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The only examples this article gives of irreversible damage:
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homes destroyed by hurricanes: clearly and obviously reversible. Build new houses. Fin.
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rising sea levels: reversible. Cool the climate, get more glaciers, lower sea levels. Obviously it’s more of a “100 years from now” solution, but it’s definitely a solution.
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lives lost: yeah, that’s a fair point.
And also irreversible is The decline of biodiversity. Once a species is extinct it won’t come back.
And to those who say “well, the Earth will bounce back”: we’re much closer to the end of Earth’s ability to support life than to the beginning. Earth doesn’t have endless time to evolve new kinds of creatures. We could be doing damage from which Earth’s biodiversity never recovers.
That’s not a good argument… this is such a small blip, the earth has been much hotter and colder then now and will stabilize again before it’s eventually destroyed.
To me, the better argument is simply: Wouldn’t you like there to be humans or soem sentient beings that remembered you in the future? Maybe not you specifically, but the culture and art that you contributed to?
Right, Earth will be here, life will find a way …… but cockroaches and jellyfish can’t read
Guess we’ll have to Jurassic park this shit but with Pandas
Yeah, I’ve always wanted us to have a genetic Doomsday Vault, with the sequenced genome of every species. We can clone them from that.
We are wildly far away from having the technology to do that. A single genome wouldn’t provide the genetic diversity for a sustainable population. We would need hundreds or thousands of genomes for each species to ensure that non-related individuals could mate.
We absolutely have the technology, we just don’t have the money to gather the data. Or we haven’t chosen to allocate it.
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This is clearly a “why not both” situation.
Emissions must be cut and new technologies for reversing existing damage must be developed. There’s a whole bunch of different things that needs doing, because there is simply no single solution, but using one approach to argue against another is certainly not helping anyone.
Yeah, though I think currently only emissions cutting should be implemented, mostly because damage reversing tech like DAC take green energy that could otherwise be used to more effectively cut emissions elsewhere. Once we start getting excess green energy to do such things, then it should be implemented. It should still be researched and developed now tho
Exactly, which is why I don’t get the point of this article.
Yeah, even after we get emissions under control there will still be problems, and we’ll tackle those when we get there.
I think the point is that some capitalists, both in business and in politics, encourage us to put our faith in future carbon capture so they can keep profiting off their polluting activities for now without having to invest in carbon emissions reduction. This is unrealistic and just an excuse not to tackle the difficult task of reducing emissions. We can’t afford to let the problem become that much worse before we attempt to mitigate it by sucking carbon out of the atmosphere, if there’s ever a technology that can do that effectively (which right now doesn’t look likely). We need to focus most of our efforts on reducing emissions.
some capitalists, both in business and in politics, encourage us to put our faith in future carbon capture
Sure, and others go completely against that and call it for what it is, because they have different profit motives (e.g. green energy companies). Legislators will do something in the middle, because they have other motives (i.e. campaign donations and appealing to constituents to retain their seat). That’s why it’s important to be an informed voter and voice your concerns, so legislators can decide which side to listen to.
Carbon capture should absolutely be something we do, but it shouldn’t justify expanding fossil fuel energy production, but instead help clean up what we have as we reduce our reliance on fossil fuels, which can extend the investments we’ve already made (for legislators, this means fewer people losing their jobs). Any solution we come up with will be a balance between immediate economic impact and longer-term economic and ecological impact.
In many cases, we prefer to pick the option that’s more expensive, but isn’t needed right now, and that’s for two main reasons:
- we’ll probably come up with new approaches in the future
- minimal rocking of the boat - big changes cause people to lose their jobs, which can change voting patterns
In any case, once we reduce emissions to something sustainable, the problem largely simplifies to spending money, and it’s a lot easier for legislators to spend money that make significant changes to our everyday lives. So as long as we can delay the worst of the impacts as people gradually adjust to more sustainable living, we can probably spend our way out of the ecological debt we’ve built up.
I don’t like it, but that’s the way things tend to work.
There’s a point made at the end of the article that most people seems to have missed entirely:
Existing facilities that can filter carbon dioxide out of the air only have the capacity to capture 0.01 million metric tons of CO2 globally today, costing companies like Microsoft as much as $600 per ton of CO2. That’s very little capacity with a very high price tag.
“We cannot squander carbon dioxide removal on offsetting emissions we have the ability to avoid,” study coauthor Gaurav Ganti, a research analyst at Climate Analytics, said in a press release. The priority needs to be preventing pollution now instead of cleaning it up later.
It’s obviously a matter of “why not both?”, and both the article and the scientists behind the report agree on it. However, a lot of people are betting their eggs on the idea that climate reversal technology will suddenly become a lot more effective and cheaper than it is right now. And sure, that may be the case, or not. For how many years have we heard of flying cars or self-driving autonomous vehicles and predicted that they were just around the corner, at most a few years away, but nada so far? Betting on the invention of a new technology that’ll make a very expensive process today way cheaper is a VERY naive and bad approach.
Dibs on Vault 12!
It is a pointless endeavor.
If you lived in the medieval, would you have rooted for the apocalypse?
It’s just a rational view of what has been happening my entire life. Nothing is going to stop climate change now. We will only be able able to mitigate the effects.
No need to be such a Nihilistic Nick…
It is not rational to think that humanity will stop Climate Change.
You could argue the rationality of an effort before any major technology or cultural breakthrough for all of human history, yet the reason those breakthroughs happened was due to humans acting irrationally by accident or on purpose.
Most problems would simply not be a problem if we drastically reduce the human population. Which would not only avoid the issues caused by climate change but also would prevent further increases in pollution and CO2 emissions.
I don’t know why the best solution is often the less talked about. Just stop having so many children. We don’t have 70% infant mortality rate like we used to, there’s no need to have 4 kids to preserve your legacy.
Yeah. Thanos should simply have made half of all living beings gay. Much less violent and this would probably also make future generations more likely to be gay too. So it‘ll probably have a much more longlasting effect than killing 50% once.
Gayness saves lives. I’ve always said it!
if we drastically reduce the human population. Which would not only avoid the issues caused by climate change but also would prevent further increases in pollution and CO2 emissions.
Ignoring the genocide-apologist trend, the pandemic did wonders to reduce global warming…, perhaps start taxing more the companies that force back-to-office when they could clearly keep most of their work force at home?
And, eliminate Euclidean zoning in the U.S., so that people can live near where they work, or work near where they live. (Not all of us can do it, or like working from home.)
Yup, mixed zoning would do wonders. Why we don’t do that is beyond me…
What genocide? Just sensible reproduction. There’s two options. 10 billion people living miserably like during the pandemic. Or maybe 1 billion people being able to live good lives.
So who should go? You?
I’m pretty sure he said have less children, not start death camps.
I literally said just having less children.
And I’m totally ok to only having between one or zero children myself.
China tried it, didn’t go too well… good luck trying it on a global scale…
Chinas problem was also a still very uneducated and traditionalist populace, that insisted on having boys as heirs. Leading to abortions or straight up murder of female infants. That wouldn’t really be a global issue I beleive
Derived problems were product of a sexist society should be avoidable, you know, ending sexism…
Or are you supporting that people should be able to want male babies over female ones?
Oooooh, of course, how could i forget? Blame the cis white male and the patriarchy, or course!
What about 2 billion people living pretty-good lives or 9 billion people living less-miserably? That’s at least two more options right there.
There are infinite options we start doing fractions! (Please don’t)
We can completely solve it with 10 billion 1/2 people
One difficulty with that is that the way we organize economies currently depends on having a working-age population that is large enough to support the non-working population. When you have far fewer workers than retired people you start having problems. I don’t know what the answer to that is, but it’s another instance of how any plan to seriously address climate change tends to require deep changes to how we run society. The current systems can’t simply be tweaked to make the problem go away.
There is a lot of things wrong on how we organize the economy.
If we are going to change that we may as well change it good.
currently depends on having a working-age population that is large enough to support the non-working population
This is only a problem if production does not increase dramatically, as it has for the last century. The reason it feels like there are insufficient working people is because parasites siphon from the resource distribution between more and more productive workers and their non working counterparts
We already have far more people than necessary jobs. One person with modern trchnology can produce way, way more than one person could even just a century ago.
It’s not about necessary jobs, it’s about paying into social security / pensions.
If the jobs aren’t necessary, then surely there’s a way to organize society without those jobs existing.
This is the fundamental argument behind universal basic income.
As to the question of how to fund stuff like pensions or UBI without everyone working, the answer is simply to tax those who are working more, especially those making huge amounts of money.
Sure, but that’s not relevant to the “necessary jobs” thing you brought up.
Your response was
It’s not about necessary jobs, it’s about paying into social security / pensions.
In my answer those are two topics that are not directly related, although they are linked by both having to do with the economy.
Hence I gave responses to both topics.
The “necessary jobs” topic is unrelated to the “fund pensions” topic. And the “fund pensions” topic is the one that’s being discussed in relation to population control.
You brought up a completely irrelevant topic, that’s what I’m saying.
My headcanon past 2050 is basically nuclear wasteland. I try and stay optimistic in the moment, but the old faith in humanity gas-tank is running a little empty these days.
I feel you. There is this little bit oft hope, that all my effort actually achieves something. But its like hoping for thr existance of god it feels like
They say scientists are saying this but is it like all scientists, the majority of scientists, a significant or intelligent minority of scientists, or is it just like this one person and because it’s an alarm worthy headline it’s being amplified?
Oh any worth their salt has been saying it for years. Climate change can be seen in nearly all disciplines of science. But every time we hurdle a new tier of awful they say it again so that when the end comes for us all due to our own hubris, the last man in a lab coat will scream the collective scream of his people “i told you so” before spontaneously combusting
Oh any worth their salt has been saying it for years.
For decades even.
Close to all scientists
Dude, have you read the article? this is from an article on Nature.
Nature! Not the flat earth society scientific newsletter.
For publishing on Nature it is necessary that a number of the most well reputed experts in the field have peer reviewed the article.
By modern standard of “science”, publishing on Nature or Science is the closest to get to “consensus”.
I see your point in some newspapers articles but this is not one of that cases
flat earth society scientific newsletter
Such a contradictory sentence. Can’t wait for The Final Experiment to be done with, so we can eject any remaining flerfs from society.
This is a by-product of modern society (maybe late stage capitalism). We need to be sold a “solution” to a problem. Reducing consumption is not something that can easily be sold hence these carbon capture, recycling plastic “solutions”.
Unless someone can make money off of it, reducing emissions is going to be difficult.
Instead of UBI, we should give every citizen carbon credits that they can then either use themselves for cars over certain (adjusting) emission limits or more likely sell to companies. Every company has to pay for their CO2 (and downline for imports)
The interesting thing would be people not necessarily spending their carbon credits like they do money. As there is no real incentive to sell to one company or another, other then tiny rate differences.
Also… always peg the price to what it costs to clean the carbon out. That creates a greater incentive to not skirt, as it might get cheaper over time.
So, because I can afford an EV , to electrify, to add solar, I also get a carbon bonus to sell or bury.
While normally I like where you’re going, we’re already past the point of early adopters deciding to do the right thing in lot of ways and need to scale up for affordability.
Or if your goal is to influence more personal decisions, like how much meat you eat and what temperature you set your thermostat, I’m not sure it’s enough
Imagine if you could get FREE MONEY by not using all your energy coinz!
Things that reduce consumption are frequently successful in capitalism. Generally, using less, costs less. There are always those selling a thing who are trying to increase the consumption of that thing, but often at expensive of those selling a competing thing. One successful way of doing that is to be cheaper to buy or run or both, by doing more with less.
However, sometimes we want something to be made with more a bit more to last longer and be repairable.
Raw capitalist won’t do all this on its own. The invisible hand isn’t very good at planning long term. Governments need to structure markets for outcomes they want, and keep measuring and correcting.
It’s simple, you have a shared resource running out, nobody wants to grab less of it.
Grab less of it yourself - the others will compensate for you. Produce some of that resource - the others will just profit from it for longer.
The biggest emitters are too strong to be climate-crusaded, the smaller ones do successful bribing and greenwashing, but I think there will eventually be climate crusades - against those poor bastards who formally fail to do something right, but don’t really contribute meaningfully to emissions.
Other than finding some wonderful (like in Total Recall) process to turn fossil fuels into matter practically not separable and not usable as fuel, I don’t know what one can do.
Profitable personal mobile nuclear batteries are still not reality.
Some new magical principle of producing energy, sufficiently decentralized (here go big NPPs). There’s none, so prepare for dark future.
As far as energy production goes, we already have the technology: solar, wind, nuclear. We also already have the technology for cars and personAl transportation. Above all we have transit. If we can get our shit together with things we already know, we’d be in better shape. If we would have done it as little as ten years ago, we could have stayed within the Montreal targets for global warming.
Now it’s no longer enough. We need to fix harder areas as well: aviation, shipping, grid storage, steel and cement, etc, and we need it asap … how is there still not any urgency?
You need technology cheaper than fossil fuels. Some of fossil fuels’ downsides are upsides for some people (political control), which necessitates the difference in cost by a big enough margin to counter those invisible benefits. A revolution.
There’s no urgency, I think, because Earth’s population is going to start shrinking. The emissions are going to slow down for that reason.
Countries that won’t have some quality, not quantity, approaches to their economies by then are going to fall hard.
I guess that’s how EU is going to make the world owned by Europeans again.
Carbon capture does not make money, wtf?
Carbon capture doesn’t make money. Selling the service of carbon capture does.
How?
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tldr; Greenwashing/marketing mostly.
Sounds tenuous. Gimme the full version.
Here you can find more info. I hope it’s helpful
So you got nothing. Nice.
Then I guess you guys have no use for this climate change reversal machine I made. I knew it was a shit idea. I’m so stupid. I’m scrapping it now.
Might I suggest you use the time machine you created to go back and talk yourself out of making the climate change reversal machine. I can think of nothing worse than for you to feel like you are stupid.
I’m taking my hatred-curing pills back with me to feed to my past self so that I stop hating climate change so much.
Two types of people reading this:
“Oh no! We should do everything we can to mitigate the damage.”
and
“Fuck it, might as well keep doing what I’m doing.”
And it’s the latter that got us here in the first place.
It doesn’t make any difference what got us here in the first place. What matters now is what options are the best from now moving forward.
These scientists seem to say that trying to reverse climate change isn’t the right path forward. I wonder why.
edit: I wonder what makes them think that reversing climate change won’t work.
Someone was so offended by their misreading of my comment that they went through and downvote-bombed every comment in my history.
Because it won’t work? That’s what I got from the article. I’m not sure what else you’re implying.
I mean why think it won’t work.
The article is literally right there. Why are you being weird about this?
What they’re saying is that trying to reverse climate change won’t be enough. It doesn’t mean it isn’t the right path, just that it won’t go far enough.
One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive. – Hannah Arendt
Two types of people reading this, the cannibals, and the cannibees
And now I’m just picturing myself cracking open a can of beer only for bees to start flying out!
And industrialists!
Only a Sith Lord deals in absolutes.
“Fuck it, might as well keep doing what I’m doing.”
And that last group is going to be angry when they can’t keep doing their stuff when insurance rates go insane so they can’t buy houses or cars, or when food prices keep going up even faster than they are now.
But but but… It’s because immigrants. And trans somehow idk
It’s the modern version of sacrificing people in a volcano to appease the gods.
It’s the parable of office pizza: some people take 1 slice because there are many people to feed.
some people take 3 slices, because there are many people to feed.
You hear that? It’s too late now! Welp ggs guys
well yeah, you can’t just try, you need to actually do it.
Stupid title, grammatically at least.
Tipping point has tipped?
The one I remember scaring the hell out of everyone is the permafrost melt.
Thaw out enough permafrost and it releases enough greenhouse gasses to self perpetuate. No human interaction required.
https://www.space.com/methane-beneath-arctic-permafrost-climate-feedback-loop
Yeah and it was pretty much going once we hit the twenty teens but took awhile to notice. At this point its about slowing things down as much as possible.
There are many tipping points, and we dont always know if we’ve hit one yet or not. The drastic increase in sea temperature the last two years is possibly a tipping point we’ve passed, esp since the warmer the water is, the less co2 its able to absorb. OMAC shut down (if it happens) is possibly a tipping point, which will only feedback loop into warming waters.
Honestly, the permafrost melt is more likely to be the KO punch after one or more other tipping points accelerate it.
If the people won’t rise up for the sake of their own children then the only solution is to out spend climate change. Capitalism won’t save itself, it will monetize the downfall. So in a way these tech companies are doing exactly what their suppose to but not really what they should.
Not sure if the future tense ‘will’ is appropriate here
People won’t even rise up for their own sake. gestures in every general direction
Can’t argue with that. At the end of the day we are another mammalian creature that runs around killing, fucking, and shitting then we die. The ecosystem of today dying is of no consequences to the dinosaur, the wooly mammoth, or what ever critter that roamed these same lands. I say build the buildings big enough and strong enough for the sentience of tomorrow to unearth them and wonder. Wonder hard enough and we are reborn.
