But most humans by far have existed in the last 200 years. The current mean birth age of all humans ever (50% humans born before & 50% born after) is probably only like 1950 at the oldest.
Why is that a good thing? Humans, their livestock, and their crops have grown to dominate much of the land. That reduces biodiversity and makes for a less resilient ecosystem overall.
That's not really relevant but also not true. A reasonable estimate is that ~105 billion modern
homo sapiens have ever lived[1], the inflection point you're talking about (50% humans born before & 50% born after) probably happened closer to 200-300CE[2]
Hmm interesting. Would the number of human-years or human-hours lived be different? Perhaps looking at population/exponential graphs is giving me a false intuition because the birth & growth rates were much higher in the past but the overall growth rate stayed the same.
It is relevant if you think that the individual unit of human civilization is a single person.
Yeah, early humans were only capable of extincting megafauna. Today, we're doing dozens of species per day! We'd be much more impressive as a species if we didn't limit the use of DDT, CFCs, etc
> Ah, yeah. We're gonna go to Mars. And then of course we're gonna colonize deep space. With our microwave hot dogs and plastic vomit, fake dog shit and cinnamon dental floss, lemon-scented toilet paper and sneakers with lights in the heels. And all these other impressive things we've done down here. But let me ask you this: what are we gonna tell the intergalactic council of ministers the first time one of our teenage mothers throws their newborn baby into a dumpster? How are we gonna explain that to the space people? How are we gonna let them know that our ambassador was only late for the meeting because his breakfast was cold and he had to spend half an hour punching his wife around the kitchen? And what are they gonna think when they find out, its just a local custom, that over 80 million women in the Third world have had their clitorises forcibly removed in order to reduce their sexual pleasure so they won't cheat on their husbands? Can't you just sense how eager the rest of the universe is for us to show up?
-- George Carlin
Our material wealth and our industrial capabilities just make our failings so much more shameful in my books.
This quote seems really pathetic to me personally. One because it feels defeatist and ignores bounds of progress made against a problem that is simply difficult. Two because it highlights specific problems for which carlin has no personal culpability.
Organizing civilization is hard. I have no doubts the council of intergalactic ministers had a difficult run as well. That is the nature of nature.
Completely agreed with you. It's one thing to acknowledge humanity's faults, another to just be defeatist to the point of ignoring all good things we have done as a species just because we've done bad ones too.
Self improvement requires not falling into the mindset of blame. It’s “them” destroying the planet, rather than “us” solving the hard problems together. I think only human understanding and mastery of ego will determine the fate of the planet. We can do it, if we work on ourselves first.
The problem is agrarian society itself. It is by definition, a sort of cancer that converts the environment into a food surplus, leading to an increase in population, leading to more food being produced, to more population, to... I think you see the point.
No other species on our planet does this, because the food chain system has constraints to prevent feedback loops- it's why apex predators are very low in population. We're a unique type of predator because while, we are not immune to death from any number of sources, our sheer ability to increase our population thanks to exploiting the environment outweighs any defenses the global ecosystem has been able to muster so far. Nonetheless, things seem to be heading in the direction of (population) collapse, but to what extent and how soon, it is hard to tell.
What's defeatist about it? "This fucking sucks" is to social progress what "this is odd" is to science.
Furthermore, "This sucks" implies room for improvement, whereas "This is impressive" implies no great need for improvement. Being defeatist would be to not even criticize such shoulder patting because nothing can possibly change and this is the best we can do.
> Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made.
-- Franz Kafka
I don't know who said it, but "Those who think they are something have ceased to become something" also springs to mind.
That quote says nothing that evokes "room for improvement" to me. It demeans modern civilization's achievements to plastic vomit and microwave hotdogs. It also mocks hope for the future of our ability to change by then. Which is pretty bullshit because the rate of all those things is declining. Kafka's quote there is also pretty shit.
Progressive sociological and technological change is difficult. We have made significant progress. We have a long way to go. Crying that we have achieved nothing diminishes large achievements that you take for granted.
We treat people the same way. If someone can sing very well or is very rich, but is also a murderer or rapist, those negative traits tend to be how we categorize them. And that's even if they don't murder or rape for 364 days per year.
> It also mocks hope for the future of our ability to change by then. Which is pretty bullshit because the rate of all those things is declining.
If you really think this quote is just about sneakers with lights in the heels, I can't help you.
> If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.
-- Stephen Hawking
> Don't be deceived when they tell you things are better now. Even if there's no poverty to be seen because the poverty's been hidden. Even if you ever got more wages and could afford to buy more of these new and useless goods which industries foist on you and even if it seems to you that you never had so much, that is only the slogan of those who still have much more than you. Don't be taken in when they paternally pat you on the shoulder and say that there's no inequality worth speaking of and no more reason to fight because if you believe them they will be completely in charge in their marble homes and granite banks from which they rob the people of the world under the pretence of bringing them culture. Watch out, for as soon as it pleases them they'll send you out to protect their gold in wars whose weapons, rapidly developed by servile scientists, will become more and more deadly until they can with a flick of the finger tear a million of you to pieces.
-- Jean-Paul Marat
> The frightening coincidence of the modern population explosion with the discovery of technical devices that, through automation, will make large sections of the population 'superfluous' even in terms of labor, and that, through nuclear energy, make it possible to deal with this twofold threat by the use of instruments beside which Hitler's gassing installations look like an evil child's fumbling toys, should be enough to make us tremble.
-- Hannah Arendt
If someone, rather than trembling, speaks of how it's better than it ever was.. I frankly couldn't care less what they consider "shit".
These quotes are even less coherent with whatever thesis you're trying to convey. Like... I'm pretty sure even Jean-Paul Marat would believe things are better now than pre-french revolution Paris, or say, reign of terror paris. Things are far from perfect, but they're definitely improving on many, many metrics. Wealth inequality is a (growing) problem, but I'd still rather be poor today than poor a few hundred years ago.
You do know wiped away is a pretty fake news headline term yes? These animals and fruit will bounce back pretty fast. Wither away? Drama is getting big on here
Will be a once in life opportunity for doing research in ecological sucesion.
If this was a unique event, my bet would be a fast recovery of most invertebrates in 2-3 years. Maybe a year of savage algae blooming. If the event becomes more frequent the entire ecosystem will be replaced by southern animals. Crustaceans will explode in a few years, probably. This is a blessing for some animals.
The species will be replaced by other better adapted to stand heat that now can be found in lower latitudes. Arctic areas have a lot of starfish, sea urchins and clams. This will change somehow. Most of the brown and red algae will probably disappear before ten years. This means that entire submarine forests could vanish. The worse of all this changes for men would be that Cod will disappear. Cod eggs can't stand heat and we are talking about two of the three more important fishes in the entire planet for us, so the hit will be huge.
massive sea-urchin population growth in the last ten years along the California coast has destroyed 500 miles of kelp forests, done. details on request
If we implement a bandaid with geoengineering, do you think we'll still try to fix the root cause (burning fossil fuels)? Or will we kick the can even further?
That's an important question. My thought is that it doesn't really matter in the short term. Our ecosystems out here in the west won't withstand another couple of decades of this. Any attempts to fix the root cause haven't worked fast enough, so it's time to try something else.
In the long term, I hope that the economic forces of cheap renewables and energy storage might be enough to get us down to a reasonable PPM. And maybe, just maybe, we'll see advances in sequestration that get us down to where we were before.
I'm not an expert, so please don't take any of my views as fact. I'm just a layman trying to find some hope in what looks like a pretty hopeless situation.
> Our ecosystems out here in the west won't withstand another couple of decades of this.
Which is unfortunate because even if we dropped emissions to zero tomorrow, we would still be in for a few more decades of escalating climate crisis.
In the grand spectrum of what's already be chosen as far as climate change goes, this is just the very, very beginning. Our chance to act to prevent what we're seeing now was 30-40 years ago.
Welcome to reality. While the media and governments are talking about finally preventing global warming, it is already too late. The question is, if we mobilize the entire world economy to mitigate it, it might last only a few hundred years instead of a few thousand. Ironically, I think lying to the public and claiming to be trying to "prevent" global warming is better, people would just give up if they knew what the actual impact of our actions would be.
Kind of reminds me of software engineering-- You usually only get credit for 'rescuing' a bad situation, but never for preventing that situation in the first place :)
Why is this being downvoted? I've notice a disturbing trend on HN where bad news is downvoted.
It's unquestionably too late to prevent global warming, and mitigation is only possible if we seriously consider organized economic down scaling. This is stuff people have known about for decades and strangely enough took more seriously in the 70s than they do now.
Carbon emissions grow every year and the rate they are growing at continues to rise as well. Fossil fuel usage continues to rise (globally, local changes are meaningless). The only time we see any serious reduction in emissions is during massive economic down turns.
Many argue that people won't accept a change of lifestyle, but that change is coming either way. Since virtually no one I've chatted with will even take economic reduction seriously I'm pretty certain it is "too late" in every sense.
Downvoting comments like this because you wish it wasn't true is really unfitting of a community that prides itself on being 'hackers' and understanding how the world works.
There has been an observable conservative and libertarian culture shift in hacker news while I have been a member. This community is about startups and extraction of money. The "hacker" part has been dying by simply being outnumbered for a while now.
Not to take away from what you're saying, I agree. I presume I'm in the minority of Canadians, but when the current government announced that new combustion vehicles would be banned in 2035, the only thing I could think is I need to vote for the green party. New sale combustion vehicles should be banned by ~2025, even if that means setting up crown corporations with tax dollars to deal with the infrastructure requirements. By 2035, it should be illegal drive one on public roads, period. At this point, I will only vote for people with a fully environment first platform, even at the expense of "bad" fiscal/economic policy for the country.
>I will only vote for people with a fully environment first platform, even at the expense of "bad" fiscal/economic policy for the country.
For developed countries that have high productivity growth, falling demand as the population ages and low inflation you actually have to come up with random ideas to keep the population employed. It doesn't even matter what you do. You could let them dig holes and fill them. What's important is that the money goes to people who spend it.
You know. Instead of letting the government be the investor of last resort, why not just introduce a carbon tax and carbon tariff and just let the private sector do all the investments? It would revitalize the economy far more than a bunch of trump style tax cuts.
Green investments for climate change? Fuck that, let's save capitalism with green investments!
> World’s largest solar plant goes online in China
And the irony is that such a power plant is an extreme strategic and economic resource. During wartime you no longer have to worry about how to import ever dwindling fossil fuels. During peace time, you have limitless negotiation power.
Majority renewable energy would likely push a country into a realm that is far beyond a superpower. And China seems to have caught on to this - they have probably realized how much money they are burning while securing coal reserves around the world (e.g. Zimbabwe).
Have fun pitching your fellow Canadians on a massive regression in standard of living that hits your poor & first nations communities hardest while becoming a economic vassal state to the CCP, who literally does not give a fuck.
That is not the option in front of us as voters, or as a nation.
The poor and first nations communities have not been well served by the current paradigm, and in fact the best outcome for them is generally left leaning policy that actually honors seniority of water rights, enforcement of environmental laws, and policies that support critical first nations fisheries and other resources (stop damming salmon runs, displacing the tribes and selling the water and power to large corporate farmers would be a great start).
It is the political right that has largely trampled the poor and first nations into the dust over the past decades, on both sides of that border.
wait until climate-induced mass famine hits them. Literally no one is going to give a shit about languages, cultures, or nations when hundreds of millions are dying of starvation.
I was reading this article [1] last night and this paragraph in particular has been bouncing around my head all morning:
The crisis, said Eric Kuhn, former general manager of the Colorado River Conservation District, can no longer be ignored. “According to Merriam-Webster, a drought is a temporary condition,” he said. What is happening, he suggested, is something more permanent and troubling. “This is aridification.”
I think it's just because the framing for so long has been "drought", when it clear that what is going on is probably more severe.
I was recently prompted to read 'Cadillac desert' which provides a very interesting summary of the development of water in the west, and the looming challenges. TLDR: it's gonna keep getting worse. Anyway, highly recommend.
As much as people like to ridicule the CC deniers for pointing to unusually cold conditions the same side loves to do it when it supports them. For the Colorado River specifically, we established "normal" during an atypically wet time and now that we've gone through actual normal to a dry cycle it's a crisis. It's the normal cyclical behavior of nature and not really Climate Change that's the issue.
What are you talking about? Do you have some sources explaining this? This just seems like the oft-used, "previously it was an anomaly, we are returning to normal" pseudo-science that gets dragged out about everything concerning climate change. "It's not getting hotter, we were just in a cold period".
The book Cadillac Desert makes that claim. When the water rights for the Colorado River were divided up, it was based on a quantity of water measured during a wetter year.
Yeah, but it's true. The period during which white settlers arrived in the American west was ridiculously wet. This presentation is a little irritating, but if you scroll about 80% of the way down you'll see the chart of tree ring data that shows tree growth was at a 1000-year exceptional peak during the 20th century.
"The only reason this drought is lagging behind that 1500s drought is because it's so young," Williams said.
Both of your links show how bad the current drought is. If the current drought miraculously reverses itself in the next several years, than what you're arguing could be true. However, it doesn't look like that will be happening - time will tell.
It's not exactly accurate because it doesn't account for water taken out for irrigation above this particular point, but it clearly shows the natural ebb and flow of the Colorado's volume.
I don't disagree with where you are going, but I think there might be easier ways to geoengineer than mirroring sun directly back out into space (unless I miss my mark at what solar geoengineering is - if so, I'm sorry). I cound't find it, there's also the "plan" to release megafauna into the midwest and pay to have them "sheparded" so they become a commodity instead of a liability, creating grasslands again.
The approach really should be to do _everything_. I love the idea of reforestation, sustainable agriculture, etc., but there's a ramp-up time inherent in all of these. The advantage of solar geoenegineering is that the effects would be relatively instantaneous.
"Before 1800, several million acres burned every year in California due to both Indigenous burning and lightning-caused fires, far more than even the worst wildfire years today. Tribes used low-grade fires to shape the landscape, encouraging certain plants to grow both for tribal use and to attract game."
This addresses only a symptom (more extreme wildfires) and not the root issue: persistent drought / aridification amplified by climate change. To be resilient to the latter, we need to become dramatically more efficient in how we use water resources, especially in the food production pipeline.
Did you bother to read the article for 5 seconds? Native CA tribes were burning 3-5x the amount that've been burned in the last "Bad" fire seasons we've had.
Burns were done to help manage water supplies in the first place.
The scales of water management that Native CA tribes were doing with their burns is not going to fix our water issues, since we use orders of magnitude more water than they ever did, both per capita and as a civilization.
At this point, prescribed burns are only a fuel management technique to minimize massive wildfires. They are not a realistic way to mitigate climate change driven aridification. It's not really clear that we can mitigate it - we just need to adapt to use water more efficiently.
I agree as well, we're creating a literal powder keg of a situation with the amount of dry brush that is left lying in unmanaged areas. I get that we have to protect the towns and cities, but we can't just keep pushing this situation out into the future. But I can also see that the larger and more mismanaged the eventual fire is, the more changes you can dictate to combat climate change, so I'm not sure if the wildfire problem is politically tenable.
The thing I think that would differ is the vegetation that would normally survive the fires would be able to flourish again after, e.g. some pine trees in California have pine cones that only disperse seeds during a fire (high temps).
After spending a lot of time in the Sierra Nevadas growing up, I really can see how a lot more trees are dying. A lot of it is that pine beetle wreaking havoc, but the number of standing dead trees is astounding. Old bike paths I used to fly down I now have to be careful on in case I round a corner and have a tree down; 20 years ago I just never had that cross my mind!
I do a lot of backpacking in the Sierras, and last year I went to Colorado for the first time. The number of trees there that are standing-dead from pine borer beetles is staggering. It looked to be about 1/3.
Yep, we'd manage to kill off a lot of the invasive species like eucalyptus, take a load off the water table for a few years. A chance to get ahead of things like the beetle blight that are dependent on early spring drought to kill native pine trees would be good.
The saddest part is that we could still limit the damage to the future of our civilization by actually doing something, instead of like , perfomatively banning plastic, while leaving cars and oil/gas power plants alone.
I mean, how many thousands of years of plastic utensil avoidence equals an oil well operation over a year?
It’s not really fun to conclude that it would be more humane to not have them, than to bring children into a world completely consumed by its egotistical inhabitant’s desperate desire to please Moloch at absolutely any cost.
Do you really think that local municipalities focus on single use plastic is the reason we haven't solved climate change yet?
Climate change and plastic pollution are two separate issues, but I would be willing to bet that the folks who support plastic pollution legislation are also some of the more fervent supporters of climate change legislation. And at the municipal level, for every plastic ordinance there are probably dozens of ordinances focused on climate change. But solving climate change will likely require global cooperation on a level that the world has never seen before. So you are essentially cherry picking a topic to accuse their supporters of being "performative" just because they haven't yet solved one of the biggest challenges the world has ever faced.
>Do you really think that local municipalities focus on single use plastic is the reason we haven't solved climate change yet?
No, and I wasn’t trying to say that.
> Climate change and plastic pollution are two separate issues, but I would be willing to bet that the folks who support plastic pollution legislation are also some of the more fervent supporters of climate change legislation.
I agree, but in democratic societies (at least in western europe where I have experience), policy tends to be decided by compromise between different interests, and plastic bans and more impactful climate change occupy the same lane of general support for environmentalism.
So we get into a situation where green parties want to reduce plastics and want to reduce petrol/gas use, and our (Western European) compromise becomes a ban on plastic and little done to reduce petrol/gas usage.
All this talk of geoengineering solutions seem to miss one crucial detail: who's paying for it? We can't even make people agree on carbon tax.
With any money available, we can build solar/wind farm, which is a proven method of fighting AGW (and it even pays for itself these days!) and we can't even do that fast enough.
Historically, when a democratic government meets an existential problem that it can't convince or use its richest members to pay for, then that democratic government is, either slowly or quickly, replaced by a more authoritarian government that will then do one of two things:
1 - Forcibly use the wealth of the country to solve the problem, over the objection of those prevented that use of wealth previously.
or
2 - Forcibly silence the people who are experiencing hardship as a result of the problem, so the society can go back to believing (realistically or not) that there is no such problem worth solving.
This happens by degrees, as a very rough response to the degree of hardship presented by the problem, at first, but is the expected result if the society can't democratically answer the "who will pay for it, not I" question.
I live in the Pacific Northwest. It took only two years to go from:
"Breaking news: Record-setting forest fires in California will send smoke up to Washington."
to:
"It's wildfire season again, here's our favorite air filters for 2021."
Humanity's ability to go from "oh, shit" to "this is fine" and just not realize how much worse things have gotten is incredible.
I assume in 2025 we'll all just scroll past the boring article about which ten metropolitan cities in Florida washed into the Gulf today so that we can get to some funny comics.
My hope is that there's a silver lining: farmers may finally accept that climate change is happening and start supporting policies to combat it. It's a long shot but I'm somewhat hopeful.
I live in the Willamette Valley, the heat wave has actually helped my fruit trees and blueberries but the eastern part of OR and WA are in pretty bad shape.
The USDA pumped 20bn in as recently as 2019. Partly for trade war and partly for flooding and other natural disasters. They didn't even need congressional approval, the USDA has a mandate to spend as it deems necessary.
The bureau of reclamation had much to answer for here. Why are we growing stupid things like low value alfalfa in the desert? Why are we growing rice in the desert? Because we are giving the water away for almost nothing, that's why. Large farming operations have been parasites feeding off taxpayer subsidized water, irrigation and hydro power for the last century.
Apparently I am out of a loop: Farmers are denying climate change? If my livelihood depends on good climate, how can I not notice a good climate going bad?
I'd like to understand. Is this something beyond wilful denial?
Farmers generally aren't climate change deniers in my experience, and I meet a lot of farmers on a regular basis as I work for one of the largest AG equipment suppliers in the world in r&d where we are constantly out testing new products or tech on farmers fields.
They are practical, evidence based and extremely in-tune with anything that can affect their bottom line.
I think the feeling is that farmers tend to be right leaning and conservative politically and are thought to be of the mindset to deny that climate change is real.
It's a combination of factors. If your farm depends on water, and it's a drought, it's hard to think of the long term when your may not financially survive the next few years. Droughts and other natural disasters have also occurred through all of human history, so scientists have only been able to say "this might be related" instead of "it was definitely caused by" climate change up until the last few years.
There's also more than willful denial considering the amount of propaganda that tries to claim that climate change either isn't real or is grossly exaggerated (there are even efforts to claim that it will be beneficial). The channels that tend to push this also tend to be very popular in rural areas. This isn't even just a climate change things- the same groups of people claiming there's a labor shortage also try to deport anyone who doesn't look like them.
I did a little more Googling and it's, of course, more nuanced than I thought. Even in Iowa, which is probably more conservative than most places, the attitudes are shifting:
I think a big difference is the belief of the cause of climate change, a large percentage of farmers believes it's mostly or partly due to natural variations.
I think the parent — like most people (including myself until recently) — has a poor understanding of the professional makeup of rural communities.
There was never a period in American history where most rural people were farmers. That was a Jeffersonian daydream. In the colonial/early-American period, farms consisted of landowners, and a mix of slaves and poorly-paid employees. When slavery ended and the industrial revolution came along, tractors took over most of the work and the employees left for factories; the number of landowners (what we now call "farmers") is not very different now than in 1800.
Here's a census report on the actual careers of small-town America. Lot of community service (education, health care), a little manufacturing and retail… about what one might expect, really.
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/newsroom/blogs/201...
… so getting back to the point of climate change… on the one hand, since farmers don't make up the majority of rural communities, their opinions on climate change don't mean much politically. On the other hand, they do have a very direct and personal effect on the climate w/r/t soil practices (erosion, pesticides, etc), and there are some positive signs on that front.
Corporate farming (or big ag) outnumbers family farms to the point where family farmers are politically insignificant compared to corporate farming. With that in mind, "their" (i.e., corporate farms) livelihoods depend more on government subsidies than good climate.
I don't think you can generalize how family farmers feel about climate change, or even if they're single issue voters that may or may not care about something else more. Corporate farms are big business though, and big business tends to vote conservative in the US, and conservatives in the US tend to not take action to fix climate change. These two things may be related, too.
What's your take on the Willamette Valley becoming the next Napa? I've heard this being discussed as climate change and wildfires become more apparent in California.
I've heard this too but don't know a lot about wine. What I have noticed in my 26 years here is that there are more and more drinkable reds growing in the valley, you may not see it so much in the supermarkets but when you go on wine tours it seems like there's more selection of wines that need warmer weather so it does seem like a real possibility. The land is pretty densely farmed, though, so you'd either have to log some hills or displace other crops, not that that would be a problem if it promises to be lucrative.
Last year, when SF was posting photos of the orange sky I was driving up I5 in the Willamette Valley at 11am with my brights on because smoke had turned day to night.
Last year 4.4 million[1] acres burned in CA (~4% of the state), and 1.2 million[2] in OR (~2% of the state). These are huge numbers. Similar to CA, it's not just the acreage significantly increasing in recent years but also intensity and damage. The Almeda Drive Fire destroyed over 2,000 structures between Ashland and Medford, in highly accessible terrain with firefighting resources nearby.
Right now, the Bootleg Fire in Oregon is over 150,000 acres with 0% containment [3], putting it within the top 20 largest fires in state history at present and likely to grow.
From my layman's perspective, it seems that the brief window when CA's ideal climate moves slightly north has already come and gone.
Ashland and Medford were downright scary to drive through on the main drive north (not from there, don't remember the route number specifically). The only people out were crews and the occasional artist or photographer memorializing the human aspects of widespread fire wreckage. Just devastating.
People who's livelihood depends on the climate are generally
going to have opinions about the climate that track the evidence and scientific consensus.
But climate change is the single most important issue of our time. Even if I disagreed with a candidate on everything else, I'd still vote for them if their opponent was denying the existence of climate change.
What is it going to take for people to realize how serious this is?
The reason is, you’re wrong, it’s not the most important issue. Because there are other more important issues. There are more important long term issues. There are even some more important environmental issues, in terms of harm and our ability to engage productively with them. And your opinion about what to do about climate change is surely a thoughtless, harmful, uncreative regurgitation.
When the short term immediate consequences of climate change are greater than the immediate benefits of combustion energy. So never. Look at the gilet jaunes protests. No one wants to lose their job or limit the GDP growth of their country to protect the environment for their great grandkids or great great grandkids.
I wouldn't assume farmers automatically vote red. In ND for example, which is typically red for the presidential race, we often have democrat representatives in congress. Farmers will vote on what policies affect their bottom line, and it isn't always one way or the other.
Gas taxes are extremely regressive. All consumption taxes for non-luxury goods are regressive, and lower income people typically own old cars with worse gas mileage and/or use trucks to work blue collar jobs.
> Poorer people use much less fuel than wealthier people. Gas taxes are not regressive. Poisoning the atmosphere is regressive.
That isn't always true. At least in my city, poor people have to drive to work, richer people often have the luxury of riding their bike or taking the corporate bus in (because they live closer to work (or even public transit) and/or their company provides them with perks that reduce their need for driving).
I guess you'll need to show some data because in every American city I've studied income is positively and strongly correlated with private vehicle travel. Poor people are not obligate drivers; they disproportionately walk and bike and take the bus. A typical result that I just drew from my PDF library says "higher income, higher educational attainment, and smaller household sizes tend to be associated with a higher probability of commuting by private vehicle and a
lower probability of commuting by transit or active modes."
It flips on the USA west coast, mainly because of housing prices, poor people can afford to live mostly in places where getting to anyplace without a car is inconvenient. In fact, it’s mostly not true in the USA, but is definitely true in many countries outside the USA. A common expat joke is that rich Chinese drive and poor Chinese ride bikes, while rich Americans ride bikes and poor Americans drive. See https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-07-15/how-low-i....
I wonder if this is a statistical bias where we intuitively over sample one group while under sampling another and then average over the sample.
The urban poor is probably a lot more numerous than the rural poor, but when thinking about the poor we tend to think about the rural communities. I don’t know how the numbers but common belief is that in the rural areas the poor make up a larger proportion of the total population then in urban areas. However the urban population is a lot larger then the rural population.
So in absolute numbers there might be more urban poor (which are forced to commute by walking/biking/public transit, etc.) then there are rural poor. So—in absolute numbers—it is not unlikely—though counter-intuitive—that rich car usage outnumbers poor car usage by a lot.
On top of that, one can be forgiven for under count the number of working class folks which work close to where they live. The lower classes hold the majority of service jobs, which are often located in the residential neighborhoods. And then majority of all neighborhoods are not gentrified and have affordable (or at least not ridiculously high) rent.
> The urban poor is probably a lot more numerous than the rural poor
Actually, the suburban poor trump both urban and rural poor by far. That is, people who live in communities not in the urban core of a metro area, but within distance of one. They are much more attached to cars than the urban poor (who can't afford the parking fees anyways). These are the people stuck with crappy 1 hour commutes to their low paying job, whereas the urban poor...they are close enough to their jobs, but instead their housing is really expensive (or of bad quality). The suburban poor own a car, parking isn't much of a problem for them, and they make up a lot of the cars on the freeway during rush hour because their jobs provide them with much less flexibility in avoiding it.
The suburban poor might even own a cheap house, they are much more numerous in the USA than who I would consider rich. So think someone who is commuting in from Concord because they can't afford to live in SF, not those people living in SF itself. SF is generally a bad example because of parking costs (you can't afford to drive there), but outside of downtown there are still lots of jobs that people commute by car to. Here in Seattle, a lot of people drive to their jobs outside of the city core, coming in from outside of Seattle to do so (whereas people like me take the Google bus, my Amazonian wife just has to walk a block to the bus stop that takes her within a block of her office, because we paid a bunch of money for a place in Ballard).
A fellow Seattlite here (well Vashon to be precise). I don’t know the numbers so I believe your numbers over my previous guess. But when I was thinking about the urban poor I was actually thinking about the suburbs as well. The Seattle area has a lot people living and working in places like White Center, Burien and Issaquah. Even those that live in the suburbs but work downtown, a lot of them ride the Sounder from Everet or Pyuallup, or walk on to the ferries from Bremerton or Southworth. The few times I commute to downtown with the Water Taxi I see a lot of people coming from Southworth on the WS ferry and transfer onto the Water Taxi to Colman Dock (probably less now that Southworth has their own PO boat).
But like I said, I don’t know the numbers at all. Here on Vashon I would guess that there is little correlation between economic position and whether or not you commute by car any further then the nearest park-and-ride. Although those that bike all the way to the ferry are probably on the richer side if I were to guess. I my self can walk to the highway and catch a bus to the Water Taxi (which is a pretty nice commute tbh). However I belive you when you say that the suburban poor outnumber any other group and that they are overwhelmingly drivers.
Most jobs aren’t in downtown Seattle though. So you are stuck with a job somewhere away from a main transit route, you live away from a main transit route, taking public transit really isn’t a luxury in time that you can afford.
If you don’t want to drive, there are lots of things you can do in arranging where you live and having flexibility in where and when you work (eg buying a house in Ballard rather than Lynwood, working for a high tech company with a convenient office location - because it’s part of their effort to attract workers, etc…). Those options become more accessible the more money you make.
In fact I have not lived long on the East Coast. The SF MTA, in 2017:
"""Higher income households in San Francisco make more trips by automobile. Much of this difference is associated with variations in auto access by income, with only 10 percent of households with incomes over $75,000 reporting no access to a vehicle, compared to 40 percent of households with incomes under $75,000... households making incomes over $76,000 having a significantly higher private auto mode share than households making $35,000 or less."""
Higher fuel costs can be offset with stimulus checks and tax credits. But regardless, first we have to agree that significantly reducing fossil fuel consumption is a goal.
Coal for electricity generation alone accounts for >60% of all manmade CO2 emissions. We could get very far just phasing out coal and doing nothing else, yet rhetoric usually focuses on cars and aviation. Aviation is less than 5% of all emissions. Why is the focus out of line with the reality in this way?
You can buy a zero tailpipe emission car right now. You can even ride a bus, carpool, or bike. Or take an offer for a remote working job in preference over an in office one. An individual can’t change the fuel mix of their grid. Airline usage is a luxury. Natural gas power plants are already displacing coal fired one.
This is a really cheap refute. If gas taxes are regressive, then build the infrastructure so they won’t be. If poor people are dependent on cheap gas for driving to work, increase the bus coverage and frequency, build new rail lines (and electrify existing once) for congested routes, zone cheaper housing closer to where people work and build safe bike lanes, heck even subsidize electric cars if everything else is too radical. Do this along with raising gas prices and they won’t be regressive.
EDIT: And to raise the hammer home. Biden also said no to the Green new deal. The electrification of CalTrain, and the California High Speed rail are experiencing slowdowns because of lack of funding. ST3 in Seattle is at risk of being delayed because of lack of funding. Amtrak is getting the most modest of all expansions. Bus networks in mid-sized American cities are a poor as they ever were and no change in the maps. I think that gas taxes “being regressive” is not the real reason that Biden and other politicians are not raising the gas prices.
Voters reject public transit taxes because they can’t imagine themselves riding. There is a huge blind spot on the cost of roads. Never raising gasoline tax and continuing to mandate minimum parking just shifts the cost of driving from motorists to general taxpayers.
Even this, for me, seems like a lousy excuse a politician would make. Even if true, a good politician should be able to convince the general public that this is a good idea. So far politicians that advocate for public transit as a remedy for our inevitable step away from fossil fuels are hard to find.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez bears mentioning here a one of few who does. Among my local politicians, state senetor Joe Nguyen goes a step further and advocates for public transit as social justice issue (as well as a climate one).
The badies are easier to find. California Governor Gavin Newsom stresses the importance of tackling the climate crises, yet is not funding necessary infrastructure project which would make the transformation easier. Europe is also full of the Gavin Newsom types. And this is sad because most people are in favor of radical climate policies. So convincing the public of a good climate policy should be easy (this is also [probably] true of the west coast states).
In my opinion, if dealing with the climate disaster is as important as these politicians correctly claim it to be, then they should commit to it. Failing to do so reflects how bad they are at politics and honestly they should probably find a new career where they will do less damage.
He has the power to influence the legislator, and he hasn’t been shy about using that power to speak against funding green infrastructure since he took office.
Climate change will be also regressive and hit poor people the hardest. So, even though gas tax may be regressive, no gas tax is likely even more regressive. It's just postponed by a few years/decades.
And there are mitigations we can take to help the poor, as sibling comments say.
Generous federal financial assistance is like a backdoor minimum wage increase. Hopefully inflation doesn’t nullify the bigger purchasing power those bigger numbers are assumed to confer.
A lot of people who don't "accept that climate change is happening" actually do when you talk to them and understand where they're coming from. What they often don't like are the proposed solutions to it. Which makes sense when you consider that those proposed solutions often involve completely upending their life.
using your brain, don't you think vague, exaggerated and detail-free statements like "completely upending your life" are part of utterly ordinary mental resistance-patterns? In other words, actively defeating consideration of detail and alternatives
If you are a farmer your entire life revolves around planting your crops with heavy machinery[0], fertilizing[1] your crops with heavy machinery, harvesting your crops with heavy machinery, and then transporting your crops to storage/processing by truck, rail, or barge. All of which require massive fossil fuel inputs. So I would say "completely upending their life" is a fair assessment.
Edit: Would love to hear your detailed alternatives though.
[0]: Requires lots of fuel.
[1]: Fertilizer is a produced from natural gas or mined using heavy machinery.
That's sort of my point. Any change on the scale required to affect climate change would require a massive upheaval of the industry so it isn't going to happen anytime soon.
Farmers have known about climate change and accepted it for years [0]. What's missing is the acceptance that it's anthropogenic. So instead of supporting any sort of helpful policies most farmers (which are really just huge agricultural concerns) just bitch about water rights, "city folk", and stick their hands out for government subsidies.
I don't expect much self reflection from that group. They finance state and federal representatives to double down on subsidies rather than any meaningful changes.
I don't think this comment understands the reality of how great the US's food producing abilities are. US producers could add more new land to its agriculture output than all other countries combined. All that new land is in areas that already have infrastructure for that land to be productive. US farms continue to increase the productivity of their land. In some locations in the Midwest, farmers are able to increase their crop cycles.
The effects of climate change are probably a net gain for US agriculture, I don't expect the fight to come from them.
Maybe not those two days of crazy heat but overall our spring and early summer was much warmer and drier. Normally I lose most of my cherries because of cold or moisture during or right after the blossom but this year I had a bumper crop on both my cherry trees and my plums are also doing great. Apples and pears are generally always great, this year I had some fruit drop after the two 100+ days but still going to be a good harvest.
If this persists annually, it could result in another selective event like what happened with peppered moths in Sheffield during the Industrial Revolution:
Black shade is related with having a stronger shell and protection in a dark place, so we would have two opposite selective forces crashing one against the other. Crabs would track and eat any white mussels in its first months (probably, I'm just speculating).
I live around Portland, OR. I took my family berry-picking a couple of weeks back and it was a very sad sight. Almost all the raspberries, blackberries, boysenberries, and marionberries were gone. The blue-berries were the only things to survive pretty much, but they had very little flavor.
In my backyard on the first day we hit 107-108, I lost all my pea plants and my green beans took a major beating. My corn and zucchini plants were wilting like crazy, I thought they were a goner. The second day I said forget this and just let the garden sprinkler run all afternoon; high water-bill be damned. That did the trick, I managed to save my tomatoes, corn, a good chunk of the green beans, and the zucchini. The south-facing side of my Japanese maple is still scorched.
What a crazy event. The worst part of it is all the people that lost their lives.
This is pretty chilling to consider. Also notable that many right wingers in colder climates think (or at least claim to believe) that climate change might be a net positive for them.
One of the predicted winners of climate change is Russia. It's supposed to thaw fertile lands that are currently under permafrost and open up new shipping lanes. Obviously even Russia will experience some downsides but the positives could easily outweigh the bad.
Everything has tradeoffs. Various studies of the economic impact of climate change suggested some warming would be a net positive for northern countries but sufficient warming would be universally bad for every country. We have already reached that point, the issue for the north isn’t just an increase in average temperatures it’s an increase in variability. Canada wasn’t prepared for 120f temperatures and spending money to prepare for such rare events is hard to justify. On the other hand failing to prepare has real consequences.
Plus, retreating permafrost is a serious issue for infrastructure built on top of it. Combined with new pests and everything put together it’s a complex issue to analyze.
YES! I’m more scared of what’s in the permafrost we’re about to unleash than any other part of global warming... though most of that fear, for me, is from all that trapped methane’s effect on the atmosphere and climate. The awful contagions, viruses, bacteria, and death buried/hidden/locked away are seeming more and more like an apocalyptic “fatality” (think Mortal Kombat) move at this point...
That's not how it works. Climate change might lead to a modest average temperature increase in the northern parts of Canada and Russia but that is not necessarily going to make those places arable because along with climate change comes a dramatic increase in variability.
As we just saw in the PNW/BC heat bubble, climate change is not just an increase in average temp, it is a dramatic and worrisome increase in the standard deviation of temperatures. Which means here in Canada and in continental climates like Siberia there will be dramatic swings in temperature, forest fires, and drought. That is, there will still be extreme cold temperatures in the winter, just not reliably so, and summers could be all over the map.
It's already happening. Heat waves in April followed by very late frosts in May, for example. Hard to farm in those conditions, trust me.
Not to mention melting glaciers and declining snowpack means in the longer/medium term the rivers which provide the water for these vast continental regions dry up or shrink dramatically. See the Columbia Icefields / Athabasca glacier and the Bow glacier in western Canada. Not a good situation. Just came back from the Columbia Icefields and it's... as depressing as usual. Can't even walk up to the ice anymore like when I was last there a decade ago.
I'll just stay here in the great lakes, lots of water for now.
You know it's bad when the blackberries in the Willamette Valley die! It's nearly impossible to kill those bastards, if I don't rip them out multiple times a year the only thing I have in my yard are blackberries. I might have to get a goat herd.
I have that same problem (who doesn't eh?) and unfortunately the ones in my yard are doing great. They don't get the full day's sun like that berry farm did though.
I pull them out from the roots and every year they come back. It's right along the fence line too, which makes it very difficult to maneuver for pulling them out. I have snooty neighbors that get uppity about dandelions growing in my yard. I love blackberries and sometimes I just want to let them grow, but my neighbors would have a heart attack and sue me for it given the chance hah.
Quick edit: the days are also quite a bit longer so while further south they might hit 100 and be fine, up here it was 100 for many hours nonstop. That's whats withering the plants. Heck, it's not even that unusual for Portland to toy with 100d in the summer, it's unusual to go that high for that long.
I measured 116 degrees at my house. These boysenberries are out in a field with the sun battering on them all day long. At those temps, it must've been a big shock for the plants. Most of them had significant burn damage to the leaves.
> The second day I said forget this and just let the garden sprinkler run all afternoon; high water-bill be damned. That did the trick
I haven't seen any reporting on if the industrial scale farms actually employed evaporative cooling via sprinklers throughout the heat wave.
It seems like a no-brainer when your crop is at risk and you're already presumably equipped with appropriately sized sprinklers and water supply... was it just too hot to be effective? Or did the total loss instances just stand around and watch their crops dry out and bake in the sun?
It is not typical for farms to have equipment to keep sprinklers going on all parts of all fields of all crops simultaneously, as was pretty much necessary. People have equipment for normal conditions, and not a ton of idle capacity that it would have been a no-brainer to deploy.
I imagine most farmers don't have the equipment to sprinkle all their crops at the same time, normally they'd rotate what's being sprinkled. So they'd only be able to pick a small amount to save
The Pacific Northwest is known for its highly productive dryland farming, relying on natural rainfall patterns instead of irrigation or sprinklers, which also reduces costs. Consequently, there is a relative dearth of infrastructure for distributing piped water to the crops during a severe drought or heatwave.
It wouldn't work with existing systems. For example, out here in the West, center pivot irrigation is the most common. In a quarter mile crop circle, the arm takes a full 24 hour day to make a full rotation. The bigger 1 mile circles typically take a few days. This is too slow to rescue most crops from a long stretch of 110 degree days.
EDIT:
Nope! I'm mistaken. I found a newsletter in my inbox from earlier this year saying that there are companies doing exactly what you propose: making high speed irrigation systems for cooling. Here's an example:
I actually searched for that exact question before I turned on the sprinkler. Search for "does watering plants in sunlight burn them" and there's tons of results claiming it's not true. Sources ranged from The Guardian to StackExchange. I was desperate and those search results were good enough for me at the time, so never bothered to look for any kind of studies around the matter. If you can find evidence of watering in sunlight burning plants, I'd like to read it.
> At the start of this paper, we quoted the oft-stated advice that plants must not be watered in the midday sunshine in order to avoid tissue damage as a result of intense sunlight focused by water drops on leaves (Table S1). We have shown that this widely held belief is only correct for hairy leaves. Based on the computed light-collecting efficiency of water drops (Figs 4–7), we have also determined that the risk of sunburn of smooth, hairless leaves is theoretically the highest at a solar elevation of θ ≈ 23°, corresponding to early morning or late afternoon. In practice, however, the light intensity from such an oblique position of the sun is too weak to be a factor, as was confirmed by Expt 2.
I live around Portland too. Berry picking in Clackamas County has been just fine, especially blackberries and loganberries. Even with the (very) brief heatwave.
In Georgia, this year has been cooler than usual. I don't even think it's broke 90 (F) yet here where we live in North Georgia. And a late frost took out a good number of fruits (like figs) and killed a number of trees.
Climate change causes these kind of events to happen more frequently. So if you have N heat waves this decade while you had M<N heat waves 50 years ago in a decade then you can say that about N-M of these were causes by the climate change.
But I'm pretty sure you know that. However, people seem to have demonstrated a lack of ability (or will) to understand the climate change based on the long term stats, so some think that maybe the individual events help these people understand (or accept) the reality.
> Why is this heat wave from climate change but past heat waves were not?
(If I'm not wrong), is a new record for the area so is the highest heat wave reported past or present. Is a new situation.
> Is every temperature anomaly caused by climate change?
Not, but if climate change predicts extreme temperatures, and you start having extreme temperatures, higher and higher each year, maybe we should pay more attention to the pattern.
Baking the wheat crop this time of year is a good thing, not a bad one. Lower moisture contents during harvest increases value as it's easier to store for a myriad of reasons.
Seattle-area resident here. Fir trees are browned on the top-sides of their branches and native shrubs and bushes have taken a bad beating from the heat. A large fraction of deciduous trees look like they would in fall. Anything near asphalt is close to dead. I measured 162F on our driveway asphalt, sufficient to cook meat.
As a once every few decades event, this is not a big deal, the vegetation will recover. However, if this happens once every 2-3 years, the Pacific NW tree cover is in deep trouble. I can see it changing from evergreen to deciduous over time if the trend continues.
What neighborhood do you live in? Up here in Ballard, I'm not noticing much damage yet, definitely not any dying trees, but we have a bit more coolness, humidity going on because of the bay/canal.
Eastside. Close to the water, you should have fared much better. The fir trees aren't dying but their branches on topsides are heavily browned. They'll probably recover fine IF this is not a regular event. Otherwise, tree cover change in the long term looks inevitable.
Counter-anecdote: I live in Seattle, my fir trees look normal. My garden survived the heat wave without issue. Auto-drip irrigation runs at dusk and dawn, same as every other year. Our small marijuana crop was briefly at risk without extra ventilation, but otherwise it’s a normal crop year for us.
Also, none of berries were scorched as mentioned in other threads. We actually had a huge, way above-average raspberry harvest. Maybe we’re just lucky?
What does that have to do with anything? Even if true (and say the 2000 year old climate data was not cherry picked to make a point) I doubt that the changes back then to the current ‘abnormality’ happened at the same pace the current changes back to the supposed ‘normality’.
Also the changes back to this supposed ‘normality’ are only happening now because of abnormally high co2 levels in the atmosphere—emitted by humans—which are causing the temperature to go up in most places on the planet. The changes in the pacific north west is a manifestation of this broader change, and that is what people are justly worried about. No matter if the climate in this local area is going back to an “older patter”.
> What does that have to do with anything?
Everything, I live in California and my family has lived here for generations. If droughts and higher heat are normal events and the fact that there are an extremely large amount of people living in California currently and a large portion of nations food are grown here are extremely concerning. Expect mass exoduses to other areas of the country, and sky high produce prices if a 60 year drought happens like has happened multiple times before. In addition if the 20th century and its wet abnormality allowed a population explosion to this area we need to expedite de-salinization efforts, reduce water wherever possible and reduce carbon as well.
You don't have to go far to find someone who doesn't believe climate change will affect them in their lifetime, but I think people are [blissfully] unaware of how fragile and capitalist-driven the West's food market is.
It would only take a couple of failed seasons before our poor starved and we faced massive inflation.
We need to start coming up with fixes, 20 years ago. I fear what's more likely is people clawing onto what they've got by further destroying the planet, as well as excessive hoarding, further strangling supply.
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203 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 277 ms ] threadWe are watching the world wither away, quite rapidly, with nothing to show for it.
Except for the entirety of human civilization, sure.
[1]: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12288594/ [2]: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-are-the-demographi...
It is relevant if you think that the individual unit of human civilization is a single person.
Exactly, no one knows the answer....
We can't agree as a civilization when this planet started, but everyone knows when it's going to end.... irony is thick around these parts...
"One thing I know, I know nothing."
The world will keep turning, regardless of fitness for human life.
Modern humans are more impressive than our ancestors, according to you. Is that good, or are we a tsunami?
-- George Carlin
Our material wealth and our industrial capabilities just make our failings so much more shameful in my books.
Organizing civilization is hard. I have no doubts the council of intergalactic ministers had a difficult run as well. That is the nature of nature.
No other species on our planet does this, because the food chain system has constraints to prevent feedback loops- it's why apex predators are very low in population. We're a unique type of predator because while, we are not immune to death from any number of sources, our sheer ability to increase our population thanks to exploiting the environment outweighs any defenses the global ecosystem has been able to muster so far. Nonetheless, things seem to be heading in the direction of (population) collapse, but to what extent and how soon, it is hard to tell.
Furthermore, "This sucks" implies room for improvement, whereas "This is impressive" implies no great need for improvement. Being defeatist would be to not even criticize such shoulder patting because nothing can possibly change and this is the best we can do.
> Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made.
-- Franz Kafka
I don't know who said it, but "Those who think they are something have ceased to become something" also springs to mind.
Progressive sociological and technological change is difficult. We have made significant progress. We have a long way to go. Crying that we have achieved nothing diminishes large achievements that you take for granted.
> It also mocks hope for the future of our ability to change by then. Which is pretty bullshit because the rate of all those things is declining.
If you really think this quote is just about sneakers with lights in the heels, I can't help you.
> If machines produce everything we need, the outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.
-- Stephen Hawking
> Don't be deceived when they tell you things are better now. Even if there's no poverty to be seen because the poverty's been hidden. Even if you ever got more wages and could afford to buy more of these new and useless goods which industries foist on you and even if it seems to you that you never had so much, that is only the slogan of those who still have much more than you. Don't be taken in when they paternally pat you on the shoulder and say that there's no inequality worth speaking of and no more reason to fight because if you believe them they will be completely in charge in their marble homes and granite banks from which they rob the people of the world under the pretence of bringing them culture. Watch out, for as soon as it pleases them they'll send you out to protect their gold in wars whose weapons, rapidly developed by servile scientists, will become more and more deadly until they can with a flick of the finger tear a million of you to pieces.
-- Jean-Paul Marat
> The frightening coincidence of the modern population explosion with the discovery of technical devices that, through automation, will make large sections of the population 'superfluous' even in terms of labor, and that, through nuclear energy, make it possible to deal with this twofold threat by the use of instruments beside which Hitler's gassing installations look like an evil child's fumbling toys, should be enough to make us tremble.
-- Hannah Arendt
If someone, rather than trembling, speaks of how it's better than it ever was.. I frankly couldn't care less what they consider "shit".
That's super interesting. Thanks for your input.
If this was a unique event, my bet would be a fast recovery of most invertebrates in 2-3 years. Maybe a year of savage algae blooming. If the event becomes more frequent the entire ecosystem will be replaced by southern animals. Crustaceans will explode in a few years, probably. This is a blessing for some animals.
It's time to consider solar geoengineering or other more extreme mitigation strategies.
In the long term, I hope that the economic forces of cheap renewables and energy storage might be enough to get us down to a reasonable PPM. And maybe, just maybe, we'll see advances in sequestration that get us down to where we were before.
I'm not an expert, so please don't take any of my views as fact. I'm just a layman trying to find some hope in what looks like a pretty hopeless situation.
Which is unfortunate because even if we dropped emissions to zero tomorrow, we would still be in for a few more decades of escalating climate crisis.
In the grand spectrum of what's already be chosen as far as climate change goes, this is just the very, very beginning. Our chance to act to prevent what we're seeing now was 30-40 years ago.
It's unquestionably too late to prevent global warming, and mitigation is only possible if we seriously consider organized economic down scaling. This is stuff people have known about for decades and strangely enough took more seriously in the 70s than they do now.
Carbon emissions grow every year and the rate they are growing at continues to rise as well. Fossil fuel usage continues to rise (globally, local changes are meaningless). The only time we see any serious reduction in emissions is during massive economic down turns.
Many argue that people won't accept a change of lifestyle, but that change is coming either way. Since virtually no one I've chatted with will even take economic reduction seriously I'm pretty certain it is "too late" in every sense.
Downvoting comments like this because you wish it wasn't true is really unfitting of a community that prides itself on being 'hackers' and understanding how the world works.
For developed countries that have high productivity growth, falling demand as the population ages and low inflation you actually have to come up with random ideas to keep the population employed. It doesn't even matter what you do. You could let them dig holes and fill them. What's important is that the money goes to people who spend it.
You know. Instead of letting the government be the investor of last resort, why not just introduce a carbon tax and carbon tariff and just let the private sector do all the investments? It would revitalize the economy far more than a bunch of trump style tax cuts.
Green investments for climate change? Fuck that, let's save capitalism with green investments!
> China isn't doing anything, so why should we?
If the entire human race comes to an end, the last two gravestones will read: "the guy in the other grave is to blame."
https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-is-china-the-main-climate-c...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/01/16/next-chin...
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/10/01/worlds-largest-solar-...
And the irony is that such a power plant is an extreme strategic and economic resource. During wartime you no longer have to worry about how to import ever dwindling fossil fuels. During peace time, you have limitless negotiation power.
Majority renewable energy would likely push a country into a realm that is far beyond a superpower. And China seems to have caught on to this - they have probably realized how much money they are burning while securing coal reserves around the world (e.g. Zimbabwe).
The poor and first nations communities have not been well served by the current paradigm, and in fact the best outcome for them is generally left leaning policy that actually honors seniority of water rights, enforcement of environmental laws, and policies that support critical first nations fisheries and other resources (stop damming salmon runs, displacing the tribes and selling the water and power to large corporate farmers would be a great start).
It is the political right that has largely trampled the poor and first nations into the dust over the past decades, on both sides of that border.
The crisis, said Eric Kuhn, former general manager of the Colorado River Conservation District, can no longer be ignored. “According to Merriam-Webster, a drought is a temporary condition,” he said. What is happening, he suggested, is something more permanent and troubling. “This is aridification.”
I think it's just because the framing for so long has been "drought", when it clear that what is going on is probably more severe.
[1]: https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2021-07-11/lake-m...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2021/jun/...
Edit: Here's a more accessible version of the graph: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/368/6488/314/tab-figu...
Both of your links show how bad the current drought is. If the current drought miraculously reverses itself in the next several years, than what you're arguing could be true. However, it doesn't look like that will be happening - time will tell.
It's not exactly accurate because it doesn't account for water taken out for irrigation above this particular point, but it clearly shows the natural ebb and flow of the Colorado's volume.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-45435593
I don't disagree with where you are going, but I think there might be easier ways to geoengineer than mirroring sun directly back out into space (unless I miss my mark at what solar geoengineering is - if so, I'm sorry). I cound't find it, there's also the "plan" to release megafauna into the midwest and pay to have them "sheparded" so they become a commodity instead of a liability, creating grasslands again.
EDIT: typo
https://www.npr.org/2020/08/24/899422710/to-manage-wildfire-...
"Before 1800, several million acres burned every year in California due to both Indigenous burning and lightning-caused fires, far more than even the worst wildfire years today. Tribes used low-grade fires to shape the landscape, encouraging certain plants to grow both for tribal use and to attract game."
This addresses only a symptom (more extreme wildfires) and not the root issue: persistent drought / aridification amplified by climate change. To be resilient to the latter, we need to become dramatically more efficient in how we use water resources, especially in the food production pipeline.
Burns were done to help manage water supplies in the first place.
At this point, prescribed burns are only a fuel management technique to minimize massive wildfires. They are not a realistic way to mitigate climate change driven aridification. It's not really clear that we can mitigate it - we just need to adapt to use water more efficiently.
After spending a lot of time in the Sierra Nevadas growing up, I really can see how a lot more trees are dying. A lot of it is that pine beetle wreaking havoc, but the number of standing dead trees is astounding. Old bike paths I used to fly down I now have to be careful on in case I round a corner and have a tree down; 20 years ago I just never had that cross my mind!
I mean, how many thousands of years of plastic utensil avoidence equals an oil well operation over a year?
It’s not really fun to conclude that it would be more humane to not have them, than to bring children into a world completely consumed by its egotistical inhabitant’s desperate desire to please Moloch at absolutely any cost.
Climate change and plastic pollution are two separate issues, but I would be willing to bet that the folks who support plastic pollution legislation are also some of the more fervent supporters of climate change legislation. And at the municipal level, for every plastic ordinance there are probably dozens of ordinances focused on climate change. But solving climate change will likely require global cooperation on a level that the world has never seen before. So you are essentially cherry picking a topic to accuse their supporters of being "performative" just because they haven't yet solved one of the biggest challenges the world has ever faced.
No, and I wasn’t trying to say that.
> Climate change and plastic pollution are two separate issues, but I would be willing to bet that the folks who support plastic pollution legislation are also some of the more fervent supporters of climate change legislation.
I agree, but in democratic societies (at least in western europe where I have experience), policy tends to be decided by compromise between different interests, and plastic bans and more impactful climate change occupy the same lane of general support for environmentalism.
So we get into a situation where green parties want to reduce plastics and want to reduce petrol/gas use, and our (Western European) compromise becomes a ban on plastic and little done to reduce petrol/gas usage.
With any money available, we can build solar/wind farm, which is a proven method of fighting AGW (and it even pays for itself these days!) and we can't even do that fast enough.
1 - Forcibly use the wealth of the country to solve the problem, over the objection of those prevented that use of wealth previously.
or
2 - Forcibly silence the people who are experiencing hardship as a result of the problem, so the society can go back to believing (realistically or not) that there is no such problem worth solving.
This happens by degrees, as a very rough response to the degree of hardship presented by the problem, at first, but is the expected result if the society can't democratically answer the "who will pay for it, not I" question.
"Breaking news: Record-setting forest fires in California will send smoke up to Washington."
to:
"It's wildfire season again, here's our favorite air filters for 2021."
Humanity's ability to go from "oh, shit" to "this is fine" and just not realize how much worse things have gotten is incredible.
I assume in 2025 we'll all just scroll past the boring article about which ten metropolitan cities in Florida washed into the Gulf today so that we can get to some funny comics.
I live in the Willamette Valley, the heat wave has actually helped my fruit trees and blueberries but the eastern part of OR and WA are in pretty bad shape.
Edit:
Citation in case people people need one...
https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2019/12/31/790261705/fa...
The USDA pumped 20bn in as recently as 2019. Partly for trade war and partly for flooding and other natural disasters. They didn't even need congressional approval, the USDA has a mandate to spend as it deems necessary.
I'd like to understand. Is this something beyond wilful denial?
https://www.npr.org/2020/11/20/936603967/farmers-are-warming...
Though apparently that wasn't the case 8 years ago: Why Don’t Farmers Believe in Climate Change? - Mother Jones
https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2013/07/farmers-clim...
They are practical, evidence based and extremely in-tune with anything that can affect their bottom line.
There's also more than willful denial considering the amount of propaganda that tries to claim that climate change either isn't real or is grossly exaggerated (there are even efforts to claim that it will be beneficial). The channels that tend to push this also tend to be very popular in rural areas. This isn't even just a climate change things- the same groups of people claiming there's a labor shortage also try to deport anyone who doesn't look like them.
https://www.extension.iastate.edu/news/iowa-farm-and-rural-l...
I think a big difference is the belief of the cause of climate change, a large percentage of farmers believes it's mostly or partly due to natural variations.
1) Assume there is a huge body of activist climate-deniers controlling society
2) The moment we all merely believe the same thing, the climate will begin rapidly healing itself
HN does not believe in actual sacrifice (since the typical HN reader is in the top 1% of polluters), only ideological conformity
There was never a period in American history where most rural people were farmers. That was a Jeffersonian daydream. In the colonial/early-American period, farms consisted of landowners, and a mix of slaves and poorly-paid employees. When slavery ended and the industrial revolution came along, tractors took over most of the work and the employees left for factories; the number of landowners (what we now call "farmers") is not very different now than in 1800.
Here's a census report on the actual careers of small-town America. Lot of community service (education, health care), a little manufacturing and retail… about what one might expect, really. https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/newsroom/blogs/201...
… so getting back to the point of climate change… on the one hand, since farmers don't make up the majority of rural communities, their opinions on climate change don't mean much politically. On the other hand, they do have a very direct and personal effect on the climate w/r/t soil practices (erosion, pesticides, etc), and there are some positive signs on that front.
I don't think you can generalize how family farmers feel about climate change, or even if they're single issue voters that may or may not care about something else more. Corporate farms are big business though, and big business tends to vote conservative in the US, and conservatives in the US tend to not take action to fix climate change. These two things may be related, too.
PBS Frontline, Betting on Trump: Water (2017)
Last year 4.4 million[1] acres burned in CA (~4% of the state), and 1.2 million[2] in OR (~2% of the state). These are huge numbers. Similar to CA, it's not just the acreage significantly increasing in recent years but also intensity and damage. The Almeda Drive Fire destroyed over 2,000 structures between Ashland and Medford, in highly accessible terrain with firefighting resources nearby.
Right now, the Bootleg Fire in Oregon is over 150,000 acres with 0% containment [3], putting it within the top 20 largest fires in state history at present and likely to grow.
From my layman's perspective, it seems that the brief window when CA's ideal climate moves slightly north has already come and gone.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_California_wildfires [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Oregon_wildfires [3] https://inciweb.nwcg.gov/incident/7609/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group_homogeneity
People who's livelihood depends on the climate are generally going to have opinions about the climate that track the evidence and scientific consensus.
What is it going to take for people to realize how serious this is?
Not everyone has it so good. The way to get people to think about the long term is to understand which short term concerns are blocking the path.
That isn't always true. At least in my city, poor people have to drive to work, richer people often have the luxury of riding their bike or taking the corporate bus in (because they live closer to work (or even public transit) and/or their company provides them with perks that reduce their need for driving).
The urban poor is probably a lot more numerous than the rural poor, but when thinking about the poor we tend to think about the rural communities. I don’t know how the numbers but common belief is that in the rural areas the poor make up a larger proportion of the total population then in urban areas. However the urban population is a lot larger then the rural population.
So in absolute numbers there might be more urban poor (which are forced to commute by walking/biking/public transit, etc.) then there are rural poor. So—in absolute numbers—it is not unlikely—though counter-intuitive—that rich car usage outnumbers poor car usage by a lot.
On top of that, one can be forgiven for under count the number of working class folks which work close to where they live. The lower classes hold the majority of service jobs, which are often located in the residential neighborhoods. And then majority of all neighborhoods are not gentrified and have affordable (or at least not ridiculously high) rent.
Actually, the suburban poor trump both urban and rural poor by far. That is, people who live in communities not in the urban core of a metro area, but within distance of one. They are much more attached to cars than the urban poor (who can't afford the parking fees anyways). These are the people stuck with crappy 1 hour commutes to their low paying job, whereas the urban poor...they are close enough to their jobs, but instead their housing is really expensive (or of bad quality). The suburban poor own a car, parking isn't much of a problem for them, and they make up a lot of the cars on the freeway during rush hour because their jobs provide them with much less flexibility in avoiding it.
The suburban poor might even own a cheap house, they are much more numerous in the USA than who I would consider rich. So think someone who is commuting in from Concord because they can't afford to live in SF, not those people living in SF itself. SF is generally a bad example because of parking costs (you can't afford to drive there), but outside of downtown there are still lots of jobs that people commute by car to. Here in Seattle, a lot of people drive to their jobs outside of the city core, coming in from outside of Seattle to do so (whereas people like me take the Google bus, my Amazonian wife just has to walk a block to the bus stop that takes her within a block of her office, because we paid a bunch of money for a place in Ballard).
But like I said, I don’t know the numbers at all. Here on Vashon I would guess that there is little correlation between economic position and whether or not you commute by car any further then the nearest park-and-ride. Although those that bike all the way to the ferry are probably on the richer side if I were to guess. I my self can walk to the highway and catch a bus to the Water Taxi (which is a pretty nice commute tbh). However I belive you when you say that the suburban poor outnumber any other group and that they are overwhelmingly drivers.
If you don’t want to drive, there are lots of things you can do in arranging where you live and having flexibility in where and when you work (eg buying a house in Ballard rather than Lynwood, working for a high tech company with a convenient office location - because it’s part of their effort to attract workers, etc…). Those options become more accessible the more money you make.
"""Higher income households in San Francisco make more trips by automobile. Much of this difference is associated with variations in auto access by income, with only 10 percent of households with incomes over $75,000 reporting no access to a vehicle, compared to 40 percent of households with incomes under $75,000... households making incomes over $76,000 having a significantly higher private auto mode share than households making $35,000 or less."""
EDIT: And to raise the hammer home. Biden also said no to the Green new deal. The electrification of CalTrain, and the California High Speed rail are experiencing slowdowns because of lack of funding. ST3 in Seattle is at risk of being delayed because of lack of funding. Amtrak is getting the most modest of all expansions. Bus networks in mid-sized American cities are a poor as they ever were and no change in the maps. I think that gas taxes “being regressive” is not the real reason that Biden and other politicians are not raising the gas prices.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez bears mentioning here a one of few who does. Among my local politicians, state senetor Joe Nguyen goes a step further and advocates for public transit as social justice issue (as well as a climate one).
The badies are easier to find. California Governor Gavin Newsom stresses the importance of tackling the climate crises, yet is not funding necessary infrastructure project which would make the transformation easier. Europe is also full of the Gavin Newsom types. And this is sad because most people are in favor of radical climate policies. So convincing the public of a good climate policy should be easy (this is also [probably] true of the west coast states).
In my opinion, if dealing with the climate disaster is as important as these politicians correctly claim it to be, then they should commit to it. Failing to do so reflects how bad they are at politics and honestly they should probably find a new career where they will do less damage.
Governors don’t control taxation. They control the executive branch, not the legistlature.
And there are mitigations we can take to help the poor, as sibling comments say.
Edit: Would love to hear your detailed alternatives though.
[0]: Requires lots of fuel.
[1]: Fertilizer is a produced from natural gas or mined using heavy machinery.
I don't expect much self reflection from that group. They finance state and federal representatives to double down on subsidies rather than any meaningful changes.
[0] https://www.arborday.org/media/mapchanges.cfm
The effects of climate change are probably a net gain for US agriculture, I don't expect the fight to come from them.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-36424768
In my backyard on the first day we hit 107-108, I lost all my pea plants and my green beans took a major beating. My corn and zucchini plants were wilting like crazy, I thought they were a goner. The second day I said forget this and just let the garden sprinkler run all afternoon; high water-bill be damned. That did the trick, I managed to save my tomatoes, corn, a good chunk of the green beans, and the zucchini. The south-facing side of my Japanese maple is still scorched.
What a crazy event. The worst part of it is all the people that lost their lives.
https://twitter.com/xongkuro/status/1412778979342356482?s=21
Plus, retreating permafrost is a serious issue for infrastructure built on top of it. Combined with new pests and everything put together it’s a complex issue to analyze.
As we just saw in the PNW/BC heat bubble, climate change is not just an increase in average temp, it is a dramatic and worrisome increase in the standard deviation of temperatures. Which means here in Canada and in continental climates like Siberia there will be dramatic swings in temperature, forest fires, and drought. That is, there will still be extreme cold temperatures in the winter, just not reliably so, and summers could be all over the map.
It's already happening. Heat waves in April followed by very late frosts in May, for example. Hard to farm in those conditions, trust me.
Not to mention melting glaciers and declining snowpack means in the longer/medium term the rivers which provide the water for these vast continental regions dry up or shrink dramatically. See the Columbia Icefields / Athabasca glacier and the Bow glacier in western Canada. Not a good situation. Just came back from the Columbia Icefields and it's... as depressing as usual. Can't even walk up to the ice anymore like when I was last there a decade ago.
I'll just stay here in the great lakes, lots of water for now.
I pull them out from the roots and every year they come back. It's right along the fence line too, which makes it very difficult to maneuver for pulling them out. I have snooty neighbors that get uppity about dandelions growing in my yard. I love blackberries and sometimes I just want to let them grow, but my neighbors would have a heart attack and sue me for it given the chance hah.
Boysenberries should be able to tolerate 100 degrees, too. Portland is way north for them.
Quick edit: the days are also quite a bit longer so while further south they might hit 100 and be fine, up here it was 100 for many hours nonstop. That's whats withering the plants. Heck, it's not even that unusual for Portland to toy with 100d in the summer, it's unusual to go that high for that long.
I haven't seen any reporting on if the industrial scale farms actually employed evaporative cooling via sprinklers throughout the heat wave.
It seems like a no-brainer when your crop is at risk and you're already presumably equipped with appropriately sized sprinklers and water supply... was it just too hot to be effective? Or did the total loss instances just stand around and watch their crops dry out and bake in the sun?
EDIT:
Nope! I'm mistaken. I found a newsletter in my inbox from earlier this year saying that there are companies doing exactly what you propose: making high speed irrigation systems for cooling. Here's an example:
https://www.agriculture.com/machinery/irrigation-equipment/h...
EDIT: Here's an interesting experiment on it: https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1469-...
> At the start of this paper, we quoted the oft-stated advice that plants must not be watered in the midday sunshine in order to avoid tissue damage as a result of intense sunlight focused by water drops on leaves (Table S1). We have shown that this widely held belief is only correct for hairy leaves. Based on the computed light-collecting efficiency of water drops (Figs 4–7), we have also determined that the risk of sunburn of smooth, hairless leaves is theoretically the highest at a solar elevation of θ ≈ 23°, corresponding to early morning or late afternoon. In practice, however, the light intensity from such an oblique position of the sun is too weak to be a factor, as was confirmed by Expt 2.
Is every temperature anomaly caused by climate change?
But I'm pretty sure you know that. However, people seem to have demonstrated a lack of ability (or will) to understand the climate change based on the long term stats, so some think that maybe the individual events help these people understand (or accept) the reality.
(If I'm not wrong), is a new record for the area so is the highest heat wave reported past or present. Is a new situation.
> Is every temperature anomaly caused by climate change?
Not, but if climate change predicts extreme temperatures, and you start having extreme temperatures, higher and higher each year, maybe we should pay more attention to the pattern.
As a once every few decades event, this is not a big deal, the vegetation will recover. However, if this happens once every 2-3 years, the Pacific NW tree cover is in deep trouble. I can see it changing from evergreen to deciduous over time if the trend continues.
Also, none of berries were scorched as mentioned in other threads. We actually had a huge, way above-average raspberry harvest. Maybe we’re just lucky?
Also the changes back to this supposed ‘normality’ are only happening now because of abnormally high co2 levels in the atmosphere—emitted by humans—which are causing the temperature to go up in most places on the planet. The changes in the pacific north west is a manifestation of this broader change, and that is what people are justly worried about. No matter if the climate in this local area is going back to an “older patter”.
It would only take a couple of failed seasons before our poor starved and we faced massive inflation.
We need to start coming up with fixes, 20 years ago. I fear what's more likely is people clawing onto what they've got by further destroying the planet, as well as excessive hoarding, further strangling supply.