The Environment Thread

[Bi_3]

This is why I don't give a flying fuck about international treaties, who is and isn't in them, and who is and isn't holding up their end of the bargain.

Just get to work in developing clean technologies to phase out fossil fuels, and then sell the shit out of them to developing nations.

Exactly this

[tragabigzanda]

FUCK ICE

[Green Habit]

Well the treaties are great, because they can jumpstart a demand for cleaner tech. I wouldn't go kicking the very concept to the curb just because the market is the ultimate driver of the technology; the treaties can help compel the market.

To be clear, I don't think the market alone will spurn itself here. (Though it would be great if if could catch lightning in a bottle.) I think national governments need to be aggressively chipping in too with not just R&D, but more importantly in making direct purchases into building clean infrastructure. But there is no international government that has this ability on a global scale. Therefore, I say that, instead of doing a whole lot of talking with "pledges", each nation should do everything they can to clean up their energy, then export what they've developed at home to abroad.

[tragabigzanda]

FUCK ICE

[Stickman]

[Green Habit]

The opportunity for a dick joke using FTFY was so much greater there.

[McParadigm]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate- ... story.html

Continued deforestation and other fast-moving changes in the Amazon threaten to turn parts of the rainforest into savanna, devastate wildlife and release billions of tons carbon into the atmosphere, two renowned experts warned Friday.

“The precious Amazon is teetering on the edge of functional destruction and, with it, so are we,” Thomas Lovejoy of George Mason University and Carlos Nobre of the University of Sao Paulo in Brazil, both of whom have studied the world’s largest rainforest for decades, wrote in an editorial in the journal Science Advances. “Today, we stand exactly in a moment of destiny: The tipping point is here, it is now.”

The speed of the transformation in some key planetary systems, like Greenland’s ice and the Arctic’s permafrost, has “indeed been underestimated by climate science,” said Stefan Rahmstorf, head of Earth system analysis at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany. “And that’s partly because we cannot really capture them well in our models.”

In interviews, Lovejoy and Nobre said they decided to sound a dire alarm about the Amazon after witnessing the acceleration of troubling trends. The combination of warming temperatures, crippling wildfires and ongoing land clearing for cattle ranching and crops has extended dry seasons, killed off water-sensitive vegetation and created conditions for more fire.

The Amazonis now 17 percent deforested, but for the large proportion of it inside Brazil, the figure is closer to 20 percent. The fear is that soon there will be so little forest that the trees, which not only soak up enormous quantities of rainwater but themselves give off billowing columns of mist that aid agriculture and sustain innumerable species, won’t be able to recycle enough rainfall.

That point of no return, commonly referred to by scientists as a tipping point, “is much closer than we anticipated,” Nobre said in an interview.

The troubling news comes on top of other alarming developments regarding the Earth’s climate.
Earlierthis month,nearly 100 polar scientists detailed how the Greenland ice sheet’s losses have accelerated in recent decades, growing from 33 billion lost tons per year in the 1990s to a current average of 254 billion tons annually.

“Greenland is losing ice faster than expected, partly because climate models aren’t good at predicting extreme melting events but also because many of the ice sheet’s smaller glaciers have started to speed up too,” said Andrew Shepherd, a glaciologist at Leeds University in the U.K., who led the latest study. “So the [worst]-case scenario now becomes business as usual.”

[verb_to_trust]

"If nuclear war destroys humanity and most of the rest of life, a good bet for survival in the short term, and for evolutionary ancestry in the long term, is rats. I have a post-Armageddon vision. We and all other large animals are gone. Rodents emerge as the ultimate post-human scavengers. They gnaw their way through New York, London and Tokyo, digesting spilled larders, ghost supermarkets and human corpses and turning them into new generations of rats and mice, whose racing populations explode out of the cities and into the countryside.

When all the relics of human profligacy are eaten, populations crash again, and the rodents turn on each other, and on the cockroaches scavenging with them. In a period of intense competition, short generations perhaps with radioactivity enhanced mutation-rates boost rapid evolution. With human ships and planes gone, islands become islands again, with local populations isolated save for occasional lucky raftings: ideal conditions for evolutionary divergence.

Within 5 million years, a whole range of new species replace the ones we know. Herds of giant grazing rats are stalked by sabre-toothed predatory rats. Given enough time, will a species of intelligent, cultivated rats emerge? Will rodent historians and scientists eventually organise careful archaeological digs (gnaws?) through the strata of our long-compacted cities, and reconstruct the peculiar and temporarily tragic circumstances that gave ratkind its big break?"

[E.H. Ruddock]

Scurry amirite

[Bi_3]

https://metro.co.uk/2020/01/02/nearly-5 ... -11989639/

Difficult to grasp a loss on that scale

[BurtReynolds]

nm

[mike untz]

[surfndestroy]

I'm not sure being right once out of 16 is all that impressive.

[Stickman]

Trump slashes environmental regulations

[Bi_3]

What a coincidence

https://www.thewrap.com/greta-thunberg- ... c-studios/

[JuanHamm]

What a coincidence

https://www.thewrap.com/greta-thunberg- ... c-studios/

What about this is a coincidence?

[McParadigm]

What a coincidence

https://www.thewrap.com/greta-thunberg- ... c-studios/

What about this is a coincidence?

When resource and industry powerhouses decided to counter climate research that was detrimental to their bottom line, they began to fund their own research institutes with the purpose of creating an alternative narrative. They instead created a disinformation feedback loop so powerful, and so worldview-forming, that adults lost to it have an unending need to be presented with reassurances that the people who disagree with them are, at heart, disingenuous.

Coincidentally, this weaponizing of misinformation also became the campaign model for an entire political party.

[JuanHamm]

What a coincidence

https://www.thewrap.com/greta-thunberg- ... c-studios/

What about this is a coincidence?

When resource and industry powerhouses decided to counter climate research that was detrimental to their bottom line, they began to fund their own research institutes with the purpose of creating an alternative narrative. They instead created a disinformation feedback loop so powerful, and so worldview-forming, that adults lost to it have an unending need to be presented with reassurances that the people who disagree with them are, at heart, disingenuous.

Coincidentally, this weaponizing of misinformation also became the campaign model for an entire political party.

Thanks, this really cleared it up

[Bi_3]

What a coincidence

https://www.thewrap.com/greta-thunberg- ... c-studios/

What about this is a coincidence?

When resource and industry powerhouses decided to counter climate research that was detrimental to their bottom line, they began to fund their own research institutes with the purpose of creating an alternative narrative. They instead created a disinformation feedback loop so powerful, and so worldview-forming, that adults lost to it have an unending need to be presented with reassurances that the people who disagree with them are, at heart, disingenuous.

Coincidentally, this weaponizing of misinformation also became the campaign model for an entire political party.

Thanks, this really cleared it up

i r dumb and washedbrain.

[tragabigzanda]

FUCK ICE