Terrible work, everyone.
Looking at liberals who refuse to even CONSIDER putting up an actually pro-climate candidate like
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liberals who refuse to even CONSIDER putting up an actually pro-climate candidate
I got a push poll from my Congresswoman, Liz Fletcher (D), accusing her biggest primary race rival of being a far-left extremist who would destroy the Houston economy with his climate alarmism. The poll also accused him of sponsoring Hamas terrorism and being weak on women's rights because he wouldn't negotiate on an abortion bill.
Still a little squishy on Pervez Agwan, but Fletcher's poll did not help her case.
Political polls be like:
Do you support: (A) TERRORIST DEATH AND VIOLENCE (B) RAINBOWS AND SUNSHINE
Published results: 99% of people support ME!
Its more:
How would you feel if you knew that Candidate A loves kittens and personally donated $50000 to the SPAC, has six shelter kittens of her own, and has advanced legislation to fund a study that will guarantee all cats receive adequate housing, food, and medical care without raising taxes or increasing the national debt?
How would you feel if you knew that Candidate B once kicked a stray cat over a fence, took money from an organization that refers to cats as "feral" and "unloveable", hates Garfield, and won't support the CATS Acts?
Okay, thank you for your response.
Now, having heard those messages, would you feel more inclined to support Candidates A, C, b, or D?
Houston had not only like 100+ days of 100 degree weather, but we were also entering emergency water management conservation AND fire danger all over texas. It also doesn't help that Houston has a chemical plant explosion every other month. The idea that the economy and climate are separate it's so unhinged. Who is her opponent?
thank you. I might
for the dark horse. But I fucking hate this system so much.
I see you're complaining about climate change again.
Have you personally spent your entire life recycling everything you can, composting all organic materials you touch, eliminating all red meat intake, planting multiple trees per year, growing your own vegetable and fruit garden in the backyard of your house which you own, avoiding purchasing any plastics despite everything being packaged as such, not buying anything anything beyond your extreme basic necessities, never flying in an airplane for any reason, preferring to keep anything broken and virtually unusable instead of replacing it since repairing it is either unavailable or too expensive, and only riding ebikes or only driving Teslas to save the environment?
No? Then you're the real problem and you can't complain.
growing your own vegetable and fruit garden in the backyard of your house which you own,
What's funny is I started doing that years ago less for the reduced carbon footprint of growing stuff that actually thrives in my local climate compared to buying produce from a grocer and more as a zen-finding exercise so [redacted]
methane from rice
wut
edit:
Flooded rice produces methane
still wut
technically yes but the total amount is so tiny it's not even worth discussing
even the beef isn't worth discussing compared to the CO2 emitted from driving and doing a bullshit job
I don't see any cows out there drilling for oil.
All the small farmers are going out of business and the corporations are moving in with their AI powered sustainable drone systems, stop swallowing the anti farmer propaganda.
Let's put the oil barons out of business before we put our farmers out of business.
This rhetoric is how you end up getting your daily food rations off Musky and his sustainable lab meat. Consolidation food production is not going to work out great for you average human, VC money funding grassroots left right and centre in this scene also, it's all propaganda.
If you can't comprehend what i said then the message wasn't for you.
You think methane emissions from cattle magically reduces because they're grown on a small farm? Our atmosphere doesn't give a shit if the greenhouse gases came from a factory farm or an artisanal homestead, it's all the same in the end.
Think about what i said, it helps with understanding and stop you from falling for bullshit.
composting all organic materials you touch,
oil executives are made out of backwards chiral proteins, probably aliens
Yeah, true that these things are good to do, but expecting all or even most of these things from working class or poor people is unrealistic at this point.
And realistically they would be better able to do these things and the environment would be better if the social economy was organized differently, which once again leads us to criticizing Capitalism as the principle issue instead of blaming individuals surviving and living within their material conditions, so I think people who blame individuals but are unwilling to support any shift in economy or politics are more to blame than people just trying to get by and doing what they can with what they are given.
Even if they did all that, they'd wipe out all that carbon-savings by having a single kid in the US.
ever wished there were a way to score free meat, do good for oppressed people, eliminate animal cruelty AND save the environment at the same time?
don't look up "how many cops are there" and do not harvest the carbon negative pork!
When I was young, they told me we were working on new technology and it was going to stop the climate issue.
.
When I was young, I saw polite little PSA's in magazine's telling me not to shower too long.
When I was young, I heard of the hydrogen car.
When I was young, I watched the crocuses grow in the spring.
When I was young, the snow fell on the correct dates.
When I was older, I realized the scope of it all.
When I was older, we were setting up the wind turbines.
When I was older, they were testing out new tech to harvest energy from currents.
When I was older, I saw my first electric car.
When I was older, we got new recycling bins.
When I was older, my neighbor threw his oil-heater out.
When I was older, I learned that cold melt water from the pole was slowing the Golf stream.
When I was older, I saw no crocuses.
When I was older, it snowed a day in May.
Today, I fear for it all.
Today, we are throwing the wind turbines in the trash after their use-life ran out.
Today, I know we don't use solar panels cause it'd make electricity too cheap.
Today, they had posters begging us to sort correctly.
Today, I saw even more electric cars, and I knew they still ruined the climate.
Today, I looked outside, at the snow that came two weeks ago and stayed.
Today, it hit two degrees.
Will there be a tomorrow?
Still huffing that "maybe China can do geoengineering" copium so I don't fucking kill myself
we're gonna see the global south independently start dumping calcium carbonate into the upper atmosphere within a decade, mark my words
i wish em luck
Sulphate aerosols, probably. Calcium carbonate is better for land/ocean based geoengineering. But yeah: the potential for unilateral action with stratospheric aerosol injection in particular is very high. There's some evidence that doing it from the southern hemisphere will help mitigate some of the negative side effects, but that's still inconclusive. We desperately need to talk about the global governance of this stuff before we deploy it, but we won't.
Geo engineering is peak liberalism because it is only a rational fix and not a suicidal thing to do if you believe liberal ideas of infinite sustained economic growth and civilizational progress being linear march forward while ignoring collapse happens at least once a century with total collapse every few centuries. A ~250 year average on the churn of history. I find it nuts there are people who believe human history is a steadily march of forward progress and economic growth rather than a series of stumbles, falls, and lurches.
Am daytime drunk...
The big problem with all these magic geoengineering fixes that allow petrol states to continue existing (looking at you Venezuela, US and Russia too) is when we have a global economic collapse or major conflict, the industrial mass production of sulfur compounds to pump into the upper atmosphere (a costly economic activity at any meaningful scale, not a minor undertaking) comes crashing to a halt and things are 10 times worse than they would have been without doing it in the first place. Everyone pushing this suicidal bullshit always leaves out the caveat that the mass production and release of geoengineering chemicals into the atmosphere if done for any significant period of time has to continue for the rest of human civilization or everything dies. Geoengineering allows us to kick the can down the road (something human civilizations strive at) on abolishing petrol states and enables a level of atmospheric carbon that couldn't happen otherwise because the changing climate would have caused wars and civilizational collapse that mean a lot of people die, empires fall, but most life on earth (and humans) still survive.
The geoengineering ideas and even people on the supposed "left" supporting it is what has me at this point believing all life will be gone from earth within three centuries max. That rather than 2 to 5 degrees we are going to trigger a greenhouse warming cascade like happened on Venus (earths twin) that early on crossed an atmospheric water vapor and methane tipping point. I'm sure there will be more magic fixes that attempt to mask rather than undo or stabilize. Carbon cycle breaks forever, is done. Issue isn't with the technical fesability but human behavior to date on a macro scale, I have to believe geoengineering will happen while the petrol states continue increasing their rate of carbon production due to the breathing room it creates. US keeps pouring money into discovering new fossil fuel reserves around the world, US Dept of Energy keeps inventing novel methods to find and exploit previously unreachable fossil fuel ie how to extract shale oil and gas via fracking. Global warming will be masked for 50 years to a century or two until there is a world war or economic collapse, at which point that century of global warming happens in less than a decade triggering a rapid series of catastrophic tipping points (endgame ones being inverted carbon sinks, clathrate gun, water vapor, etc) faster than anyone has means to respond.
I did my postdoc on geoengineering, and I'm sorry to tell you that I basically agree with all of this.
What's your take on the weather being unusually bad this year and that correlated with the banning of some container ship exhaust products?
It's definitely a contributing factor. Ironically, the shift away from coal and toward natural gas--which is "cleaner" from the perspective of GHGs--is also a significant contributor, as coal produces way more aerosols. The bigger deal this year is probably the fairly strong El Nino that we've got brewing for the first time in several years (2017 was the last significant one). You can see the pretty significant sea surface temperature anomaly between the coast of South America and the central Pacific. Strong El Ninos tend to cause higher-than-normal global average surface temperatures, and strong La Ninas tend to cause lower-than-normal global average surface temperatures. Since we've been in a pretty strong La Nina phase over the last few years, the average temperature has (in a sense) been artificially low.
Gonna be honest - if the Great Dying didn't kill off all life on Earth, I don't see even especially reckless human activity doing it either. CO2 from that period went from 400 ppm to 2,500 ppm for reference, and Earth got like 8-10°C warmer then. Even shitty capitalist market mechanics would have abandoned carbon emissions at this point. If you want to turn Earth into Venus, you need to actively make it your goal. I mean burning every single last drop of fossil fuel faaaar after it's stopped being profitable.
As I understand it Venus is kinda locked in anyway at this point, halting all fossil fuel burning with nothing to mitigate the damage we've caused just roasts us faster because the exhaust literally blocks a bunch of sunlight
The copium is "new technology not invented yet might be engineered by China, who plans for the future beyond make line go up next quarter" since the alternative is we're all fucking dead and nothing any human being does has any point at all
As I understand it Venus is kinda locked in anyway at this point, halting all fossil fuel burning with nothing to mitigate the damage we've caused just roasts us faster because the exhaust literally blocks a bunch of sunlight
It's not quite that bad. 2-3° is probably locked in (barring sci-fi technology like large scale carbon capture), but not the kind of runaway that would lead to Venus. You're right about aerosol masking hiding a lot of the impact, but that damage will be very front-loaded (since the residence time of the aerosols in the atmosphere is only on the order of months), and limited to probably a few tenths of a degree. Not nothing, but not enough for us to go Venus.
Could the old climate be restored over several generations using some large scare application of some future technology? After a rapid transition away from the carbon energy economy. I guess there is a lot of speculative coping in this question.
It'll fix itself over the next few tens of thousands of years, but obviously that doesn't help us at all.
From what I understand there isn't a model that suggests the earth becoming un-inhabitable by complex life no matter how bad we fuck up right now.
The sharks will be fine. They're older than Polaris. They got this shit.
Well, that's at least comforting. Any Venus model would probably push quite a few people into an existential crisis. Thank you for your response.
I used to very much share that fear until someone sat me down and explained that even in the absolute worst case scenarios we're not going to get a hothouse earth situation. Still plenty to worry about, but multi-cellular life will probably survive no matter what we do.
I'm right their with you. I find the "eh, the earth will be fine" response many people have when i bring up global warming bizarre and upsetting. I am heartened that even if we're not able to mitigate this, there will still be life and with life, hope. A lot of what we do as leftists is trying to create good conditions for people who will come after us and never know our names. But I want to save this world. I want to stop the sixth great extinction. I want to try to save the amazon and the pacific northwest and many other places of beauty and splendor.
It is good that the world will survive, but the world that survives will be all the better if we struggle and mitigate the damage now.
Yeah. I kinda freaked out over the summer reading the posts. We just gotta live life and hope whoever comes after us learns from our mistakes. Maybe someone will build something from the rubble like Matt said.
In some ways yes, but in other ways we'll just have to find a new equilibrium. The extent to which this is fixable really depends on how many "tipping points" we've passed over. Lots of systems in the global climate are (at least) bistable, meaning they have at least two dynamical regimes that they can settle into--think two bowls separated by a high wall, with a ball rolling around in one of them. Since different stable states exist, if we push the relevant systems far enough, they'll "snap" into a qualitatively different state, and then won't return to their original state even if the forcings all return to pre-industrial levels. There are a number of big ones that we should be concerned about, but the global thermohaline circulation that drives ocean currents is probably the most obvious and urgent one. With enough of a disruption, the gradients of temperature and salinity (and thus changes in density) that keep the water stably circulating in the oceans can and will either disappear or change enough that most significant currents cease. It's hard to overstate how catastrophic that would be, and if it were to happen no amount of negative emissions would restart it in the short term.
For other systems, rapidly reducing the GHG content of the atmosphere would (almost) certainly work. That's part of why liberals are so gung-ho about carbon capture and sequestration technology research: it would let us rewind things without having to change much about our global economic system in the immediate term. So far, this is as sci-fi as saying "time travel would help." Capturing a trace gas (remember that CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere are on the order of 400 parts per million) is thermodynamically challenging, and we don't have anything like the technology to do this at scale for a reasonable cost of energy yet.
So the liberals are selling us a panacea that does not even exist to solve problems that should have been addressed a long time ago. Idk, I feel exhausted saying that. I need to start learning a lot more on this topic myself.
Thank you for your informed responses. I appreciate you helping all of us here understand this grave issue which is criminally neglected by the capitalist powers that be.
Ministry for the future? I should get around to finishing that
Specifically China will coordinate the effort and crush any military resistance to it seeing as the decline of the US is thoroughly assured now and we're due for a military humiliation showing how much our arsenal has decayed
the global north can freeze to death from the meltwater or they can starve to death from the darkening (technically starves in both cases)
this is the future that we chose
There's also having ships spraying seawater mist to make larger, brighter marine clouds.
Marine cloud brightening is surprisingly tricky on a technical level. There's been some discussion of trying to retrofit cargo ships to create larger, more long-lasting wakes, which might actually be more effective. The albedo of calm seawater is VERY low (close to that of asphalt), and with the number of cargo ships out there, even a moderate change might have an impact.
My money is also on some form of arcologies as well if it gets bad enough
We're going to turn the sky white with artificial clouds to block out the sun because that's the stupidest and easiest thing to do.
We'll still hit 4 degrees C, but we also won't have a blue sky anymore.
And then fossil fuel companies will use it as an excuse to keep fucking the planet. Changing the albedo with clouds is at best a delay of the inevitable.
wrongshway erB will unironically do the mayocide
then there will at least be a lot of habitable land in the north
I will not flesh this out further, you have to read into it
wrongshway erB
Is that some kind of pig-latin or code that we're supposed to "read into"? or is one of us having a stroke?
born too late to live past 50, born too early to not be born because complex life on earth is extinct, born just in time to die
I'm sure the sun will move away from us any day now and we can go back to normal
Putting sulfates in the atmosphere to dim the sun Putting a big sunshade between the Earth and the Sun
Pushing the Earth further away
please god can we just start killing the people responsible before we turn our home into fucking venus
It's been swell Holocene, hope whatever comes next does a better job than us...
times
to the big oil capitalists
