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“Don’t Look Up” in Real Life

newtboy says...

Buy oceanfront property in S Florida, or farmland in N India and put your money where your mouth is….but know you can’t get flood/drought insurance. 🤦‍♂️

Yes, don’t look up is fiction, just like your religion. It still has lessons to teach.

TangledThorns said:

Don’t Look Up is fiction. Just like Climate Change.

Beyond Tulsa: The Secret History of Flooding Black Towns

luxintenebris says...

one of the very first stories ever read about a white community destroying a black community boiled down to simple envy.

two communities, one black, one white, lived adjacent to each other. the blacks were obstinately outcast from the larger white town and in turn, formed their own community.

in short, an economic downturn bankrupted many of the whites; the blacks were rock solid and continued to thrive.

the combination of blacks buying up failed white farmland; whites having to patronize black establishments for goods, and sheer unearned pride led the whites to "Tulsa" the black community.

the black folk did not reincorporate and dispersed. while the whites and their town barely hung on for a while, before it again failed. it only lives on as a name on old maps.

odd thing, even on modern maps there appears to be an area of expansive farmland where those towns once were. in comparison to the peppering of towns all along the state's roadways, that area is abnormally sparse. almost as if the map had a scar.

Shocking Data On China’s Economic Growth

notarobot says...

This is another example of Conservative thinking. All these guys are concerned with is the right now, and the near future. The next quarter. They have no idea what they're talking about here.

China is expecting their population to increase by 300 million in the next thirty-ish years.

I'll say that again for the folks at the back:

China is expecting their population to increase by one United States of America worth of people by the 2050's.

We're talking about a country with a government founded by a workers' revolution, that has had a widespread famine in living memory. (During the Great Leap era.) This isn't ancient history.

They cannot allow "market forces" to dictate how and where people live in North America where fertile fields are plowed under to make room for sprawling suburbs.

That's why they're building. That is why they are building UP.

Young families will not be able to just go any buy a house in the suburbs. China, for the most part doesn't build suburbs. Suburbs waste space.

They need existing farmland to be protected to manage their food security. They don't want a famine, that's how you get a revolution. They don't want a revolution.

They want stability.

China doesn't worry about next quarter because they planned for that a decade ago. It's the next decades that they're planning for now---a timeframe these Conservative talking heads are incapable of understanding.

Why Shell's Marketing is so Disgusting

newtboy says...

Yes, we're overpopulated. That doesn't invalidate my arguments.

I gave examples of multiple cultures that do what you claim is impossible. I never implied Americans would accept a lower standard of living, only that it's the right thing to strive for, and coming like it or not.

I grow 75% of the produce for two people on 3/4 acres.

Masses of people are going to die unnecessarily. Period. This could be avoided, but won't be. Our choice is accept less now, or have nothing later.

The dependence on fossil fuels for agriculture could be quartered with some minor changes with little drop in output. The western world won't make the investment needed to make that a reality. Also, the fossil fuel needed to make fertilizers is not a significant amount....maybe as little as 3%of natural gas produced.

There are millions of hungry people now without access to the artificially supported agriculture system who relied on natural sources that no longer exist. Aren't you concerned about them?

Name one I listed not supported by science.

Food shortages are preferable to no food.

The 3' estimate is old, based on estimates already proven miserably wrong. Like I said, Greenland is melting as a rate they predicted to not happen until 2075.

When tens of millions must flee low lying areas, and all low lying farmland is underwater, and much of the rest in drought or flood, what do you think happens?

By 2100, all estimates show us far past the tipping points where human input is no longer the driving force. Even the IPCC said we have until 2030 or so to cut emissions in half, and we are not lowering emissions, we're raising them. 50 years out is 75 years late....but better than never.....but we aren't on that path at all. Investment in fossil fuel systems continues to accelerate thanks to emerging third world nations like China and India making the same mistakes the Western world made, but in greater quantities.

The IPCC report said if we don't immediately cut emissions today, by half in 11 years and to zero in 30, then negative emissions for the next 50 that we're on track to hit 3-6C rise by 2100 and raising that estimated temperature rise daily....4C gives the 3' sea level rise by 2100 with current models, but they are woefully inadequate and have proven to be vast underestimation of actual melting already.

We may develop the necessary tech, we won't develop the will to implement it. Indeed, we're at that point today....have been for decades.

Yep, sure, no sacrifices needed. You can have it all and more and let the next guy pay the bill. What if we're the last guys in line?

Funny, isn't that what the Paris climate accord is? Sane leaders giving such stupidity serious consideration, because they understand it's not stupidity it's reality. Granted, they don't go nearly far enough, but they did something more than just claim it will be fixed in the future by something that doesn't exist today and ignoring human behavior and all trends, because using/having less is simply unacceptable.

We need a nice pandemic to cull us by 9/10 and a few intelligent Maos to drive us back to sustainability. We won't get either in time.

Why Shell's Marketing is so Disgusting

bcglorf says...

@newtboy,

If North America is to adopt the Amish lifestyle, how many acres of land can the entire continent support? The typical Amish family farm is something like 80 acres is it not? I believe adopting this nationwide as a 'solution' requires massive population downsizing...

If you want to look at the poorest conditions of people in the world and advocate that the poverty stricken regions with no access to fossil fuel industry are the path forward, I would ask how you anticipate selling that to the people of California as being in their best interests to adopt as their new standard of living...

You mention overpopulation as a problem, then invent the argument that I think we should just ignore that and make it worse. Instead I only pointed out that immediately abandoning fossil fuels overnight would impact that overpopulation problem as well. It's like you do agree on one level, then don't like the implications or something?

The massive productivity of modern agriculture is dependent on fossil fuel usage. Similarly, our global population is also dependent upon that agricultural output. I find it hard to believe those are not clearly both fact. Please do tell me if you disagree. One inescapable conclusion to those facts is that reducing fossil fuel usage needs to at least be done with sufficient caution that we don't break the global food supply chain, because hungry people do very, very bad things.

Then you least catastrophic events that ARE NOT supported by the science and un-ironically claim that it's me who is ignoring the science.

You even have the audacity to ask if I appreciate the impacts of massive global food shortages, after having earlier belittled my concern about exactly that!

The IPCC shows that even in an absolute worst case scenario of accelerating emissions for the next century an estimated maximum sea level rise of 3ft, yet you talk about loss of 'most' farmland to the oceans...

Here's where I stand. If we can move off gas powered cars to electric, and onto a power grid that is either nuclear, hydro or renewable based in the next 50 years, our emissions before 2100 will drop significantly from today's levels. I firmly believe we are already on a very good course to expect that to occur very organically, with superior electric cars, and cheaper nuclear power and battery storage enabling renewables as economical alternatives to fossil fuels.

That future places us onto the IPCC's better scenarios where emissions peak and then actually decrease steadily through the rest of the century.

I'm hardly advocating lets sit back and do nothing, I'm advocating let's build the technology to make the population we have move into a reduced emissions future. We are getting close on major points for it and think that's great.

What I think is very damaging to that idea, is panicky advice demanding that we must all make massive economic sacrifices as fast as possible, because I firmly believe trying to enact reductions that way, fast enough to make a difference over natural progress, guarantees catastrophic wars now. Thankfully, that is also why nobody in sane leadership will give an ounce of consideration to such stupidity either. You need a Stalin or Mao type in charge to drive that kind change.

Why Meat is the Best Worst Thing in the World

newtboy says...

Ha! Thanks for the link.
So, it's total b.s. as I read it.

First, then he misstated, he thinks we could feed 3.5 billion more people if we converted all land currently providing food for animals into successful industrial human farmland, which is not what he said at all. He said "if we just eat what we feed to animals", which is impossible insanity.

Second, they extrapolated by determining the approximate number of hectares being used to provide animal feed (likely including natural grasslands that aren't and cannot be planted or farmed), then extrapolating again using a formula that tells them the maximum number of people you can feed with successful aggressive multicrop farming of the same number of hectares, as if you can get the same maximum yield from any hectare....and ignoring that it takes huge amounts of fresh water to farm industrially, water that native grasslands don't need or have available.

eric3579 said:

He doesn't actually explain how that number comes about and what it means exactly. Where he pulled that statistic from, for anyone interested. from.http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/8/3/034015

New Rule: The Lesser of Two Evils

newtboy says...

It's like the doctors have given you second and third opinions and told you your liver is failing, you have to stop drinking or you'll die. You won't die the next time you have a beer, but every beer takes you farther over the edge. You can say the bartender who knows this is blameless for serving you, because others gave you the alcohol that destroyed your liver and it took longer than one night, or you can work from now and realize that he's intentionally killing you in hopes of a tip before you stumble outside and keel over.
Working from today, our planet's liver is failing, there no transplant, and Trump just reopened the bar and is serving everclear. Chances are he can't accelerate things so much that Florida submerges in the next 3 1/2 years, that doesn't mean he can't make things be far worse, beyond the point of possible mitigation.

You may hold that theory, but climatologists disagree. We are past, but still near the tipping point, and every ton of CO2 takes us farther from a survivable rise. It's ridiculous to think that we're already past holding at 3.5 degrees global rise (edit: the maximum assumed to be survivable by civilization), so we might as well make it 5 degrees.

Island nations, people who live South of New Orleans, and millions of others are already being displaced. It only takes one high tide (edit: or one extended drought) to wipe out low lying farmland permanently, and erosion has become an unstoppable force.

Trump is moving towards raising the level of multiple greenhouse gases we produce, Obama had us lowering those levels. Time can only tell what that actually means in tonnage, but 180 degree turnaround is awful enough. I agree, we also didn't do enough under Obama.

? Reversible means it can be reversed, not that it's easy. I don't know where you get that idea. Irreversible in this context means sending the temperature trend the other way before civilization becomes unsustainable. Eventually the planet should normalize unless we really follow Trump's lead wholeheartedly, then we might go full Venus. There WAS a magic bullet, being responsible with our atmosphere, but we argued over climate change until it was useless.

If, before it reverses (which it may not do at all, btw) the planet becomes inhospitable to humans, then for humans, it's irreversible. In 4 years we can do enough damage to 1) make the effects longer and harsher enough to make long term survivability impossible and or 2) go beyond the next tipping point where feedback loops reinforce each other, leading to a Venus like runaway greenhouse effect. We're damn close to massive methane releases (already happening) and if we don't avoid that, nothing will save civilization.
All that said, Clinton probably wouldn't do enough to avoid disaster either, but at least she accepted the science and agreed we should make efforts to mitigate the coming damages.

I'm definitely a pessimist, mostly because I understand the systems and human nature, and so I think we're totally hosed as a species.

MilkmanDan said:

I appreciate your argument, but I don't share your alarm.
^

Millennial Home Buyer

TheFreak says...

Here's a thought, instead of adding $600 billion dollars to the US military budget, we could use some of that money to push broadband out to every home in the US.

When every struggling post-boom town has high speed internet, we just need to push the dinosaurs who resist "work from home" out of senior management positions in the corporate world and we'll have a migration towards the smaller, more remote communities, where property values are much lower.

It will mean that sprawl subdivisions will become the new slums...but that just provides incentive to bulldoze those warts off the map and return the lost farmland.

The paradigm shift would spark massive economic growth.

Naw...we need more tactical stealth fighters.

Seed Matters

jmd says...

Saddly people need to eat and we arn't getting any richer. So until we can get the world's economy to unfuck itself, food will be grown as cheap and plentiful as possible. Maybe when enough farmland gets pushed to unusable status, we may see some change. Remember we are humans, we don't change things until AFTER something bad happens.

If Meat Eaters Acted Like Vegans

dannym3141 says...

@transmorpher

It's a little difficult to 'debate' your comment, because the points that you address to me are numbered but don't reference to specific parts of my post. That's probably my fault as i was releasing frustration haphazardly and sarcastically, and that sarcasm wasn't aimed at you. All i can do is try and sum up whether i think we agree or disagree overall.

Essentially everything is a question of 'taste', even for you. There's no escaping our nature, most of us don't drink our own piss, many of us won't swallow our own blood, almost all of us have a flavour that we can't abide because we were fed it as a child. So yes, our decisions are defined by taste. But taste is decided by the food that is available to people, within reasonable distance of their house, at a price they find affordable according to the society around them, from a range of food that is decided by society around them. Your average person does not have the luxury to walk around a high street supermarket selecting the most humane and delicious foods. People get what they can afford, what they understand, what they can prepare and what is available. Our ancestors ate chicken because of necessity of their own kind, their children are exposed to chicken through no fault of their own, fast forward a few generations, and thus chicken becomes an affordable, accessible staple. Can we reach a compromise here? It may not be necessary for chickens to die to feed the human race, but it may be necessary for some people to eat chicken today because of their particular life.

I don't like the use of the phrase 'if i can do it, i know anyone can'. I think it's a mistake to deal in certainties, especially pertaining to lifestyles that you can't possibly know about without having lived them. Are you one of the many homeless people accepting chicken soup from a stranger because it's nourishing, cheap and easy for a stranger to buy, and keeps you warm on the streets? Are you a single mother with coeliac disease, a grumpy teenager and picky toddler who has 20 minutes to get to the supermarket and get something cooking? Or one of the millions using foodbanks in the UK (to our shame) now? I don't think you're willfully turning a blind eye to those people, i'm not tugging heart strings to do you a disservice. Maybe you're just fortunate you not only have the choice, but you have such choice that you can't imagine a life without it. I won't budge an inch on this one, you can't know what people have to do, and we have to accept life is not ideal.

And within that idealism and choice problem we can include illnesses that once again in IDEAL situations could survive without dead animals, nevertheless find it necessary to eat what they can identify and feel safe with.

Yes, those damn gluten hipsters drive me round the bend but only because they make people think that a LITTLE gluten is ok, it makes people take the problem less seriously (see Tumblr feminism... JOKE).

I agree that we must look at what action we can take now - and that is why i keep reminding you that we are not in an ideal world. If the veganism argument is to succeed then you must suggest a reasonable pathway to go from how we are now to whatever situation you would prefer. My "ideal farm" description was just me demonstrating the problem - that you need to show us your blueprint for how we start again without killing animals and feeding everyone we have.

And on that subject, your suggestions need to be backed by real research, otherwise you don't have any real plan. "It's fair to say there is very little risk" is a nice bit of illustrative language but it is not backed by any fact or figure and so i'm compelled to do my Penn and Teller impression and call bullshit. As of right now, the life expectancy of humans is better than it has ever been. It is up to you to prove that changing the diet of 7 billion people will result in neutrality or improvement of health and longevity. That proof must come in the form of large statistical analyses and thorough science. I don't want to sound like i'm being a dick, but any time you state something like that as a fact or with certainty, it needs to be backed up by something. I'm not nit picking and asking for common knowledge to have a citation, but things like this do:

-- 70% of farmland claim
-- 'fair to say very little risk' claim
-- meat gives you cancer claim - i accept it may have a carcinogenic effect but i'll remind you so does breathing, joss-sticks, broccoli, apples and water
-- 'the impact to the planet would be immense' claim - in what way, and what would be the downsides in terms of economy, productivity, health, animal welfare (where are all the animals going to be sent to retire as of day 1?)
-- etc. etc.

Oh, and a cow might get its protein from plants, but it walks around a field all day eating grass, chewing the cud and having sloppy shits with 4 stomachs and enzymes that i don't have................. I'm a bit puzzled by this one... I probably can't survive on what an alligator or a goldfish eats, but i can survive on parts of an alligator or fish. I can't eat enough krill in a day to keep me going, but i can let a whale do it for me...?

More studies confirm Calcium still doesn't prevent fractures

MilkmanDan says...

OK, his studies beat my anecdotal bias.

...That being said, I will continue to eat breakfast cereal with milk pretty much every day (as I have since I was very very young), and be strongly tempted to attribute my own lack of having ever broken a bone to that.

The other anecdote I have in my favor is coming from a farm family that raised chickens. I grew up in a prairie grassland area (converted to irrigated farmland thanks to aquifer access), while my cousins lived a couple hours away in limestone hills ranchland. Both of our families raised free range chickens.

Our chickens produced very thin-shelled eggs, and displayed behavior to suggest they were calcium-deprived. For example, our chickens wouldn't cannibalize their own viable eggs, but if we threw empty shells to them they would fight to eat the shells. Same but to a lesser extent for leftover bones, etc. (I assume they fought less over these because bones are harder to near impossible to break down with a beak). On the other side of the table, we sometimes exchanged eggs with my cousins, and their chicken's eggs were always extremely thick-shelled and hard to crack open.

When I asked about that, my folks told me (and later my Biology teacher confirmed) that was because the sod/soil around my home and flora and fauna growing from it contained very little natural calcium. Chickens raised in our area would often be supplemented with commercial feed that contained extra calcium, but we let ours range for food and eat table scraps; almost never supplementing their food with any commercial stuff. But the limestone (aka calcium carbonate) around my cousin's house contained very high amounts of natural calcium, which was naturally infused into the plants / grains / insects that their chickens ate, giving them incredibly thick shells.

So, I guess that while calcium intake apparently doesn't have a very statistically significant impact on human bone growth, I think that it must have a much more significant role to play in egg thickness if you happen to be a chicken... At least if you compare extremes of low natural calcium diet versus extremely high natural calcium diet.

Doubt - How Deniers Win

bcglorf says...

This is getting old.
If production were simple, ie not requiring extra water and fertilizer, everyone who's hungry would farm, and there would be 'bush taca' (wild food) to gather and eat. You can't make a living stealing from subsistence farmers, you go hungry between farms that way.
I point out that historically you are wrong. I cite specific examples illustrating that you are wrong. Still you come back insisting that somehow men with guns can't starve people out who want to farm. That somehow the mass starvations under Stalin, Mao, and North Korea weren't even related to the mass theft at gunpoint of farm crops and land from farmers. You insist that it's not what is today stopping farmland from productivity in places like the DRC, Liberia, Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, and many more. I give up.

the tech to replace oil and coal and gas exist today
But also
we can't get to the moon with NASA today, or get on a concord
I give up.

78% less glacier doesn't mean ...
I think those numbers are small, and it's likely that there will be less than 22% of glaciers left in 100 years

I cited the actual science from the IPCC with their own projections. You take the very, very worst of the multiple scenarios the IPCC run. Not content with that, you take the most extreme range of error within that extreme scenario. Not content with that, you then inject your PERSONAL BELIEF that even that position of science is likely to optimistic.

I give up. If you refuse to listen to fact and reason that's up to you. Just don't pretend your any better than the other side ignoring the actual science just from a different end of the spectrum.

Doubt - How Deniers Win

bcglorf says...

Then slow down with theories of our impending demise, the IPCC doesn't support it. You want to talk about not denying the science, then you don't get to preach gloom and doom. Don't claim a large percentage of farmland is going to be lost to sea level rise by 2100. Don't claim coastlines are going to be pushed back 10 miles by a worst case 1 foot rise of sea level by 2100.

We are talking about advancements solving problems like a maximum sea level rise of a foot in the next 100 years, with best guesses being lower than that. I think it's modest to suggest our children's children will have figured out how to raise the dikes around places like New Orleans by a foot in the next 100 years.
The concord and moon trips are no longer happening because they are expensive. We can do them if we needed to, and more easily than the first time around. Finding out people aren't willing to pay the premium to shave an hour off their flight doesn't mean the technology no longer exists. Just because America no longer needs to prove they can lift massive quantities of nuclear warheads into orbit doesn't mean we couldn't still go to the moon again if it was needed. There's just no reason to do it, the tech exists still none the less.
Yes, there are social problems that confound the use of new technology. You fail to notice that is also the problem with feeding everybody. Food production isn't the problem, but rather the men with guns that control distribution. Stalin's mass starvation of millions was a social problem, not climate change or technology. Mao's was the same. North Koreas the same. All over Africa is the same. We have more than enough food, and plenty of charities work hard to send food over to places like Africa. Once the food gets there though the men with guns take most of it and people still starve. The reason Africa has so many crop failures is the violent displacement of the farmers. Exactly the same problem that saw millions starve in Russia, China and North Korea.
You are right that a changing climate could compound Africa's ag industry a bit, but it's a small hit compared to the violent displacement problem. Also, don't neglect to consider to impact of meaningful CO2 emission restrictions around the globe. A large scale global economic downturn probably means a lot more war, bloodshed, and starvation. If you do not reduce emissions enough to trigger that downturn and instead just 'marginally', you get stuck with both because Africa is still going to see virtually the same climate changes through the next hundred years.

And if you are worried about losing the glaciers in the Himalayas by 2100 there is very good reason to believe that's gonna be alright:
http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S41/39/84Q12/index.xml?section=topstories

newtboy said:

Slow down with the theories that our 'advancements' will solve all problems, not create more, because all the things you listed have been fairly disastrous in the long run, many being large parts of the issue at hand, climate change, and things like putting a man on the moon or traveling the globe in hours have gone backwards, meaning it was simpler to do either 35-45 years ago than it is today (we can't get to the moon with NASA today, or get on a concord). Assuming new tech will come along and solve the problems we can't solve today is wishful thinking, assuming they'll come with no strings attached means you aren't paying attention, all new tech is a double edged sword in one way or another.
IF humans could harness their tech, capital, and energy altruistically, yes, we could solve world hunger, disease, displacement, etc. Humans have never in history done that though.
We already can't feed a large percentage of the planet. If a large percentage of farmable land is lost to sea level rise (won't take much) and also a large population displaced by the same (a HUGE percentage of people live within 10 miles of a coast or estuary), we're screwed. It will mean less food, less land to grow food, more displaced people, less fresh water, fewer fisheries, etc. We can't solve a single one of these problems today. What evidence do you have we could solve it tomorrow, when conditions will be exponentially less favorable?
For instance, something like 1/3 of the population survives on glacial water. It's disappearing faster than predicted. There's simply no technology to solve that problem, even desalination doesn't work to get water into Nepal. People seem to like water and keeping their insides moist, how would you suggest we placate them?

Will Russia become a superpower?

Yogi says...

America expanded NATO and rearmed Germany a country that and invaded and nearly destroyed Russia twice in that century. We didn't keep to our treaties and we rarely ever do.

Russia was a weak superpower in the Cold War actually, they had been under rapid industrialization but were basically moving from being mostly farmland so it was superficial. The amount of power they had was greatly exaggerated. The thing is when you have the two LARGEST propaganda systems on Earth saying that Russia is indeed a very significant threat and that they are Socialist you can't really fight that with facts because people are too emotional about the situation.

If history says anything we will likely overstate Russias power and influence. Our "Containment" of them will really be more of a power grab to increase our influence all over the world.

What's interesting is the American public is kind of sick of this shit. You see the media and the administration and tons of people on the Hill talking about how awful Putin and Russia is. How they're going to take over places bit by bit and everything is going to hell, how terrible this is, but many in the public don't believe them and don't give a shit. We're sick of this lying crap, we don't believe the President when he says we have to invade a new place anymore and he looks like an idiot when everyone shuts him down.

So my prediction is the media will do more screaming, more wringing of hands and yelling at people about why don't they care about this or that. They'll make things up, sensationalize conflicts and basically use propaganda all while ignoring our crimes and situations we're responsible for.

This was long and pointless with no citations but I've decided I don't care, take this as my opinion and shove a salt lick down your throat.

Chinese bomb the frozen Yellow River, make it flow again

notarobot says...

Water is a serious issue for China. They can produce enough food for themselves at the moment, but it's estimated that the population of the country will increase by 200 million before it actually plateaus. The growing cities are eating up the best farmland in the nation, which has caused concerns. And desertification has been growing the Gobi desert too...



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