Senate Global Climate Change

I'm not talking about the leaders, I'm talking about the majority of the country, and the majority of most countries, who aren't willing to go big on climate change yet.

 

UK to put nuclear power at heart of net zero emissions strategy

It is about time.

 

Part of me wants to ask, what book? The rest of me doesn't want to read it, I already know things are bad.

Also 2050, that's 29 years from now. With any luck I'll still be alive and my kid's will just be hitting their prime. How can people not want to do everything we can to at least try to fix this problem? What is our problem?

I'm starting to feel this way now. Which is really surprising considering how much I loved to eat meat for the first 30ish years of my life.

So, I give in...what book?

 

Well if something about Climate Change becomes good for your anxiety levels I want to be the first to know!

 

I don't know if children becoming haughty ***holes qualifies as optimistic.

Without killing animals for food, humanity would not have survived, homo sapiens would not have come into existence in the first place, and we certainly wouldn't have developed enough intelligence to understand the concept of barbarism. Hopefully adults will point this out to arrogant children.

 

If Joe Manchin blocks Biden climate action fighting plans, would that be the end of the world or would it just be harder and find other ways to work around if?

I do my part to fight climate change and plant 20 trees a month.

 

Every year of delay in making significant progress makes mitigation more difficult, but there's no hard cutoff date for guaranteeing the end of the world as far as I know.

 

And in august I planted about 80 trees in Vancouver bc

 

Staving off a global security catastrophe is going to take a lot more than planting some trees.

Here’s something scary:

https://climateandsecurity.org/wp-c...urity-threat-assessment-of-climate-change.pdf

 

NYT article on the final melting and disappearance of Kilimanjaro's glaciers features once again the disproportionate effect of climate change on the world's poorest people who contribute the least to anthropogenic carbon forcing.

There was also an article on San Diego's relative water independence. It really reiterates California's desperate continuing need for negative population growth. There isn't much more water to be squeezed out of conservation in some parts of California. It reminded me of Dune. The entire state needs to build itself a stillsuit to reclaim every last liter of water from wherever (including graywater and sewage).

 

So I was bored and had the time. If deforestation rates and tree planting rates were to continue at the same pace they are at now we won’t have anymore trees by the year 2255.

Something else I looked up the weight of all plastic in the ocean will exceed that of the weight of all fish in 2050.

Fun times.

 

Don’t worry, a virus far more lethal than Covid will wipe us all out long before then. The Earth is not about to let itself be destroyed by the likes of human beings.

 

Man, you're all promises and then let downs

 

There is no intent behind processes such as natural selection. The massive rock we're standing on has no more ability to resist anthropogenic ecocide than it has the ability to deflect incoming asteroids of sufficient size. The facts of physics and biology will certainly doom our species, sooner rather than later at this rate, but we'll take a lot down with us and it seems like the main culprit will be an unlivable climate. Going by history, there has never been a single disease that has come close to wiping out humanity. Even the indigenous peoples of the Americas likely would have recovered from the deluge of multiple Old World plagues if not for European conquest, enslavement, and genocide. I mean this sincerely, what is your basis for your pronouncement?

 

Dude's been staring into the abyss for a year and a half.

 

Can’t I just make a pissy comment after a really busy day at the hospital without being psychoanalyzed?

Asking sincerely as I genuinely respect you. Obviously I don’t believe nature actually has a consciousness or any nonsense like that; my point is, at the rate we’re destroying the environment, we may encounter a highly lethal disease that knocks the human race below the genetic threshold needed for our species to survive. Ebola would’ve done the job had it been easier to transmit.

 

But it wasn't. Not even close. I asked because I remember this being your thing even pre-COVID-- "The Virus." I wasn't trying to psychoanalyze you. The idea that a zoonotic virus will wipe out our species doesn't seem to have much scientific basis other than hypotheticals. I'm not completely discounting the possibility; certainly there have been other species, like Tasmanian devils, under threat from communicable disease (in their case a transmissible cancer). I just don't see how it's an inevitability or a natural defense mechanism.

 

It wasn't, but it could've been. While the chances of a highly lethal virus that destroys 99% of the human population is small (although I'm sure we could create one if we were so inclined), the more we disrupt environments that we didn't co-evolve with (like the jungle in the Congo where we first encountered Ebola), the more likely it is that we encounter a zoonosis that is both highly transmissible and highly lethal. When you say "But it wasn't", the only reason for that was lack of airborne spread; the Ebola Zaire strain killed 9/10 people. Had it been airborne, it would've been catastrophic. Not extinction-causing, but billions dead is pretty awful.

As a physician, I probably fear this more given my education and training on the subject compared to those outside the field. I also worry about whether or not humanity would be able to regroup after a highly lethal pandemic. Given our behavior during a not-as-lethal one, I'm not very optimistic.

 

My biggest fear is more directly related to climate: that water and energy access become hard limits on global food production and as agriculture comes under more and more duress from climate change and short term global population growth - there will be a major collapse in the food supply that causes mass starvation. In those conditions of course disease will spread more readily among distressed populations. It's possible we will see some of this calamity in my lifetime, but I hope not. There's some real upside to dying soon. Every annual 1% we add to the human population is another blow to sustainability.

 

So, can't we just selectively boycott the oil companies that are pushing the anti-climate agenda? Yeah I'm sure they're all doing it, but let's say for example Shell stops donating to Republicans. So then we start buying gas from Shell to the exclusion of their competitors, and that should incentivize the the oil industry to quit obstructing climate legislation, right? Yeah, we'd still be burning fossil fuels for the time being, but it's going to take time to wean ourselves off them overnight anyway, and at least this way we might be able to do some good.

 

Honestly with how many companies are setting goals of no more gas cars by 2030 or so. It’s only a matter of time before gas stations start to go the way of the dodo. Gonna take a long time. Now what would be a real game changer is a cheap enough alternative to plastic.

 

You really want to replace our private and public petrol-powered fleet with electric, then we need a massive expansion of nuclear power. That is the only short term bridge to some other long term scalable non carbon-emitting energy tech and carbon sequestration, if such things are really even plausible.

 

I think we need more public transportation and less cars both gas and electric. But I live in DC where 60% of our Metro cars have been taken out of service because they derail. Metro cars that came into service in 2017. Metro has been riddled with problems forever. I avoided taking it to Wizards games with my son during the 2010's because cars were getting stuck in tunnels and filling up with smoke. I remember telling my dad I would be the first person to panic in a subway car filling up with smoke and he said "You'd have a right to panic.".

I don't know if they always use cheap incompetent contractors or what, but subways are not new. Why can't we get this right?