What a legend. Worth the 8 minutes.
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This is from the Miami Condo collapse thread but it‘s the same thing that has been happening with global warming for four decades. Someday there will be a similar rude awakening when people will realize we have been putting off for too long and it will be equally too late.
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The images and videos of this are kinda hard to make sense of. Like those platforms are huge, right? So it’s gotta be a massive amount of gas.
Visiting family back in the conservative suburbs of Omaha for the month and oh boy have I been bombarded with their fascist rhetoric.
I love when they say they don’t believe in global warming. It’s basically akin to saying I don’t believe 1+1 is 2. Dude, check a graph of global temps since 1880 and take note of the line moving upwards more quickly over the last couple decades. It’s an objective fact.
Just lead them down the path where they will tell you it was warm in the past. Then point out the only reason they know is because of climate scientists. When they agree, let them know those same scientists are the ones sounding the alarm about the future. Then laugh in their faces as they grapple with cognitive dissonance. It won’t make a difference but you’ll feel good about yourself.
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The tech bro hard on for nuclear power drives me absolutely bonkers.
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Eh. It’s the only solution I know of for baseload generation that doesn’t emit carbon or require us to cut power consumption, which honestly has no shot of happening with people being people.
We need nuclear like we need dozens of different technologies to get us out of the hole we’re in. And we had all better hope they pretty much all work as advertised or better because if not… they didn’t leave us any other outs.
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thanks bill gates.
problem with nuclear is that it’s expensive to build and electricity coming out of it isn’t any cheaper than fossils. it’s almost always delivered way later than schedule called for, not to mention regulartory and nimby problems, and in general disposal of waste is not yet solved.
i would be in favor more thorium and/or smaller scale modular-uranium reactors, and decades into the future fusion, but i am against building more reactors basically designed in the 80s-90s.
Yeah the old school reactors aren’t the solution we need. We need the next gen reactors or we’re fucked. I should be clear that’s what I mean when I say we need nuclear. That technology has to come a long way in a short amount of time or the whole human race is probably fucked.
Really glad to have been born in 1985. Feels super lucky. I guess I should be grateful it was good for a while, except I had a really bad childhood so lol me I guess.
I like nuclear, but I’m not in favor of building more reactors until we get the waste problem sorted.
I’m probably jaded, but I don’t see how you have a responsible nuclear program that is ever privately owned in a capitalist society as corrupt as this. Profit and shortcuts will always come before safety and well-being.
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luckily for us, doing nuclear privately isn’t really profitable like that (without corruption obv). during daylight hours there is going to be LOTS of solar, and the evening and night is a combination of high peak and deep trough. that’s close to the worst combination for economic value of a 100% steady output like nuclear, and that’s even before you add batteries to the grid.
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The issues around nuclear are real but the debate only make sense in comparison to the alternative. Too often people critique nuclear against some mystical source of energy that is totally safe. Of course, compared to said mystical safe energy source I wouldn’t choose nuclear.
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Interesting paper showed that about 100,000 lives were saved by nuclear industry over 40 years to 2000 ish, by replacing coal with nuclear.
Lots of deaths from coal, coal mining and coal pollution. Not many from nuclear.
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Existing nuclear is very expensive once you count all the externalities and should sort of be a last-resort option, but it would have to be in the mix for an energy policy to defeat climate change.
There’s a lot of what looks suspiciously like utopianism surrounding the idea of molten-salt thorium reactors and I feel like they might not deliver on the promise, but you know what would have been cool? If we’d made an effort to find out. China currently thinks they will have operational thorium reactors around 2030, which is way too late.
Send it to Mars with Elon.
The BBC’s role was more insidious. Its collaboration arose from a disastrous combination of gullibility, appeasement and scientific ignorance. It let the fossil fuel industry .
It gave the oil and tobacco companies just what they wanted: in the words of the American Petroleum Institute “victory will be achieved” when “recognition of uncertainties becomes part of the ‘conventional wisdom’”.
Last week, a group of us revealed what the BBC has been teaching children about climate breakdown. The GCSE module on BBC Bitesize listed the “positive” impacts of our global catastrophe. Among them were “more resources, such as oil, becoming available in places such as Alaska and Siberia when the ice melts”; “new tourist destinations becoming available” (welcome to Derby-on-Sea); and “warmer temperatures could lead to healthier outdoor lifestyles”.
Lol BBC.
A few years ago, after I gave a talk on water and climate change, I had an Arizona rancher come up and ask me if there would be enough water in the future for their livestock or if they should sell out and move north. This week, I received an email from a retiring doctor, who, acknowledging both their privileged economic situation and the personal nature of the decision, nevertheless asked if it “would it be more advantageous/safe to consider moving to coastal Oregon or Washington, rather than staying in southern California” because of rising seas, extreme heat and the growing threat of wildfires. At an Independence Day party this weekend, a couple asked me if they should move from Colorado to Michigan because of growing drought and water shortages in the western US.
I get these questions regularly and am both encouraged and dismayed by them. Encouraged because it suggests that the message about climate risks is finally getting out and people are beginning to reflect on the personal implications of those risks. Dismayed by the realization that the climate crisis is going to produce two classes of refugees: those with the freedom and financial resources to try, for a while at least, to flee from growing threats in advance, and those who will be left behind to suffer the consequences in the form of illness, death and destruction.
Some places will get pretty crowded when everyone who can starts to run.
Harley said the heat may have killed as many as a billion mussels and other sea creatures in the Salish Sea, which includes the Strait of Georgia, the Puget Sound, and the Strait of Juan de Fuca, but he said that was a very preliminary estimate.
“When we see mussel beds disappearing, they’re the main structuring species, so they’re almost like the trees in the forest that are providing a habitat for other species, so it’s really obvious when a mussel bed disappears,” he said. “When we start seeing die-offs of other smaller animals, because they’re moving around, because they’re not so dense, It’s not quite as obvious.”
He said the death of a mussel bed can cause “a cascading effect” on other species.
Imo its dire maybe too late. We already have these events and the< probably repeat itsself more often with brutal effects on flora and fauna. Biden is president for 6 month and hasnt done much. How quick could change realistically happen to reverse the effects we already see? You need to craft the laws then you need to implement them and the people have to adapt to them. It takes time, too much time I fear.
Even when they are trying to make legislation to advance “green” energy they fail miserably.
Ultimately, Europe is not reducing emissions by burning American trees — it’s just outsourcing them to the United States.
By failing to restrict biomass to the byproduct from manufacturing paper, furniture or lumber, Europe created a strong incentive to cut down whole trees and turn them into wood pellets.
North Carolina has been “ground zero” for the wood pellet industry, said Danna Smith, co-founder and executive director of the environmental advocacy group Dogwood Alliance. One hundred and sixty-four acres of the state’s forests are cut down by the biomass industry every day, according to an analysis by Key-Log Economics.
It’s one of the topics where our “model countries” in the North like Finland and Sweden are the drivers for this shitty legislation because they want to make money out of their woods.