Comment by blondie9x
8 years ago
Adaptation without mitigation will not be effective as the impacts worsen. Uncapped emissions and business as usual scenarios will cause outcomes that we will not be able to build ourselves out of.
We must reduce emissions and push for sustainable infrastructure and solutions, now.
We must adapt and we must also mitigate. Only through the combination of both efforts and through our determination and willingness to lead sustainable lifestyles will we be able to beat climate change. We must push for renewable energy, and technological solutions to efficiently use resources.
The policy coming out of the White House is against these efforts and we need to find a way to prevent them from hurting us and our posterity by postponing the efforts to transition to clean energy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/09/climate/clean-power-plan....
Nah, the problem is self-limiting. If global warming reduces the carrying capacity of the environment, people will die. Dead people don't use resources; their bodies are returned to the environment by decomposers, where they will provide fertilizer for trees and other plants, which will grow even more abundantly because of the enhanced CO2 levels. Eventually the earth reaches a new equilibrium at a somewhat higher temperature.
Most people don't want to die, and so we have a self-interested argument for not destroying our environment. But we're at the top of the food chain - well before there's a lasting impact on the earth's ability to sustain life, we'll all be dead. It's the height of hubris to believe we have the ability to effect lasting change on the earth's environment that won't disappear once we do.
It's not true that a stable equilibrium is always reached. It's also possible that irreversible changes are set into motion which shift the equilibrium so far away from livability that humans cannot survive.
See, for instance, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clathrate_gun_hypothesis
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This has been happening throughout history of Earth. Just look at all the ice ages (including the most recent so called little ice age).
Just cca 11,000 years ago, without any human intervention (nobody driving SUVs around back then), temperature has risen dramatically which caused massive ice sheets on top of North America and Europe to melt. This caused sea levels to rise by 120 meters, swallowing an area of land larger than China and Europe combined.
Until this day we still don't know what caused that (and it seems to be a reoccurring event as it has happened multiple times). The last time it happened it has caused extinction of most of megafauna (with some remnants surviving in Africa as it was least affected).
We are struggling to cope with sea levels rising by 1-2mm per year. Imagine if they rose by 120m in couple of years. All coastal mega cities - NYC, SF, Tokyo etc would be underwater completely.
It seems that we could be headed for a mass extinction, whether or not humans manage to survive thousands of years longer.
We aren’t going to entirely destroy life on the planet, which will eventually recover great diversity (speciation to fill new ecological niches in some new stable equilibrium) within a few million years after we’re gone, but it will look significantly different than what we are familiar with.
That’s not much consolation to people who feel attached to what human societies and cultures we have all spent a lot of effort developing.
This issue is too political for normal people to properly understand. I don't mean to offend you personally but there's little value in the feelings of someone who's been immersed in a social atmosphere of global warming propaganda, calls to action, and pressure to shut down dissenting voices. Even scientists can't safely publish work on positive effects of climate change or areas where it's not as bad as previously thought without littering their papers with defenses of "but it's still bad".
Your GP said "we must" do some things. No, there isn't a single obvious best answer. We don't know what the longer term effects will be and whether building protection will be enough or not - or enough to pay for their useful life. We don't have accurate science for that. Even if we did, we've still got hundreds of years to prepare, and importantly, future money to spend on it, which is cheaper than spending money today because of the time value of money. Every solution costs money and it's no obvious which one is cheaper.
Where did you get the mass extinction and "entirely destroy life on the planet" ideas? I know there are frequent extinctions of insects and large mammals, but that's been going on for centuries and is nothing to do with global warming. Global warming might exacerbate that but again, I don't think we have clear predictions of whole food chain collapses.
EDIT: I see you've toned down your comment from a strong belief to a suggestion of a possibility, so the main motivation of my reply doesn't really apply now.
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We're not, actually:
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/06/the-ends...
I used to think that we were, and when I read that article, I kept looking for flaws in its logic or counterexamples in other press. But ultimately, it interviews a real expert, and his logic is correct: we're drawn to flashy apex predators at the top of the food web, but these species spring in and out of existence all the time, and when it comes to the fossil record, they're barely a blip. If we were actually in a mass extinction, we would be worrying about cockroaches, ants, and seaweed going extinct, not tigers and rhinos. And of course, we wouldn't be here to observe it.
That's not an argument to completely fuck up the environment, since, like I mentioned, we'll be the first to go and most people have some sense of self-preservation, let alone preservation of the human species. It is a reminder of just how insignificant we actually are on a planetary scale, and of how our cognitive biases often lead us to think that we are more important or more powerful than we actually are.
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I hear the eco-nihilist party is polling excellently, pretty soon everyone will see the folly of trying to improve anything ever.
Too bad the people who die in the name of "carrying capacity"always tend to be brown and poor.
LOL. Sigh. Why does global warming attract this particular brand of sophistry all the time?
"President, what's your solution to the North Korean nukes?"
"Nothing to worry: the problem is self-limiting. If they start a nuclear war, billions will die, and then the survivors will be too poor to build any more nuclear weapons, so naturally there will be no more nuclear wars."
"But what about Puerto Rico? When are the aids coming?"
"The problem is self-limiting. If we do nothing, most of them will die or simply move to somewhere else, and then next time another hurricane hits there will be less people to die!"
The people most likely to die are the lowest emitters.
Remarkably blasé and somewhat nihilistic.
There are market forces behind renewables already. Wind and solar is getting cheaper and cheaper. Coal and oil are getting more expensive.
Why can’t Tokyo attempt both adaptation and mitigation? Which happens to be exactly what they’re doing.