Anthropogenic Climate Change

Blaming China and India also comes off as kind of racist or xenophobic.

"It's the fault of those other countries full of yellow and brown people!"

As if deniers weren't awful enough already.

Edited by M84 on Oct 1st 2019 at 10:52:22 PM

To be fair, they are the second and third largest emitters, but if you are not blaming Russia and the United States as well, ESPECIALLY with the United States actively attempting to hinder attempts to fight it, you are either blind, racist, or both.

There's also an ugly undercurrent to the opposition I've heard in India. It basically goes like this -

"So no one complained when the West was doing it, but now that we start to industrialize, it's our fault. Clearly, it's meant to stop us from becoming a great power with our rightful place in the sun!"

That it is blatantly untrue doesn't matter. That Climate Change is already affecting India badly doesn't matter. But chest-thumping and misplaced nationalism does.

It's tragic, is what it is.

Edited by TechPriest90 on Oct 1st 2019 at 12:15:10 PM

That's one of the biggest issues with the "degrowth" line of climate change mitigation: folks in the frontier regions want their cut of the pie, too. There are millions of unionised palm oil plantation workers in Southeast Asia and they haven't been taking EU moves to shutter the market too kindly.

Yes, the developed world had the biggest carbon footprint, and still has the highest per capita emissions. And yes, the developing world will surpass the number as they continue to industrialise. Both these things can be true at the same time. India, Brazil, Indonesia, Nigeria and many others are looking to bring modern infrastructure and living standards to the rural poor, and they're going to look for the cheapest way to do it.

I guess that in a rational world, climate justice would be a big incentive for developed countries to invest in clean growth. Retooling obsolescent industries into renewables would help drive down costs through competition, which benefits everyone in the long run. For the moment, though, it's politically easier to kick the ball down the road and call it someone else's responsibility.

So what studies shows that in 50 years that humanity will go extinct if climate change goes unchecked?

What studies shows that U.S military is one of the largest contributors to climate change?

None, I'd imagine, as in 50 years that humanity will go extinct if climate change goes unchecked? has very much the air of a crank theory. As for the second question, a quick Google search sends me here and here.

Didn't Greta said we're facing an extinction event and is it possible for the military to become Green

We are, just not our own. Look up the ongoing Holocene extiction. Its pace is predicted to peak in the 2060s from what I have read.

Warfare is anti-environment by default, unless you take a misanthropic view on things like the Mongol conquests and the European conquest of the Americas dropping atmospheric carbon levels by killing tens of millions of people.

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Oct 2nd 2019 at 1:56:38 AM

Thunberg was talking about this extinction which is only tangentially related to man-made climate change and isn't the extinction of humanity (yet).

I am sure the military can Go Green, but it would need technology that can store large amounts of energy in a portable form. Biofuels, fuels synthesized from hydrogen (which in turn could be produced from electrolysis or thermochemical cycles like the sulfur-iodine cycle) or the like.

(Also, unless I missed something, warfare did not lead to millions of fatalities during the conquest of the Americas. Diseases imported by Europeans did)

Edited by SeptimusHeap on Oct 2nd 2019 at 11:39:49 AM

Aren't biofuels kinda not worth it?

Ethanol definitely isn't worth it. Whoever thought we could get decent fuel from corn was a fucking moron. There are a lot of downsides to using ethanol made from corn that more than offset whatever environmental benefits using it as a gasoline substitute might have.

It's better for everyone and the environment to just use that corn to feed people.

Edited by M84 on Oct 2nd 2019 at 5:50:37 PM

Diseases alone don't lead to that kind of catastrophic decline. Europe recovered from the Black Death within decades. The Indigenous communities that weren't in conflict with the Europeans when the diseases hit usually bounced back quickly (there's a primary account of the 1781-1782 Hudson Bay smallpox epidemic that describes this pretty well). In fact, the deadliest outbreaks happened well after European contact, when forced displacement, destruction of resources, increased slave raids and forced labour schemes like the encomienda system pushed Indigenous populations past their breaking point. The ecological impact is pretty well-documented at this point, I believe.

But anyway, no military is going to switch to hydrogen cells anytime soon for one simple reason: logistics. It's easier to stay operational when everything you use, from stoves to jet engines, runs on JP-8. Warfare itself involves environmental destruction to deny the enemy resources and shelter, and often leads to a rise in poaching and illegal logging/mining. Even peacetime exercises involve a massive carbon footprint - plus, y'know, lots of live munitions going off near fragile ecosystems.

Edited by eagleoftheninth on Oct 2nd 2019 at 3:41:12 AM

So to save the world the military has to go?

How soon will climate change wipe out humanity?

Edited by warrior93 on Oct 2nd 2019 at 6:48:52 AM

It took a lot more than "a few decades" for European demography to recover from the Black Death, especially as the Black Death was only one disease while there were a number of diseases that came to the Americas (and not just from Europe - the African slave trade also brought its own bugs) and the Little Ice Age began around that time and thus any demographic recovery would likely be even slower in the Americas than in. Additionally, the territory of the present-day US was thinly inhabited in pre-Columbian times so it didn't add much to American demography (besides, the big bottleneck occurred earlier). That said, it's probably weering from the topic so I'll shut up now.

Regarding these last questions, no (hydrogen cells are not the only game in town when it comes to renewable fuels) and not likely at all (A 16xCO2 world with 16 times as many CO2 as today would be - barely - habitable).

"Wipe out humanity" is a very difficult thing to quantify. Humans are pretty resilient to gross environmental changes. The critical problems will begin as our food supplies start to fail and there is mass starvation. That's when stuff gets serious. It'll start in poorer countries, which will devolve into chaos and warfare, then spread across the globe.

If it gets bad enough, you will start to see food shortages in major metropolitan areas, possibly compounded by civil unrest within developed countries (rural areas cutting off supplies to urban areas, for example). If the cities start to fall apart, that's your tipping point. At that point it's too late for any systematic technological solutions to be developed because there will no longer be economies supporting them.

Most nations will turn to martial law, possibly Balkanizing to reduce the scope of government, with forced agricultural labor, food rationing, and the like. With the collapse of technological infrastructure will come a dramatic reduction in carbon emissions, which will help turn the tide (although our rotting technology will release a ton of it). Most likely, the planet will start to recover before the last humans have died off.

So, yeah, good luck.

Worth noting is that tropical areas will become uninhabitable as temperature rises and weather gets worse, driving migration towards temperate and subtemperate regions. The bands of habitability will move north and south, and nations previously too cold for it will have agricultural booms. It probably won't be enough to stabilize the world's food supply, but it means we won't run out of food all at once.

Some militaries have already begun looking into electrification of their vehicles, which would have a number of advantages. We discussed this already, either here or in another topic. You will still need petroleum fuel for aircraft for some decades, and possibly forever for combat craft which need the highest possible energy density, but otherwise it's going to happen sooner or later. The problem is that it won't happen nearly soon enough even at the most optimistic rate of change, but military fuel consumption is a relatively small slice of the global pie.

Edited by Fighteer on Oct 2nd 2019 at 7:27:31 AM

I always hear that the military is a major contributor to climate change like a big slice of the pie

I lack the statistics to prove it, but one thing to note is that, as global stability declines due to climate change, we'll need more military forces to keep order, accelerating that ratio.

There’s a problem that arises from climate change that often goes unmentioned.

Forced redistribution of people.

Let me explain: Every city, town or populated centre has various necessities that have to be covered for it to be sustainable, the chief of them is water, followed by food and later electricity. Because climate change will lower the water table of many places, that means that the capacities of various urban centers to sustain their populations will become highly strained, this is the current situation of the city of Lima.

Since the use of desalinization plants is akin to kicking the can down the road at best due to population growth, the most reliable method of preventing a city from being drying would be to relocate enough of the population to various parts of the country, designating the destiny of relocation in accordance to its capability to sustain human life. Of course, I’m also aware that this forced relocation will be extremely unpopular but it’s still one of the best solutions to the issue at hand.

People being forced away from their current living areas will happen regardless. After all, we're already seeing the effects of rising sea levels on several islands. If the sea level continues to rise we will end up losing significant chunks of Hawaii, meaning all the people who live there will have to relocate to the mainland.

And California, which is already experiencing longer and more severe drought and wildfire seasons, may end up reverting back to desert, at which point food prices will shoot up as farming becomes unsustainable.

We might see a second “medieval” period as people will be forced to leave the urbs due to logistical issues in maintaining a high population or rising prices of basic services like water to offset the cost of maintenance.

Countries with high centralization or enormous urban population density like China or the USA will be hit the worst, less developed countries shall be affected too but not as much because the shock won’t be as prominent to them.

Edited by raziel365 on Oct 2nd 2019 at 5:27:50 AM

I feel the opossite honestly, Urbanization would be the only thing preventing deadly food shortages

Don't mistake out-and-out corruption for stupidity. It was a subsidy to American corn farmers (as if they don't already have enough money being rammed up their butts by the government).

@alekos23: Plenty of biofuels are good ideas (for example, biodiesel is awesome, and algae are worth researching). Just not corn ethanol, which takes more petroleum to produce than it saves.

Not at all, modern urban centers are a huge drain of food and water in comparison to rural areas. It’s not like the polis or municipium which technically included in its territory the farming and pastoral vicinities that could feed the people of the city.

Edit:

You might be confusing infrastructure building, which includes roads, trains and bridges and various things that help with communications and logistics; with urbanization, which is the conversion of soil from its previous use or state so that it becomes inhabitable. If anything, urbanization can take a lot of fertile land for the purpose of housing a growing population.

Edited by raziel365 on Oct 2nd 2019 at 5:29:52 AM

Yeah, but we need somewhere to put the people. Better dense urban housing than sparse suburban or exurban housing, which consumes vast amounts of land in the most wasteful way possible.