Senate Global Climate Change

Yep. It'll cook the planet and us but hey, problem solved. You failed to specify the nature of the solution wanted.

 

Well in that case!

 

It won't be the LLM that kills us but its draining of water and energy supplies.

 

Yet another example of America going from first to last under Trump.

 

I think everyone was taken by surprise by this. BASF isn’t known as a hub of innovation (also having worked with them I can say that isn’t entirely fair), but actually now turns from its old school chemical business to a few very progressive technologies. It’s what you hope more of the big European player would adopt.

 

This year's monthly temperature measurements are even scarier to me than last year's, even though they're ever so slightly lower. Jan 25 was hotter than Jan 2024, and the last 3 months were nearly as bad as they were a year ago, with 21 of the last 22 months above the 1.5 C / 2.7 F threshold.

It was expected that we'd break records last year because we were in an El Nino phase, but we transitioned into a La Nina about halfway through last year, and that was expected to bring a much greater fall in temperatures with it, but we're not seeing that.

2023 - 2024 was so much higher than normal that I was hoping we'd at least see drops like we had after other El Nino's, but there's hardly any difference. I heard on NPR that some climatologists are wondering whether climate change is disrupting or altering the El Nino - La Nina cycle altogether.

Maybe it'll still return to the mean level of temperature increase that we were seeing before 2024, but it's seeming more likely to me that we're running closer to the trajectory of a worst case scenario. This isn't good.

 

We are having some really bad weather here in the USA. Two people died in my county when trees fell on their cars during evening rush hour yesterday. How sad is that, it's Friday night you're feeling good and tree falls on car BREAKING: Two people killed by trees falling on cars in Fairfax County | FFXnow At my house we had a little rain and some thunder, but nothing major. We had a way worse storm last week that woke up my whole house at 2AM.

@Luke02 or anyone from the Chicago area the dust bowl era is back. Did you experience any of this dust storm? See the moment a dust storm blanketed Chicago; "It's like something out of the history books" - CBS Chicago

And tornadoes, tornadoes, tornadoes!

Severe Storms Leave Tornado Damage In Midwest: Latest News | Weather.com

At least 16 killed, dozens injured as suspected tornadoes hit Missouri and Kentucky

5 dead after storms and likely tornado rip through St. Louis | STLPR

Every morning, every single morning when I get dressed at the gym there is a weather disaster in this country being reported. How can any of us feel safe, or afford insurance? Good luck world.

 

A double-whammy of bad climate news.

The five-year climate forecast made by the World Meteorological Organization and the U.K. Meteorological Office has gotten worse:

"There’s an 86% chance that one of the next five years will pass 1.5 degrees and a 70% chance that the five years as a whole will average more than that global milestone, they figured..."

"And for the first time there’s a chance — albeit slight — that before the end of the decade, the world’s annual temperature will shoot past the Paris climate accord goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) and hit a more alarming 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) of heating since the mid-1800s, the two agencies said."



Also, according to different research that combines data from multiple studies, as modeling improves, the predicted temperature that will lead to the destabilization of the Antarctic ice-caps keeps falling:


"The world’s ice sheets are on course for runaway melting, leading to multiple feet of sea level rise and “catastrophic” migration away from coastlines, even if the world pulls off the miraculous and keeps global warming to within 1.5 degrees, according to new research.

"The world has pledged to restrict global warming to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels to stave off the most catastrophic impacts of climate change.

"However, not only is this limit speeding out of reach — the world is currently on track for up to 2.9 degrees of warming by 2100. But the most alarming finding of the study, published Tuesday in the journal Communications Earth and Environment, is that 1.5 might not even be good enough to save the ice sheets.

"Multiple studies suggest 1.5 degrees of warming is “far too high” to prevent rapid ice sheet retreat that would be irreversible on human timescales, and the world should prepare for many feet of sea level rise over the coming centuries, according to the study.

"“You don’t slow sea level rise at 1.5, in fact, you see quite a rapid acceleration,” said Chris Stokes, a study author and glaciologist at Durham University."



And Trump is busy blocking CA from maintaining higher emission standards and reversing Biden's measures to combat climate change, which were insufficient on their own.

Bad trends all around.

 

"BASF.....the cassette tape company?! " -- Doc Brown

 

The thing is, conservative leadership in the US knows at this point that climate change is verifiably real. But they'll never admit it for political reasons, and they won't do anything about preventing or slowing it down because of being more interested in protecting industries.
What they are doing is following DeSantis' model, which is to focus on 'mitigation' - in other words, instead of trying to stop fires from happening, after everything has burned down just throw money around to build everything back up again.

 

Yeah that works til it doesn't, which is to say it doesn't work.

 

It allows them to kick the can down the road, but we're about to run out of road.

The good news is that (according the the techbros, at least) we can just all abandon this world and move to another planet that is about a million, billion times less habitable than this one.

 

Not to mention smaller (I assume you're referring to Mars), and easier for them to control who gets to go, so it's the ultimate block against 'illegal immigrants'.

Reminds me of the movie Elysium; it was a pretty dull flick, but the future it portrayed doesn't seem that far off.

 

It's impossible to maintain a permanent human presence on another world-- let alone something like a space station-- without support from Earth, and any individual trying to stay permanently would probably die much younger. It's impossible to terraform Mars into anything remotely Earth-like (e.g., without a planetary magentosphere the sun will just strip away most of the atmosphere). But I don't think even Elon is stupid enough to believe his own hype about a "multi-planetary species," or that the sun turning into a red giant in a billion years is something we should actually be concerned about (which would render Mars a smoking cinder anyway).

 

It's why they want Greenland.

 

What they are doing is committing murder. People are already dying from climate related weather events and it will get worse.

Children born today will only be 75 years old. But I honestly believe that we'll start starving, fighting, drowning , melting long before 2100. I think it'll be within my lifetime. I am 47.

 

I'd say impossible in the near/medium term, unless we all agree a huge catastrophe is about to strike.

Terraforming is definitely a fantasy that would be difficult even on the scale of centuries - O'Neil Cylinders would be more reasonable than that, as would domed or underground cities on Mars and the larger moons, or even floating cities on Venus.

But yeah, for all political/pragmatic purposes, I definitely agree. Especially on existing without crucial support from Earth for decades.

Also, the Mars obsession isn't really the first logical step. If we want a springboard to the rest of the Solar System and beyond, you'd need to start with permanent bases on the Moon. Much faster communication, easier logistics and more secure supply routes, a better place to test mining and manufacturing off of Earth, and lower gravity means less rocket fuel required to launch. Outside of Earth, Venus and Ganymede may actually be better options than Mars - natural shielding from radiation through their atmosphere for both.
* Ganymede has some kind of magnetosphere, a thin oxygen atmosphere and a subground liquid H2O ocean (plus it's larger than Mercury and Titan)
* the clouds of Venus are so dense you could build bases that "float" above the hotter and more turbulent lower atmosphere while protected still by the upper atmosphere
* Europa doesn't have a good atmosphere, but if we can finally verify it has a huge liquid H2O ocean beneath its frozen surface then that could work just as well
But we still don't know how to combat the long-term health effects of low-gravity, especially for anyone who returns to Earth.

But yeah, going off that tangent, anyone sane should know we need to focus on preserving and restoring Earth's ecosystems first, and anything else a very distant second. His short-sighted desire for huge population growth in order to fuel space colonization, knowing it could never happen that quickly and the effects it would have here on Earth between resource scarcity, pollution, and ecosystem exploitation/extinction... extremely stupid.

 

There's an unspoken 'secret' about terraforming that the techbros don't like to bring up - the best way to do research into terraforming other worlds is to develop technologies to make our own world more habitable.

 

We are way more likely to blow ourselves up trying to Geo Engineer our way out of this mess. There are people trying to figure out how to build giant mirrors to direct the sun away and cool us off. What could go wrong?

 

Don’t worry, the technology they are looking into is more along the lines of “how do I keep the servants in the bunker from killing me once they realize my wealth no longer has any value.” than anything to mitigate the situation.

 

That's not exactly right. We could develop algae that can soak up the C02 and bring back the Earth to a better place. But the same thing on Mars is not needed.

 

What you cited might be used to make Venus habitable - I mean, not any time soon, but the point stands. 'Other worlds' mean just that.

But if we're really being honest, our solar system really doesn't have 'habitable' places to live other than the one we're already on without a ****ton of work and more time than we - as a species - has right now. Whether or not a technology might help some far-off descendants of ours colonize some other location in space, we should be, right now, focusing on making our own world more habitable.

 

Well, sorta. It'd be a contributor. The main issue with Venus is lack of water. If Earth were smooth the water content would make a global ocean a couple of miles deep. Venus's water spread out over a smooth surface would not even be a couple of inches. The point being, a given world's needs will be unique.

 

Yeah, I know. If terraforming was at all feasible, we'd simply employ it to fix our screwed up planet -- not take a planet without a magnetosphere, with 1/100th atmospheric pressure, with 1/3rd the gravity, etc., etc. and make it into a 2nd earth.

Here's a vid from PBS Spacetime hosted by a PhD astrophysicist (whose specialty is general relatively) that shows just how ridiculously impossible it would be. It's pretty interesting just how daunting it would be.