Re:Global warming: The state of the climate in 2016
by mzw_mzw on Thursday November 17, 2016 @07:05PM
(#12983082)
> First we'd have to stop the massive deforestation that's happening right now. A lot of that is for agriculture, so we'd have to find another way to feed those people.
You speak about deforestation in the US, but there are more forests in the United States now than there were at the time of the Revolutionary War.
Re:Global warming: The state of the climate in 2016
by DennisP on Thursday November 17, 2016 @07:38PM
(#12983276)
Overall, and in the part you quoted, I mean globally.
I did mention the southeastern U.S., because burning wood for fuel doesn't help the global situation, no matter where it's done, even if there's more forest elsewhere in the particular country where it's harvested.
Re:Global warming: The state of the climate in 2016
by anon1253 on Thursday November 17, 2016 @05:48PM
(#12982485)
All true, but "the scale of it all" will be truly mind boggling whatever we do, or don't do. Solving this problem will require engineering on a scale never seen before, failure to act will result in losses on a scale never seen before. So it's not a choice about scale, it's a choice about the survival of civilization.
Re:Global warming: The state of the climate in 2016
by DennisP on Thursday November 17, 2016 @05:55PM
(#12982543)
I completely agree. My only argument was with the word "just." It's a massive problem, and if we were a rational civilization we would be doing everything possible right now, before it's too late. It should be as high a priority as if a civilization-ending asteroid were on a collision course with the Earth.
Re:Global warming: The state of the climate in 2016
by hnsucks2 on Thursday November 17, 2016 @08:09PM
(#12983450)
>First we'd have to stop the massive deforestation that's happening right now. A lot of that is for agriculture, so we'd have to find another way to feed those people.
You say that like we couldn't just let them starve. If their descendants are going to be wiped out by global warming anyway what's the difference?
Re:Global warming: The state of the climate in 2016
by DennisP on Friday November 18, 2016 @04:35AM
(#12985518)
There's that word "just" again. The countries where it's happening don't want to let their people starve; you'd have to make them. You'd have to use military force to guard vast forests all over the world from hundreds of millions of desperate people. Good luck with that.
Re:Global warming: The state of the climate in 2016
by hnsucks2 on Friday November 18, 2016 @05:12AM
(#12985674)
Does nerve gas harm trees?
Re:Global warming: The state of the climate in 2016
by sctb on Friday November 18, 2016 @04:12PM
(#12990119)
This comment, along with many others posted from this account, violate the guidelines for being unsubstantive and flamewar (nerve agent, rather) style. We ban accounts that continue to post like this.
Re:Global warming: The state of the climate in 2016
by anon1253 on Friday November 18, 2016 @08:06AM
(#12986426)
Why not nuke metropolitan areas while you're at it? Most of the population is in the coastal cities anyway, who cares about New York, Shanghai or Mumbai. Quick fix. Or force serialization for > 60% of the world population. I mean sure, there are "solutions" but there is ethics to consider too …
Re:Global warming: The state of the climate in 2016
by antisthenes on Friday November 18, 2016 @01:39PM
(#12989021)
I've already suggested in another thread that any 'solution' to global warming that doesn't involve mass genocide will be too slow to have any effect.
Even sterilization might not be quick enough.
Obviously, neither is acceptable from a humanist perspective.
Actually, now that I've read your comment closer, I noticed you mentioned serialization. Do you mean digitizing people's minds and killing them afterwards?
Re:Global warming: The state of the climate in 2016
by hnsucks2 on Friday November 18, 2016 @08:17AM
(#12986491)
For a start, the cities you list contain many valuable people. Places doing lots of slash-and-burn farming, not so much. My original comment was a bit facetious, but if it is a civilization-ending threat (and I'm not saying it is), better to start the killing sooner when we can control who dies than collapse the whole thing and lose thousands of years of scientific and cultural progress.
Re:Global warming: The state of the climate in 2016
by hnsucks2 on Friday November 18, 2016 @07:59PM
(#12991345)
By the way, we already do this! We let millions starve to death in squalor already. Why? For the sake of civilization. Or do you think it'd be smart to ship them all over here? Amazing how timid we are about weighing life against life in a controlled fashion when this is already happening every day. We can't even have a little hypothetical chat on the Internet about it.
We might also want to stop clearcutting vast forests in the Southeastern U.S. to ship wood pellets to Europe, which burns them.
Then we'd have to save the rest of our existing forests, many of which are struggling due to various effects of climate change, including heat stress, drought, topsoil loss, disease, and forest fires. Many large forests are net carbon emitters now.
After we've done all that and finally stopped losing trees, we can think about having more trees. We'll need space for them, so that means reducing agricultural area even more. We've been emitting about ten billion tons of carbon every year for quite a while, so it's going to take a lot of land.
We're also running out of fish in the ocean, so with that food source going away we're going to need more from agriculture than we get now.
"Just plant trees." Like many, perhaps even most purported climate change solutions, it sounds great until you work out the scale.