working. Then they would need to be scalable. Remember that right now science research is already underfunded. Even under these models to feed the projected population increase we would need increase agricultural output by 70%. Again we do not have long time to do that. It might be possible with the recent genetic break through that allows scientists to edit genes maybe. We would have to accept GMO foods. And even this is optimistic, because many many things not just cars require oil to make including commercial fertilizers. There are possible replacements being studied, but we need time to develop and test these alternatives. If we follow the approach that is currently being advocated by politicians we will very likely end up with temperatures greater than 2C. If we go the infinitely harder route assuming that we have not already started feedback mechanisms like prominent climate scientist Jason Box has suggested we would have a chance of holding it below 1.5C. However, this requires massive collective behavioral changes that are contrary to the nature of humanity in general. We would need to move beyond blame and who holds the most responsibility in order to reach the strict goals required. The only time in history I am aware of this type of behavior was during world war 2. I have my doubts we can get enough people to act in time. But I am going to join the effort to try. Finally, as further evidence a large number of climate scientists are showing symptoms likened to PTSD which some are calling climate despair . This is not a conspiracy or doomsaying.
Finally, I think the possibility of a thermonuclear war over resources is entirely possible. Remember even before climate change started Africa and the Middle East did not have a lot of water and were poor. Now consider the effect of the worst drought in the Middle East. Desperate people do crazy things. I fully believe if they get that desperate they might be willing to use nuclear weapons even if it doomed our entire species. This is just one of the possibilities.
I am unwilling to ignore the growing evidence. I believe that if we are to have a chance at survival we must act now. I choose to act now and do as much as I can. I am joining the climate mobilization in the US. Let us hope that we can get climate change deniers out of office. If we act and in 30 years from now it turns out we were wrong you are welcome to laugh at me then, but I am unwilling to risk inaction.

Keladry wrote: 2040 is the point when our planet can't feed everyone anymore unless major scientific breakthroughs happen.

Plants would love the higher CO2 and increases in temperature might drive greater precipitation too :blink:

But as a product becomes scarce the resultant increase in its value tends to attract investment, though it probably will lag behind population growth. I think ideally technology would leverage off advancements in food production to allow poorer areas to establish themselves with some measure of self sufficiency instead of huge immigration pressures on established nations. Slow changes should be manageable, but fast ones are more concerning. I did a bigger reply but it got lost in the internetz
:blush: