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The saddest part of global turmoil around AI, Iran war, etc. is how dramatically climate change has disappeared from the 'global conversation'. This is not some
by sebmellen 8mo ago
The saddest part of global turmoil around AI, Iran war, etc. is how dramatically climate change has disappeared from the 'global conversation'. This is not something we can afford to ignore for much longer.
- quotemstr 8mo ago[flagged]
- sebmellen 8mo ago"People have been saying computers will start to speak since the Dartmouth Workshop in 1956. Here we are 50 years later in 2006 and there's no sign of progress yet! Nothing's happened. You really need to knock if off with the predictions."
- quotemstr 8mo ago[flagged]
- jbotz 8mo ago> Has the climate collapsed? There are still glaciers in Glacier Nation Park. The Maldives remain islands, not seamounts. Just to really quickly call out these tired old straw-men... all of these "predicted disasters" are far further along today than they were predicted to be by this date by, for example, the IPCC in 1990[0]. Deniers keep acting as if it scientists have been "crying wolf" for decades when the truth is that the 99% of the scientists doing real work on anthropogenic global warming have always been extremely conservative and reality has outpaced their predictions all along. [0] https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar1/wg2/ https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar1/wg2/
- tokai 8mo agoThe glaciers in Glacier Nation Park have reduced by 39% the last 50 years. There used to be 150 glaciers larger than 25 acres, now there is 26. Maybe not the best example. https://www.usgs.gov/news/national-news-release/glaciers-rapidly-shrinking-and-disappearing-50-years-glacier-change https://www.usgs.gov/news/national-news-release/glaciers-rap...
- fc417fc802 8mo ago> Except that computers did, in fact, learn to speak. But prior to it happening it was just a long term prediction that had kept not happening for the longest time. > Has the climate collapsed? There's an awful lot of room between "business as usual" and "total collapse". Must we wait until after bad things have happened to only then discuss what we might have done about them in hindsight? Surely proactively avoiding problems is better?
- jatari 8mo agoClimate hasn't been a real topic of discussion since the Obama administration.
- jonahrd 8mo agoI disagree, Greta Thunberg's whole thing started in 2018, leading to larger and larger climate protests and action globally... ..until about 2020, with COVID/russia-ukraine/Oct 7/trumps re-election following and burying it below tons of other news cycles.
- crystal_revenge 8mo agoAnd the Obama administration really just talked about it. It was under his administration that the US shale oil extraction really started heating up. The problem is the only solution to climate change is keeping oil in the ground. There are other things that can be done to make a zero emissions transition less painful, but oil (and all other fossil fuels) need to start staying in the ground. During the Obama administration is when we started to see a dramatic increase in US oil production [0]. The US hegemony is oil powered and founded on the petro-dollar. There's no way US policy can be aligned with anything remotely resembling a path towards a sustainable energy environment. 0. https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/leafhandler.ashx?n=pet&s=mcrfpus2&f=m https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/leafhandler.ashx?n=pet&s=m...
- jdlshore 8mo agoThe Inflation Reduction Act was a massive climate bill: $400 billion worth. I don’t think it’s fair to characterize that as “just talked about it.”
- scottyah 8mo ago[flagged]
- michaelteter 8mo agoFox News and Trump still routinely say it's a hoax. And their devotees repeat that line in one breath, and in the next breath say, "wow, we just set a new high temp record in January!"
- pocksuppet 8mo agoWe've been getting progressively more dog-eat-dog short-term since Reagan.
- giraffe_lady 8mo agoI don't think climate change is being ignored: AI, war profiteering, ICE, detention centers, destruction of the international system, global fascism are their answer to climate change. It's not to prevent it, or to mitigate its damages, it's for the people who disproportionately caused it, and have already benefitted from it, to finalize their control over the resources they want. Some of those resources are some of us.
- georgemcbay 8mo agoAnd they aren't even really bothering to hide it anymore. A lot of Trump's seemingly odd obsessions like taking over Greenland and Canada are less odd (but still very unsettling) when you accept that the global power elite have already accepted that run-away climate change is inevitable and the only open questions are who is going to profit from it and how.
- slackfan 8mo ago[flagged]
- giraffe_lady 8mo ago“But other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?"
- epgui 8mo agoThe rate of change is the issue sir. You can’t “aside” it.
- maest 8mo agoThe US has been taking steps in the wrong direction wrt climate change and they will undoubtedly be judged to jave been on the wrong side of history on this one. In the near term, however, Americans will blame everything except man-made pollution for the fallout from climate change.
- sebmellen 8mo agoRegardless of the politics of the day, where is the long-term, popular will (or capacity) for a "green/electric" revolution in the US? We are massively dependent on fossil fuels, and our quality of life is too. At the same time, we don't have China's industrial capacity or their stomach for massive state-driven subsidies. I don't see how you escape peak oil otherwise.
- maest 8mo ago[flagged]
- sebmellen 8mo agoYes, exactly my point. It's too hard to grapple with, so it's easier to ignore.
- Retric 8mo agoOil is just one aspect of climate change, coal was far more important because there’s plenty of coal to case extrem harm. The vast majority of new electricity generation installed in the US over the last 15 years has been wind and solar. That naturally results in fossil fuels being fazed out when existing power plants age and thus need to be replaced. 70% of US electricity came from fossil fuels in 2010, that dropped to 60% by 2020. More significantly it mostly swapped to natural gas which emits far less CO2/KWh than coal. We could go faster but the tail end of the curve represents a small fraction of the CO2 vs the peak. Even natural gas is facing severe pressure from ultra cheap battery backed solar. More importantly natural gas power plants don’t last nearly as long so will get fazed out much faster. EV’s are also about more than tailpipe emissions, making and transporting gasoline is quite harmful before it ends up in a gas tank.
- crystal_revenge 8mo agoReducing the severity of climate change (we've already signed up for potentially civilization destroying consequences, even if we could go zero emissions today), requires keeping proven reserves in the ground. No amount of "green" energy will impact our future if it doesn't mean we start using less fossil fuels (globally) than today. Darkly, a disastrous global nuclear war that sends us back in time 500 years would be the most effective and most probable way of achieving this.
- cindyllm 8mo ago[dead]
- spongebobstoes 8mo agowhat if we could capture carbon at a significant rate? I know that we can't right now, it's a hypothetical
- KellyCriterion 8mo agoyes, I guess with fusion this would be possible?
- jdlshore 8mo agoSolar + battery is a miracle technology that’s being installed at an enormous rate. Technically, it’s fusion power, capturing energy from a fusion plant 8 light-minutes away. :-D
- bgnn 8mo agoIt's not only carbon. There are a multitude of gasses which cause greenhouse effect.
- AngryData 8mo agoIdeally we would but that costs energy, and if we can't afford the energy to completely remove the need for fossil fuels, spending even more on capturing it again seems still far out of reach. Part of the reason it is still far away despite the increasing prevalence of renewable sources is that not everything is a 1:1 replacement between electric power and fossil fuels, fertilizer and many of our chemical productions can be done without fossil fuels, but at 10x the energy cost that we currently use. We like to focus on things like cars and engines, but those were always an easy win because internal combustion is only 30% efficient to start with while electric motors are 90%+. But as a source of chemical process energy not only can fossil fuel sources be more efficient than as a motor fuel, our electric energy replacement for chemical synthesis and purification is not always very efficient itself, on top of being an energy intensive product already. I think last time I looked, which was admittedly a few years ago now, fertilizer production with fossil fuels consumed 1% of the world's electrical production, and the best anyone could hope for in synthesizing nitrogen from the air and not using any fossil fuels was at least a 10 fold increase in energy requirements. Which means clean fertilizer requires at least 10% of total world electrical production, which is obviously an ass ton. Perhaps we have slightly more efficient fertilizer synthesis now, but at the same time farmland utilization has dropped which means a higher reliance and demand for artificial fertilizer. Of course I think this is all avoidable if we weren't complete slaves to capital markets and just built tons of nuclear reactors and solar plants even if it that means they weren't all profit makers. Energy production and availability is ultimately one of our largest bottlenecks across almost every industry and human endeavor.
- noncoml 8mo agoNot because of AI or Iran war. It’s because we, in the US, voted for it to disappear.