Global Warming's Terrifying New Math

religion (abramics) play a HUGE role in the west's attitude to nature. The Bible tells man it can do what it likes to nature if it's in his own interest. Even in secular people these attitudes to nature found in the Bible, Hebrew, and Koran linger strongly.

I refute it thus! (bangs a walking stick against the pavement, glowers triumphantly)

xposts unless, of course, it leads to failed states, which would then be even more ironic because the same people who feared govt. intrusion would be found wishing for more of a govt. presence

in conclusion, *dives off a cliff*

I suppose the Assyrians, Hittites, Phonecians & Romans were highly mindful and reticent in their relationship with nature, going out of their way not to disrupt the balance of ecosystems. It took that nasty Bible to undo all their good work in that direction.

The Bible tells man it can do what it likes to nature if it's in his own interest.

of course, there are also ways to interpret it that lead to a pro-environment conclusion. my dad told me the other day that when people ask him what i do, he says "zach follows Genesis chapters 5 through 7, and tends the garden". putting aside that the garden tending part is in Ch. 2 (i believe), and also how frustrating it is that he won't just tell people what i do because he's embarrassed to tell his conservative friends who i work for, it does demonstrate that some religious people apparently find environmental inspiration in the bible. bill mckibben - a goddamn saint if one ever existed - is a really prominent example of that.

ty for that WaPo link Karl, that was exactly the kind of stuff I was wondering about w/r/t Cowspiracy. Mattresslessness, you might also want to check that out in terms of picking which meat to eat less of.

Man lentils are amazing -- someone should try to rebrand them so they're as hip as quinoa and kale

state of the art teaphuck ny times / wash post / j.chait etc. comment section trolling lately seems to be saying how awesome a warmer world will be. who pays these people?

Koch bros iirc

yes karl thanks for that link it was very enlightening!

lol yeah lentils are the best and cheap as hell

i am confident after the Katrina and Sandy "responses" that our Guvmint will handle an ongoing extinction event just fine.

To paraphrase Rumsfeld, you go to extinction with the government you've got, not the government you wish you had.

LOL @ ALEC

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/04/05/this-conservative-group-is-tired-of-being-accused-of-climate-denial-and-is-fighting-back/

more on vegetarianism/environment, this time with a focus on water:

http://www.vox.com/2015/4/10/8382165/the-environmental-case-for-eating-vegetarian-in-one-sentence

very good piece. somewhat confusingly on the almond issue, I just read this Mark Bittman piece linked to in the CA drought thread: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/14/opinion/making-sense-of-water.html?_r=0

heheh

But according to estimates by the Public Policy Institute of California, more water was used to grow almonds in 2013 than was used by all homes and businesses in San Francisco and Los Angeles put together. Even worse, most of those almonds are then exported — which means, effectively, that we are exporting water. Unless you’re the person or company making money off this deal, that’s just nuts.

http://i.imgur.com/ZbTlLWM.jpg

bittman knew that almonds aren't really nuts, but he couldn't resist

I seed what he did there

though agriculture is a surprisingly minuscule part of the state’s gross domestic product

I did not know this. Everything I've ever learned about american agriculture has been super confounding

CA has the largest GDP in the country

suck it, Texas

I was surprised not at the size of CA's GDP but rather that agriculture isn't a big part of it (only 2% according to Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_California#Sectors). Seeing the other sectors' percentages, I am less surprised now but still.

how about a ridiculous thought experiment, because hey it's tuesday afternoon.

imagine we colonize another planet. the planet is earthlike, except that it's unoccupied and pristine and isn't a shithole. (don't worry about the practicalities of space colonization. just imagine it's almost like an earth-annex, or a newly discovered continent, that's easy to get to and develop)

do you think that we'd colonize in a deliberately sustainable way, net-zero energy consumption if possible, taking care not to obliterate local biodiversity and to avoid overpopulation? or do you think we'd just trash it? would the answer change if there were numerous new planets to colonize?

Use it up, find another.

Mars is a close as it gets to Earthlike in our solar system, and it appears there's practically no fossil resources (save widespread underground water) there. Everything else would have to be brought in, so to be viable, any colony would of necessity be the most sustainable human community anywhere. Think Biosphere 2, only with more severe consequences than everyone starving and gasping for oxygen for the last year of the experiment.

It's kinda fortunate for the universe that by the time we have technology to colonize other worlds, we'll likely lack the physical resources or collective will to do so in any appreciable way. After the heat waves, droughts, famines, diseases, wars and oil/phosphate shortages of the bottleneck century, our remaining descendants will have to hunker down around the poles for a few millenia while dying algae pull the excess CO2 at the surface down to the abyss. And it will be for all intents impossible to have a repeat of the industrial revolution for at least a few million years, as all the easily accessible fossil fuels will have been extracted.

didnt the diamond book collapse discuss pacific island populations where the canoes just *stopped coming* and presumably the last residents could only look out to see and hope someone came. they didn't. the end.

i'm also going with the "using up one planet after another" hypothesis until Keir Dullea goes through that Stargate.

@ Hunt3r

In Collapse, that was the case for Rapa Nui/Easter Island and the Greenland Vikings. Diamond's "islands are snow bubble Earths" thesis is most concisely conveyed in an essay he wrote for Discover magazine in 1995. Caveat!, The site that's from was an important contributor in 2001 to unremitting depression. On the bright side, I've now reached Kübler-Ross-ian acceptance.

the pope is going to publish an encyclical letter on climate change

In a sign of what can be expected in the encyclical, Cardinal Turkson, who authored an early draft of the document, suggested it was a sin for “humans to degrade the integrity of earth by causing changes in its climate”.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/672de57c-edd0-11e4-90d2-00144feab7de.html#axzz3YnkIbuVg

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CEyYVomWEAAaoor.png

it could have been so much easier.

Black line represents current emissions?

Annual emissions history.

2° C is no longer a realistic possibility (save a near term pandemic), and our children will be forced inject sulfates into the stratosphere to slow (but not change the ultimate magnitude) of the impacts and runaway feedbacks. I'm living in a future scuba diving destination.

http://aeon.co/magazine/technology/could-we-reboot-civilisation-without-fossil-fuels/

inching ever-closer to thunderdome wheeeeeeee

Royal Dutch Shell has been accused of pursuing a strategy that would lead to potentially catastrophic climate change after an internal document acknowledged a global temperature rise of 4C, twice the level considered safe for the planet.

Shell accused of strategy risking catastrophic climate change

The campaign for U.S. Senate candidate Mike Beitiks begins with a message of comfort to his prospective constituents: “ISIS. Obamacare. Russia. The NSA. Wealth disparity. Immigration reform. Gun control. What do all of these hot issues for the 2016 election have in common? None of them matter because we’re all going to die.” Beitiks’ platform is singular: Halt government action until climate change is addressed. While the San Franciscan native is certain this message won’t get him elected, he’s hopeful that his extremely narrow campaign will at least offer consolation to those who fear human extinction, if only by letting them know they’re not alone.

http://www.theawl.com/2015/05/the-were-all-going-to-die-candidate

A plausible timeline of the distant future (BBC).

Idk, I find all of that kind of comforting.

Was surprised to see how close we are, relatively speaking, to the end of life on Earth

Even if we did everything right, our descendants would have ~800 million years, and C3 photosynthesis (most plants) only~ 500 million years, before the planet becomes uninhabitable due to sun's evolution. We're smack dab in the middle of a billion years between the oxygen crisis and snowball Earths, and the ultimate runaway greenhouse. On the other hand, if our descendants are still around then it should be straightforward to create some artificial ring systems (just deposit a few comets inside the Roche limit) or sun shades at Lagrange 1 to extend habitability.

Oh, is that all.

Sanpaku's link seems to be here

need to poll everyone's favorite timeline event. leaning toward 'local group finishes merging,' which would have to mean a local supergroup.

Either Laptop Dissolving at 100k or The Big Rip at 20 billion.

All matter is torn apart by the expansion of the universe. All distances become infinite - not good.

Pick your biblical plague:

‘Blob’ of warm Pacific water may intensify drought; threatens ecosystem
Red crabs swarm Southern California, linked to ‘warm blob’ in Pacific
Purple blob creatures invade California beaches
Toxic algae bloom might be largest ever

December 2014 record warm
Global oceans also record warm for 2014
2014 Earth's warmest year on record
Janaury 2015 second warmest on record
February 2015 second warmest February on record
March 2015 and first quarter of year warmest on record
April 2015 fourth warmest on record
May 2015 was warmest May on record
March–May and year-to-date also record warm

I thought I'd be inured to this by now, but I've a strong urge to assume the fetal position.

On the other hand, if our descendants are still around then it should be straightforward to create some artificial ring systems

Assumes humans will acquire ever-increasing amounts of cheap, readily-available power without inadvertently using that power to destroy every ecosystem on earth through ineptitude, greed and mismanagement. Long odds.

That won't happen. With just 2.3% annual growth in energy use, Earth reach boiling temperature on Earth in [400 short years](http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/). Far more likely that we eek along with the 500 or so million it will be possible to support after the Big Melt and with extensive phosphorus recycling, and with luck someone a few millenia down the line will invent the autonomous self-replicators we'd need to exploit solar energy on Mercury or volatiles in the trojans. Without some sort of autonomous self-replicators, exploiting any off-world resources is a fool's errand.

I highly recommend Paolo Bacigalupi's "The Water Knife." It's fiction, and a thriller, but it's an impressively imagined near-future where dwindling water supplies have turned the American southwest into a capitalist/cutthroat nightmare of water rights, militias, mass migration and black market economy. Really dark and horrific at times, but rooted in a frightening plausibility.

+1. Bacigalupi has been one of the better Cli-fi authors, though sometimes capturing a post-apocalyptic atmosphere outweighs characterization in his work. The Water Knife is set in a plausible noirish world of US Southwest states struggling for vital resources barely within constraints of Federal oversight. Only the fixation on physical copies of 130+ year old documents strained credulity.

His distant climate change in Thailand novel The Windup Girl and his two young adult novels Ship Breaker and The Drowned Cities are also vignettes in a shared awful post-industrial universe, and all fairly good. Don't bother with Zombie Baseball Beatdown or The Doubt Factory which were outside his milieu, though the latter was well intentioned. He hasn't written his masterpiece, yet.