patrick.net

YesYNot says

As for me personally, I've never commuted by car more than a few miles. I burn what wood is available to me locally in an EPA regulated (shudder) stove to lower the emissions from burning gas. I bought a more fuel efficient car for my wife when she took a job with a long commute (good opportunity). I'm mindful of AC usage. I've donated to a few organizations devoted to local outdoor resources. Finally, I vote for the environment, because I believe it's one of the more important issues out there.

None of that is having any impact, though the commitment is honorable.

We have to get the population down to 1-2B, it's an existential threat that is more important than people's personal desires, and eventually ban private vehicles entirely and eliminate suburbs not within walking distance of commuter rail.

It doesn't matter if people take 5 minutes to separate the colored paper from the cardboard from the yellow paper from the white paper from the newsprint.

What matters is the massive amounts of non-renewable energy used and gone forever by the entire unavoidable infrastructure energy expense of supporting 7B people. And electric cars are not going to save the day, since fabricating them, making and laying the asphalt for roads, the huge energy inputs in turning rare earth metals into batteries that don't last more than a few years, and of course the increased energy output to charge the car's batteries which will greatly REDUCE the portion of renewable energy usage vs. nonrenewables which are more costly, less controllable, and less efficient and convenient than burning fossil fuels.

WaPoIsHitler Lipsovitch says

spewing Carbon up the atmosphere's ass with no enviro controls or scrubbers or suchlike. Yet the temperatures continued to fall worldwide for decades.

Carbon is not removed by scrubbers. Any attempts to remove CO2 are referred to as carbon capture and storage. These schemes are too expensive to implement. CO2 is very stable and stays around until plants use sunlight to convert it to a higher energy form. It is interesting that you brought up scrubbers, though, which reduce SO2 emissions. SO2 emissions produce acid rain and happen to cool the environment. Using scrubbers is a good thing, but it doesn't prevent global warming - it exacerbates it. But we are getting off topic. This thread is about the vast difference between weather and climate and why predicting weather is harder than and very different from predicting climate.

WaPoIsHitler Lipsovitch says

We have to get the population down to 1-2B

I'll veer off topic, because solutions to climate change are important. There are several possible solutions. The most appealing is technological. Here, voting is the most important, because it will depend on scientific advances and tax incentives. The socially hard to swallow is population decline. This will only happen through some extinction event, which I personally think is becoming more likely due to disease. It's not something that we will implement by choice. As far as individuals doing what they can to lower their impact: one person won't make a difference, but everybody doing the responsible thing would make a huge difference. In that way, it's like any other aspect of society, really.

YesYNot says

The most appealing is technological. Here, voting is the most important, because it will depend on scientific advances and tax incentives

Physics limits this. Just like even if light speed is possible, we'd never build a Dyson Sphere around the sun or come up with a way to store the energy on a ship to achieve those speeds. People are hoping for a magic McGuffin like Cold Fusion that will likely never exist.

YesYNot says

As far as individuals doing what they can to lower their impact: one person won't make a difference, but everybody doing the responsible thing would make a huge difference.

People need to eat about 2000 calories a day. Most of which couldn't be provided for most people without massive petrochemical inputs. Corn and Beans use copious amounts of fertilizer, the transportation of that fertilizer, and the machinery that powers mechanized (fossil-fuel powered) agriculture.

Every technical solution to a problem requires increasing inputs on a finite planet. We don't expand agra production because of just knowledge, but knowledge plus MASSIVE inputs of non-renewable items like Phosphates and Petrochemicals and their derivatives. Millions of pounds of Plastic is used annually just in the USA for agriculture.

There are no heat-trapping transparent panels made of cardboard coming for greenhouses.

YesYNot says

What have you done for the environment?

So you have some credibility, but I'm sure you'll admit there is still more you can do. Voting doesn't impress me unless it's on local initiatives. A broken system only produces broken results.

I compost. We are on a never-ending quest to eat better, which means no industrial foods. We are CSA members, we re-use our paper and plastic bags. We don't buy stuff we don't need, and make things last rather than junk and replace. Recently purchased a public transportation pass, not for the environment, but because I hate traffic. We don't allow the spraying of any insecticides at any property we rent. Our household cleaners, and laundry cleaners are environmentally friendly. We have a small garden, I am working on expanding. And we pass all of this on to our children.

Be an "environmentalist" is just common sense as a better world makes for a better life. But that word is dirty, and used mostly by people who want to make money off it. So you'll forgive me if I'm more than a bit jaded, when it comes to politician based movements from people who's daily environmental practices I don't know.

NuttBoxer says

I compost. We are on a never-ending quest to eat better, which means no industrial foods. We are CSA members, we re-use our paper and plastic bags. We don't buy stuff we don't need, and make things last rather than junk and replace.

We do all of this, except I occasionally eat some chips.NuttBoxer says

We don't allow the spraying of any insecticides at any property we rent.

I'm going to spray for mosquitoes this year. I'd rather spray than take the chance on disease.NuttBoxer says

We have a small garden, I am working on expanding. And we pass all of this on to our children.

We do this too.

NuttBoxer says

politician based movements from people who's daily environmental practices I don't know

Climate change didn't start with politicians. Gore didn't invent climate change any more than he invented the internet. He just was able to identify two important issues before most other politicians. He's gotten plenty wrong as well. At some point, we have to make decisions as a society. Politicians are just how those decisions get made. Just because politician use issues to win elections and may exaggerate things to their own benefit doesn't mean that everything advocated by politicians is bunk.

WaPoIsHitler Lipsovitch says

Physics limits this. Just like even if light speed is possible, we'd never build a Dyson Sphere around the sun or come up with a way to store the energy on a ship to achieve those speeds.

Have you looked at the price of natural gas or solar panels over the last 10 years. Gas has gotten cheaper with technology. Now, there's some debate about the amount of fugitive CH4 emissions and other issues due to fracking, but it's technology allowing us to replace higher carbon fuels with a lower carbon one. Solar panels have needed to be subsidized, but they are getting to the point that they don't need subsidy.

There are other technologies in development too. I've worked on some.

WaPoIsHitler Lipsovitch says

People need to eat about 2000 calories a day. Most of which couldn't be provided for most people without massive petrochemical inputs. Corn and Beans use copious amounts of fertilizer

Beans don't use copious amounts of fertilizer. Corn needs a lot of nitrogen, which comes from natural gas (the massive petrochemical input). Beans utilize bacteria to fix nitrogen from the air. Rotating beans in with corn reduces the amount of N fertilizer (fossil fuel) required. The other two fertilizers (phosphorus and potassium) are dug out of the ground and don't need that much in the way of petrochemicals to convert to fertilizer. I generally agree with you point that technology has increased corn yields (by a factor of 10 IIRC) over the last 100 years and it requires fossil fuels. OTOH, the biggest impact of agriculture on climate change is not fossil fuel use. It's over-fertilization with nitrogen, which produces a lot of N2O emissions. Better regulation of N application would be a good thing to do to mitigate climate change.

YesYNot says

Politicians are just how those decisions get made.

Citizens drive change, politicians just reflect it(if they're doing their jobs). I agree, you don't throw out the baby with the bathwater, but I read some of the supposedly founding study that was first used(Hawaii), not by Gore, but by a South American politician in the 70's to support climate alarmism. Didn't see the strong corroborations alarmists try to make.

My other misgivings are due to man's constant assertion that he is more important than he really is, and that he will accomplish X by Year Y, only to not even come close. I believe this bias is playing a large role in over-estimating our ability to impact this planet. This is confirmed when I see things like this:

https://www.ted.com/talks/dan_barber_how_i_fell_in_love_with_a_fish

Dan Barber, btw, watch his episode on Chef's Table. Now THAT'S environmental revolution.

YesYNot says

Have you looked at the price of natural gas or solar panels over the last 10 years. Gas has gotten cheaper with technology. Now, there's some debate about the amount of fugitive CH4 emissions and other issues due to fracking, but it's technology allowing us to replace higher carbon fuels with a lower carbon one. Solar panels have needed to be subsidized, but they are getting to the point that they don't need subsidy.

Do Solar Panels help produce the "P" of "NPK"? Are scientists working on magic GMO Corn that requires no Phosphates? Can Natural gas make bioavailable phosphate fertilizer all by itself?

Phosphates naturally "In the Soil" do not provide current high-level Crop Yields. To get modern agra outputs, you must use Phosphates trapped in Rocks, refine it, schlep it to the fields, and then use a machine to distribute it. While Phosphates are renewable in a geographic time scale, there is no source anywhere near as efficient as Phosphate Rock Mining.

The primary problem is Population, not "we need to invest more in technology" or "Recycle your veggie waste"

Unlimited Faith in Science, expecting the impossible or the laws of physics to be bent by some incredible technology, is far more RISKY than doing what we know will work for a fact within a matter of a few decades. Science Research is a not a strategy video game "7 more turns before Galactica Empire develops Solar Panels II, Emperor of Terra. Press Okay to Continue." or "Emperor Ming of the Chinese, at current SciencePoint Allocation, China will develop Gunpowder in 14 turns."

We may never be able to replace fertilizer (which in turn creates other problems like river runoff), but we can reduce humanity down to a point where organic agriculture with minimal, renewable inputs that we already have "in the bag".

Converting anything to anything requires energy and often creates waste products that are difficult to dispose of. Adding to the energy requirements delays the point of switching to majority renewable energy.

If we delay 20 years hoping for a technical solution that doesn't arrive, then meanwhile we've added a billion or two more people and end up with no solution and a bigger problem.

We need to stop the expansion of the human population yesterday.

First rule of having a problem: Stop digging the hole you're in - THEN worry about getting out.

WaPoIsHitler Lipsovitch says

Do Solar Panels help produce the "P" of "NPK"? Are scientists working on magic GMO Corn that requires no Phosphates? Can Natural gas make bioavailable phosphate fertilizer all by itself?

No. There is a lot of talk of peak phosphorus. Most of it in the US comes from FL, which actually provides a lot of the worlds supply. IIRC, this might be peaking in 40 yrs. I forget exactly. In some locations, there is too much P in the soil, so adding it does nothing for yield. In those places, they cannot use animal waste as fertilizer, because the excess P will find it's way into the water table. In other places, they need to add it for yield. It's a finite resource, but it doesn't use much fossil fuel to mine and convert into phosphoric acid or fertilizer.

WaPoIsHitler Lipsovitch says

but we can reduce humanity down to a point where organic agriculture with minimal, renewable inputs.

We can encourage people to limit reproduction, but we don't have much of an ethical argument to prevent people from reproducing. Nature has a way of taking care of large populations. It might be due to running out of phosphate fertilizer, or it might be due to disease.

Hater says

So what are the believers doing with climate models?

Climate models are very different than weather models. They have different objectives. What is being predicted is physically being controlled by different things, so the inputs to the abstract models that describe these systems are very different.

How science doesn't work IRL:

"I don't understand, we estimated we were putting in 60 science points per turn, where is my 4th Generation Nuclear Plant?!"
"I have 550 Science Points, how come I can't select Solar Panel Efficiency III?"
"I spent $20B on Solar in the past decade, how come efficiency barely increased? Give me my $20B back, universe! My population is outsripping my energy needs and the Universe's AI is cheating by gimping my Tech Tree!"

YesYNot says

Nature has a way of taking care of large populations. It might be due to running out of phosphate fertilizer, or it might be due to disease.

So you agree with me in stopping all food aid, medicine, and vitamin freebies for the third world, yes? Or at least only in return being Sterilized, yes? We certainly need to stop subsidizing population growth via charity, no? At the Very least!

Hater says

So what are you saying? Climate changes over time?

Climate changes over time with or without human inputs. But what changes climate over time is different from what changes day to day weather patterns in a given location. The uncertainty is in understanding exactly what portion of our observed climate change is due to human emissions and what portion is due to other factors. Since the other factors could be working in the opposite direction, anthropogenic forces could theoretically contribute more than 100% of the observed change.

WaPoIsHitler Lipsovitch says

So you agree with me in stopping all food aid, medicine, and vitamin freebies for the third world, yes? Or at least only in return being Sterilized, yes? We certainly need to stop subsidizing population growth via charity, no? At the Very least!

That's a tough ethical question. It's especially tough when starvation is caused by war or for other political means as is often the case. No, I don't agree that we should only help people on condition of sterilizing them. I don't think that populations are exploding in regions where people are starving, though. So, I don't think it would solve the problem, even if implemented. IMO, religion is the biggest driver of population explosions. Religions that didn't encourage reproduction were lost the evolutionary war to religions that did encourage that. Pope Francis has already been pretty revolutionary, but he needs to go ahead and tell people that it's OK to use contraception.

YesYNot says

IMO, religion is the biggest driver of population explosions

Disagree. Abundant Food is the biggest historical driver of population explosions. Religion certainly helps, but the biggest driver there is ISLAM, which overlaps with the most rapidly growing regions.

Additionally, shrinking populations drive technological progress, which is why a post Black Death Europe invested heavily in labor saving devices, but an overpopulated China had the tech but not the drive to implement and experiment more with it.

YesYNot says

No, I don't agree that we should only help people on condition of sterilizing them.

I disagree. The first step to solving a problem, as I said earlier, is to stop digging the hole. It's literally crazy helping impoverished areas with massive birthrates have more children! A bunch of White Barbarian foreigners talking about family planning in the face of a thousand years of culture is dismissed as silly White Man babble by entire tribes whose culture believes the exact opposite and measures BOTH women and men by number of children born.

European populations are declining in most nations without any special programs, sometimes even in the face of incentives to have children.

But many parts of the world the population is exploding.

Quick aside YesYNot: How can the population of a region explode, at the same time 1/3rd the population is claimed to have AIDS? Knowing this region has horrible medical care and almost no access to AIDS drugs (meaning, mothers DEFINITELY pass on HIV to newborns).

WaPoIsHitler Lipsovitch says

Disagree. Abundant Food is the bigges

Historically, this is true. I misspoke. Today, wealthy countries with plenty of food are not breeding as fast as less wealthy countries. I believe that population grows more where people are more likely to die young and there is a lot of physical labor needed. People want insurance against having their kids die and they want extra hands to do some of the work.

WaPoIsHitler Lipsovitch says

Quick aside YesYNot: How can the population of a region explode, at the same time 1/3rd the population is claimed to have AIDS?

IDK. It's not something I've studies at all. But IDK where the 1/3rd comes from. I had to look it up but found that ethiopia has a huge population growth rate and large population and has an aids rate of 2 or 3%.

You can blame a lot of ills on too big of a population, but where do you go from there? Do we kill off half, or prevent people from having kids? Neither of these is politically (realistically) feasible.

Hater says

Not everything politicians do is bunk, but global warming climate change is fraudulent.

This is the assertion. I don't believe you are correct. This thread is about eliminating one bogus argument against anthropogenic climate change theory.

Closed the Strikeout?

YesYNot - how about this limitation? The vast majority of water use in California is agra, despite constant misleading PR Campaigns to convince people to shorten showers and save water on the individual consumer level. And yeah, they could be more efficient, but that will only delay the day of reckoning and the population of California continues to increase YoY.

Are we going to somehow replace aquifers that took hundreds of thousands of years to fill? Gonna take a lot of energy-intensive desalination plants, and either coal/oil to power them, or obscene levels of investment in Solar Power at current levels of efficiency.

These guys are showing the depletion of the aquifers by modern highly-productive agriculture. Something compost ain't gonna fix.

Also, wouldn't large scale Solar Plants change the Albedo of the Earth?

YesYNot says

IDK. It's not something I've studies at all. But IDK where the 1/3rd comes from. I had to look it up but found that ethiopia has a huge population growth rate and large population and has an aids rate of 2 or 3%.

Which is probably half that, like 1-2%.

In any case, of interest:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HIV/AIDS_in_Africa

If 15% of the population had AIDS, population would go into reverse dramatically. Since there is an actual census of people, but the HIV numbers are statistical guesses based on small population samples and/or inaccurate cheap testing that has false positives in the presence of malaria, I doubt the HIV Claims.

To me, AIDS/HIV is the biggest bugaboo of the past 30 years, on part with cranial measurements/anthropometry of the 20s and 30s.

YesYNot says

Historically, this is true. I misspoke. Today, wealthy countries with plenty of food are not breeding as fast as less wealthy countries. I believe that population grows more where people are more likely to die young and there is a lot of physical labor needed. People want insurance against having their kids die and they want extra hands to do some of the work.

Today, but the largest expansion of human population was due to greatest expansion of food availability (when plentiful meat and exotic fruits graced the tables of humble Western workers for the first time in history. It wasn't odd for the generations before the Greatest came back from WW2 to eat nothing but cornbread or oatmeal for days at a time.) is still with us - the Babyboomers, which are a Western-wide phenomenon.

The reason the population isn't reproducing is because the culture frowns upon people having too many kids, enshrines working women and devalues parenting especially fatherhood, and provides a great deal of distractions at the cost of massive, massive inputs. That, and due to deregulation, deindustrialization and end of government sponsored affordable housing development programs, the iron costs of living for the young have greatly increased while real purchasing power declined, but fun tech toys have declined even further in cost.

One of the reasons I think the West is so distorted in how to solve the world's problems is because factories have been outsourced, and raw material extraction also.

So the miles of clear cut forest, the smog from factories making Electronics and chotskies, and the sludge and acidic runoff of metal mining has all been moved beyond the experience of Americans.

Somebody in 1970s America would have fewer illusions about the byproducts of factories and industry necessary to support the modern quality of living, and less inclined to believe that cardboard recycling or tiny homes are going to solve the world's pollution and resource problems as they walked through smog filled cities with burning rivers. Because it was made her and the byproducts were visible, aromatic, even auditory. Ironically, in today's America, because polluting factories, mines, etc. are now mostly abroad, they think it's just a problem of marginally increasing solar panel outputs.

WaPoIsHitler Lipsovitch says

due to greatest expansion of food availability

Food availability wasn't the only thing that created the baby boom. Part of it was celebratory. Part of it was delayed child birth - people who wanted kids weren't procreating when they were at war. WaPoIsHitler Lipsovitch says

tiny homes are going to solve the world's pollution and resource problems as

You are underestimating the impact of buildings. reducing house size would make a big impact.

I completely agree with the general notion that people have no idea how things are made and how pollution has been shifted from the US to other countries.

http://www.breitbart.com/tech/2017/03/29/j-scott-armstrong-fraction-1-papers-scientific-journals-follow-scientific-method/

Apparently most researchers also have either no idea how to actually DO science or no interest in actually doing so in an ethical way.
If your only God is Science, their her priesthood are a bunch of heathen frauds! Apparently they, and especially climate scientists, are hucksters of the lowest sort.
If we can't believe the "science" about climate research because it is poorly done or flat out fraudulent, why should we enact policy based on it?

Quigley says

Apparently most researchers also have either no idea how to actually DO scien

Yes, all scientist are fWaPoIsHitler Lipsovitch says

YesYNot - how about this limitation? The vast majority of water use in California is agra, despite constant misleading PR Campaigns to convince people to shorten showers and save water on the individual consumer level. A

Yeah, I'm aware of the issue. It's not just CA, either. The aquifer I would worry about more than that is in the Ogallala in the midwest. It doesn't get as much publicity as CA due to the drought and general desert conditions in part of the state. Beef and other industrial meats are the biggest culprits.