The company I work for makes power infrastructure for data centres and the like, 3 phase 400v conductors, the smallest we make is 1000 amp rated and we go up to 6000 amp rated, that is a hell of a lot of power and we run 24 hours a day 7 days a week pumping out miles of these to power the data centres that run the internet so we can be shitty to each other
I guess this is supposed to be taken as a bleak joke but it won’t be over soon. We all will likely experience a direct hit to our quality of life. If you’re poor, your survival will get harder. If you have or want children they will have fundamentally worse lives, compared to what we experienced so far. This can go on for decades or centuries, depending on how much we can stsill fix and what tipping points occur.
So yeah, hope that is some motivation to change something. Or at least shout at some people. :)
One thing to note is that if everyone stops having children, it will create a demographic crisis with a lot of older people / pensioners not able to work and not a lot of working age people to support the aging population. Good for environment ofc but quite bad for the remainder of population.
Scientists use climate proxy records like coral skeletons, tree rings, glacial ice cores, and sediment layers. For example, the levels of oxygen 16 in a layer of ocean debris and fossils go up as temperatures rise. So a high level of oxygen 16 in sediment from one layer tells scientists that the planet was hot and watery when the sediment was laid down.
The presence of oxygen 16 tells you the planet was warm. It does NOT tell you atmospheric temperature.
The claim made in the image is fear-mongering non-sense. The earth is 4 billion years old and was almost certainly hotter in the past, and within the last 100,000 years.
Scientists need to stop being deliberately melodramatic - to the point of lying - to make a point. It is counter-productive.
The point isn’t the temperature per se. The planet will be fine with or WITHOUT humans. If temperatures continue to rise, humans will become very uncomfortable letting to wars and instability of society.
The point is that they’ve established a relationship between o16 levels and temperature, so if you’ve got twice the o16 then say it was 25% warmer (made up ratio, I haven’t read the study).
This doesn’t tell us what the air temperature was, but it does tell us what it wasn’t (IE upper and lower bounds).
When you have several of these proxies it helps narrow down the temperature range (think how your god works better when you have more satellites).
Now if you know that the last seven days are the hottest on record and you know from your proxies that you are outside of temperatures of the past 100k years then it’s a pretty safe bet to state that we’re at the hottest time in the past 100k years.
There is no melodrama or lying in this fact, unfortunately.
It seems the temperature has been slightly hotter about 6500 years ago for a period of around 2 centuries with temperature estimated between +0.8 and +1.8 °C compared to 19th century, but this is subject to debate, (see for example www.nature.com/articles/s41597-020-0530-7).
Before that, we have to go back to a period where most Homo Sapiens were living in Africa about 125,000 years ago, where warming was likely +0.5 to +1.5°C compared to the same 19th century baseline.
Regardless if there was periods much hotter in the long past, the big difference with today’s situation is the rate at which this warming is taking place. For example, for the “6500 years ago” period, it took about 3000 years of warming to go from +0 to it’s maximum (which is between +0.8 and +1.8 °C). Today we are at about +1.1°C and it took us only 100 years, through fossil fuels burning and farming to reach that and most of which happened in the past 50 years.
Sources:
IPCC WG1, figure2_1
www.nature.com/articles/s41597-020-0530-7Also, about oxygen 16 and oxygen 18:> The water remaining in the ocean develops increasingly higher concentration of heavy oxygen compared to the universal standard, and the ice develops a higher concentration of light oxygen. Thus, high concentrations of heavy oxygen in the ocean tell scientists that light oxygen was trapped in the ice sheets. The exact oxygen ratios can show how much ice covered the Earth. Sources:
Malthus was wrong about this too. It’s not the population that’s a problem, it’s miles of strip malls, filled with cheap trash, and meat and dairy every meal of the day.
How else are they supposed to assuage the feeling that they’re not some immortal magical beings living some divine simulation/game as the chosen ones players?
Sure it is, but I think that’s still better than if every individual needs to drive their own car through half the country to buy coffee. Shipping needs to happen in any way. Sure we could order less stuff from the internet, so individual house door shipping would be less, but that’s a drop in the ocean, compared to the other named factors
Trucks, like cars are on a transition to become EVs, with Tesla leading the industry there as well. Of course people will then complain regarding lithium and other bullshit, hence why I think we should stop listening to extremists.
Lol, trash reasoning. “Extremists” that want to start building communities that dont require you to drive everywhere. Just because evs are slightly better then gas doesnt mean its good to keep making cars a centralizing point we build our society around.
My guess would be for EV everything. Plant trees in the city roads to lower the average temperature, the countries themselves should create tax incentives for people to move out from overcrowded cities as well.
But sure, easy to just end personal vehicles all together right? People like you are the reason our politicians are so shit.
Really not a choice, carbon emissiosn have to stop. EVs dont do that. Urban trees are not going to revese climate change. Wow, you’re saying people need to keep lowering denisity.
Realistically, EVs are useful as a stopgap solution. They could be used to cover the transition as we expand public transit like EV busses, trains, subways, etc.
EVs are basically clean vehicles. All the emissions from them come either from their production or from where their energy comes from. The latter is easily solvable by going nuclear and renewable. Also old EV batteries can be recycled and repurposed as grid storage.
There’s no silver bullet to stop CO2 emissions, there’s a shitload of solutions being studied right now that will need to be implemented.
They emit a lot, but they transport … a very lot. Trucks are higher emitters per comodity.
Still both should be powered by something else like hydrogen (more interesting for ships I guess) or batteries…
And cruise ships should be IMHO taxed so high (the tax should probably directly go to countermeasures), such that only very rich people are able to (not that I grant them the fun, but they should finance this climate disaster in every possible way…)
Based on what a reasonable carbon price should be, I don’t think you would need to tax them to oblivion. They would just need to pay their fair share.
This website suggests that it is about 0.4 tonne of CO2 per passenger per day. Canada’s current carbon tax is $65 per tonne. So a 7 day cruise would be $182 per passenger in carbon pricing. This is just ballpark and yes you can argue that carbon prices should be higher.
For whom though? I think if your product is going to be very expensive because of that you,ll try to find ways (less carbon emissive) to make it cheaper, and for others, who have low emissions already, they get an advantage. Also rich people generally emit much more carbon than poor people.
I’m a little bit tired of the argument, that everything gets expensive, like the money just goes to nirvana, it’s a tax and a tax should steer industries (mostly) to do the right thing (in this case emit less CO2). The money can go directly to people e.g. in the form of a universal basic income.
For the ability to produce enough food. It’s not the tax that’s the issue it’s that the climate will make industrial food production unviable. We will rapidly exit the conditions that underpin the viability of the modern economy. The only work of value will be making food and related tools in a volatile climatic environment. The bill will not be payable in money, is my point. That is, a tax will be woefully inadequate.
Certainly, it will be really “interesting” how to produce food for ~10 billion people in this uncertain future. But if we finally learn to accept that e.g. cattle isn’t the way forward, I think it may be possible with plant-based food. Although something like vertical farming etc. is definitely not viable today, it may be in the future. And at least currently it’s totally possible to sustainably produce enough (plant-based) food. I think we’ll learn to adapt, that much I trust in agricultural-technological advancement etc. But it will be “meaty” for most people and conflicts will arise (as they already are, see e.g. the conflict in Sudan that is indirectly related to climate change already, similarly as Syria previously (there were quite a few droughts the years before))
Absolutely, and it’s astonishing, that still so few people see how “deep in shit” we already are, and I really hope that very soon ( < 5 years or so) a lot more people through whatever means will start to see that. But I think it’s not a good idea to go into the doomsday mood, I don’t think that helps either (individually, say depression etc. inability for action). But yeah it’s depressing how little this topic is still relevant in politics etc. and how little the scientific community is/was heard, that is telling us that we need to change like > 70 years ago (and a very soft transition would’ve been possible since than, not so much now unfortunately, whether we do it, or nature does it…).
I guess it’s less doom and more, you can just use an ev, and magically, it’s all ok. It will take significant social and economic changes that will radically alter how people in the first world live.
I looked into carbon offsets of shipping containers from China to the US as part of my job. I was shocked at how little was emitted per container - Probably cost around $40 of offsets for one 45 footer.
Like you said, the bigger issue is the trucks needed for last mile / between distribution centers.
No need to single out meat production. There is so much farming going on that annihilates places like the Amazon. I have seen claims of those crazy huge shipping vessels that pollute more than all cars combined over the course of a year.
What they are farming in all that land is feed for livestock.
So yes, even though they’re growing plants there, those plants are being grown to feed the animals instead of feeding humans directly. Which thanks to trophic levels is a massive waste.
The amount of feed needed to rear one animal to kill for food is not even CLOSE to equivalent to how much we would get if we didn’t add the extra step in of feeding animals and just grew plants for ourselves instead.
The meat industry is a massive contributor to global warming, and we could drastically reduce our effects on climate change if we just stopped eating animals.
Add comment