State of the (whole) world - 2022

[DArtagnan]

The most impactful things that we could change - but aren't - are related to very, very few people - and so any amount of educating the masses wouldn't do shit.

The rich and powerful in charge of the mega corporations (and who're driving governmental policies) that constitute something like 95% of the alterable and tangible causes are not lacking in education, they're lacking in non-human nature.

It's the same reason people keep drinking when they're alcoholics - or people keep eating sugar when they're fat. Because it's easier and more comfortable than the road to something better. You can't "educate" people away from being people - that's not happening.

The way to get those people to change is to present them with a you're-dying scenario - which is why diabetics often stop eating sugar.

This is the same scenario that will ultimately get countries to change in a non-laughably inadequate way in terms of policies - and actually prevent rich people from exploiting the corrupt systems. By then, though, it will be too late for millions and millions of people.

This ridiculous notion that the common man can change anything by not being a standard lemming consumer-type is a myth perpetuated by powerful people who don't want to change their ways and so they made everyone else the scapegoat, and set in motion the shame-game. Sure, it would be a (minor) improvement if the masses behaved more responsibly - but it wouldn't make a dent as far as climate change is concerned. At least not in time - at this point.

I see no way out of the coming disaster.

 

[OverIt]

The downhill roll of civilization started in the 1970s, governments deliberately stunted growth from there by reducing wages for scientists and increased the wages for the clowns(entertainers like actors) under the guise of "skill shortage". Also people got paid less and less over time We are in the age of business exploitation of lower class people.

History of people getting paid less:

WTF Happened In 1971?

"I don't believe we shall ever have a good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government, that is, we can't take it violently out of the hands of government, all we can do is by some sly roundabout way introduce something that they can't stop." - F.A. Hayek 1984…

wtfhappenedin1971.com

Also search engines deliberately hide stuff like this, you have to deliberately search for things like that using specific wording to find things like that. For example I am having the hardest time finding information on the wages for scientists in 1970s.

I can find the median salary for scientists now. Average scientist gets 92k a year while a medical scientist get 200k a year. Which is why you see lots on new medications every year but not much else in the science front.

 

[Capt. Huggy Face]

Google needs a slapdown, along with some other tech companies. They're just begging for it, and it's long overdue.

 

[GothicGothicness]

You are completely wrong if you don't think you'll be affected Dart, the climate crisis is now, and not 30 years into the future ( and I expect and hope you'll still be alive at that time anyway ) just look at Pakistan for example, and South of Europe. Denmark will be greatly affected in your lifetime as well. People are still underestimating the climate crisis so much that it is hard to believe, a lot of it is to blame on media I guess, they spend a lot more resources reporting about football ( which I do love) when they do to inform people about the greatest crisis humanity has faced. ( Because it doesn't earn them much money )

It is very surprising to see how little people care about the fact that we are making our own planet completely uninhabitable for human beings.

I think there are five main problems.

1. The majority of people are not able to understand what is happening even if people see a movie from Pakistan under water, and hear that 66 million people needs to be dislocated and 1000's are dying, they are not able to comprehend the impact of such a thing. Also it is too hard for many peoples brain to accept what is happening, and they prefer to live in "happy" denial.

2. A lot of people don't care until they are affected themselves, or think they'll not be affected.

3. People think it is hard to change there way of life, and that the quality of life would greatly decrease. But in reality the main problem is probably just that they value the wrong things, or think change is hard. It is not hard, for example my favorite food was beef, I decided to stop, and it was not hard ( I still eat beef, if it is the only option when someones treats for dinner or such ).

4. People who are denying climate change altogether, or have for example religious beliefs that god will fix it for us.

5. Lying politicians, like in Sweden one of the candidates for the election today is saying that building Nuclear Power plants will solve the climate crisis, it is hard for me to believe that people are so stupid as to vote for this man, who by the way is a complete idiot. But I guess a lot of people want to believe it because it makes it easier to live that way.

 

[OverIt]

How do you know that climate change hasn't existed before and that past data is wrong?

Paleoclimatology - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

I currently believe that the earth has always been in flux and behaves in cycles. And the data supports it. Problem is that anti climate change people only look at the last 200 years at which point the earth was in a cycle of heating up and look for causes of that. Which tends to be correlation than causation.

 

[Capt. Huggy Face]

I suspect you're both right. While we may move through cycles naturally, man definitely has an effect on those cycles. The evidence man contributes to the warming is quite clear to me.

 

[JDR13]

5. Lying politicians, like in Sweden one of the candidates for the election today is saying that building Nuclear Power plants will solve the climate crisis, it is hard for me to believe that people are so stupid as to vote for this man, who by the way is a complete idiot. But I guess a lot of people want to believe it because it makes it easier to live that way.

We're used to that level of stupidity over here. Are you sure he's not an American posing as a Swede?

 

[Capt. Huggy Face]

In defense of the crazy Swede, he's not the first environmentalist I've heard say that lately. Seems like it's becoming a trend. Fact is, nuclear energy hardly contributes to global warming at all, though there is that pesky problem with the disposal of the waste and plants being used as pawns in a war by a crazy dictator, accidents, etc.

 

[OverIt]

In defense of the crazy Swede, he's not the first environmentalist I've heard say that lately. Seems like it's becoming a trend. Fact is, nuclear energy hardly contributes to global warming at all, though there is that pesky problem with the disposal of the waste and plants being used as pawns in a war by a crazy dictator, accidents, etc.

I really dont understand that issue with waste disposal of nuclear energy. Surely there must be many abandoned mines they can dump the waste in right? If so why are they dumping it into lakes and oceans? The mind boggles.

 

[SveNitoR]

I really dont understand that issue with waste disposal of nuclear energy. Surely there must be many abandoned mines they can dump the waste in right? If so why are they dumping it into lakes and oceans? The mind boggles.

They don't dispose of it in lakes, at least not in any decent country.

The potential problem is that the halftime is so incredibly long (up to 24 000 years), that society, if it exists in a few thousand years, won't be able to read warning signs and the warning signs will break down. It will be very hard to guarantee good protection. This is an actual problem that scientists and engineers are working on: how do we keep our radioactive waste from leaking into the environment for the next 50 000 years or so. Abandoned mines aren't good enough, since they aren't made to contain the radioactivity and be resilient to disasters, terrorism and normal geological change.

 

[SveNitoR]

I suspect you're both right. While we may move through cycles naturally, man definitely has an effect on those cycles. The evidence man contributes to the warming is quite clear to me.

XKCD has a pretty good illustration of the difference between normal climate cycles and what has been going on since the industrialization. I'll see if I can find it.

Edit: Found it:

Earth Temperature Timeline

xkcd.com

 

[OverIt]

They don't dispose of it in lakes, at least not in any decent country.

The potential problem is that the halftime is so incredibly long (up to 24 000 years), that society, if it exists in a few thousand years, won't be able to read warning signs and the warning signs will break down. It will be very hard to guarantee good protection. This is an actual problem that scientists and engineers are working on: how do we keep our radioactive waste from leaking into the environment for the next 50 000 years or so. Abandoned mines aren't good enough, since they aren't made to contain the radioactivity and be resilient to disasters, terrorism and normal geological change.

That is only if you are enriching to nuclear bomb level. When they enrich to nuclear power plant levels its only about 50 years. For example Chernobyl is fine now. It is a tourism spot now.

Chernobyl nuclear disaster site tourism: Visitor numbers surge after hit HBO TV series

Ukraine's Chernobyl might be on track to become 2019's surprise hit tourism destination.

www.traveller.com.au

XKCD has a pretty good illustration of the difference between normal climate cycles and what has been going on since the industrialization. I'll see if I can find it.

Edit: Found it:

Earth Temperature Timeline

xkcd.com

That is lying by omission. They deliberately start at the low point of the cycle. We are currently in the spike upwards in heat. The previous cycles peak was actually hotter or at our current point depending on which data you refer to.

This one shows we are at the same point:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254935256_Lisiecki_L_E_Raymo_M_E_A_Pliocene-Pleistocene_stack_of_57_globally_distributed_benthic_18O_records_Paleoceanography_20_PA1003

This one shows the last peak being hotter:

More Information : European Science Foundation

Multiple methods showing variability of earths climate:

 

[Capt. Huggy Face]

Cool graphs.

Anyone want to hear something completely unscientific? I'll try to keep it short, with no promises, but I'm aware of my recent longwindedness. I've been home sick with my boy.

That one graph show a pretty remarkable turn warmer at the end and predicted for the future. I have no idea for certain as to the cause, but here's my unscientific observation about weather in the desert.

It does indeed rain in the desert. Rain can be a real event in the desert. Because it doesn't happen all that often, it's very noticeable. Storms in my particular desert, at least, have always been violent. That's just how it's been since I moved here 20 years ago or so. Storms out here are like Mother Nature's frustrated orgasm, a sneeze that never quite happens so often. When it does, it's often violent, if not very destructive beyond flooded roads. The storm cells are small and intense and always have been.

Our monsoon season, or rainy season, is different, entirely different. For 2-4 weeks every year it rains a lot more than usual.

Twenty years ago, our monsoon season was like clockwork. Every afternoon, it would rain consistently -- a nice steady, drenching rain -- for at least a couple hours, often stretching into the night.

Starting about 12 years ago, the monsoon nearly dried up. Yeah, it rained a bit more than the rest of the year, but it was no longer a drenching rain so badly needed by the desert. It was the scattered, violent storms.

The past two summers, the monsoon has returned about halfway to what oldtimer locals who have lived here their whole lives call normal, the steady monsoons I first saw 20 years ago. While our monsoon has snapped back halfway in frequency, our monsoon is still more scattered and more violent. Despite the half reprieve of the last couple years, the local water table remains dangerously low in the Southwest for the number of people living here, and the wildlife suffers, too.

I say all this to illustrate the observable effects of the Earth warming. Perhaps no one needed it, while our plague of wildfires lately. But these things don't snap back so quickly, at least in terms of man's frenetic, frantic pace, relatively speaking to Mother Earth's, likely due to the relatively short time he is allowed to be here. I say all this to scold myself for my blithe, callous damage assessment of earlier, as I flatter myself that I can hover above it all, simply observing.

We haven't even discussed the effects of drought. I'd hardly know where to begin. I may know well enough soon enough.

While I imagine myself hovering above a devastated boardwalk in my relatively rich country and looking toward the future, the picture is not the same everywhere. I have heard the president of the Maldives explain calmly and with eloquence the apparently bleak future of his country. Ive never been to the Maldives, but it looks nice as hell in photos. I've done a little scuba diving, and the place is well known by avid divers. It inspired me to splice together this weak homage to the world below sea level that is so very different than our own, yet the similarities are there:

It'd be a real shame to lose that. I guess the folks in the Maldives will be gaining a whole lot of that. But that's their problem, right? But where would I launch my boat from to visit it? There's a lot of nice history in Venice, it appears from photos, though I've never seen it. It'd be a shame to lose that place, as well, and I guess a lot of people live there, too. I don't care so much about a boardwalk in San Diego, though I like the place and do visit, but that's just my little corner of the world. I suspect San Diego is on stronger footing than the Maldives, in more ways than one.

Is this what's needed in the bigger picture, a thinning of the human herd? I don't know, but a whole lot of people will suffer.

 

[SveNitoR]

That is only if you are enriching to nuclear bomb level. When they enrich to nuclear power plant levels its only about 50 years. For example Chernobyl is fine now. It is a tourism spot now.

Chernobyl nuclear disaster site tourism: Visitor numbers surge after hit HBO TV series

Ukraine's Chernobyl might be on track to become 2019's surprise hit tourism destination.

www.traveller.com.au

That is lying by omission. They deliberately start at the low point of the cycle. We are currently in the spike upwards in heat. The previous cycles peak was actually hotter or at our current point depending on which data you refer to.

This one shows we are at the same point:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254935256_Lisiecki_L_E_Raymo_M_E_A_Pliocene-Pleistocene_stack_of_57_globally_distributed_benthic_18O_records_Paleoceanography_20_PA1003

This one shows the last peak being hotter:

More Information : European Science Foundation

Multiple methods showing variability of earths climate:

He very clearly shows the timescale, where he starts and the difference between temperature change the last 20k years and the quick increase the last 200 years. He even has examples of estimated temporary spikes, which might disappear through the estimated mean temperatures. Even the picture you link shows the extremety of change if the projections turn out to be true.

Why don't you include temperature from the formation of earth a few billion years earlier? Are you lying by omission?

Edit:
Regarding nuclear waste: There's a huuuge difference between the slightly radioactive ground after dust from Chernobyl fell to the ground and and the waste products after it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste

Edit 2:
If you are really interested IAEA have a lot of information about the long term measures required. https://www.iaea.org/topics/radioactive-waste-and-spent-fuel-management

 

[OverIt]

He very clearly shows the timescale, where he starts and the difference between temperature change the last 20k years and the quick increase the last 200 years. He even has examples of estimated temporary spikes, which might disappear through the estimated mean temperatures. Even the picture you link shows the extremety of change if the projections turn out to be true.

Why don't you include temperature from the formation of earth a few billion years earlier? Are you lying by omission?

Edit: Regarding nuclear waste: There's a huuuge difference between the slightly radioactive ground after dust from Chernobyl fell to the ground and and the waste products after it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioactive_waste

Yes if the projections from IPCC turn out to be true. But that seems impossible at this point.

So far the temperature increase is roughly 1 degree for 90 years. Also the hockey stick seems to conflict with actual satellite data. I mean it would only be true if you start from the first dip and up the the final peak. Dip to dip or peak to peak is half of that.

Its also looks like countries are polluting the same as ever:

Carbon Dioxide Peaked In 2022 At Levels Not Seen For Millions Of Years

Carbon dioxide measured at NOAA’s Mauna Loa Atmospheric Baseline Observatory peaked for 2022 at 421 parts per million in May, pushing the atmosphere further into territory not seen for millions of years.

www.forbes.com

As for nuclear waste, I dont know because I am not a nuclear scientist but i found this:

Compare radioactivity to uranium ore
It is impossible to ask for zero radioactivity because our world and our universe has notable low level radioactivity going on constantly. We would be comparing to a theoretical zero-radiation ideal that does not exist. A better measure of radioactivity is to compare our waste to the radioactivity of natural uranium ore dug up from the ground. After all, this exists in nature and it is the original source of our materials. Using this metric, we can estimate that in general it will take a few hundred years for our current stockpiles of used fuel to be at around the same level of activity as natural uranium ore. In short, the nuclear fuel can return to being as radioactively dangerous as natural uranium ore in few hundred years, rather than millions.

Does nuclear waste last millions of years? | Vision of Earth

 

[SveNitoR]

Yes if the projections from IPCC turn out to be true. But that seems impossible at this point.

So far the temperature increase is roughly 1 degree for 90 years. Also the hockey stick seems to conflict with actual satellite data. I mean it would only be true if you start from the first dip and up the the final peak. Dip to dip or peak to peak is half of that.

Its also looks like countries are polluting the same as ever:

Carbon Dioxide Peaked In 2022 At Levels Not Seen For Millions Of Years

Carbon dioxide measured at NOAA’s Mauna Loa Atmospheric Baseline Observatory peaked for 2022 at 421 parts per million in May, pushing the atmosphere further into territory not seen for millions of years.

www.forbes.com

As for nuclear waste, I dont know because I am not a nuclear scientist but i found this:

Does nuclear waste last millions of years? | Vision of Earth

No, the IPCC projections are not impossible.

There are likely feedback loops that we are approaching which will accelerate the amount of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere a lot (if they do happen like they have calculated): Methane gas in northern Russia's tundra of immense proportions being released; less ice in the north and south poles means less and less reflections and higher absorption of the sun's energy; gas trapped under the poles and in other permafrost underwater areas being released; the forests reaching a point where they can no longer trap (use) the increased CO2 by increasing the amount of leaves; the oceans trapping more CO2 leads to an increase in the acidity, which means less sulphur production by plankton and therefore less cloud formation.

These are just the ones I thought about at the top of my mind.

And for the nuclear waste issue: read IAEA's reports or some other real experts, not the first random dude on the internet you find. I'll even link you to where you can read up on it: https://www.iaea.org/publications/1...approaches-for-radioactive-waste-repositories

 

[DArtagnan]

I don't know why people obsess over placing blame here. We're way past the stage where we can do something about it anyway.

No, we COULD theoretically do something - assuming this is influenced by man. I think that's obvious, but I don't waste time arguing about it. But we're not going to do anything in time. I think that's equally obvious.

What we could do instead, is prepare for the coming disaster by having alternatives to our current ways of living - and prepare our infrastructure for the future as best we may. This especially goes for the people without means.

What we're doing by these pathetic initiatives - pretending we can't immediately and fully restrict the absurd amount of pollution and destructive behavior by the big corporations - is like pumping out water in the Titanic by hand as it's sinking.

 

[GothicGothicness]

I don't know why people obsess over placing blame here. We're way past the stage where we can do something about it anyway.

No, we COULD theoretically do something - assuming this is influenced by man. I think that's obvious, but I don't waste time arguing about it. But we're not going to do anything in time. I think that's equally obvious.

What we could do instead, is prepare for the coming disaster by having alternatives to our current ways of living - and prepare our infrastructure for the future as best we may. This especially goes for the people without means.

What we're doing by these pathetic initiatives - pretending we can't immediately and fully restrict the absurd amount of pollution and destructive behavior by the big corporations - is like pumping out water in the Titanic by hand as it's sinking.

Sadly, I more and more come to realize you are right.

But, I am not going to give up trying to make people do something about it! What I would really like to know, from people reading this thread and not doing much for the climate is, why?

I keep asking people this, and the most common responses I get is
1. "I don't believe we are causing climate change" ( hard to believe from people I earlier considered smart, but this is because they live in their own bubble where there beliefs gets confirmed. )

2. It is up to the politicians to do something, I as an individual cannot do anything. Follow up questions, do you vote for a party who wants to do something for the environment? No.

3. I don't care about the future, I want to live my life now.

4. It is too much for me to think about the climate, corona, wars and so on, I get depressed, so I ignore it.

5. I can't live without : beef, car, airplane, extreme shopping, <insert more>

This makes me think of the movie don't look up from Netflix, and realize that the real people are probably even worse.

 

[Couchpotato]

Well Dart is always right am I right..Ha though crowd.

Anyway this time he is even a report from 2019 suggested what he did.

Ignore the Fear Mongering, Here's What Climate Change Models Actually Say | Mises Institute

The most alarming of the projections of climate change damages rely on naïve assumptions about human adaptability.

mises.org

 

[GothicGothicness]

Well Dart is always right am I right..Ha though crowd.

Anyway this time he is even a report from 2019 suggested what he did.

Ignore the Fear Mongering, Here's What Climate Change Models Actually Say | Mises Institute

The most alarming of the projections of climate change damages rely on naïve assumptions about human adaptability.

mises.org

Ahh, well 2050? How about 2022?

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/14/world/asia/pakistan-floods.html

What China's worst drought on record looks like

Satellite images show extent of severe drought along the Yangtze River in China

www.bbc.com

Climate Change made devastating early heat in India and Pakistan 30 times more likely – World Weather Attribution

www.worldweatherattribution.org