A good, even *quality idea....for 40+ years ago.

It took 100+ years to mortally wound the ocean by 1000 cuts. A bandaid on one wound is not going to turn it around, and we almost certainly aren't going to do it anyway. Countries that don't buy into the plan will simply harvest most of the fish left by those who do. This only works in small scale preserves that are guarded against poaching, often by a military.

Fish stocks are disappearing at an alarming rate, many going extinct. For those species, it's too late, and they are numerous, and they are largely the fish humans prefer. Many others are in such decline fishing for them is already off limits or severely curtailed, like commercial salmon, abalone, and crab fishing in California. Even those actions have failed to revive their populations year after year.

Diatoms, phytoplankton, and other similar biotas are at the limit of acidity and temperature they can tolerate, and they are the base of the ocean food web, feeding most fish when they are fry or larvae. The gasses in the atmosphere today will push diatoms over that precipice with a massive ocean extinction following soon afterwards, and we continue to add more greenhouse gases than we added yesterday every day.

Then there's habitat loss, coral reefs and kelp forests are both being decimated by temperature rise and acidification. Together they are food and habitat for 25%-50% of all ocean fish and shellfish.

Less over harvesting of the ocean is a good idea, but pretending it alone can save the oceans is pure fantasy. The ocean has absorbed as much as 90+% of the excess heat from global warming, causing oceanic heat waves that destroy habitats both directly and indirectly. There is NO plan that solves that problem, it's well beyond our capabilities under the best conditions with worldwide maximum efforts.

Just sayin'.

How do you solve something that's going apeshit in another country? For starters, in the case of Ukraine and Crimea, we keep our obligations we agreed to and support them with the U.S. military from day one when Russia invaded Crimea, and again in Ukraine proper. Had we done that as we specifically and unambiguously agreed to do when they gave up their nukes in return, the "civil war" (that's clearly a foreign invasion) wouldn't have occurred. That's an Obama administration failure, one that seriously harmed our international standing and trustworthiness, imo. If we had just put 100 Marines on the borders, Russia wouldn't have risked WW3 to invade either country.
My point is human political or boundary issues are nothing compared to intentionally reengineering the makeup of the atmosphere and getting enough cooperation to implement the desired (required) changes.

If she changes policy in the west, that will impact the East....and South. What America does is more often than not mirrored, especially when we're successful.
Her impact is more for the public than governments. Sway enough of the public, get them to vote on your issue, and politics will evolve at light speed.

Her delivery is exactly what's needed. An angry, educated young woman (they called me young man at 14, so don't balk), being unpleasant about having her future stolen makes exponentially more impact to the audience she targets than a thousand dry, factual, statistic rich talks by scientists. (Those are a dime a dozen today) Kids telling their parents that when the shit hits the fan, the kids are tossing them in the swollen river, not supporting them through their old age, is exactly the kick in the face many need. Kids of today will blame adults of today for the future they live in. Adults of today clearly don't consider that enough.

Something is better than nothing, she's demanding something. She's 16, do you expect her to have all the answers? (Some feasible solutions would be nice) She's well ahead of the curve just understanding the severity of the problem. I'm sure if we listened to all her speeches she gives some suggestions of action we could take to move in the right direction, but I doubt any one person has answers that solve every major effect of climate change, much less all the secondary and tertiary effects. I certainly don't expect her, at that age, to do more than demand those in power take it seriously and find solutions....and act. Chastising a major polluter who walked away from the weak, insufficient Paris agreement is a good start if it works, but I agree it's only barely a start.

You should consider it, she got millions to March for her cause worldwide. Even if she is a willing tool for some adults, it's clear more adults are tools for her. Consider, she isn't talking to kids, she's talking to adults, and some at least are listening to her, not her parents.

Personally it disturbs me that emotional delivery like this is required for many to even consider the issue beyond "what does my political party say on this issue, that's what I say too." I wish scientific issues like climate change were immune to politics, propaganda, and emotion, but they aren't. That's why we're hosed imo, humans are too willing to be deceived if the lie is more pleasant than reality, and denying there's a problem or need for change is quite pleasant to lazy Americans, far easier than facing facts and implementing difficult solutions....until it's not at least, by which time it's far too late.

How do you easily solve something thats going apeshit in another country, big or small? There is next to nothing the west can do to help other than alleviate the symptoms. Remember the cold war? What could the west do to help the people beyond the dividing line in countries that used to be democracies before WW2? Next to nothing.

Hong-Kong is currently part of the largest... just kidding.

What is her impact in China? Russia? India? Brazil? Indonesia? On people who make decisions? This is a real question.

I dont doubt her content, she seems well prepared and I have nothing to point out as obvious propaganda. Her delivery is off-putting. unpleasant, distracting and weird. Petulant child. Also she is pointing out the obvious without thinking of implementation. Normal millenial, just wants something.

The Republican party has been a good marketing tool for the fossil fuel industry so far, yes.

Adults tools in her hands? Seriously? I havent considered that and it frightens me.

I totally disagree. Hong Kong and Ukraine are 1) issues that would be easily solved with comparatively little effort and mostly just the will to stand against our enemies and with our allies, and 2) are both issues that directly effect only a small human population.

She's a marketing tool in the same sense that the entire Republican party is nothing more than a tool of the fossil fuel industry, except their science and tears are totally fraudulent and only self serving.

Have you considered that the adults around her may be tools in her hands?

@bcglorf Here's a tome for you....


It's certainly not (the only way). Converting to green energy sources stimulates the economy, it doesn't bankrupt it, and it makes it more efficient in the future thanks to lower energy costs. My solar system paid for itself in 8 years, giving me an expected 12 years of free electricity and hot water. Right wingers would tell you it will never pay for itself....utter bullshit.

Every gap in our knowledge I've ever seen that we have filled with data has made the estimates worse. Every one. Every IPCC report has raised the severity and shrunk the timeframe from the last report....but you stand on the last one that they admit was optimistic and incomplete by miles as if it's the final word and a gold standard. It just isn't. They themselves admit this.

The odds of catastrophic climate change is 100% in the next 0 years for many who have already died or been displaced by rising seas or famine or disease or lack of water or...... and that goes for all humanity in the next 50 because those who survive displacement will be refugees on the rest's doorsteps. Don't be ridiculous. If we found an asteroid guaranteed to hit in the next 50-100 years, and any possible solutions take a minimum of 50 years to implement with no surprises, and only then assuming we solve the myriad of technical issues we haven't solved in the last 100 years of trying and only if we can put the resources needed into a solution, not considering the constantly worsening barrage of smaller asteroids and the effects on resources and civilisation, we would put all our resources into solutions. That's where I think we are, except we still have many claiming there's no asteroid coming and those that already hit are fake news....including those in the highest offices making the decisions.

Every IPCC report has vastly underestimated their projections, they tell you they are doing it, only including data they are certain of, not new measurements or functions. They do not fill in the gaps, they leave them empty. Gaps like methane melt that could soon be more of a factor than human CO2, and 100% out of our control.

The AR5 report is so terrible, it was lambasted from day one as being incredibly naive and optimistic, and for not including what was then new data. Since its release, those complaints have been proven to be correct, in 5 years since its release ice melt rates have accelerated 60 years by their model. I wouldn't put a whit of confidence in it, it was terrible then, near criminally bad today. I'll take NOAA's estimates based on much newer science and guess that they, like nearly all others in the past, also don't know everything and are also likely underestimating wildly. Even the IPCC AR5 report includes the possibility of 3 ft rise by 2100 under their worst case (raised another 10% in this 2019 report, and expected to rise again by 2021, their next report), and their worst case models show less heat and melting than we are measuring already and doesn't include natural feedbacks because they can't model them accurately yet so just left them out (but noted they will have a large effect, but it's not quantitative yet so not included). Long and short, their worst case scenario is likely optimistic as reality already outpaces their worst case models.

Again, the economy benefits from new energy production in multiple ways. Exxon is not the global economy.

It took 100 years for the impact of our pollution to be felt by most (some still ignore it today). Even the short term features like methane take 25+ years to run their cycles, so what we do today takes that long to start working.

If people continue to drag their feet and challenge the science with supposition, insisting the best case scenario of optimistic studies are the worst we should plan for, we're doomed....and what they're doing is actually worse than that. The power plants built or under construction today put us much higher than 1.5 degree rise by 2100 with their expected emissions without ever building 1 more, and we're building more. Without fantastic scientific breakthroughs that may never come, breakthroughs your plan relies on for our survival, what we've already built puts us beyond the IPCC worst case in their operational lifetimes.

There's a problem with that...I'm good with using real science to identify them without political obstruction and confusion, the difference being we need to be prepared for decisive action once they're identified. So far, we have plans to develop those actions, but that's it. In the event of a "surprise" asteroid, we're done. We just hope they're rare.
This one, however, is an asteroid that is guaranteed to hit if we do nothing, some say hit in 30 years, some say 80. Only morons say it won't hit at all, do nothing.
Climate change is an asteroid/comet in our orbit that WILL hit earth. We are already being hit by ejecta from it's coma causing disasters for millions. You suggest we don't start building a defense until we are certain of it's exact tonnage and the date it will crash to earth because it's expensive and our data incomplete. That plan leaves us too late to change the trajectory. The IPCC said we need to deploy our system in 8-10 years to have a 30-60% chance of changing the trajectory under perfect conditions....you seem to say "wait, that's expensive, let's give it some time and ignore that deadline". I say even just a continent killer is bad enough to do whatever it takes to stop, because it's cheaper with less loss of life and infinitely less suffering than a 'wait and see exactly when it will kill us, we might have space elevators in 10 years so it might only kill 1/2 of us and the rest might survive that cometary winter in space (yes at exponentially higher cost and loss of life and ecology than developing the system today, but that won't be on my dime so Fuck it).' attitude.

@newtboy,

"bankrupting the global economy isn't the only way to plan for asteroids, now is it? What we have done is put some money towards developing solutions that could be implemented in time, with minor exceptions for super fast unknown asteroids we likely couldn't do much about if we did have a planetary defense system."

That's precisely my point though, bankrupting the global economy to reach negative net emissions tomorrow isn't the only way to plan for climate change either.

"the probability of disastrous climate change is near 100% if you take historic human behavior into account. For many it's already hit. It's only the severity and speed that are in question, and those estimates rise alarmingly with every bit of data we use to replace guesses in the equations.

And the odds of a catastrophic asteroid hit sometime in the future is near 100% too, it's just a question of how many millions of years Earth's luck holds out. Nor has every prediction or projection underestimated future warming so far, your flat wrong on that.

More to the point, the timing and severity of the changes we face is ABSOLUTELY relevant to the actions we need to take. Similarly, knowing the benefit of reducing our emissions by X% by a particular date is also extremely relevant to the actions we need to take. Unfortunately, it must be acknowledged that we have a lot of gaps and uncertainty in our knowledge on those points.

At minimum base level, we know changing global temperature on the whole will impact us negatively, that our CO2 emissions will make things warmer than they otherwise would be, and thus can easily conclude with certainty that the science dictates policies to reduce emissions are a good idea.

Now, you seem to be hell bent on demanding those policies take the shape of staring down the face of disaster 2-3 times worse than the IPCC AR5 reports absolute worst case scenario. I've got to tell you, that the uncertainties involved with that kind of prediction are too great to warrant an honest dictate that the facts support a need for economically devastating action being taken today. It's just not the case.

Even if green tech never takes over, if the next century sees us final solve fusion power and adoption of electric cars, we already get our emission outputs off the worst track scenario the IPCC projected in AR5. I honestly do believe that we will see non-fossil fuel electricity generation and electric cars as the norm in my lifetime, so I'm hopeful for a future that tracks better than the IPCC worst case. That doesn't mean we should do nothing, but it's more like we should take a similarly rational/practical approach to it like you see us doing with asteroids.

Another entrant in the incredibly long line of adaptation / adaptive learning / intelligent systems / artificial intelligence demonstrations that aren't. The agents act based on a set of rules / freedoms/constraints prescribed by a human. The agents "learn" based on the objective functions defined by the human. With enough iterations (how many times did the narrator say "millions" in the video) . Sure, it is a good demonstration of how adaptive learning works, but the hype-fog is getting a big thick and sickening folks. This is a very complex optimization problem being solved with impressive and current technologies, but it is certainly not behavioural intelligence.

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I am so glad I have no passion to solve the cube.

From NYT article https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/03/opinion/sunday/this-is-why-uma-thurman-is-angry.html?referer=https://t.co/3KI4YYryAt?amp=1

In the famous scene where she’s driving the blue convertible to kill Bill — the same one she put on Instagram on Thanksgiving — she was asked to do the driving herself.

But she had been led to believe by a teamster, she says, that the car, which had been reconfigured from a stick shift to an automatic, might not be working that well.

She says she insisted that she didn’t feel comfortable operating the car and would prefer a stunt person to do it. Producers say they do not recall her objecting.

“Quentin came in my trailer and didn’t like to hear no, like any director,” she says. “He was furious because I’d cost them a lot of time. But I was scared. He said: ‘I promise you the car is fine. It’s a straight piece of road.’” He persuaded her to do it, and instructed: “ ‘Hit 40 miles per hour or your hair won’t blow the right way and I’ll make you do it again.’ But that was a deathbox that I was in. The seat wasn’t screwed down properly. It was a sand road and it was not a straight road.” (Tarantino did not respond to requests for comment.)

Thurman then shows me the footage that she says has taken her 15 years to get. “Solving my own Nancy Drew mystery,” she says.

It’s from the point of view of a camera mounted to the back of the Karmann Ghia. It’s frightening to watch Thurman wrestle with the car, as it drifts off the road and smashes into a palm tree, her contorted torso heaving helplessly until crew members appear in the frame to pull her out of the wreckage. Tarantino leans in and Thurman flashes a relieved smile when she realizes that she can briefly stand.

Uma Thurman said she didn't want to drive this car. She said she had been warned that there were issues with it. She felt she had to do it anyway. It took her some 15 years to get footage of the crash. (Note: There is no audio.)
“The steering wheel was at my belly and my legs were jammed under me,” she says. “I felt this searing pain and thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m never going to walk again,’” she says. “When I came back from the hospital in a neck brace with my knees damaged and a large massive egg on my head and a concussion, I wanted to see the car and I was very upset. Quentin and I had an enormous fight, and I accused him of trying to kill me. And he was very angry at that, I guess understandably, because he didn’t feel he had tried to kill me.”

Even though their marriage was spiraling apart, Hawke immediately left the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky to fly to his wife’s side.

“I approached Quentin in very serious terms and told him that he had let Uma down as a director and as a friend,” he told me. He said he told Tarantino, “Hey, man, she is a great actress, not a stunt driver, and you know that.” Hawke added that the director “was very upset with himself and asked for my forgiveness.”

Two weeks after the crash, after trying to see the car and footage of the incident, she had her lawyer send a letter to Miramax, summarizing the event and reserving the right to sue.

Miramax offered to show her the footage if she signed a document “releasing them of any consequences of my future pain and suffering,” she says. She didn’t.

I did not solve it before the ending. I am a La-whoooo-zah-her.

@newtboy
@BSR

Think of it a bit like this (quote from Wilde)

"...surrounded by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation. It is inevitable that they should be strongly moved by all this. The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence; and, as I pointed out some time ago in an article on the function of criticism, it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought. Accordingly, with admirable, though misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not p. 3cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease.

They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor.

But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realized by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it"
--------------
And allow me to pop this out:
"the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves"
--------------


This is a stark/bleak example. I don't personally agree with it entirely. As I said, I bring cereal for my students and it's there and free and available unless I don't have time to get to the store or unless I myself am out of pocket change to buy extra food.


I don't ENTIRELY disagree though ----> Which is not to say that I agree.

I would say, YES there are structural changes that need to take place, but I also believe that assistance needs to be there to handle some kind of transition period while a problem is realized.

ALL of that being said

Here is a perfect example of a societal ill in our current system that needs to be addressed. It's a disgusting by-product of a structurally unsound student loan system.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Db9NaPDtAmU


Source: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1017/1017-h/1017-h.htm