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New UN report calls climate change 'unequivocal’ and ‘unprecedented.’

F1fan

Veteran Member
Climate change ‘unequivocal’ and ‘unprecedented,’ says new U.N. report
Do you think this will mean anything in the US where 30-40% the population will think it is a hoax to institute any one of a number of perceived conspiracy theories?
Well I suspect the GOP Will reject this and find some reason to ignore the threat. This has been their pattern for decades. I doubt Democrats have enough support and cooperation to make any relevance changes to our carbon output. I doubt citizens are going to demand change until the effects of climate change start causing them more problems and cost them money. It'll probably be too late by then.
 

Dan From Smithville

What's up Doc?
Staff member
Premium Member
Well I suspect the GOP Will reject this and find some reason to ignore the threat. This has been their pattern for decades. I doubt Democrats have enough support and cooperation to make any relevance changes to our carbon output. I doubt citizens are going to demand change until the effects of climate change start causing them more problems and cost them money. It'll probably be too late by then.
According to this article the report indicates that even with net zero emissions by 2050 we will still see a rise in the average temperature and there already exist irreversible impacts like icecap melting that will last centuries. By the time governments finish talking about it, it will all be done and dusted.
 

Dan From Smithville

What's up Doc?
Staff member
Premium Member
Well I suspect the GOP Will reject this and find some reason to ignore the threat. This has been their pattern for decades. I doubt Democrats have enough support and cooperation to make any relevance changes to our carbon output. I doubt citizens are going to demand change until the effects of climate change start causing them more problems and cost them money. It'll probably be too late by then.
We could turn the tide, but I am not very optimistic. Looks like we will have to pick up the pace on developing extreme environment agriculture.
 

F1fan

Veteran Member
We could turn the tide, but I am not very optimistic. Looks like we will have to pick up the pace on developing extreme environment agriculture.
The effects are going to be extremely expensive. Insurance will either be limited or go up dramatically. I don't know where the money is going to come from. The coastal cities are going to be the most affected. Miami is already having huge problems with flooding.
 

Dan From Smithville

What's up Doc?
Staff member
Premium Member
The effects are going to be extremely expensive. Insurance will either be limited or go up dramatically. I don't know where the money is going to come from. The coastal cities are going to be the most affected. Miami is already having huge problems with flooding.
I remember as a kid hearing about the problems with flooding that Houston, Texas had. If they thought it was bad then.
 

oldbadger

Skanky Old Mongrel!
Well I suspect the GOP Will reject this and find some reason to ignore the threat. This has been their pattern for decades. I doubt Democrats have enough support and cooperation to make any relevance changes to our carbon output. I doubt citizens are going to demand change until the effects of climate change start causing them more problems and cost them money. It'll probably be too late by then.
I think that we might be able to slow CC down, and even make life in cities more bearable and healthy, but I don't think we can stop CC now.
I often wonder about the massive carbon input that the huge fires are causing, world-wide.... they must be accelerating the problem quite quickly; what do you think?

It might be time to prepare for the high sea level rises, the changeable weather patterns, all gloom and doom from me, I'm sad to say. :(
 

infrabenji

Active Member
Climate change ‘unequivocal’ and ‘unprecedented,’ says new U.N. report
Do you think this will mean anything in the US where 30-40% the population will think it is a hoax to institute any one of a number of perceived conspiracy theories?
It’s tough to say. I think we’ll follow chinas lead towards clean energy but I don’t think that’s enough. We produce the second most garbage in the world, I believe, with Canada in first place. And our environmental impact reaches beyond what can be accounted for. Anatomyof.ai is a really fascinating look at the extent of our resource consumption. There are some major existential threats to the little blue ball we live on. I really hope but am not counting on a good chunk of Americans to take climate change seriously. I imagine it’ll be a plot by Obama and Hillary to eat more babies and make bees that turn you into a satanist when they sting you.
 

It Aint Necessarily So

Veteran Member
Premium Member
It's clear that things will only be getting worse, and they're already intolerable for many. Many things will need redefining. What's a hundred-year flood now? Will five categories for tornado and hurricane intensity enough when they are 20% more intense than now?

I saw a guy on TV who was watching his home burn down that he had just built to replace the one that burned 2-3 years before that in the same area. He decided that where he had been living was no longer habitable. There's term now called climate migrant - somebody relocating because of long-term climate change. This may be fueling some of the northern migration from Central America to the States (I believe that Guatemala has been hit hard with climate disasters of late), although political unrest surely accounts for some of it.

The western US appears to be going not through drought, by which I mean a temporary but prolonged diminution in rainfall, but aridification/desertification, which refers to a permanent transformation from grasslands or woodlands to scrublands or desert. This is what happened in northern Africa when the North and South American continents made contact and eliminated a Pacific to Atlantic current like the gulf stream to create the Sahara and the savannas, which had been ape-inhabited jungle. The transformation brought them out of the trees, caused them to stand upright and hunt meat rather than eat leaves and nuts from the trees, and the rest is history. I'm not looking for as good a result from running western Americans out of their habitat.

And what of those living on coasts? Somebody mentioned Miami and the effects of sea-level rising there, but that is not a local phenomenon. Tampa Bay has to contend with it, as does much of southern Louisiana. People on Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana and Tangier Island in the Chesapeake Bay are relocating people as their landscape becomes seascape. And this is before considering the hurricanes. If you have a home on the American gulf coast or much of the Atlantic seaboard, what are the chances of losing it to hurricane in the next 20 years? When will it become uninsurable and unsellable? And if you do sell while you can, where will you go? To the western fires? To the midwestern tornadoes? To the heat waves everywhere?
 

Brian2

Veteran Member
Climate change ‘unequivocal’ and ‘unprecedented,’ says new U.N. report
Do you think this will mean anything in the US where 30-40% the population will think it is a hoax to institute any one of a number of perceived conspiracy theories?

The right wing has been delaying doing stuff about climate change for a long time now. They love selling Australian coal and think it is going to cost money to stop climate change.
I heard one of them say today that it is time to bring the nuclear option to the table again. More mines.
We had a great opportunity to become the world's leader in solar power production and technology but I think that chance has passed us by with all this delaying and uncertainty and therefore lack of investment.
 

Nimos

Well-Known Member
Climate change ‘unequivocal’ and ‘unprecedented,’ says new U.N. report
Do you think this will mean anything in the US where 30-40% the population will think it is a hoax to institute any one of a number of perceived conspiracy theories?
Maybe :)

But regardless of that the science community have yelled about it for a long time now and given that it needs to be solved by politicians all over the world, we can only guess how well that is going to work :D

And as usually they have had a lot of meeting and signing a lot of papers, but they have hardly committed to anything, which explain why it doesn't seem to really make a difference.

Also as long as you have a world economy based on consumption, its difficult to see how things should improve a lot. The moment things start to go downhill they encourage people to spend money to keep things going. Its a fire out of control, where we are trying to put it out by throwing cups of water on it and a lot of gasoline at the same time in hope that it will somehow work :D

In Denmark our government want to get everyone to drive electric cars, so they are really boosting that. Which sounds great, if it weren't due to the ****load of cars and batteries that has to be made, there need to be build a whole infrastructure in the whole country, now imagine all countries doing that :O And to make all this we need rare metals.

Rare metals only exist in tiny quantities and inconvenient places—so you have to move a lot of earth to get just a little bit. In the Jiangxi rare earth mine in China, Abraham writes, workers dig eight-foot holes and pour ammonium sulfate into them to dissolve the sandy clay. Then they haul out bags of muck and pass it through several acid baths; what’s left is baked in a kiln, leaving behind the rare earths required by everything from our phones to our Teslas.

At this mine, those rare earths amounted to 0.2 percent of what gets pulled out of the ground. The other 99.8 percent—now contaminated with toxic chemicals—is dumped back into the environment. That damage is difficult to quantify, just like the impact of oil drilling.


And, as in every stage of the process, mining has hidden emissions. Jiangxi has it relatively easy because it’s digging up clay, but many mines rely on rock-crushing equipment with astronomical energy bills, as well as coal-fired furnaces for the final baking stages. Those spew a lot of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in the process of refining a material destined for your zero-emissions car. In fact, manufacturing an electric vehicle generates more carbon emissions than building a conventional car, mostly because of its battery, the Union of Concerned Scientists has found.

Hopefully we can get better at recycling the batteries, but still how much rare metal do we need to dig out, to make electric cars for everyone?

The reserves of some rare earth minerals used in electronics, medical equipment and renewable energy could run out in less than 100 years. Rare earth minerals are naturally occurring resources, which cannot be recreated or replaced. Some minerals are only present in very tiny quantities.

Guess what that number will drop to when we start to really crank up the number of cars that has to be made? Also a lot of the reserves of these rare earth minerals are in China, just freaking perfect :D

As always the human race is to stupid to act in time, we always have to react when its to late.
 
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Brickjectivity

Turned to Stone. Now I stretch daily.
Staff member
Premium Member
Climate change ‘unequivocal’ and ‘unprecedented,’ says new U.N. report
Do you think this will mean anything in the US where 30-40% the population will think it is a hoax to institute any one of a number of perceived conspiracy theories?
I think US citizenry is starting to notice the effects of climate change, so I don't think we're permanently going to ignore it. It is quite inconvenient for the coal industries, major employers. Its becoming obvious that the weather has changed. What will happen is that those political forces which have denied climate change will begin to accept it and will claim to have been the first to actually do anything about it. There will be no victory for the left versus the right, as in all things. As in all things there will be talk and talk.
 

Brian2

Veteran Member
Maybe :)

But regardless of that the science community have yelled about it for a long time now and given that it needs to be solved by politicians all over the world, we can only guess how well that is going to work :D

And as usually they have had a lot of meeting and signing a lot of papers, but they have hardly committed to anything, which explain why it doesn't seem to really make a difference.

Also as long as you have a world economy based on consumption, its difficult to see how things should improve a lot. The moment things start to go downhill they encourage people to spend money to keep things going. Its a fire out of control, where we are trying to put it out by throwing cups of water on it and a lot of gasoline at the same time in hope that it will somehow work :D

In Denmark our government want to get everyone to drive electric cars, so they are really boosting that. Which sounds great, if it weren't due to the ****load of cars and batteries that has to be made, there need to be build a whole infrastructure in the whole country, now imagine all countries doing that :O And to make all this we need rare metals.

Rare metals only exist in tiny quantities and inconvenient places—so you have to move a lot of earth to get just a little bit. In the Jiangxi rare earth mine in China, Abraham writes, workers dig eight-foot holes and pour ammonium sulfate into them to dissolve the sandy clay. Then they haul out bags of muck and pass it through several acid baths; what’s left is baked in a kiln, leaving behind the rare earths required by everything from our phones to our Teslas.

At this mine, those rare earths amounted to 0.2 percent of what gets pulled out of the ground. The other 99.8 percent—now contaminated with toxic chemicals—is dumped back into the environment. That damage is difficult to quantify, just like the impact of oil drilling.


And, as in every stage of the process, mining has hidden emissions. Jiangxi has it relatively easy because it’s digging up clay, but many mines rely on rock-crushing equipment with astronomical energy bills, as well as coal-fired furnaces for the final baking stages. Those spew a lot of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in the process of refining a material destined for your zero-emissions car. In fact, manufacturing an electric vehicle generates more carbon emissions than building a conventional car, mostly because of its battery, the Union of Concerned Scientists has found.

Hopefully we can get better at recycling the batteries, but still how much rare metal do we need to dig out, to make electric cars for everyone?

The reserves of some rare earth minerals used in electronics, medical equipment and renewable energy could run out in less than 100 years. Rare earth minerals are naturally occurring resources, which cannot be recreated or replaced. Some minerals are only present in very tiny quantities.

Guess what that number will drop to when we start to really crank up the number of cars that has to be made? Also a lot of the reserves of these rare earth minerals are in China, just freaking perfect :D

As always the human race is to stupid to act in time, we always have to react when its to late.

Some people seem to want to go to live on Mars. I wonder if that is for selling holidays or for an alternative home when earth is completely f+++++ or to find and mine minerals like rare earths. Probably all 3 along with learning things also, which seems to be always a driving force.
 

Nimos

Well-Known Member
Some people seem to want to go to live on Mars. I wonder if that is for selling holidays or for an alternative home when earth is completely f+++++ or to find and mine minerals like rare earths. Probably all 3 along with learning things also, which seems to be always a driving force.
Maybe the bible was true after all, the story about Noah never happened, but is what will happen when humans have to build an ark to get away from Earth once we have ruined it :D

God gave up on us a long time ago, he could see that it was a lost cause, and probably regretted getting rid of the dinosaurs :D
 

Brian2

Veteran Member
Maybe the bible was true after all, the story about Noah never happened, but is what will happen when humans have to build an ark to get away from Earth once we have ruined it :D

God gave up on us a long time ago, he could see that it was a lost cause, and probably regretted getting rid of the dinosaurs :D

The prophecies about the end times certainly are materialising before our eyes as we watch.
 

Nimos

Well-Known Member
The prophecies about the end times certainly are materialising before our eyes as we watch.
They say that we don't do anything, the water could rise with up to 15 meters in 2300.

But just checked to certain and I will be flooded :( But good news are that I just have to walk a few blocks and I can live on my own little island :D

Flood.jpg


I live right at the Red dot :)

You can check if you make it here :D

Flood Map: Elevation Map, Sea Level Rise Map
 

Secret Chief

nirvana is samsara
I imagine it’ll be a plot by Obama and Hillary to eat more babies and make bees that turn you into a satanist when they sting you.

But do you have any proof that it's not such a plot? I believe the bees already exist and are living in bunkers underground. Illegally.
 

F1fan

Veteran Member
I remember as a kid hearing about the problems with flooding that Houston, Texas had. If they thought it was bad then.
I heard a news report yesterday that the engines that run New Orleans water pumps are diesel locomotives. Wow, if one fails they are in serious trouble.
 

F1fan

Veteran Member
According to this article the report indicates that even with net zero emissions by 2050 we will still see a rise in the average temperature and there already exist irreversible impacts like icecap melting that will last centuries. By the time governments finish talking about it, it will all be done and dusted.
Right. I don't understand deniers who think we need more evidence before we cap carbon emissions because by that time (now) it'll be too late. It's like an adult saying I will keep doing meth until I see definitive evidence that it is deadly. Well how is that attitude mature? I suspect the resistance by US conservatives is an artifact of fundamentalist Christianity. They have contempt for science as driven by their creationist beliefs, and contempt for expertise and reason for the same reason, so they reject climate change science. Plus they have long believed in an End Times scenario, and any destruction of the environment might be satisfying to them and their religious beliefs.
 
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