4 ms·

I find all the recent discussions about how we are past the tipping point pretty scary. However, let's hope it will help to raise the awareness globally and hel

by seren 11y ago

I find all the recent discussions about how we are past the tipping point pretty scary. However, let's hope it will help to raise the awareness globally and help us take more decisive actions (whatever it can be, including geoengineering)

vixen99 11y ago
And which particular empirical dataset is giving you cause for concern?
- 7952 11y ago
  Planet earth is not a lab with perfectly controlled conditions. It is a highly complex system with problems that are difficult to measure directly. Ignoring things that are dfficult to measure is a recipe for bias.
- fsloth 11y ago
  For me the current industrialization launched extinction event [1] is giving me the creeps. The last time it happened anything larger than a cat did not do so well. Yeah, we humans are an exception and soon we will grow meat in labs and vegetables in city gardens, so we might fare better than that. The difference with this and historical predicted catastrophes that did not happen, is that it's actually happening right now. As an example the malthusian catastrophe that never happened was that Malthus was predicting future values of population versus food production (thus giving yet another failed apocalyptic prediction) whereas the extinction is actually happening, right now. [1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/06/22/the-earth-is-on-the-brink-of-a-sixth-mass-extinction-scientists-say-and-its-humans-fault/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/06/22...
  - saiya-jin 11y ago
    jeeez, you enjoy living scared to death about impending doom here or there? I don't get people like you, apparently spending too much time on internet. go out and have some fun :) doomsayers running around are nothing new for last couple of thousands of years. you know what I think? it's a character weakness, and a big one in this case. grow some balls, look at positive things happening, have some faith (not religious one, in mankind), and for the-guy-on-the-cloud sake, don't poison others with your inner frustrations/scares/half-empty glass.
    - Daishiman 11y ago
      No, the difference is that, unlike the "last couple thousands of years", we actually understand out environment very, very well, to the point where out predictions of climate have not been failing, and when they do, it's because we have underestimated everything. I would call finding the positive side of seeing the end of the planet as you know it a serious case of delusion, at the very least, and at worst the sort of attitude that's gotten us here.
    - fsloth 11y ago
      Like I said, the difference between the forecasts of past crackpots, and the current extinction event, is that the crackpots made crazy predictions with poor understanding of the world, whereas the extinction event is an observable fact As in 'lets see how many species whe have left - oo, there goes one... and there another'. Human beings have made a great impact to our environment and it saddens me an intelligent person such as you can bypass it with a shrug. Do you remember the slight problem we had with CFC compounds destroying the ozone layer in the 80's? Well, it was an observable fact - and it was fixed by placing controls. So, less people die of skin cancer which I think is nice. With your attitude we should have just let the CFC flow and tell australians not to worry so much about increasing cancer rates but rather just be cool and wear longer sleeves. I have great faith in humanitys spirit and skill, but we are now a species which operates on a planetary scale and we should acknowledge it. I would like to avoid ecological disasters before they become undoable ala easter islands.
- Gravityloss 11y ago
  I guess radiative properties of CO2 in the lab, that was already thought of centuries ago. Also the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere plotted against time. It was news back then and some people started getting worried because of that. Since Keeling started measuring it in 1958, it took some years for the trend to show.
Ygg2 11y ago
I think our safest bet is pretty much - get fusion ASAP, outsource it, replace all forms of energy with it. And start planting trees/plnats wherever you can. Also it might be better for people to congregate in few large metropolis, to minimize the impact. Chernobyl is doing great pretty much because no humans are there to bother the wildlife.
- masklinn 11y ago
  > I think our safest bet is pretty much - get fusion ASAP, outsource it, replace all forms of energy with it. We've been trying to get controlled civilian fusion ASAP for 60-odd years now and it seems as far away (or as close a reach) as it ever was.
- adwn 11y ago
  > get fusion ASAP If we rely on fusion to save us then we're thoroughly fucked – please excuse my language, but it's the most accurate portrayal of the situation. - The best-known research project, ITER, is incredibly expensive and it will be 2050 until we can even start building commercial reactors using this concept (note that this is the current official schedule, so expect to add several decades to this). It is not even certain whether we can overcome the immense engineering challenges within the next 100 years. - Other approaches only receive a fraction of the funding of ITER. Some of them might be more promising, but are still far away from breakeven, and it is still unknown, if and when they reach commercial viability. We already know how to generate CO2-neutral energy: solar, wind, and fission nuclear. Let's do those instead, and keep researching fusion energy, but don't bet the future of our planet on it.
  - jcrei 11y ago
    I really like solar and wind (personally invested in some) but can you (or someone) clarify the CO2-neutral aspect of solar? Until some time ago, we still kept hearing about the impacts of building the panels, etc...
  - adrianN 11y ago
    I link this in every discussion about how we will never get fusion power: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/04/11/0435231/mit-fusion-researchers-answer-your-questions http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/04/11/0435231/mit-fusi... See the nice funding graph in question three. If we were to decide that fusion is the way to go and would fund it appropriately, we could get commercial reactors much faster. However, note that building power plants takes a lot of time. Building a new nuclear power plant for example takes 6-8 years just for the actual construction. Planning and bureaucracy have to be added to this. So even if we speed up fusion power development so that we can start building commercial fusion power plants in say twenty years, that's still mostly too late if we want to limit warming to two degrees. At current CO2 production rates we have time until 2039 for that. http://trillionthtonne.org/ http://trillionthtonne.org/
Asbostos 11y ago
There's a rhetoric problem with being past the tipping point - it means that all the advice we've been submerged in for the past 10 years suddenly has to change from "release less greenhouse gas" to "forget the gas, that ship has sailed, just protect ourselves!". We might very well find that coal saves us by providing the power needed to do large scale engineering work, generate the food we'll need, and basically all the good things that it already does plus whatever added demands come from more severe weather and sea level rise.
- bkmartin 11y ago
  And then it runs out quicker than ever and we all die. Soooo.... I think we better just take some of the scariest fear messages with a grain of salt, especially when it leads back to the status quo. I think that we need to be the best stewards of our planet that we can be and that means there is a sort of moral imperative to move to the cleanest methods of energy production as soon as possible. We are making strides, the whole world is. Maybe not as fast as some would like, but the progress is there and will continue because the economics are finally starting to come around.
x5n1 11y ago
Yes let's totally ignore the real problem(s) and let's apply the same tools that got us here to get us into a more precarious position, i.e. geoengineering.
- hyperbovine 11y ago
  Agreed, but voices of reason like yours will be "lost in the flood" once the East River starts lapping at sidewalks of Wall St. Geoengineering to avert climate disaster will be attempted by governments and even private individuals everywhere once the shit really begins to hit the fan. So, we might as well get good at it.

by seren 11y ago

vixen99 11y ago

And which particular empirical dataset is giving you cause for concern?

7952 11y ago
Planet earth is not a lab with perfectly controlled conditions. It is a highly complex system with problems that are difficult to measure directly. Ignoring things that are dfficult to measure is a recipe for bias.
fsloth 11y ago
For me the current industrialization launched extinction event [1] is giving me the creeps. The last time it happened anything larger than a cat did not do so well. Yeah, we humans are an exception and soon we will grow meat in labs and vegetables in city gardens, so we might fare better than that. The difference with this and historical predicted catastrophes that did not happen, is that it's actually happening right now. As an example the malthusian catastrophe that never happened was that Malthus was predicting future values of population versus food production (thus giving yet another failed apocalyptic prediction) whereas the extinction is actually happening, right now. [1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/06/22/the-earth-is-on-the-brink-of-a-sixth-mass-extinction-scientists-say-and-its-humans-fault/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/06/22...
- saiya-jin 11y ago
  jeeez, you enjoy living scared to death about impending doom here or there? I don't get people like you, apparently spending too much time on internet. go out and have some fun :) doomsayers running around are nothing new for last couple of thousands of years. you know what I think? it's a character weakness, and a big one in this case. grow some balls, look at positive things happening, have some faith (not religious one, in mankind), and for the-guy-on-the-cloud sake, don't poison others with your inner frustrations/scares/half-empty glass.
  - Daishiman 11y ago
    No, the difference is that, unlike the "last couple thousands of years", we actually understand out environment very, very well, to the point where out predictions of climate have not been failing, and when they do, it's because we have underestimated everything. I would call finding the positive side of seeing the end of the planet as you know it a serious case of delusion, at the very least, and at worst the sort of attitude that's gotten us here.
  - fsloth 11y ago
    Like I said, the difference between the forecasts of past crackpots, and the current extinction event, is that the crackpots made crazy predictions with poor understanding of the world, whereas the extinction event is an observable fact As in 'lets see how many species whe have left - oo, there goes one... and there another'. Human beings have made a great impact to our environment and it saddens me an intelligent person such as you can bypass it with a shrug. Do you remember the slight problem we had with CFC compounds destroying the ozone layer in the 80's? Well, it was an observable fact - and it was fixed by placing controls. So, less people die of skin cancer which I think is nice. With your attitude we should have just let the CFC flow and tell australians not to worry so much about increasing cancer rates but rather just be cool and wear longer sleeves. I have great faith in humanitys spirit and skill, but we are now a species which operates on a planetary scale and we should acknowledge it. I would like to avoid ecological disasters before they become undoable ala easter islands.
Gravityloss 11y ago
I guess radiative properties of CO2 in the lab, that was already thought of centuries ago. Also the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere plotted against time. It was news back then and some people started getting worried because of that. Since Keeling started measuring it in 1958, it took some years for the trend to show.

Ygg2 11y ago

I think our safest bet is pretty much - get fusion ASAP, outsource it, replace all forms of energy with it. And start planting trees/plnats wherever you can. Also it might be better for people to congregate in few large metropolis, to minimize the impact. Chernobyl is doing great pretty much because no humans are there to bother the wildlife.

masklinn 11y ago
> I think our safest bet is pretty much - get fusion ASAP, outsource it, replace all forms of energy with it. We've been trying to get controlled civilian fusion ASAP for 60-odd years now and it seems as far away (or as close a reach) as it ever was.
adwn 11y ago
> get fusion ASAP If we rely on fusion to save us then we're thoroughly fucked – please excuse my language, but it's the most accurate portrayal of the situation. - The best-known research project, ITER, is incredibly expensive and it will be 2050 until we can even start building commercial reactors using this concept (note that this is the current official schedule, so expect to add several decades to this). It is not even certain whether we can overcome the immense engineering challenges within the next 100 years. - Other approaches only receive a fraction of the funding of ITER. Some of them might be more promising, but are still far away from breakeven, and it is still unknown, if and when they reach commercial viability. We already know how to generate CO2-neutral energy: solar, wind, and fission nuclear. Let's do those instead, and keep researching fusion energy, but don't bet the future of our planet on it.
- jcrei 11y ago
  I really like solar and wind (personally invested in some) but can you (or someone) clarify the CO2-neutral aspect of solar? Until some time ago, we still kept hearing about the impacts of building the panels, etc...
- adrianN 11y ago
  I link this in every discussion about how we will never get fusion power: http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/04/11/0435231/mit-fusion-researchers-answer-your-questions http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/12/04/11/0435231/mit-fusi... See the nice funding graph in question three. If we were to decide that fusion is the way to go and would fund it appropriately, we could get commercial reactors much faster. However, note that building power plants takes a lot of time. Building a new nuclear power plant for example takes 6-8 years just for the actual construction. Planning and bureaucracy have to be added to this. So even if we speed up fusion power development so that we can start building commercial fusion power plants in say twenty years, that's still mostly too late if we want to limit warming to two degrees. At current CO2 production rates we have time until 2039 for that. http://trillionthtonne.org/ http://trillionthtonne.org/

Asbostos 11y ago

There's a rhetoric problem with being past the tipping point - it means that all the advice we've been submerged in for the past 10 years suddenly has to change from "release less greenhouse gas" to "forget the gas, that ship has sailed, just protect ourselves!". We might very well find that coal saves us by providing the power needed to do large scale engineering work, generate the food we'll need, and basically all the good things that it already does plus whatever added demands come from more severe weather and sea level rise.

bkmartin 11y ago
And then it runs out quicker than ever and we all die. Soooo.... I think we better just take some of the scariest fear messages with a grain of salt, especially when it leads back to the status quo. I think that we need to be the best stewards of our planet that we can be and that means there is a sort of moral imperative to move to the cleanest methods of energy production as soon as possible. We are making strides, the whole world is. Maybe not as fast as some would like, but the progress is there and will continue because the economics are finally starting to come around.

x5n1 11y ago

Yes let's totally ignore the real problem(s) and let's apply the same tools that got us here to get us into a more precarious position, i.e. geoengineering.

hyperbovine 11y ago
Agreed, but voices of reason like yours will be "lost in the flood" once the East River starts lapping at sidewalks of Wall St. Geoengineering to avert climate disaster will be attempted by governments and even private individuals everywhere once the shit really begins to hit the fan. So, we might as well get good at it.