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Re:The $47T Death Sentence for Oil and Gas by meddlepal on Thursday September 26, 2019 @10:52AM (#21081412)
Are you sure it's just boomers? I'm in my 30s and I don't care too much either, 30-40 years from now I'll be in the twilight years. I've been listening to doom and gloom environmentalists for my entire life telling me we are X years from destruction.

Here's what's going to happen:

1. Some places are going to be flooded. The important ones will construct sea barriers. The others: oh well.

2. Some places will become infertile while other places become fertile: sucks that the Midwest will become a desert but Canada is going to be a great place to grow things in 100 years.

3. Technology will improve if things get really dire but I'm sure human ingenuity will pull through.

Re:The $47T Death Sentence for Oil and Gas by KoftaBob on Thursday September 26, 2019 @10:54AM (#21081436)
I never said it’s just boomers. My point was that boomers are a large portion of the population and positions of power, and they won’t be around for the worst of it, so they largely don’t care.

The numerous “i’m young and also don’t care” comments completely miss the point.

Re:The $47T Death Sentence for Oil and Gas by benj111 on Thursday September 26, 2019 @11:23AM (#21081766)
"The important ones will construct sea barriers"

No the ones that can afford it will.

"sucks that the Midwest will become a desert but Canada is going to be a great place to grow things in 100 years"

Do you have some evidence or are you just assuming? Day lengths, and weather changes means it wont necessarily work out how you expect.

"Technology will improve if things get really dire"

Such as.... Because by then it'll be too late for solar, wind turbines, battery storage, nuclear, electric cars/planes/boats and any kind of carbon capture that's currently plausible.

Re:The $47T Death Sentence for Oil and Gas by awnfuron on Thursday September 26, 2019 @11:40AM (#21081961)
Calling areas that can't afford the construction of sea barriers unimportant is a very cavalier approach. Maybe "human ingenuity will pull through" but how long will it take, and how many "unimportant" people will die or experience extreme hardship first?
Re:The $47T Death Sentence for Oil and Gas by agentultra on Thursday September 26, 2019 @11:41AM (#21081992)
> 1. Some places are going to be flooded. The important ones will construct sea barriers. The others: oh well.

Most valuable places will be flooded. Sea barriers won't stop it. You're going to be able to sail over the Guggenheim. Maps of the US will have to be re-drawn to remove Florida.

> 2. Some places will become infertile while other places become fertile: sucks that the Midwest will become a desert but Canada is going to be a great place to grow things in 100 years.

Unlikely. Soil erosion is accelerated by climate change. There are roughly 60 harvests left. Fresh water is going to become extremely scarce. Constant, slow-moving storms will basically reduce yields on land that is still viable. Did you notice how much of this year's harvest was off because of the torrential rains?

The tundra isn't going to become fertile. It's a bubbling mass of methane and hyrdrocarbons. It barely has any soil. Who wants to try and grow things on a mushy field, full of mostly dead things, that might explode or re-introduce you to ancient diseases?

Plus you will have vast tracts of densely populated areas with people that need to migrate because the wet bulb temperature there is lethal to all humans. Mass migrations of billions of hungry, thirsty people.

> 3. Technology will improve if things get really dire but I'm sure human ingenuity will pull through.

Not fast enough. I wouldn't rely on it, "sorting itself out." We're already in the 6th mass extinction. That's not activism, that's just science. We're on the roller coaster and the time to get off was about 30-40 years ago.

If you look into any carbon sequestration technology out there it's simply not feasible at scale. Maybe it will be in 30-40 years but we'll already be into the worst effects of climate change by then.

If we do nothing now it will be worse later than if we try to do better.

The likelihood that you or I will make it to our twilight years in comfort is very low. It gets lower the more that we delay action to reduce our carbon footprint and try to slow down or stabilize the feedback loops. Things got this way because the generation before us didn't do anything about it knowing full well that this outcome was likely. It was known in the seventies that this could happen if we didn't reign in emissions. Well... guess what? It happened. And here we are. It's not the predictions of one person -- there are thousands of corroborating studies over decades of research.

Re:The $47T Death Sentence for Oil and Gas by meddlepal on Thursday September 26, 2019 @11:46AM (#21082071)
> You're going to be able to sail over the Guggenheim. Maps of the US will have to be re-drawn to remove Florida.

You made my point for me. Sorry, that's just NOT going to happen. The extreme hyperbole of the climate change side is not helping matters.

Re:The $47T Death Sentence for Oil and Gas by agentultra on Thursday September 26, 2019 @01:40PM (#21083330)
This is worst-case scenario, 2100, 4C based off of IPCC data which is conservative.

It's possible it won't happen but it's not going to be because we do nothing today and continue with current emissions trends.

https://choices.climatecentral.org/#6/25.760/-80.206?compare...

Re:The $47T Death Sentence for Oil and Gas by meddlepal on Thursday September 26, 2019 @01:57PM (#21083508)
Once again I refer to this:

> You're going to be able to sail over the Guggenheim

The Guggenheim is 77 feet tall. We're not going to be sailing over it. That's my point about hyperbole.

All coastal cities will experience some flooding. I've seen projections of 4-6 feet sea rise. That's not insurmountable by sea walls.

That map is useless because it doesn't show projected depths. It gets people all riled up without also explaining, yea in mid-town Manhattan if we do absolutely nothing between now and then we'll be under a foot or two of water.