Climate Change Thread

[edyzmedieval]

Just give me my all-in-one nutrient pastes, patties, purees, and potations already (gotta have variety).

There's plenty of that already available, including one with a rather... ominous name. Soylent. Plus many others getting into powder meal replacements, not just them.

[Montmorency]

I'll switch to Soylent if I ever need my colon removed.

[Montmorency]

I know exactly the meme to build with this, but I can't find the right materials.

This will have to do.

[ReluctantSamurai]

In an earlier post, I made reference to mineral wars, and to the early '90s TV series SeaQuest DSV. Well, here we go:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...s-un-ultimatum

Deep-sea mining has been given the go-ahead to commence in two years, after the tiny Pacific island nation of Nauru notified the UN body governing the nascent industry of plans to start mining. Triggering the so-called “two-year rule”, which some have called the nuclear option, the International Seabed Authority (ISA) now has two years to finalise regulations governing the controversial industry. If it is unable to do so, the ISA is required to allow mining contractors to begin work under whatever regulations are in place at the time.

DeepGreen is looking to extract polymetallic nodules from the seabed. The nodules, which resemble potatoes and are thought to take millions of years to form, are rich in manganese, nickel, cobalt and rare earth metals, key components of batteries for electric vehicles. DeepGreen argues deep-sea mining is a less environmentally and socially damaging alternative to terrestrial mining, and is crucial for transitioning to a greener economy.

DeepGreen is in the process of merging with blank-cheque company Sustainable Opportunities Acquisition Corp (SOAC) to become The Metals Company. The Metals Company plans to list on the Nasdaq in the third quarter.

But SOAC said in a filing to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) last week it was not yet known whether mining the seabed would have less impact on biodiversity than mining for the same quantity of metals on land.

“We cannot predict ... whether the environment and biodiversity is impacted by our activities, and if so, how long the environment and biodiversity will take to recover,” it said.

Imagine if that last highlighted phrase was used in a congressional hearing as part of a land-based, open-mine environmental impact statement... People in the affected area (in this case an area the size of Romania) would be having a hizzy-fit...

So instead of SeaQuest's UEO (United Earth's Ocean Organization) we have the ISA (International Seabed Authority). A quick synopsis of the initial SeaQuest plot-line:

The storyline begins in the year 2018, after mankind has exhausted almost all natural resources, except for the ones on the ocean floor. Many new colonies have been established there and it is the mission of the seaQuest and its crew to protect them from hostile nonaligned nations and to aid in mediating disputes as well as engage in undersea research[...]

And instead of DSV's baddies like the Macronesian Alliance and Deon International, we get Deep Green, Sustainable Opportunities Acquisition Corp (SOAC), and the cryptic The Metals Company. Are you effing kidding me with those names??? As noted above, The Metals Company plans to list on Nasdaq sometime later this year....

So here we have an undersea mining company, with no idea of the environmental impact its' mining will have on deep sea biosystems, and with little to no regulatory systems in place, set to begin providing the world with all those precious rare and expensive minerals it needs for a "carbon zero" future by 2050.

The prescience of Rockne S. O'Bannon (DSV's creator), is uncanny...

[Shaka_Khan]

[Shaka_Khan]

[Beskar]

There's plenty of that already available, including one with a rather... ominous name. Soylent. Plus many others getting into powder meal replacements, not just them.

Problem is volume as they all typically taste bad and it is about trying to tolerate as much as you can before you give up.

[ReluctantSamurai]

Leave it to the Aussie's to come up with a discussion about climate change that even a grade school student can understand:

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-...ange/100020944

In Australia we've been talking about climate change for over a century …

As decades go by and emissions rise, the politics has stayed the same. Each time it bubbles up we're told taking action will result in job losses and disruption to the Australian way of life, and we're better off waiting.

But strip away all the politics, and the maths tells a different story: reducing emissions now will buy us more time to get to zero, but inaction dramatically cuts the time we have to act. This is why the next five years are so important.

By the 1980s, scientists (including those who worked for fossil fuel companies) had a pretty clear idea what was going on in the climate, and could start to measure increases in CO₂ and increases in global temperatures. So we knew even then that one day we'd have to stop using fossil fuels.

Coal industry representatives [insert oil and gas representatives here in the US] have fought back strongly against any plans to cut greenhouse emissions from burning coal, saying it would be an expensive move which would undercut one of Australia's strongest export industries.

This opposition was accompanied by familiar framing: "Advocating a moderate and pragmatic response on global warming."

Those reasonable sounding words, repeated by politicians and fossil fuel companies year after year, make it sound like we're gradually solving the problem. But again, strip away the politics, and see what is happening to emissions globally.

So this is where we are now. We're at a point where the effects of climate change [...] can no longer be ignored, and globally the emissions tap has gone from dripping, to flowing, to full bore. The only thing that hasn't changed is the political message.

That century the world had to get on top of this problem has been squandered in a few short decades.

We can't just keep emitting until 2050 and be fine; that date only works if we all start reducing emissions now. If we spend the next five years not reducing emissions, that gives us just 17 years to make that transition.

If you live in a part of Australia that's reliant on fossil fuel jobs, it is easy to see the appeal of the message "we can't turn things off tomorrow". But if we keep following that thinking, tomorrow won't be in 2050 — it will be just around the corner.

I highly recommend reading the Deloitte Access Economics report that blows the doors off the argument by the energy industry that "green energy" will cost thousands of jobs, and be economically ruinous:

https://www2.deloitte.com/au/en/page...te-growth.html

What this report reveals is a fundamental flaw in how we are viewing the debate on climate change; we are all missing the point. We view the costs of action against an economic future where the basic assumption is that the economy will keep growing with unconstrained emissions. It is no wonder, then, that any debate about climate change turns up a large cost of action with scant benefits from change.

The economic baseline that we are conducting this debate against is fundamentally flawed. In its place, this report develops a baseline where unconstrained emissions are not consistent with unconstrained growth.

[edyzmedieval]

Given the fact that in Eastern Europe, today was marked in some places by record breaking heat... we need to act fast. And the problem is that individual steps, like recycling, going biking instead of a car and installing solar panels, will not be enough. Political action is required.

Romania had 41 degrees today, apparently Bulgaria and Greece experienced 43. And Turkey is literally burning.

[ReluctantSamurai]

I think this article link, which I first posted back in February, is worth a second look:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine...istory/617793/

Today, atmospheric CO₂ sits at 410 parts per million, a higher level than at any point in more than 3 million years. And humans are injecting more CO₂ into the atmosphere at one of the fastest rates ever. When hucksters tell you that the climate is always changing, they’re right, but that’s not the good news they think it is. “The climate system is an angry beast,” the late Columbia climate scientist Wally Broecker was fond of saying, “and we are poking it with sticks.”

The beast has only just begun to snarl. All of recorded human history—at only a few thousand years, a mere eyeblink in geologic time—has played out in perhaps the most stable climate window of the past 650,000 years. We have been shielded from the climate’s violence by our short civilizational memory, and our remarkably good fortune. But humanity’s ongoing chemistry experiment on our planet could push the climate well beyond those slim historical parameters, into a state it hasn’t seen in tens of millions of years, a world for which Homo sapiens did not evolve.

When there’s been as much carbon dioxide in the air as there already is today—not to mention how much there’s likely to be in 50 or 100 years—the world has been much, much warmer, with seas 70 feet higher than they are today. Why? The planet today is not yet in equilibrium with the warped atmosphere that industrial civilization has so recently created. If CO₂ stays at its current levels, much less steadily increases, it will take centuries—even millennia—for the planet to fully find its new footing. The transition will be punishing in the near term and the long term, and when it’s over, Earth will look far different from the one that nursed humanity. This is the grim lesson of paleoclimatology: The planet seems to respond far more aggressively to small provocations than it’s been projected to by many of our models.

We’re more than 3 million years in the past now, and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is at 400 parts per million, a level the planet will not again see until September 2016. This world is 3 to 4 degrees Celsius warmer than ours, and the sea level is up to 80 feet higher. When we arrive in the middle of the Pliocene, just over 3 million years ago, CO₂ levels are high enough that we’ve escaped the cycle of ice ages and warm interglacials altogether. We are now outside the evolutionary envelope of our modern world, sculpted as it was by the temperamental northern ice sheets and deep freezes of the Pleistocene. But as to atmospheric carbon dioxide, 3 million years is how far back we have to go to arrive at an analogue for 2021.

The iconic quote from this well-written article is "Life has speed limits".

And this warning:

Humans are currently injecting CO₂ into the air 10 times faster than even during the most extreme periods within the age of mammals. And you don’t need the planet to get as hot as it was in the early Eocene to catastrophically acidify the oceans. Acidification is all about the rate of CO₂ emissions, and we are off the charts. Ocean acidification could reach the same level it did 56 million years ago by later this century, and then keep going.

This sauna of our early mammalian ancestors represents something close to the worst possible scenario for future warming (although some studies claim that humans, under truly nihilistic emissions scenarios, could make the planet even warmer). The good news is the inertia of the Earth’s climate system is such that we still have time to rapidly reverse course, heading off an encore of this world, or that of the Miocene, or even the Pliocene, in the coming decades. All it will require is instantaneously halting the super-eruption of CO₂ disgorged into the atmosphere that began with the Industrial Revolution.

We know how to do this, and we cannot underplay the urgency. The fact is that none of these ancient periods is actually an apt analogue for the future if things go wrong. It took millions of years to produce the climates of the Miocene or the Eocene, and the rate of change right now is almost unprecedented in the history of animal life.

[edit]

@Monty

I noticed your post just after mine back in February when I first linked the Atlantic article:

From the little reading on climate I've done over the past year, I've gleaned that consensus modeling has downgraded both the worst-case scenarios and the best-case scenarios. Thoughts?

So in which direction do you think consensus modeling has taken us?

[Montmorency]

IIRC the old target of +1.5 °C is considered unattainable, with the new hope being 2.5 °C, while the outer envelope of 5 °C is deprecated because it assumes no decarbonization and adaptation by countries, but you would probably be more diligent in tracking down the reports than I am.

wasn't one of the problems with lab grown muscle the lack of resistance training to break and reform the tissue in response to linear exercise, such that it generates a texture we recognise as 'meat'?

i.e. the absence of this training process results in something that has all the delicious texture of a tumour, instead of the chicken fillet we were hoping for...

**imagines giant bio-vat factories with endless rows of gelatinous cubes of muscle being tirelessly stretched between two piston driven slabs**

Artisanal handcrafted cultured soylent green.

[ReluctantSamurai]

...with the new hope being 2.5 °C...

I think even that is unlikely given the trillions still being poured into fossil fuels usage and development...


@spmetla

I have to admit that this has slipped under my climate change radar:

https://www.civilbeat.org/2021/06/ex...aii-this-year/

Climate change for Hawaii is often viewed in terms of sea level rise. But fire (outside of volcanic activity) looks to certainly be a problem. In terms of acreage affected, Hawaii leads the nation...even worse than the Western states, which has all the media coverage:

https://www.civilbeat.org/2019/08/ha...y-other-state/

The mean annual area burned in Hawaii from 2005 to 2011 accounted for 0.48 % of Hawaii’s total land area, which was greater than the proportion of land area burned across the entire U.S. mainland (0.30%), and even across the 12 states in the fire-prone western U.S. (0.46 %) over this same time period [...]

And it appears that land management, or lack thereof, is as responsible as climate change:

“Our real problem is a fuels problem,” Walker said. “We have all this open grassland that we’re not managing. And if we don’t manage them, these fires are going to continue.”

And why, in god's creation, are folks intentionally starting fires?

Humans are almost entirely to blame for wildfires in Hawaii, starting many of the fires. But unlike some global warming challenges, experts said this one is solvable at the local level. Lightning rarely sparks a blaze in the islands, and usually just on the Big Island. But arson and unintentionally set fires are rampant, particularly on the west side of Oahu.

Thoughts?