tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5939915290794973654.post2416672050613627361..comments2024-03-08T14:23:31.503-05:00Comments on A Puff of Absurdity: Climate Change Grief - It's a BummerMarie Snyderhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/13872774009526266579noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5939915290794973654.post-54694006144779191152016-07-13T21:22:34.797-04:002016-07-13T21:22:34.797-04:00At this point, I'm grasping at any glimmers of...At this point, I'm grasping at any glimmers of hope I can find. I don't want to just lie down and wait for death. There has to be something to keep fighting for. The Jacobson TEDTalk does a better job of getting at the timing factor - that we don't have 20 years to build new nuclear facilities, but we can put up significant wind and solar arrays right away. <br /><br />Political will is a big stopper - and corporate will (same thing). We need everyone to become terrified enough to act in dramatic fashion immediately. <br /><br />We can stop population growth, but not without infringing on people's freedoms. We have to shift that understanding of freedom to reproduce being the ultimate right. Of the three (climate, population, consumption), I think curbing population will be the hardest sell. It goes against biological drives as well as a strong notion of personal autonomy over our bodies. <a href="http://www.worldwithoutus.com/index2.html" rel="nofollow">Weisman's</a> solution of sterilizing all woman after one birth event would work, except doctors would be slaughtered trying to follow those orders. <br /><br />How do we do it all while demonstrating and perpetuation compassion is another good question. We have to keep our heads while it's all going for a shit or it'll be even more of a bloodbath out there. Marie Snyderhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13872774009526266579noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5939915290794973654.post-81890860025519034782016-07-13T16:27:23.604-04:002016-07-13T16:27:23.604-04:00I enjoyed the video (aside from the McPherson segm...I enjoyed the video (aside from the McPherson segment), Marie, but I'm not buoyed by Nye's "we can do this" ending. As the Potsdam Institute's Schellnhuber put it at last December's climate change summit, our only hope now is for what he called an "induced implosion" of the fossil energy industry. That means collective government intervention to shut down hydrocarbon energy. The problem with this is that there is some $27-trillion in market equity in fossil fuel reserves. http://capitalinstitute.org/blog/big-choice-0/ Bursting that bubble could wipe out 80% of that value from the markets triggering a global economic collapse that would make the Great Depression look insignificant. Our consumer lifestyle, to which we're so deeply attached (perhaps "embedded" is a better word) would abruptly end.<br /><br />Another problem that wasn't addressed is that we're running out of time. Alternative energy projects still take many years from study and policy decisions to planning, development and implementation. Market considerations aside, transitioning from fossil to alternative energy won't be fast nor will it be cheap especially if government revenues tank. It's going to take very powerful leadership with iron resolve to make that dream happen. There aren't many of that stature to be found today.<br /><br />This video skipped over the need for concerted effort by all governments. It's the Herculean dimension that mandates pretty high levels of stability especially among the developed and emerging economies. Climate change is already a destabilizing force in some of these economies and its only getting started. We have a weak, perhaps deliberately poor, grasp of our resilience - globally, regionally and nationally. We may "stress test" our banks but we never dream of putting our countries through a similar process.<br /><br />This video also imagines that we can tackle climate change in isolation. We can't. There are three connected and existential threats facing mankind - climate change, overpopulation and over-consumption of the planet's resources. The hard fact is you cannot solve any one of them without solving all of them. Jared Diamond discusses this existential Hydra in his book, "Collapse." The other fact is that, if we don't voluntarily solve these challenges, nature will remedy the problems for us.<br /><br />I try to avoid McPherson but he does make some compelling arguments. One is that we have already crossed many major climate tipping points. I think he's catalogued more than 60 of them. Some are obvious - the disappearance of Arctic sea ice and the resultant warming of Arctic waters and the atmosphere that, in turn, have energized this highly destructive Polar Jet Stream that contributes to the severe drought and flooding problems in temperate regions. When the theory of tipping points was introduced the idea was to avoid these phenomena from occurring. Ten years ago the IPCC warned if we didn't keep warming below 2C the Arctic could be ice free by 2100. Now it seems they were out by 84-years. These changes underway in the Arctic are the dreaded "natural feedback loops" we were supposed to be working to avoid triggering. Well, they've been triggered. How do you put that Genie back in the bottle? How do we get the Earth's population back down to 2.5-billion, max? How do we slash our consumption of renewable and non-renewable resources by at least 40%? How do our cash strapped governments persuade voters to pay more for less, enough to fund both mitigation (cutting GHG emissions rapidly), the long-term initiative, and adaptation, the immediate and short-term imperative? How do we disarm an increasingly bellicose world?<br /><br />I don't know. Not a clue. Perhaps it is true that all intelligent life is ultimately self-extinguishing. - MoSAnonymousnoreply@blogger.com