Sea Change – The Pacific's Perilous Turn
apps.seattletimes.com
apps.seattletimes.com
Being technologists we tend to assume (hope?) that some solution will present itself before it is too late. I am growing increasingly pessimistic that such a solution will arise. The powers that be in our world are dedicated to economics, not science, and certainly not to the environment. Their altars are derivatives and overnight lending rates, of war and spying, of realpolitik and power.
Humanity, I do not think, is likely to survive this coming apocalypse without widespread civil uprisings against the current power establishment, and with it a sea change in what is viewed as unethical or sinful: unnecessary CO2 production being viewed as the great evil that is is, an existential threat to every extant political, religious, and economic group.
Instead we have the Koch brothers, Apple vs. Google flame wars, and the expenditure of almost unbelievable energies on wars and political positioning.
It's insane. I don't think humanity will survive into the 22nd century, and it will be our own damn fault for not rising up and removing those power structures that lead us to this point.
I don't know enough about climate science to be fully informed about impact, but this I know... A true carbon tax would be of such enormous magnitude, that it would compare with issues like class disparity. * If the pessimists are true, the deaths involved from climate change will draw Syria plus 9/11 plus many other wars.
* - On a side note, if done on a revenue neutral basis, it could be used to lower taxes for everyone, and provide relief for people who live a lower-carbon lifestyle.
By the way, not 1 word in the article, filled with all sorts of scary quotes, about diatoms and their role in CO2 sequestration.
South Korea has banned importation of all Japanese fish from 8 prefectures in the areas near Fukushima.
Except that's not possible, even for a Chernobyl-level release of radioactive material. You might as well suggest that Chernobyl made all food from Britain to Afghanistan inedible. We can detect material from Fukushima in the Pacific, but only because we have the technology to detect radiation in infinitesimal amounts.
see http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Latest-News-Wires/2011/0401/R...
And I have suggested nothing of the sort about Chernobyl rendering all food inedible... the type of accident, the fact it is water-borne rather than wind-borne, and that there is nearly 10 times the amount of nuclear material at Fukushima (1600 tons) vs Chernobyl (180 tons) make for a very different situation.
(I am not even including the spent fuel rods which Reuters amongst other news sources, claims are very dangerous if not handled properly: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/13/fukushima-nuclear-p... )
Besides, it has been more than 2 years and no covering of Fukushima has been done, whereas in Chernobyl they erected a cover over the reactor within 6 months.
What we do know as part of the historical record, is that the operator, TEPCO, has been lying or at least, shading the truth, about the severity of the situation all along.
This false view has been partly inflamed by an "environmental" website that posted an alarming picture of Fukushima radiation spreading across the Pacific -- except the posted picture was actually of the tsunami wave's height, not radiation, spreading across the Pacific.
Fukushima isn't going to release nearly enough radiation to poison the Pacific Ocean. Maybe it will release just enough radiation to force changes in the nuclear power industry. Nothing else has worked.
Japan's own testing showed contamination even in 2011, by cesium isotopes, some 2000km out to sea from Fukushima.
The answer is, that you don't know.
The map was bad, and the science was worse, but there's no meaningful connection between them, certainly not in my presentation.
> Japan's own testing showed contamination even in 2011, by cesium isotopes, some 2000km out to sea from Fukushima.
Yes, measurable with specialized equipment, but not significantly above the natural background radiation level.
This is not to diminish the seriousness of Fukushima -- it is very serious -- but it's not going to render the Pacific's fish unsafe. That's a fantasy.
> The answer is, that you don't know.
The figures are easy to collect and easy to interpret, and they have been. The claim that the Pacific's fish will become inedible is not connected to reality.
http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=83397&tid=3622&cid=94989
Quote: "By the time tuna are caught in the eastern Pacific, cesium levels in their flesh are 10-20 times lower than when they were off Fukushima. Moreover, the dose from Fukushima cesium is considered insignificant relative to the dose from naturally occurring polonium-210, which was 1000 times higher in fish samples studied, and both of these are much lower relative to other, more common sources, such as dental x-rays."
> The answer is, that you don't know.
You're the one who doesn't know, even though the information is easily accessed.
We do know, that they are not contained as of today.
We also know that some unknown amount of radioactive material of unknown composition (Iodine-131, Strontium-90, Cesium-137 - but in what ratio?) enters the atmosphere or the Pacific.
TEPCO does not know the numbers or the amount; and in fact, they hope but do not know for certain that the melted core is still on top of the 7 meter thick concrete slab which is under the pressure vessel that used to hold the core, but which was breached.
Really, your response is arrogant.
Because of Fukushima, Germany has decided to abandon nuclear power entirely. The German's aren't stupid --- they recognize what Fukushima means, i.e. nuclear power is incredibly difficult to make safe, and to an increasing number of people, simply not worth the risk. As a result, Germany is becoming a pioneer in alternative energy sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany
Quote: "Germany is the world's top photovoltaics (PV) installer, with a solar PV capacity of 34.499 gigawatts (GW) at the end of July 2013.[2] The German new solar PV installations increased by about 7.6 GW in 2012, and solar PV provided 18 TWh (billion kilowatt-hours) of electricity in 2011, about 3% of total electricity.[3] Some market analysts expect this could reach 25 percent by 2050.[4] Germany has a goal of producing 35% of electricity from renewable sources by 2020 and 100% by 2050."
We in the U.S. are far behind countries like Germany, and we have no excuse.
> Really, your response is arrogant.
Translation: "I know better than to argue using facts, so I will argue using opinions." Sadly noted.
> Are you reading what I actually wrote?
Are you reading what I have linked to? Are you prepared to challenge your own fantasies?
I disagree with that view, and view Fukushima as an event that is ongoing, and will continue to be ongoing until radiation from all sources is no longer entering the environment.
Sadly human history is that of destroying and changing the environment, unintended consequences, and constant failure to improve the human condition. I'm not sure removing the power structure will fix this, what is going to happen when those are removed? At least in some places in the world the power structures are all that stand between individuals and more destruction of the planet.
A lot of us often criticise processes that occur in small companies with very smart individuals. How do we have hope for better processes in a world with billions of people if we can't even get 200 people to work?
I think the core issue, as Dr. Harari put it, is that we have catapulted by an evolutionary accident to the top of the food chain but we have not had time to respond to that change. Therefore we have become the most destructive force in the history of this planet. We are an animal with better cognitive abilities. Let's hope that we can progress beyond this stage fast enough...
While I disagree that we've failed "to improve the human condition," I do think that, as a species, we're prone to taking the short view. We do what's expedient for us, and only for us, and only in the immediate timespan. We're fantastically bad about planning for the future. Throughout history this has actually benefitted us somehow; being creatures of convenience, fear, etc., has forced us to innovate. Now it's a question of whether we can innovate more quickly than we can fuck things up.
"We are an animal with better cognitive abilities. Let's hope that we can progress beyond this stage fast enough..."
I'm strangely optimistic. Not happy about the current situation, and pessimistic about the environment over the next 50-100 years. But I have hope that we'll figure this out. In a weird way, I have hope that this will finally be the undeniable, forced confrontation with our waste and excesses that will demand global cooperation and an end to petty, short-term bullshit. A big step forward for our species, forced upon us when our back's against the wall.
This doesn't mean Dr. Harari's point is invalid, but it may mean that the point is moot in praxis. We can't return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, so the only practical alternative is to continue on the technology treadmill, even if it diminishes quality of life in various ways. Over the last 30,000+ years, we don't seem to have found a way around this issue.
Well that's a dumb thing to say. Have you been going to barbecues with Harold Camping?
It'll be a different place in 87 years, sure. But humanity will be doing just fine, unless some whackjob launches off some nuclear weapons.
Insofar as humanity's long-term survival goes, though, no I do not think it is by any means a sure thing. The rate of CO2 emissions increases every year, parallel to the population. The "whackjobs" that are attacking are those who produce and profit from fossil fuels production and consumption. They already exist, and are not some far off, imaginary threat.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/12/02/1166704/-CO2-Emissi...
I have some bad news:
* The problem isn't pollution and CO2 release, at last not directly. The problem is the number of people doing the polluting and CO2 releasing.
* A solution would be to have a smaller worldwide birthrate. Easy to say.
* But any solution to the above point is very likely to collide with equality and fair play, as well as crashing into the "Population Paradox".
* The Population Paradox goes like this -- someone delivers a reasoned appeal to have fewer children, in the name of human survival and that of the earth. It's perfectly worded, and delivered to a huge audience.
* Sensitive, intelligent, compassionate listeners resolve to have fewer children.
* Insensitive, unintelligent, uncompassionate listeners don't -- they will have the usual number of children.
* That's the Population Paradox in a nutshell: because of evolution, over time people become less sensitive to the damage they cause. And history proves that political "solutions" aren't solutions at all, but disasters.
I hate to break this to you, but the biggest obstacle to a human solution to this problem is ... humans. Or nature, if you prefer, in the guise of natural selection.
EDIT: People, do try to avoid downvoting posts that are truthful but upsetting, solely on the ground that they're upsetting.
> Anyway, the question I think people should talk about -- and it's absolutely taboo -- is, how many people should there be? And I think it should be about 100 million or maybe 500 million. And then notice that a great many of these problems disappear. If you had 100 million people properly spread out, then if there's some garbage, you throw it away, preferably where you can't see it, and it will rot. Or you throw it into the ocean and some fish will benefit from it. The problem is, how many people should there be?
http://www.ted.com/talks/marvin_minsky_on_health_and_the_hum...
If only people were rational. But population doesn't follow rationality, it follows the Logistic function:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function
The Logistic function's left-hand side looks as flat as it does because there are too few organisms to support a larger growth rate.
The Logistic function's right-hand side looks as flat as it does because there are too many starving organisms to support a larger growth rate.
Welcome to natural selection. :)
I'm not even sure that we are in disagreement. Reducing the birth rate would be one (admittedly important) prong in a multi-prong approach. But given current environmental realities, reducing the birthrate, even drastically, would not have the desired impact on current CO2 levels.
Also, given humanity's energetic sexuality I do not think such a goal is realistic in practice, at least not enough to prevent apocalypse, and certainly not in the time frame required.
I hope you aren't talking about me. Population growth is the problem, but there is no solution, at least not one that civilized people would or should accept.
Maybe you should read my first post again. I don't wave my hands at population as though control is an easily applied remedy -- I state it as an insoluble problem.
In the above post I did explicitly point out that there are no political solutions to the population problem -- I called them disasters, and eugenics is certainly on the list of all-time political disasters.
The reason is simple -- nature is smarter than us. When evolution works, when nature produces something remarkable, it's not because we're smart, it's because nature is.
We're faced with a problem that's easy to state and impossible to solve. Virtually anything we can think to try would make the problem worse. We've proven that with our total mishandling of the antibiotic issue. We now know what can go wrong, we have the required information, but we don't seem to be able to craft an effective remedy.
Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methicillin-resistant_Staphyloc...
You mean, speaking as the product of random, undirected evolution by natural selection? My remarks were meant to suggest that evolution sometimes produces results that are so fantastic that poorly educated people are tempted to attribute the outcome to supernatural forces.
> I've heard of no convincing explanation of natural selection that describes it as an intentional force.
Who said anything about intention? Evolution by natural selection is a totally random process that selects the most fit genotype during a random selection process. We are the result -- everything we are, results from a process with no goal or even complex rules. What's truly amazing about evolution is how much results from such simple rules.
> On the contrary, nature is about as dumb as a rock.
Quite true -- and the smartest person, the most beautiful creature, the richest works of art, all sprang from nature "dumb as a rock". Which means nature is smarter than us. Maybe this time you'll understand what I'm trying to say.
No God, no designer, no wizard behind a curtain, just natural resources and natural selection. With the results that we see around us.
http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_and_the_magic_washing_...
In it Hans Rosling explains how something simple as making people able to use a washing machine to clean their clothes, will ultimately reduce population growth.
This is because the knock-on effects of that are that women are more able to educate themselves, more able to keep their kids alive as a result of education and thus the family has no need to reproduce massively.
The key is not to educate people about overpopulation, but to educate them effectively in how to remove the need for high reproduction while increasing their life quality.
This doesn't take the Population Paradox into account. I'm not saying such measures shouldn't be pursued. To do otherwise would be to abandon democratic principles and the uncontroversial advantages of education.
But it won't make any difference. When medical researchers discovered antibiotics, they believed that marked the end of bacterial infectious diseases. But that was not to be -- natural selection reacted to these new measures by choosing the tiny minority of bacteria that proved resistant to antibiotics, and we now face bacterial strains that are completely resistant to any available remedies (MRSA, tuberculosis and others).
In the same way, natural selection will react by these new measures by choosing the tiny minority of people that prove resistant to education and gender equality, and we will face human strains that are completely resistant to any available remedies.
In case anyone thinks this is some kind of veiled racist rant, I personally think the resistant strain will turn out to be white people of European descent. The reason? We can and do rationalize anything to ourselves -- for example, that environmental projects will save either us or the planet, in the face of uncontrolled population growth.
See, in the Population Paradox, it's not the people who get it that are the problem -- it's the people who don't, who can't, get it. And history proves that there's no political solution that doesn't turn out to be much worse than the problem itself.
"We have met the enemy, and he is us." -- Pogo
More here: http://arachnoid.com/evolution
Generally because of constant attempts to flip population numbers (oh no ! too many ! oh no ! too few ! oh no ! too many ! ...) the population numbers start to fluctuate wildly. Then at some point, they hit 0. Whoops.
Keep in mind that if you do seek to reduce birthrate, to have more than extremely small changes in the rates is likely to result in outcomes vastly different from what you envisioned. So far, the most famous of those rate-adjustment fuckups have been with rabbits, cats and kangaroos. If the same happened to people, we'd be in shit so deep you wouldn't believe it.
Because it's bullshit. The core of it is this statement:
> Insensitive, unintelligent, uncompassionate listeners don't -- they will have the usual number of children.
It entirely ignores the fact that having children and rearing them is WORK, EFFORT. People in poor countries do the work for a single reason: They NEED their kids to care for them in old age. As you remove this need, even dumb people will want to avoid having kids, because it's less work.
There's a reason the US fertility rate has stabilized to 2 childs per woman, and an overpopulated country like china is even below it, and it is that the complex real world pressures cause an equilibrium on their own.
In short: Don't just write massive posts, also ask "why?" a LOT more.
Yes, that explains why people who lived in the early agricultural societies, who had easy lives, also had a lot of children. It explains why, today, those with the highest birthrate end up becoming the majority, consistent with the principles of natural selection.
You need to realize something about natural selection -- the future population belongs to those with the highest birth rate, whoever and wherever they are. You should know this, but you clearly do not.
In Israel, arabs are outbreeding Jews and will eventually become an absolute majority:
Title: "High Arab birth rate in Israel raises concerns about country’s Jewish identity":
http://www.ibtimes.com/high-arab-birth-rate-israel-raises-co...
In the U.S., groups other than White descendants of Europeans are outbreeding them and will soon become an absolute majority, as they already are in California:
Title: "California: Whites are no longer the majority"
http://tv.msnbc.com/2013/07/01/california-whites-are-no-long...
I'm not complaining about the ethnic makeup of the future, I'm only making the point that natural selection blindly chooses those with the highest birthrate, and it is that group that becomes the future population of the world.
> Don't just write massive posts, also ask "why?" a LOT more.
It is you who needs to educate yourself on this issue. You posted opinions, I posted facts. You haven't the slightest idea what you're talking about.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_overpopulation
Quote: "As of September 10, 2013 the world's human population is estimated to be 7.11 billion by the United States Census Bureau, and over 7 billion by the United Nations. Most contemporary estimates for the carrying capacity of the Earth under existing conditions are between 4 billion and 16 billion. Depending on which estimate is used, human overpopulation may or may not have already occurred. Nevertheless, the rapid recent increase in human population is causing some concern. The population is expected to reach between 8 and 10.5 billion between the year 2040 and 2050. In May 2011, the United Nations increased the medium variant projections to 9.3 billion for 2050 and 10.1 billion for 2100."
When, where?
Also, your links only affirm what i already said. People with a perceived lack in the "secure future" department have more children.
Lastly, i never said overpopulation isn't a thing. It's unclear why you quote wikipedia.
Do note that the trails both start in 1960 and the child mortality axis is scaled logarithmically, meaning that at any time Yemen's child mortality was an order of magnitude larger than that of the USA. Also note that you can switch child mortality with expected lifespan and get pretty much the same curve.
My point is that the people of the 22nd century will probably be more alien to us than we are to people of the early 20th century. One innovation is all it takes to change paradigms, and those innovations are very difficult to see coming. Then something builds on top of that and something else on top of that, and next thing we know someone is getting filthy rich by removing carbon from the atmosphere using science fiction technology.
I believe that your pessimism is unfounded. Human beings have a long history of rising to a challenge. Even more so when there are fantastic sums of money to be made from a global economy. The safe bet is on technology and innovation, on unexpected ideas and discoveries that change the way we understand our problems. I'll admit that the environmental situation looks grim, but take heart in the fact that help is on the way.
And: HN has gotten so conspiracy crazy. For whatever Snowden did, he certainly changed the way that we view things in our corner of the internet. Privacy and liberty are genuinely important values and they should be fought for. But really, every thread? "the powers that be"? This too shall pass, I suppose.
Also, go back 4,000 years and say I am using secret knowledge to build a 4 man horseless carriage that's 5x as fast as a horse and does not need a driver that burns oil to run and they can picture something fairly close to what a automated car can do. People had no idea how animals worked inside when they domesticated them, that in no way prevented dogs from being useful.
This is true, but let's not use our past successes as an excuse to rest on our laurels. Right now humanity is firmly on track for ecological and economic disaster, and nature doesn't give two shits about our track record.
Our problems are serious, and we must attack them head-on. Not tomorrow. Now.
I deal with the struggle you mentioned all the time. In an ideal world, I would be channelling all my energy into addressing climate change. But I have to eat, so I channel my energy into the startup world with the hope that one day I can become more deeply involved in helping solve climate change.
1. Your language ("sin", "evil", "believe") indicates a major subjective component in what you're saying. As with everything subjective, you're probably aware that it's not provable with cold facts and logic, and it might justifiably be rejected by others' own subjectivity and take on facts.
2. A pervading feeling that the world is going to hell in a handbasket has proven seductive many times in history. Does any of this sound familiar:
"[They] claim that the current society and its rulers are corrupt, unjust, or otherwise wrong. They therefore believe they will be destroyed soon by a powerful force. The harmful nature of the status quo is considered intractable without the anticipated dramatic change"
Such world views have occurred often enough that there's a consecrated term for them: [1]. Sure, the different groups that held such beliefs differed from you in how they thought it would come to pass. But they differed from each other as well.
3. There's nothing necessarily theistic about millenarian beliefs. ("Official" churches have more often than not fought against them [3].) E.g. a lot of people in the 60s thought the apocalypse was due within two decades due to overpopulation.
4. Climate models have a simple, persuasive logic behind them. But that doesn't make them necessarily right. Malthusianism also had a seemingly bulletproof logic, yet the facts did not keep pace with it [4]. When the climate models turn out lacking precision [5], they also lose the force of scientific certainty. All we're left with is "the world is warming, we can't say how fast"; which is, of course, not a falsifiable belief [6].
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millenarianism#Theology
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_bomb
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennialism#Reformation_and_b...
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon%E2%80%93Ehrlich_wager
[5] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/...
(I can't find the source for the last one, but remember James Hanson mentioning it. Anyone know what I'm referring to)
Similarly, a factor such as carbonization of the oceans is very falsifiable. And experiments can measure the impacts on species individually.
We can't be certain about the future, but it seems like a fallacy to say that therefore worry is unjustified and Manichean. From my read of the evidence we've never faced a situation so objectively dire.
The ocean absorbs excess CO2 from the atmosphere. If it absorbs it as fast as we produce it, there will not be any warming, but a lot of acidification.
If it absorbs it much more slowly, then there will be a lot of warming but little acidification. The truth is somewhere in between.
What is the basis for the assumption that any ocean acidification won't suddenly disappear, because some algae species decided it is now sufficiently widespread and easy to acquire to use it for lunch ?
Plus it won't be catastrophic at all. Some very low-level species, like algae, will adapt by changing their internal chemistry. And because we eat them (through intermediaries) we will have effectively adapted too.
And don't you believe in evolution ? If this doesn't happen, then we die, and in that case we should die. The whole point of creation is that it adapts to these sort of things. Adapt or die. Works on a large scale as well as a small one.
I'm not sure absolute falsification is meaningful with this kind of prediction. We only have one system, very hard to falsify.
We can falsify elements of evidence which suggest one planetary state over another. That's about it.
Then it's not science.
A rapid unexplained significant decline in global temperatures over a decade despite increasing carbon use would clearly falsify the idea of AGW.
edit: or just a theory that explains global temperature trends better than the current climate models that use anthropogenic carbon emissions. Or data that conclusively overturns the record of recent warming.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...
No. The claim that AGW implies that mean global temperature will increase every single year is a naked straw man.
http://ete.cet.edu/gcc/style/images/uploads/GlobalSurfaceTem...
You can't stop/reverse something that's not happening, that's not even coherent.
If it's not happening you need better data showing it isn't happening or reasons why the current data is being massively misread.
If, all else being equal[1], global warming is happening and then stopped/reversed without anthropogenic carbon emissions going down then the case for rejecting AGW gets stronger. You'll need a replacement theory/model though. At what point does the new model become more convincing then the current one? Scientific consensus might be a good starting point.
[1] obviously if a bunch of volcanos or nuclear winter are responsible for the cooling that's not going to falsify the ideas behind AGW. For example, cooling in the 1940's.
"5 year period? 10? 20? 50?"
How much reversing are we talking about? We have 100+ years of warming to reverse. The fact that it's hard to easily falsify AGW isn't because AGW is unfalsifiable, it's because the science and data supporting AGW is enormous.
You'll need a replacement theory/model though.
Wait, what??
I. points out incoherence. {first he says show it isn't happening, then he assumes it's happening but it stops or reverses}
II. you could show warming is not happening this way (data)
III. if it was warming and then started reversing falsification might happen this way (new theory/model)
IV. additional considerations about falsification
No need to get hostile. I was referring to two possible outcomes: (1) global warming was never occurring (2) global warming was happening, but for what ever reason stopped or even reversed.
Make sense now?
How could you falsify the idea "things will continue to be fine"? I'm trying to assess if falsification is a good standard to use.
Sorry, a bit in a rush but that's the main idea. Expecting no specific change is the scientific default.
Rationalists are allowed to get emotional, and it's not a detriment to their cause when they do. While not every rationalist will, we need emotional people to make emotional responses, or we lose ground in these debates. We don't need to be calculated about it, but we shouldn't scorn it -- that's all.
Not picking on you, OP -- just expressing a gripe that I have.
http://plover.net/~bonds/positivism.html take this not as gospel, but as a starting point
From wikipedia's definition: Positivism is a philosophy of science based on the view that information derived from logical and mathematical treatments and reports of sensory experience is the exclusive source of all authoritative knowledge, and that there is valid knowledge (truth) only in scientific knowledge. Verified data received from the senses are known as empirical evidence.
Does global warming evidence satisfy the absolute standard of "empirical evidence" ? Well empirical evidence requires that data be produced according to the following process : 1) hypothesize 2) produce an experiment 3) accept/reject hypothesis (and goto 1, if possible)
Obviously experiments verifying global warming, or any significant part of climate theory are not possible, since we only have one earth and we can't quite produce another one with different levels. Nor are we allowed to assume that past data sufficiently isolates the factor being experimented with. Even if that were true, it is not possible to directly observe global warming without introducing potentially incorrect (or known incorrect) assumptions, like the central limit theorem.
A positivist would reject global warming, insisting only that we don't know, and that we can't know, because it's impossible to produce empirical evidence indicating either way. Since we don't even have direct measurements of the world getting warmer, only statistical proof, a positivist wouldn't even agree the world is warmer now than 100 years ago.
This sort of thing is why positivism was rejected as a viable philosophy. As your article described, this happened in programming, by the rejection of pure functional programming. But it also happened in science. The only remaining sciences that use positivism as a test of truth is first-order logic. Even second-order logic requires a less stringent standard.
On the issue of China, because their per capita emissions are so low, and any reasonable global cap and trade system would allocate CO2 emissions rights to countries on a per-capita basis (or at least per-capita indexed to some base year like 1960), China is not actually the bad guy, and under a fair cap and trade system they would be net sellers of CO2 credits not the other way around. However too many people are blinkered by anti-Sinitism to accept this fact.
One solution that works at a lower political level if densifying cities and making them walkable. See e.g. grist.org/carbon-zero/
I can reduce my energy use as far as possible. Apart from the online stuff I'm pretty low CO2. I can reduce, reuse, and recycle. (I need to get better at that.)
But what else can I do?
https://www.sunfunder.com/ https://joinmosaic.com/
Also, don't become too pessimistic. Even here, its pretty obvious that people tend to fall into two camps: doomers or deniers. Very few in between. I have spent the better part of a year struggling with depression related to the realization of the scale of environmental and sustainability issues facing civilization. I was a doomer, and some days, I still am. That said, I also see that the uptake of renewable energy is accelerating. Electric car sales were considered negligible two years ago, and now they are growing fast. Thats not to say that there aren't HUGE challenges facing us. But I also feel more hopeful that things will eventually change in time.
However, I'm not confident that individual contributions like that are very effective in a global economy based on perpetual growth and consumption.
Everyone who can vote has at least some power. Please vote for pro-science and reality-based candidates whenever possible.
We're well past the point where changing individual behaviour will be enough (and also, this strategy has been promoted over the last 30 years and largely failed - emissions are still rising). We need protests and actions that will lead to policy changes around the world and the shutdown of the fossil fuel industry.
The more obvious choice is to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels. How's that really been going all this time? Yeah that's what I thought. Rock? Meet Hard Place.
Not really. First you need to capture the CO2, then you need to send it to space. Considering the scales involved we're unable to do either.
No. The atmosphere is not isolated from space in way that could be addressed by venting (selective or not).
You could in principal isolate CO2 and launch it into space (long-term, that's an oxygen-depletion strategy, but, ignoring the resource requirements, it might be better than building it up in the atmosphere on some time scales), but when you consider the resource (including energy) costs of launching material into space, that's a pretty bad idea, especially given that if you can isolate it, you can sequester it on earth with the same atmospheric effect without launching it into space.
What happens then is that more CO2 is added, and it seems to be clear at this point that the plants are not keeping up - even losing ground due to land use change and deforestation.
Main carbon sinks are ocean uptake (the problem discussed in the article), weathering and the small amounts of organic matter that sink below the ground/sea/lakes without rotting (and which will create new coal and oil in time).
Apart from the first point, these processes happen on geologic time scales. (Also, shells of small sea animals, but again a miniscule factor. Those will be the next lime rocks.)
What you suggest is a new sink for carbon. However, it would probably cost more energy than can be gotten from fossil fuels because gravity. (Sry, too tired to run the calculations right now.)
The energy is there, there is ~89 petawatts of incoming solar hitting the ground and we apparently use ~18 terawatts and it looks technically achievable using current technology, so the main restriction would seem to be production capacity and capital costs.
Perhaps biggest, at least in the USA, there is the "Not in my backyard" syndrome. We all want clean energy, but we don't want the chance of a meltdown happening near us / our kids / our workplace.
Then there are the coal workers--there are a LOT of jobs tied up here, and it would be political suicide to tell a huge chunk of Southeast America that their job is going away.
Then there's the question of other countries. We can make all the changes we want here in the USA, but what do we do about China, Brazil, etc? Any developing country is going to want to trade emissions for growth. China's been doing it for decades and is just now starting to wonder if maybe they should clean up the air. We still breathe that same air, how do we get them not to foul it up? Do we encourage them to build nuclear reactors? Do we have to inspect them to make sure they're safe? Maybe they don't care if a meltdown happens every 5 years, but again, that fouls up our air/waters as well.
edit - The problem with most nuclear technology, is that if you are looking for a solution to global energy, it has to be something that you are not going to be scared of your enemy possessing. Nuclear might be cheaper to implement in some scenarios, but it is geopolitically screwed as a ubiquitous energy source.
[1] http://gizmodo.com/5350191/how-many-solar-panels-would-it-ta...
[1] 100 TW primary energy, 100 W/m^2 for solar irradiation on earth and 20% efficiency of the solar cells. Then you need 5e6 m^2.
[2] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-04-22/windmill-boom-curbs...
An article by MIT claims 14TW - http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/energy-scale-part1-1024.h... - and I've seen figures from 12TW to 20TW bandied around and I tend to use 18TW when running the numbers, but I have never seen an estimate as high as 100TW. Where's that figure from?
Edit: Additionally, the power of solar panels used is for England, not the Sahara. The purpose of the posting was essentially a back of the envelope calculation with pessimistic assumptions.
[1] http://yoshi-k.de/2008/09/die-plausibilitat-der-solarenergie... ( German)
Some communities are doing "community solar" where you essentially invest in a shared solar infrastructure. I'm planning on buying in to the one along the Seattle Waterfront: http://www.seattle.gov/light/solar/community.asp
Historic: http://io9.com/solar-powers-epic-price-drop-visualized-51044... Recent: http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/08/13/2455121/solar-ge...
Financing has helped with the capital costs. Many people can now get solar panels installed with no money down.
Yes, global warming has become the religion of leftists.
Interestingly enough most of those people are completely in denial about their own irrational zealotry.
Nice try though.
"Give to us clear vision that we may know where to stand and what to stand for—because unless we stand for something, we shall fall for anything."
Malcolm Muggeridge
At this point in time I'm more interested in the experiences of living and learning. I don't care enough about "ultimate" questions or answers to accept or reject them. I don't need to be right about this; tomorrow I might decide to be a hardcore fundamentalist X, for any value of X. When I talk to friends and family who have beliefs (or not) of any sort, I try to emphasize the good parts of their systems: those parts that seem the most likely to help them in the ways they need help. I also critique those concepts that don't seem likely to help, but only for that reason, not because they're "true" or not.
I've probably said too much; this is really off-topic for HN.
Both conservatives and liberals get very religious about what people put in their bodies; the two sides differ primarily on which orifice concerns them the most.
Leftists like Bill Gates, Newt Gingrich, John Hunstman, Frederick Smith, Susan Collins, Tim Pawlenty?
Cap and Trade was a free-market republican idea originally [1], but now that it's being advocated by the 'Leftists', it's become much more politicized.
A plurality of scientists agree that steps should be taken, the FUD denial is all paid for by a dozen companies who stand to profit from additional delays, yet it's somehow comparable to 'religion' to think that we should take action?
[1] - http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Presence-of-Min...
I doubt that the researchers involved are interested as much in the politics, but it's fair to say that they wouldn't be getting a fancy new media campaign if their results didn't support the movement. Remember Marcott et al?
...
"Remember Marcott et al?"
Sorry most of us dont frequent bonkers climate denialism blogs. There's nothing there to the foaming at the mouth over Marcott:
http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/04/climate-science-once-...
Unfortunately, almost all of the controversy was completely off-target, and a lot of it displayed a significant misunderstanding of the claims of the Marcott paper.