Anthropogenic Climate Change

Dude, I'm just telling the truth. Televangelism and megachurches proved that American evangelical Christianity was for sale to the highest bidder in the sixties and seventies. Don't believe me; look it up. I'm not dissing religion in general, but this particular manifestation is as morally bankrupt as any Wall Street CEO.

Stipulated that it's not going away, we could at least harness it for good purposes: spreading environmentalism instead of homophobia. Give big donations to churches if they start reminding parishioners about what God said about being good stewards of the Earth... you know, like what is actually in the Bible?

Edited by Fighteer on Oct 16th 2019 at 6:34:18 AM

I realize that your comment was aimed at the for-profit evangelist types, but "oh look an actual use for religion" is very similar to the kind of anti-theist religion-bashing I see a lot of on the Internet, so it was uncomfortable to look at.

Besides, I don't think bribing them to try to spread a certain message would work. Else we could have told them to knock off the homophobia, here's a check for a million, years ago. Profits are a close second concern compared to the ability to spread their particular twisted interpretation of religion to the masses.

Yeah, but how did that interpretation grow in the first place? Study that history. Wealthy patrons with political interests found preachers who were sympathetic and bankrolled them into media giants. No reason that patrons with different interests couldn't do the same again.

I admit that I'm not really being serious here, just taking an opportunity to point out how many supposedly God-loving Christians just adore Big Oil and Big Money when Jesus' message was to aid the poor (never mind what he said about rich people) and God told Adam and Eve to take care of the Earth. That didn't come about by accident.

Edited by Fighteer on Oct 16th 2019 at 8:06:41 AM

Given that a majority of America Christians aren't evangelical, it still came off as insensitive.

re Australia: bad weather and seasonal variations in temperature are two different things. Do they get very cold winters, from what I can tell a la a quick Google search, they do not, though they do get very hot summers. Annual seasonal temperature variation on average appears to be only about 15 degrees centigrade. Ideal for battery storage. I haven't done enough research to know what Tesla's storage facility can store, but I am going to guess no more than a week or so of peak demand.

re Electric Cars as a storage grid— yes, that works, but even if you electrified every car and truck in the US, that only provides a few days worth of peak demand. For renewables to work in temperate climates, you need enough storage to take you through the entire winter, when demand is high and supply is low. Until the storage problem is licked, that means more production and that means nuclear.

As for meat vs. meatless, the problem isn't diet (people want to eat themselves to death, they have the right), it's land use. Forest is being converted to open range at a very high rate due to the growing demand for meat. Fewer trees accelerates the effects of carbon in the atmosphere, so this is making a bad problem worse. The solution is land use reform, or maybe food taxes, not necessarily persuading large populations to voluntarily change their diet (make meat expensive, people will eat less of it).

Edited by DeMarquis on Oct 16th 2019 at 8:53:54 AM

And American Evangelical Christians are voting solidly against environmental causes. So it is completely apt. Let's not get distracted. If you are Christian and care about the environment, I'm not talking to you.

Moving on...

Edited by Fighteer on Oct 16th 2019 at 9:58:20 AM

Do consider that at least the Catholic Church has already taken a stance towards environmentalism with Pope Francis.

Moving on as you said.

No, diets are indeed part of the problem, the state is also in the duty to promote healthy products and reign in junk food like candies or chips.

At least here in my country we have introduced the concept of nutritional octogons, which warn people about the nocive effects of certain foods, and it has worked to lower their consumption in a few months.

The government can promote a certain quota of meat, be it red or white, that is the recommended intake according to nutrionists to lower its demand.

It was a bit snippy (in a punch-up way), but I agree with Fighteer's statement seriously: religion is a powerful and useful tool for advancing your values, and that's true with fighting climate change. Let's use it.

Erm...no. That's kind of like alcohol prohibition in the US - it doesn't matter whether it's a good idea, we'll be damned before we give up our Gigantic Gulp sodas, refried hamburgers and vats of candy. Remember the time when Bloomberg tried to force a ban on large sodas and New York screamed bloody murder until the courts struck it down?

Tying this back into climate change, I think asking Americans to give up beef is a lost cause (and a tax attack will disproportionately slam the boot down on the poor), but we can make adjustments. Fortunately, "healthy eating" advice (for those Americans willing to follow it) also happens to be heavily environmentally friendly. Also, America's dairy policy needs to die ASAP, because we're overproducing and thus encouraging ridiculous overconsumption. (Seriously, have you seen pizzas these days?) And the big tactic I like with meat (because it's the Mad Scientist tactic that doesn't require sacrifices) is to harness animal methane as burnable fuel.

Food production pollution is something that we kind of need to use edge nibbling tactics against, rather than expecting massive changeovers.

Edited by Ramidel on Oct 17th 2019 at 10:54:30 AM

Fighteer, about the first line of your comment here... TheThoughtAssassin is not talking about cost alone.

That said... TheThoughtAssassin, you need to separate the numbered bullets in your post here. Put each one in a separate paragraph and use # at the beginning of each line (see Text-Formatting Rules for more details).

Edited by MarqFJA on Oct 18th 2019 at 12:37:18 PM

Are there any realistic ways to do this? Most methane emissions (despite "common knowledge") come not from farts, but from the digestion of plant matter in ruminants' stomachs, and so could be thought of more appropriately as burps. Do we fit every livestock ruminant on the planet with a face mask and collection tank?

Frankly, while cost is an important factor, it's more of an excuse than a genuine obstacle. After all, many people are happy enough to spend tons of government money building tanks and bombs, or giving huge tax breaks and subsidies to fossil fuel corporations. The truth is that the kind of investment needed to rapidly transition to a carbon-neutral global economy would generate massive numbers of jobs, spur a great deal of scientific research, and revitalize the consumer economy in many ways. It would be incredibly positive for most people.

What I find among the most common arguments against this tend to fall into two main categories: resistance to cultural and/or lifestyle changes, or resistance to government intervention in business.

• A lot of people have an emotional investment in gas cars. The best remedy for this is simply to drive an electric vehicle (ideally a good one, like a Tesla). See how amazing they can be above and beyond the environmental benefits. Look at the reduced cost of charging vs. gasoline. Explain that you never have to charge away from home except on trips.
• There's a concern that solar panels are ugly, or difficult to install, or not reliable. The best remedy for this is to listen to people who have them: who have cut their power bills to near zero, or who have their lights on during a power outage (they probably also have home battery backup in this case).
• Recycling is something everyone can do, and making it part of one's daily routine can turn it from a burden into a habit.
• Eating less meat is tough, but substitutes are getting better. This one will take the most time, as I said above.
• Some people just have this conditioned hate of anything that seems like environmentalism. Not all of them can be reached, but if they can be persuaded to try the things they claim to hate, you might get a convert. It helps to not be smug, and especially to avoid some of the more out-there causes like organic foods and anti-GMO rhetoric.

As for the "government intervention" concern, as I said above, we already have lots of intervention on behalf of the fossil fuel industry. Letting the "unfettered free market" do its thing is a ship that sailed a long time ago.

Edited by Fighteer on Oct 19th 2019 at 12:03:51 PM

Yes. That's actually close what they do - not a face mask, but a surgically attached "backpack" with a line into the stomach. The methane is drawn off and harvested instead of being burped into the air. Source

Another solution (from CSIRO in Australia) is vaccines to eradicate the bacteria in the cows' stomachs that generate methane waste.

Edited by Ramidel on Oct 19th 2019 at 7:56:02 AM

That is bizarre, but interesting. How much does it cost, I wonder? I feel like outfitting every one of the billion cows on the planet would be a ... challenging task.

An idea I had in regards to methane generated by cattle raising was to build indoor climate controlled pastures with some sort of methane collection system, more than likely used to power the building itself.

Not entirely to sure how feasible that could be.

Cost is an excuse, one that US consumers can overcome with sufficient information, as demonstrated by the widespread use of energy efficient lightbulbs.

That is, unless you are including nuclear power. Those things are expensive enough that intelligent people can have reservations.

Speaking of solar panels, do we finally have some that don't cost more energy to produce than they bring in their lifetime? Because I remember it being mentioned as a major issue with them (making them only useful for vehicles and isolated locations), but that was years ago.

I've never heard that, or at least not for years. It used to be that they cost more than they returned in energy, but that hasn't been true for a while.

Clean Technica: Google Spends Millions On Climate Denial

Congresswoman Kathy Castor from Florida has just called the company to task for donating millions of dollars to the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), a hard right-wing think tank, founded by none other than the Koch brothers, whose mission statement includes freeing corporations from regulation, "limited government", and climate denial.

Google, which advocates clean energy, claims that it donated for the specific purpose of keeping itself unburdened by regulations, but that's not a rational argument to make for organizations like this.

I'm starting to agree with Elizabeth Warren's position about breaking up tech companies more and more each day.

Edited by Fighteer on Oct 23rd 2019 at 2:24:45 PM

Plus, it's not like we can trust these companies to act in any sort of ethical way without regulations.

I've been talking about this topic in the tropical cyclone thread, but the Arabian Sea has just seen one of the strongest tropical cyclones in its history.

Tropical cyclones there are particularly sensitive to climate change; there is strong empirical and theoretical evidence that such strong storms (Category 3 and more in the Saffir-Simpson scale) literally almost cannot happen there w/o air pollution over Asia and greenhouse gases.

I wonder what other impacts this is going to have on the entire Indian Ocean system.

Because all of it interconnects. So, yeah: it's going to feedback on the lot.

Heck, it might even have knock-on effects in the Southern Ocean and South Atlantic.

Bad time to be a tropical island right now, unless you are Sao Tome and Principe. The Caribbean has increasingly powerful hurricanes, Oceania has tropical cyclones, and now East Africa, Sri Lanka, the Maldives and Southeast Asia have this to deal with. Not to mention rising sea levels which can potentially wipe out the Maldives and several Oceanian countries.

Edited by CookingCat on Oct 28th 2019 at 4:39:06 AM

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/29/climate/coastal-cities-underwater.html

Not sure if anyone can read this.

NY times has this article on what can happen by 2050.

I've seen estimates that sea level could rise by over 6 feet by 2100.

Me, I think that changes in precipitation regimes are probably more important - especially since they are often less a function of how warm it gets and more a function of how warm which part of the world gets, and that's much harder to predict.

There is certainly potential for surprises, such as noted here that not-large differences between various patterns of sea warming decide whether present-day deserts still exist in a world with more greenhouse gases.

The main take-away is that we just dont know how all these factors will interact, and that alone should frighten the hell out of us.

Washington announced that it's notifying Paris for a withdrawal from the Paris accord.