Yes. What do you think those changes are. I think the answer is going to be different in implication regionally .
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Climate Change Debate (Invitation Only)
- Thread starter Laika
- Start date
Just some big picture stuff to keep the discussion flowing....
Methane accounts for only 14% of greenhouse gas emissions but is (four times?) more powerful than CO2 as a greenhouse gas.
Greenhouse gas emissions by source.
Contribution to greenhouse gas emissions by country.
http://www.snm.co.jp/recruit/lecture/biomass_02.html
Per capita contribution to Greenhouse gases by country.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_greenhouse_gas_emissions_per_capita
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It may be worth pointing out that our current agricultural practices are dependent on oil based pesticides and fertilizer, which we will have to transition away from as the oil runs out over this and the next century.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Green_Revolution
And we have a new invitee to the thread...
Come on in @Terese
If your watching this thread and want to join in on the discussion feel free to PM me. All "we" ask is that you stick to the science, don't use denial tactics (climate change isn't proven/real/man-made,etc) or deliberately de-rail the thread. We want to keep it productive for everyone's benifit.
Come on in @Terese
If your watching this thread and want to join in on the discussion feel free to PM me. All "we" ask is that you stick to the science, don't use denial tactics (climate change isn't proven/real/man-made,etc) or deliberately de-rail the thread. We want to keep it productive for everyone's benifit.
Nice opening post, and a good set of questions Laika.
Most Serious Implications
They're all so interlinked that it's kinda tough to pick. However, I think I'll go with food shortages. If we have food available, then we can deal with people being forced to move around, we can deal with many other issues. But if we can't feed everyone the **** hits the fan pretty resoundingly. It is likely that areas without the resources that get desertified soonest, or which are soonest damaged by sea level rise, will produce big flows of refugees other places are gonna have to deal with, and those people need to be kept fed by the host area. Both for humanitarian reasons of course and because if they're not you'll have a large amount of disaffected hungry people in your country, which is tinder for the match of social unrest.
Likelihood as per Current Understanding
It rather depends how good we are at dealing with it. There are many contributing factors that damage our food supplies. These include widespread meat consumption, increases in ozone levels (quite a serious one, actually), more unstable climate patterns, salinisation of the soil caused by poor irrigation practice and by sea level rise, pollution with chemicals from industry and mining, resistance to GM technologies in many of the richest nations and desertification.
But we can deal with it, "we have the technology". A combination of high-tech solutions, proliferation of urban farming, better organised management techniques and changes in diet for the general population can manage this one. And that gives us a buffer to deal with other problems. Like water wars, mass migration, flooding and whatever problems humans are making up for themselves irrelevant of climate change.
Best Responsive Solutions
As far as food shortages go, I've already gone over it briefly above. In terms of mitigating the impacts of climate change - reduction of emissions is not enough, I don't think. If we drastically reduce meat farming and other main sources of methane production, then we can wait the 12 years until it decays. But other stuff like CO2, we need to get scrubbing to reduce the effects.
In terms of renewable energy - we already have the tech, and it's getting cheaper and better quickly. This is another area where estimates have proven conservative. There are major countries where it is the majority power source, and in much of Africa it is what they're switching over to as a primary source of electricity. Hydroelectric is big in Africa, and I reckon solar rollout will happen. This is already in motion, we are in the process of turning renewable, we just need to hurry it the hell along. But come on, ****ing Brazil is 84% renewable in terms of power generation, and some major African countries like the DRC and Ethiopia are over 99%. In looking at the list, North Korea is at 71%. Well done North Korea.
Space-based solar power and fusion may or may not show up at some point in the next few decades. But we can deal with it without them anyway.
Cleaning things up will require both technological and management solutions. For example, we're going to need to do reforestation programs. The problems is that the land where we might want to plant forest is often used for other things - this is another impetus for us to look into a) changing dietary habits and b) increasing agricultural efficiency. I think we need to tax the hell out of meat. However, there remains a high timber demand, and il/legal logging is an ongoing problem in deforestation. Improved forestries would be good, as they might undercut the demand which loggers are filling. This is particularly a problem in Brazil and Indonesia, I think. But also, technological carbon sequestration projects are gonna be needed, and quite possibly methods to scrub other bad stuff out of the atmosphere. We have the basic understanding about how to go about developing and improving such technologies, it is there, and we're getting better at it. By the time governments and/or non-governmental agencies get off their butts and do something about it, we should have the tech available for them.
Outside of that, there's a need for infrastructure to deal with the societal impacts. In particular, this relates to migrations of peoples, and their absorption into new areas. It helps that many of the areas that people are going to be migrating to will be those with severely ageing populations, including Europe, North America, Japan. This is assuming current trends continue - in difficult times, birth rates tend to rise, and this may well prove true as people are forced to deal with sea level rise in New York City, London, Tokyo... So we'll see how that goes. But these countries are going to have to get better at dealing with immigration and also develop new migrant settlement strategies alongside those already in place - for example, there are areas of the USA and Canada which are perfectly liveable but which have very low populations on account of a dearth of jobs, opportunities and stuff to do - setting up new towns here and plonking internally-displaced persons and climate change refugees from other countries there in large numbers may well be a good idea.
Most Serious Implications
They're all so interlinked that it's kinda tough to pick. However, I think I'll go with food shortages. If we have food available, then we can deal with people being forced to move around, we can deal with many other issues. But if we can't feed everyone the **** hits the fan pretty resoundingly. It is likely that areas without the resources that get desertified soonest, or which are soonest damaged by sea level rise, will produce big flows of refugees other places are gonna have to deal with, and those people need to be kept fed by the host area. Both for humanitarian reasons of course and because if they're not you'll have a large amount of disaffected hungry people in your country, which is tinder for the match of social unrest.
Likelihood as per Current Understanding
It rather depends how good we are at dealing with it. There are many contributing factors that damage our food supplies. These include widespread meat consumption, increases in ozone levels (quite a serious one, actually), more unstable climate patterns, salinisation of the soil caused by poor irrigation practice and by sea level rise, pollution with chemicals from industry and mining, resistance to GM technologies in many of the richest nations and desertification.
But we can deal with it, "we have the technology". A combination of high-tech solutions, proliferation of urban farming, better organised management techniques and changes in diet for the general population can manage this one. And that gives us a buffer to deal with other problems. Like water wars, mass migration, flooding and whatever problems humans are making up for themselves irrelevant of climate change.
Best Responsive Solutions
As far as food shortages go, I've already gone over it briefly above. In terms of mitigating the impacts of climate change - reduction of emissions is not enough, I don't think. If we drastically reduce meat farming and other main sources of methane production, then we can wait the 12 years until it decays. But other stuff like CO2, we need to get scrubbing to reduce the effects.
In terms of renewable energy - we already have the tech, and it's getting cheaper and better quickly. This is another area where estimates have proven conservative. There are major countries where it is the majority power source, and in much of Africa it is what they're switching over to as a primary source of electricity. Hydroelectric is big in Africa, and I reckon solar rollout will happen. This is already in motion, we are in the process of turning renewable, we just need to hurry it the hell along. But come on, ****ing Brazil is 84% renewable in terms of power generation, and some major African countries like the DRC and Ethiopia are over 99%. In looking at the list, North Korea is at 71%. Well done North Korea.
Space-based solar power and fusion may or may not show up at some point in the next few decades. But we can deal with it without them anyway.
Cleaning things up will require both technological and management solutions. For example, we're going to need to do reforestation programs. The problems is that the land where we might want to plant forest is often used for other things - this is another impetus for us to look into a) changing dietary habits and b) increasing agricultural efficiency. I think we need to tax the hell out of meat. However, there remains a high timber demand, and il/legal logging is an ongoing problem in deforestation. Improved forestries would be good, as they might undercut the demand which loggers are filling. This is particularly a problem in Brazil and Indonesia, I think. But also, technological carbon sequestration projects are gonna be needed, and quite possibly methods to scrub other bad stuff out of the atmosphere. We have the basic understanding about how to go about developing and improving such technologies, it is there, and we're getting better at it. By the time governments and/or non-governmental agencies get off their butts and do something about it, we should have the tech available for them.
Outside of that, there's a need for infrastructure to deal with the societal impacts. In particular, this relates to migrations of peoples, and their absorption into new areas. It helps that many of the areas that people are going to be migrating to will be those with severely ageing populations, including Europe, North America, Japan. This is assuming current trends continue - in difficult times, birth rates tend to rise, and this may well prove true as people are forced to deal with sea level rise in New York City, London, Tokyo... So we'll see how that goes. But these countries are going to have to get better at dealing with immigration and also develop new migrant settlement strategies alongside those already in place - for example, there are areas of the USA and Canada which are perfectly liveable but which have very low populations on account of a dearth of jobs, opportunities and stuff to do - setting up new towns here and plonking internally-displaced persons and climate change refugees from other countries there in large numbers may well be a good idea.
Oh yeah, on what meat you're eating - you know what the least efficient use of land in producing meat is - grass-fed outdoor free range cattle. If you wanna keep it efficient and reduce our taxing of the land, go for intense battery farms. These are immensely cruel, so don't go for them either, and that's even more efficient as well.
I warn, I may well be pretty unashamed in my vegetarian preaching in this thread, because it's directly relevant.
I warn, I may well be pretty unashamed in my vegetarian preaching in this thread, because it's directly relevant.
Some cultural impacts that could be interesting - a future society that's into its stride with dealing with climate change will have a much less consumerist ethic, there'll likely be big global diasporas of Bengalis, Indonesians and Arabians, Japan will be multicultural, many countries may see a reversal of urbanisation...
Some cultural impacts that could be interesting - a future society that's into its stride with dealing with climate change will have a much less consumerist ethic, there'll likely be big global diasporas of Bengalis, Indonesians and Arabians, Japan will be multicultural, many countries may see a reversal of urbanisation...
I can easily forsee that climate change could produce a variety of philosophical, religious and political ideas in addition to scientific discoveries. Its such a "rich" sense of the powers of mankind unleashed to change nature and its own environment on a planet. whether for good or ill, we are going to spend alot of time thinking about it as we gain a new sense of the reality of these changes.
E.g. The idea of the Anthroprocene is a new way of imaging our relationship with the planet for example:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocene
Yeah, true, it will change our understanding of our own effect on the planet. Hopefully in more of an 'everything is connected and we must be responsible' way than a 'and God gave mankind dominion...' way.
Hmm, r.e. reducing timber demand and hence logging and deforestation, a shift to bamboo as a timber replacement's not a bad idea. It is able to fulfill the same roles in a heck of a lot of cases, while being much more environmentally friendly. Also you can make fabric with it, but that's not perfected yet. I suspect some genetic tweaking or industrial biotech will get us there on that.
EDIT: This has inspired me, I just ordered 60 bamboo seeds.
EDIT: This has inspired me, I just ordered 60 bamboo seeds.
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Big set of questions you have there, fella....so I'll start with some thoughts on the first.
Location of habitable zones will change.
What it takes to survive in many will change.
This will mean immediate changes.....
- Loss of species which cannot adapt.
- Migration of human populations.
- Inter & intra nation conflict because of the migration.
- Possible famine.
- Increased per capita economic burden due to inefficiencies imposed by change itself.
- Increased agricultural productivity in large northern land masses.
- Increased disease in warmer areas as tropical diseases expand.
Longer term changes....
- Population control (We're going to face limitations on how much breeding is allowed.)
- Loss of natural habitat as populations continue to expand.
- Economic burden of mitigating rising temperatures.
I'm most concerned for polar bears & penguins.
I like your sense of humor!
What kind of world do we want to live in?
There will be many different answers, which will make reaching any kind of solution difficult.
I like an expansive & diverse natural world...humans living in part of it, & leaving much of it wild.
We already have too many people, & have wiped out much life in the oceans. Tropical forests
are shrinking daily. As the planet warms, the taiga will be next to shrivel.
I know it poses a horrible problem for libertarians, but population control will happen. It's only
a question of when. The sooner we start, the better quality of life we'll leave for future generations.
Well someone's got to!
Evening folks, I am honored to be allowed here
to discuss this important topic...
Hopefully we have solutions among us ..
I have a couple to suggest if i can find a manufacturer .... but first i need sleep 3am here.
to discuss this important topic...
Hopefully we have solutions among us ..
I have a couple to suggest if i can find a manufacturer .... but first i need sleep 3am here.
i) What do you consider the most serious implications of climate change?
Humanity dying. It's a big fear of mine, we have much potential. And animals of course, life is very precious, 7 degrees higher would be absolutely devastating.
ii) how likely do you think it is in current climate science?
No idea, but regardless, 2015 is way too soon. 2100 is as well. 7 degrees more in 100 degrees? That's a snap in geological terms.
iii) what do you think are the best solutions to respond to climate change?
Alternative fuel, less consumerism, governments taking an active part in stopping this dreadful threat.
Humanity dying. It's a big fear of mine, we have much potential. And animals of course, life is very precious, 7 degrees higher would be absolutely devastating.
ii) how likely do you think it is in current climate science?
No idea, but regardless, 2015 is way too soon. 2100 is as well. 7 degrees more in 100 degrees? That's a snap in geological terms.
iii) what do you think are the best solutions to respond to climate change?
Alternative fuel, less consumerism, governments taking an active part in stopping this dreadful threat.
As well as having no real power at all, if my noggin is correct.
Not sure where to take this, but I'm going to try and find some information that may help keep the discussion moving. As most of RFs members are americans here's some projections that may prove useful.
Rising tempratures would threaten a return to "Dust Bowl" like conditions in the USA due to prolonged drought and unsustainable farming practices degrading the top soil.
http://uk.businessinsider.com/nasa-climate-change-dust-bowl-james-beard-conference-2015-10?r=US&IR=T
Prolonged droughts are already affecting California as water sources from meltwater in the rocky mountains dry up. Drought conditions threaten agriculture and are conducive to wild fires.
http://uk.businessinsider.com/california-drought-affect-on-food-supply-2014-5?op=1&r=US&IR=T
Over the course of the next two centuries, melting ice from the West Antartic Ice Sheet could raise sea levels by up to ten feet. The US would loose 28,800 square miles of land, currently home to 12.3 million people who would be displaced as environmental refugees and threatening major cities such as New York, Miami and New Orleans. The effect of rising sea levels will takes centuries and required sustained adaption along the coastline.
http://www.climatecentral.org/news/us-with-10-feet-of-sea-level-rise-17428
Heres a link to projections for New York:
http://ss2.climatecentral.org/#13/4...ions=0-RCP85-SLR&level=10&unit=feet&pois=show
As the seas warm, it could lead to intensifying hurricanes.
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warmin...rricanes-and-climate-change.html#.WDsES_TfWnM
I think thats as much as I can handle for now.
Rising tempratures would threaten a return to "Dust Bowl" like conditions in the USA due to prolonged drought and unsustainable farming practices degrading the top soil.
http://uk.businessinsider.com/nasa-climate-change-dust-bowl-james-beard-conference-2015-10?r=US&IR=T
Prolonged droughts are already affecting California as water sources from meltwater in the rocky mountains dry up. Drought conditions threaten agriculture and are conducive to wild fires.
http://uk.businessinsider.com/california-drought-affect-on-food-supply-2014-5?op=1&r=US&IR=T
Over the course of the next two centuries, melting ice from the West Antartic Ice Sheet could raise sea levels by up to ten feet. The US would loose 28,800 square miles of land, currently home to 12.3 million people who would be displaced as environmental refugees and threatening major cities such as New York, Miami and New Orleans. The effect of rising sea levels will takes centuries and required sustained adaption along the coastline.
http://www.climatecentral.org/news/us-with-10-feet-of-sea-level-rise-17428
Heres a link to projections for New York:
http://ss2.climatecentral.org/#13/4...ions=0-RCP85-SLR&level=10&unit=feet&pois=show
As the seas warm, it could lead to intensifying hurricanes.
http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warmin...rricanes-and-climate-change.html#.WDsES_TfWnM
I think thats as much as I can handle for now.