makerofspoons

Welcome to being in your 20s in the USA.

We didn't care that we were not able to create 1:1 replacement jobs when we stopped making buggies and started making cars. I doubt the system will care this time either. I agree with you that convincing people to support these changes would be hard, but fortunately the economy will shift regardless of what the losers want. Electric vehicles are simply better, as are renewable energy sources and other growing technologies. What I'm more worried about is people voting for authoritarians that will artificially prop up dinosaur technology like coal power stations.

It will probably take until the first day most of the population goes without easy access to food. Once the markets are empty or too expensive due to crop failures and shortages, change will be swift. The question is whether that will be when it is too late.

Good luck to the poor park employees who are going to have to enforce this.

I worked at an amusement park when I was in high school that decided to ban smoking in the park one season and move the designated smoking area outside to the parking lot. I took so much abuse that summer trying to enforce the rules, dealing with upset guests coming in and out of the gates to have a smoke, forgetting items in their lockers and having to walk back, etc. Far more abuse than I took from guests in previous seasons over people smoking in the isolated smoking areas that already existed.

Have you ever moved to a new city... to escape sea level rise?

Have you ever taken a bath... but found there's not enough fresh water to go around?

Have you ever defended your home... from a gang of post-collapse cannibals?

I dunno the future feels less fun now.

"Early results suggest ECS values from some of the new CMIP6 climate models are higher than previous estimates, with early numbers being reported between 2.8C (pdf) and 5.8C. This compares with the previous coupled model intercomparison project (CMIP5), which reported values between 2.1C to 4.7C. The IPCC’s fifth assessment report(AR5) assessed ECS to be “likely” in the range 1.5C to 4.5C and “very unlikely” greater than 6C. (These terms are defined using the IPCC methodology.)"

Yikes.

I do wonder if having DS9 and Voyager available on so many streaming platforms right now cuts down on the incentive to remaster them. I'm not sure if a remaster would be enough of a draw to CBS All Access if you can already watch all the episodes on the other major streaming services, but perhaps Star Trek Discovery is successful enough they might consider it?

How much energy and water does it take to grow the cells? Are there any environmental benefits here or are the benefits primarily ethical? The article mentions the potential for decreased emissions but I've yet to see hard numbers about how much waste these products produce.

Smoking cigarettes and cigars was also once considered a delicious and ingrained part of many cultures. It is now clear that processed and red meats cause bowel cancer, and the environmental impacts they pose are also becoming more and more clear. Just like smoking ended in a generation I can definitely see people rejecting these products in the near future. Cultures change all the time.

Between the cancer risk posed by red and processed meat as well as the environmental damage, I expect meat consumption to go the way of smoking within a generation.

As we begin to appreciate the damage industrialization has brought about the future looks increasingly bleak.

If our species is to survive this century we have to get out of our cars. There is no way to sustainably build billions of electric cars- we need to consider that our existing ICE fleet needs to simply be retired and not replaced. Cars are one of the ultimate symbols of the consumption that needs to end if we are to address climate change. Between the asphalt and concrete needed to build infrastructure for them to the plastics, rubber, and metals used to manufacture them cars are rolling ecological disasters.

A much better solution is to introduce products to the market that make cows an unnecessary part of the process, such as lab grown meats and meat substitutes.

If we're not careful about the climate there might not be any people to laugh in 2500. Climate change is having a material impact on our society today. People are dying.

Why does the acceleration matter if we already regulate velocity?

Be mindful of where you get your coffee. Intensive coffee farming is environmentally destructive: https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/64/5/416/2754235

Absent urgent climate action wild coffee will likely be extinct by 2080 and farming will likely have to move regions or move indoors: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/coffee-cou...

Reducing the amount of land we use is one of the best ways to restore our ecosystems and combat climate change. As we engineer better crops with higher yields we should use less land, and as we develop vertical farming we should use even less. I would like to see government buyback programs for farms and reforestation on those properties in the future. In the US states like Ohio, Indiana, and other midwestern states were heavily deforested for agriculture in the past.

Microhousing would be just one development carbon taxing would bring about- if we began to price our food appropriately for example animal agriculture would largely come to an end except for luxuries, and that would do a great deal to cut emissions. Personal vehicles and flying would also become cost prohibitive. These are only a few of the ways taxing carbon could make our lifestyles more sustainable and shrink highly polluting sectors of our economy such that we reach a more sustainable amount of emissions per capita.

If we implemented a carbon pricing scheme and these panels allowed you to heat and cool your home with no or minimal draw off the grid, this would be an affordable option.

I worry that without the voting public waking up to the reality of how deep in the hole we already are we won't solve climate change at all. No near-future technology has the ability to reduce emissions by the amount we need to, besides widespread deployment of nuclear power which is also not politically viable. At some point people will, either willingly or by force (such as widespread natural disaster and famine), realize that things have to change.

It's not addressed in the article, but one of the big factors should be that having the massive living spaces we do now is not sustainable. If we want to curb climate change to 2 degrees, we need to get our emissions down to 2 tons per person per year by 2050, which means heating and cooling a large living space will need to become financially difficult. I predict we will see increasing demand for tiny and micro houses as legislation and economics catches up to the severity of the problem.

Micro-houses are the future of housing for everyone.

The massive living spaces we have now are not sustainable. By 2050 if we are to avoid 2 degrees of warming we need to be emitting 2 tons of carbon per year per person: http://insight.gbig.org/targeting-2-tons-closer-than-we-thin.... The average American today emits 11 tons, whereas 2 tons per person is closer to that of someone living in Brazil or Egypt.

In climates where you need to heat and cool a home, carbon taxes will make heating and cooling the living spaces we have now financially impossible. People will drive demand for these smaller living options out of necessity. Additionally, as we make consumption less and less economically attractive people will have fewer things to want to store anyway, and personal vehicles will likely no longer be something the average person will be able to afford or want so there will be less need for parking and garages.

The idea of buying a car as an investment that should retain value is totally alien to me. The thing starts to lose value as soon as you drive it off the lot. By the time you're done with it the car will be worth a couple hundred to a few thousand bucks. You agreed to buy at the listed price, and that's on you.

I would imagine if the US got into a cruise missile fight with China the US would be building ships and other equipment at a scale unseen since WW2 and compliance would probably not be the chief concern over winning the war.

35% of our food is pollinated by insects: https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/main/national/plan...

We are facing a food crunch in the near future- we will number 9-11 billion before population declines begin to set in at the same time climate change will be desertifying the worlds breadbasket, we are running out of fresh water, we are running out of top soil, and insect declines will threaten the angiosperms we eat. It is not clear how insect populations will respond to the 3-5 degrees of warming expected by the end of this century (based on RCP 8.5 and RCP 6.0 from the latest IPCC report).

Mid-century is shaping up to be one of the most important and tragic periods in human civilization, if it is to survive it. We should keep in mind we are always nine missed meals from anarchy.

City life in 10 years or so will be increasingly more expensive as food becomes increasingly expensive.

There is a triple threat to our way of producing food and the degree we have over extended ourselves:

- We are losing soil at a rate 10-40 times faster than it can be produced: https://www.mdpi.com/2077-0472/3/3/443/htm. This has led the UN FAO to speculate we may only have 60 years of harvests left, likely much less in areas of intensive farming like the UK where soils could be infertile in as little as 40 years: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/oct/24/uk-30-40...

- As much as 50-90% of our calories come from angiosperms which are dependent on insects: https://www.livescience.com/52752-what-if-all-insects-died.h.... Insect biomass as recently reported has plunged globally and they may be largely extinct by 2100: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/10/why-are-...

- As you noted, climate change will cause areas like the American midwest to experience extreme drought, desertify, and starve the populations that are dependent on it for food.

The problem comes down to people will not give up their lifestyle until they are starving, and by then it will be too late. How do you convince people that the sustainable way to live is to abandon the suburbs, the supermarkets, owning personal vehicles, air conditioning, clothes dryers, air travel, big box stores full of plastic junk - the list of wasteful things we have produced in the last century that needs to go away goes on and on. I'm guilty of partaking in it- I try to live sustainably but here I am making a living flipping 1's and 0's, burning fossil fuels on a machine that caused all sorts of environmental damage to produce. We live in a make-believe world and it's time to wake up.

I realize it- months don't really matter when we're talking about the survival of the human race. We have never produced a self-sustaining closed system. The space station, Biosphere 2, and not any of the other closed environments we have ever created managed to stay closed and succeed without outside intervention. We have invented nuclear energy, and then have chosen to not utilize it at scale. The other forms of electrical energy we have created are exactly the problem- we have now realized we were doomed the moment we built the first coal power stations and created this faustian bargain with our environment. We can grow tropical plants in Canada at a huge expense of energy and utilizing fertilizers produced by fossil fuels. This carbon-rich energy let us balloon our population so that now we can't just turn it off- we are stuck. It isn't hyperbole- the soil, the insects, and the marine life that sustain us are disappearing and we have no technology to survive without them.

Using Mark Lynas' book Six Degrees and the representative concentration pathways from the IPCC report long term for me is a century. The earliest we would see 5 degrees of warming would be around 2100 under RCP 8.5, the business-as-usual pathway. At that amount of warming we can expect a Cretaceous-like climate where methane eruptions destroy infrastructure in the northern hemisphere, super hurricanes flood the coasts, and hydrogen sulfide from the dead oceans suffocate terrestrial life. Of course, we likely are no longer on the business-as-usual pathway, we are taking some limited steps to mitigate climate change so I would say more likely long-term means 100-500 years, unless we significantly make changes to put us closer to the RCP 6.0 or RCP 4.5 pathways which are merely disastrous instead of fatal.

I mean literal extinction in the long-term. The current mass extinction we are in most closely resembles the Permian-Triassic extinction which was caused by a runaway greenhouse effect acidifying the oceans and warming the atmosphere: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permian–Triassic_extinction_ev.... It wiped out 96% of known species at the time: https://phys.org/news/2018-09-end-permian-extinction-earth-s...

I don't believe we will be able to develop a sustainable colony on Mars, at least not with present technology. Every attempt we have made to build a self-sustaining ecosystem, such as Biosphere 2, has failed.

Eerily when Biosphere 2 collapsed the insects died first, which is exactly what we are observing now globally.