Current climate change

[Thales]

31 minutes ago, BreakfastBurrito_007 said:

For example, there is the good idea to make companies responsible for the packaging that they sell with their product. At least in the USA, packaging is not made to be easily dismantled. If it were, it would be easy to sort one's recycling and improve efficiency there. I feel this should be a no-brainer and all it requires are some new, clever designs for packaging.

Think about the life expectancy of the wrapper and bag used for one McDonald's hamburger. It is perhaps 15 minutes long.

How Many Hamburgers Does McDonald's Sell Each Year?

Quote

McDonald's representatives say that the company sells a consistent daily average of 75 hamburgers a second. At that rate, the corporation sells roughly 225 million burgers worldwide every year.

Also don't forget paper napkins, drinks, and straws. All with short life expectancies.

[Thales]

32 minutes ago, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

You blamed Biden.

Biden ran on a platform of reducing hydrocarbon production. Biden has taken actual actions to reduce hydrocarbon production. In response to a question from a reporter about the growing hydrocarbon shortage The US Energy Secretary, Granholm, laughed in his face and said that OPEC should produce more oil. It is not OPEC's responsibility. It is up to the Biden administration to disclose a plan to the public as to how this growing problem will be fixed. No such plan was offered. The Biden administration is refusing to accept responsibility.

 

Since posting, I ran across this article from the Daily Mail Online. Video emerges of Biden's Soviet-born Comptroller of the Currency nominee saying that she wants oil and gas companies to go 'bankrupt to tackle climate change". This is obviously a more aggressive approach than I've previously heard.

Edited November 11, 2021 by Thales

[BreakfastBurrito_007]

22 minutes ago, Thales said:

Think about the life expectancy of the wrapper and bag used for one McDonald's hamburger. It is perhaps 15 minutes long.

How Many Hamburgers Does McDonald's Sell Each Year?

Also don't forget paper napkins, drinks, and straws. All with short life expectancies.

"short life expectancies" surely you mean their time in usage, and not the time they spend in existance?

Are you upset about the gas prices being super high, or the climate arrogance, or what? 

 

[Thales]

28 minutes ago, BreakfastBurrito_007 said:

short life expectancies" surely you mean their time in usage, and not the time they spend in existance?

Correct. I was interpreting live expectancy to be the same as time in usage.

28 minutes ago, BreakfastBurrito_007 said:

Are you upset about the gas prices being super high, or the climate arrogance, or what? 

 I  believe that those who shout the loudest (climate arrogance) have no intention of modifying their behavior to live by the climate change philosophy they (falsely) preach. John Kerry (who is currently (2021) the US’s first Special Presidential Envoy for Climate) arrogantly asserted that because he was a busy important privileged person that he was entitled to use a private jet. They are hypocrites.
The North Face is the new king of environmental hypocrisy

On the issue of gas prices, I do not like the price increase for obvious reasons. My primary concern is that the Biden administration is purposely creating these problems and is not being adequately challenged concerning what would be a better approach. I already pointed out the reaction of Granholm, who simply laughed at the reporter and implied "not our problem" even though it is.

I also just wrote in a prior post: "Biden's nominee to lead the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Saule Omarova, said she wanted to see oil and gas companies go 'bankrupt'". This is a clue that the Biden administration is intending to put an industry out of existence. That is wrong.

Edited November 11, 2021 by Thales

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

26 minutes ago, Thales said:

They are hypocrites

Your point is what then? Get on with it.

[BreakfastBurrito_007]

How did Biden create this oil shortage then? and why would he do that?

I also don't get how this is such a huge scandal.

Edited November 11, 2021 by BreakfastBurrito_007

[Palaiologos]

Without oil, solar/wind/geothermal/nuclear energy is not possible. Without oil, hydroelectric dams that provide the electricity would have never been possible. Reality is that these giant energy companies/think tanks/equity firms/etc that reap the profits know this extremely well. There's a thousand things a solar panel can't do, but a hydrocarbon being processed into one of thousands of by-products are what greases the gears of global "capitalism". No way to make electric vehicles with oil. No way to mine for raw materials to manufacture 95% of the things that surround us without oil. Sure as heck can't move nuclear waste from point A > point B without oil. All about energy transformations. Always has and always will regardless of the naivety of our species. Squirrel.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

31 minutes ago, Palaiologos said:

Without oil, solar/wind/geothermal/nuclear energy is not possible. Without oil, hydroelectric dams that provide the electricity would have never been possible. Reality is that these giant energy companies/think tanks/equity firms/etc that reap the profits know this extremely well. There's a thousand things a solar panel can't do, but a hydrocarbon being processed into one of thousands of by-products are what greases the gears of global "capitalism". No way to make electric vehicles with oil. No way to mine for raw materials to manufacture 95% of the things that surround us without oil. Sure as heck can't move nuclear waste from point A > point B without oil. All about energy transformations. Always has and always will regardless of the naivety of our species. Squirrel.

If we don't find a way, then the climate will give us a solution we won't like. Any realist knows we can't fully get rid of oil for many decades. But have you ever heard of a nurse crop? It may be, as you indicated, that we will need oil for the foreseeable future in order to continue to develop these next gen technologies and energy sources.

[Genava55]

5 hours ago, Thales said:

Want to solve the faux issue of climate change, reduce the number of people.

The goal is carbon neutrality, how do you think we should reach this by controlling the number of people?

And what do you mean by saying climate change is a faux issue?

[Thales]

5 hours ago, Genava55 said:

The goal is carbon neutrality, how do you think we should reach this by controlling the number of people?

And what do you mean by saying climate change is a faux issue?

Carbon neutrality and climate change are faux issues since they are meant to detract the gullible from the real environmental issues that we are facing. It is "wag the dog" mentality. Each person, through their mere existence, is a carbon consumer. That means that carbon has to be produced for them to exist. Reduce the number of people, then you need to produce less carbon to serve those people.

The current strategy of using existing and as yet undiscovered speculative technology to reduce a person's carbon footprint is actually cannibalization. That will also mean "rationing" resources generating carbon..  At some undefined (future) point, that will eventually mean a reduction to the standard of living and significant loss of freedom.

As a minor amusing editorial followup to the paragraph above, the production of food takes energy plus a variety of other resources, obesity is a common first world health problem. A while back, I recall seeing this headline: TAKING THE PIZZA Restaurants set to shrink sizes of pizzas and pies after health officials set new targets. Today, this is humorous, but it carries future troubling implications, suppose farming becomes restricted in its food production in the name of carbon neutrality and we also have health officials "protecting" us by limiting our caloric intake.

Let me toss-in this absurd hypothetical. You have a world of four people which has a carbon neutral footprint based on each person being allowed 25 carbon "credit" to maintain their lifestyle. So in this world the total available carbon credits is 100 to maintain a carbon neutral world. Should that imaginary world grow to 5 people, each person would only be allowed 20 carbon "credits". That would reduce the lifestyle of each person by 5 carbon units. What would a real-world translation mean? Less eating out, smaller cars, smaller houses, less clothes?????????

Edited November 11, 2021 by Thales

[Gurken Khan]

Getting rid of 1% of the pop could do a lot for the climate.

https://gettotext.com/oxfam-study-claims-the-super-rich-are-the-ecological-vandals/

[Genava55]

56 minutes ago, Thales said:

Carbon neutrality and climate change are faux issues since they are meant to detract the gullible from the real environmental issues that we are facing.

So climate change is not a real environmental issue? All the scientists and all the institutions (national, international, NGO etc) warning us on the issue are untelligent people and you have figured what are the real issues of our world?

56 minutes ago, Thales said:

Each person, through their mere existence, is a carbon consumer. That means that carbon has to be produced for them to exist. Reduce the number of people, then you need to produce less carbon to serve those people.

Good story. But practically how do you apply it in a real world? Let's take the USA or China, how do you manage to make them halving their populations in a few decades?

I agree with the idea of stopping world demographical growth to not make the issue more complicated but your idea of solving the issue by reducing the population is just silly and you didn't give it much thought. It is pure fantasy. 

56 minutes ago, Thales said:

The current strategy of using existing and as yet undiscovered speculative technology to reduce a person's carbon footprint is actually cannibalization. That will also mean "rationing" resources generating carbon..  At some undefined (future) point, that will eventually mean a reduction to the standard of living and significant loss of freedom.

Food for thought, nature found a way to do it. What you call "carbon consumers" in human societies have their equivalent in natural ecosystems. Every living beings rely on carbon for energy, they are consuming carbon all the time to live. But some living beings learnt to capture it and to store it from the atmosphere (photosynthesis). Natural carbon fluxes are much bigger than ours, the difference is that they are balanced. Ours are not. From an ecological pov, what we are doing right now is using the atmosphere as a landfill for our wastes (CO2, CH4). 

And your argument looks like you are saying that we want to compensate all our emissions with unproven technologies, but in reality that's only for the last percents of our emissions. Because we know that reducing the 10 last percents would be really difficult. However the first percents are quite easy to reduce. An example, almost 35% of world emissions are due to burning coal. You won't make me believe there isn't an alternative to coal. 

56 minutes ago, Thales said:

As a minor amusing editorial followup to the paragraph above, the production of food takes energy plus a variety of other resources, obesity is a common first world health problem. A while back, I recall seeing this headline: TAKING THE PIZZA Restaurants set to shrink sizes of pizzas and pies after health officials set new targets. Today, this is humorous, but it carries future troubling implications, suppose farming becomes restricted in its food production in the name of carbon neutrality and we also have health officials "protecting" us by limiting our caloric intake.

Second food for thought.

Let's imagine the following crazy assumptions:

- The problem won't solve itself magically.

- The emissions will continue to rise, making our dependancy to fossil fuels higher, making the problem harder to solve and reducing our carbon budget quicker.

- The time left to solve the problem before reaching a dangerous threshold of warming will shorten itself.

- The more time passes on, the more the general public will notice the effects and consequences of climate change.

- The more time passes on, the more we will talk about climate change in society (media, politics, scientific research, family)

 

And once those assumptions are understood, what are the odds that they will increase the possibility to have a dystopian policy in the future?

And if you don't understand my point, I will be more explicit. The idea that the problem will fade away is naive and there are much more chances we would live in a dystopian society when politicians are making last minute policy. Doing nothing today is the best you should do if you want to live in such societies.

 

Edited November 11, 2021 by Genava55

[artoo]

30 minutes ago, Genava55 said:

The idea that the problem will fade away is naive

The idea that humans would basically be undesirable "useless eaters" as eg Kissinger calls t it,  that humans would ruin the earth by contributing C02, so that allegedly sea levels rise, is preposterous and ridiculous.

If this entire nonsense of corruption and fraudulent "science" would be real, not even one of the multi-millionaire BS peddlers would buy insanely expensive property at coastal areas.

 

That said, please do yourself a favor and research C3 and C4 plants, bottom line, most plants starve, they came to being when CO2 levels were much higher. More CO2 means greener earth, means more food to grow for example in eg desert like areas.

 

Biggest contributor of C02 are the oceans at ~75%, do you want to cancel oceans? Human contribution is insignificant, and earth is not a closed system like "climate change" postulates.

Climate has always been changing, and will continue to do so, without any humans, it is cyclic.

[Genava55]

21 minutes ago, artoo said:

That said, please do yourself a favor and research C3 and C4 plants, bottom line, most plants starve, they came to being when CO2 levels were much higher. More CO2 means greener earth, means more food to grow for example in eg desert like areas.

I have a master degree in Earth science, I studied plant ecology in my curriculum and even plant histology. But thanks.

Every scientists know that CO2 facilitate photosynthesis and limitate water loss in plants. This is explicitely stated in IPCC reports. However, plants rely on other things to grow properly, notably nitrogen, phosphorous, potassium etc. And they also need water, light and a good range of temperatures. We know that climate change will impact those parameters as well and we know that in some cases the gain from CO2 fertilization won't be greater than the losses from water scarcity, interspecies competition etc.

This idea of CO2 being always good for plants comes from a kind people that have a relationship with plants exclusively through greenhouses. If you have a basic knowledge of plant ecology in natural system, you wouldn't make such gross generalization.

You mentioned C4 photosynthesis but this pathway has evolved to cope with lower CO2 during the last millions of years. This pathway gives a benefit to the plant in scarce situation. However in a world with higher CO2, this pathway is less suited. C4 plants struggle against C3 plants during higher CO2 levels because the latter are better to use the increase in CO2. They are outcompetiting the C4 most of the time. So it is not that simple, saying CO2 is good for plants is a no brainer claim from people believing they know better than those studying the topic.

[artoo]

11 minutes ago, Genava55 said:

So it is not that simple, saying CO2 is good for plants is a no brainer claim from people believing they know better than those studying the topic.

 It is that simple, you just don't get that this is all fraud serving a nefarious purpose, like population reduction, just like the plandemic, same perpetrators.

 

If you think, sending a mentally handicapped girl, by now young woman to do the dirty work, ok, so be it. I find it rotten they abuse a child for that, who drives other children nuts with fear porn.

So explain please, why the peddler of this nonsense buy property at coastal areas, or hang out on Epstein Island for example? Would be first loss with alleged sea level rise. Do you think the peddler of "climate warming" are good people, with noble motives who care about you?

I mean, come on, I am an adult, I don't believe in fairy tales.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

8 minutes ago, artoo said:

So explain please, why the peddler of this nonsense buy property at coastal areas, or hang out on Epstein Island for example? Would be first loss with alleged sea level rise. Do you think the peddler of "climate warming" are good people, with noble motives who care about you?

It's very simple. Sea level rise will be slow. Those who buy coastal property now think they'll be dead before the reckoning. The rich will also feel the least impact from climate upheaval, so they will play their reindeer games until the end. Human beings are quite myopic. It's the poor who will suffer the most, as is tradition.

[Genava55]

29 minutes ago, artoo said:

Biggest contributor of C02 are the oceans at ~75%, do you want to cancel oceans? Human contribution is insignificant, and earth is not a closed system like "climate change" postulates.

I see you need to learn some basics about the carbon cycle.

Let's start with a simplified figure, on this one you can see the size of the "reservoirs" (the quantity of carbon stored in different parts of the Earth from a systematic pov) and the scale of the fluxes (the annual fluxes from a reservoir to another):

As you can see, the arrow on the far left represents the burning of fossil fuels, a flux of carbon towards the atmosphere. The natural fluxes between the ocean and the atmosphere are indeed bigger than the burning of fossil fuels, however you should also notice they almost balance each others. And that's the difference I mentioned before, our contribution to the atmosphere is not balanced, we don't cause a flux in the other direction. While natural fluxes are going in both direction, photosynthesis and respiration are balancing each other, for example.

Some people still doesn't get how a smaller contribution can cause such a problem even after seeing this figure, so I will use an analogy to make it clearer. Imagine a bathtub with a tap contributing for X liters by minute and imagine the drain open evacuating the same amount, X liters by minute. The water level should be at equilibrium. The human contribution is like turning on the tap to release more liters by minute. If the drain is flowing slower than the tap, then the level rises.

And finally, can science prove it? Yes. Actually we can. Because not all CO2 is exactly the same. There are isotopes. Some isotopes are radioactive, most people know radiocarbon (¹⁴C) but there are stable isotopes as well (¹³C and ¹²C for example). And isotopic ratios varies between the reservoirs because chemical and biochemical processes discriminate CO2 made of certain isotopes (because different isotopes have different chemical bond strength). For example, inorganic carbon in the ocean is much richer in 13C isotopes than inorganic carbon in the atmosphere (CO2). So an increasing contribution from the ocean would make not only the atmospheric CO2 increasing but also the ratio of 13C isotopes. But we actually observe the reverse! Which is coherent with an increasing contribution from fossil fuels.

If you want more information on this topic, check this website: https://gml.noaa.gov/education/isotopes/

There are quite a lot of evidences supporting the idea that humanity is the cause of the increase in CO2. Maybe you should give the scientific community the benefit of the doubt and dive more in the literature.

[Gurken Khan]

32 minutes ago, artoo said:

If you think, sending a mentally handicapped girl

While I could agree on the mentally handicapped part I don't know why you need to call Drumpf a girl.

Donald Trump has described climate change as "a hoax," but petitioned to build a wall to protect one of "the greatest golf courses in the world" in Ireland from rising sea levels.

[LetswaveaBook]

2 hours ago, Gurken Khan said:

Getting rid of 1% of the pop could do a lot for the climate.

https://gettotext.com/oxfam-study-claims-the-super-rich-are-the-ecological-vandals/

@Lion.Kanzen what more than this is needed to change you into a marxist?

[Stan`]

Political discussions alway tend to digress and turn into a fight but if this discussion continues to be insulting and demeaning I will close it.

[Genava55]

1 hour ago, artoo said:

The idea that humans would basically be undesirable "useless eaters" as eg Kissinger calls t it,  that humans would ruin the earth by contributing C02, so that allegedly sea levels rise, is preposterous and ridiculous.

In 2021, you should have noticed by now that you don't need a doomsday scenario to have a huge socio-economical problem. Is COVID a threat to the very existence of humanity? No. Just like the Spanish flu or any other pandemic,  humanity has never been threatened by those. But still, pandemics are huge issues that have enormous impact on our lives. Climate change doesn't need to be a doomsday scenario to be a threat to our society and our lifestyle.

[Genava55]

8 minutes ago, LetswaveaBook said:

@Lion.Kanzen what more than this is needed to change you into a marxist?

By marxism you mean centralized state capitalism? I always thought that Chernobyl and the Aral Sea were enough to remember that marxism isn't better for the environment.

[wowgetoffyourcellphone]

5 minutes ago, Genava55 said:

By marxism you mean centralized state capitalism? I always thought that Chernobyl and the Aral Sea were enough to remember that marxism isn't better for the environment.

I think you full well know that the Soviet Union was not what Marx had in mind.

[Genava55]

Just now, wowgetoffyourcellphone said:

I think you full well know that the Soviet Union was not what Marx had in mind.

But is it really possible to get what Marx wanted without having it transformed into a corrupted and authoritarian state? Pardon my rhetorical question, but all the political party actually referring to marxism have the tendency to derive into authoritarian governments, limiting free speech and democratic rights.

I am not against social protection and such things. But the whole anti-capitalist rhetoric, I cannot understand it nor approve it.

[artoo]

33 minutes ago, Gurken Khan said:

While I could agree on the mentally handicapped part I don't know why you need to call Drumpf a girl.

I am not even sure I can call Greta a girl tbh.