There's lots of nuclear power plants out there, shut down for political reasons, that'd be ready to go in weeks if you didn't have all the anti-nuclear protests, for starters.
There's also geo-engineering and such - spraying black stuff in the atmosphere to reduce the amount of incoming sunlight.
The idea that humanity couldn't deal with this situation if it spent anywhere in the ballpark of 100% of its resources on it seems to me frankly laughable.
We've just seen first-hand evidence that millions of people could be dying and some would find it politically expedient to pretend that it wasn't actually occurring.
We absolutely have the resources and capability to solve these problems. We just don't have the will or the policy.
I'm sorry, I don't follow, who do you mean? Colonialism? The Uighurs in China? People in India/Pakistan? Possible victims of global warming? The Holocaust?
>We just don't have the will or the policy.
Right, that's what I mean. The minute things get anywhere near serious, people are gonna figure something out real quick. Restarting the nuclear power plants and closing the coal plants would take weeks, be profitable in economic terms, and hugely reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The fact that nobody's done this means we aren't serious about it.
I mean, if you were really serious, you would just deregulate nuclear power totally. If the estimates of the harms of global warming are true, you could take 1 Chernobyl-scale incident per year and still come out on top. The fact that nobody's done this means we aren't serious about it.
The combination of facts that (1) we aren't serious about this and (2) there's plenty of low-hanging fruit we could reap if we were, leads me to believe this will not really be a problem, as soon as we do get serious about it.
Sure, human technology is super advanced, but we are no play for the elements.
First, we look at the numbers concerning best case scenarios and see that a few degrees of warming is basically inevitable. Then, we ask how likely it is that well make rapid corrections now - personally I see little evidence of that, but I hope I’m wrong.
Next, try to remember that nothing in the world is disconnected. There’s a long scholarship concerning resource conflict and the destabilizing effects of mass migration. We don’t have a good track record of dealing with this, and I see little reason to expect us to become better at it soon.
The geoengineering idea is especially ludicrous to me - what we’re really talking about are emergency uncontrolled experiments to stave off a worse disaster. We’ve organized our entire global economic system around carbon - any geoengineering project has to not only compete with that, but actively remove more carbon from the atmosphere, which is a problem you’re underestimating the difficulty of.
Meanwhile, we need to worry about positive feedback cycles from various sources of methane, and the rest of the related threats to our biosphere (ocean acidification, wildfire, extreme weather).
To close, what has humanity done to convince you that we’ll 100% restructure our society to collaboratively solve this crisis “once it gets bad enough”?
Good riddance. If our technological global civilization results in conditions that make technological global civilization impossible, then so be it. It wasn't fit to exist to begin with. It's a self-regulating problem.
> There’s a long scholarship concerning resource conflict and the destabilizing effects of mass migration. We don’t have a good track record of dealing with this, and I see little reason to expect us to become better at it soon.
I don't know what you mean here - are you suggesting mass migration is inevitable?
> The geoengineering idea is especially ludicrous to me - what we’re really talking about are emergency uncontrolled experiments to stave off a worse disaster. We’ve organized our entire global economic system around carbon - any geoengineering project has to not only compete with that, but actively remove more carbon from the atmosphere, which is a problem you’re underestimating the difficulty of.
No, I mean spraying dust into the atmosphere to make it darker, so less sunlight comes in.
It's not just a matter of economy - people aren't even picking the low-hanging fruit. If any country wanted to severely cut CO2 emissions, there's a simple thing they could do:
1) reopen all the closed nuclear plants 2) deregulate nuclear power plant construction, focus on mass producing cheap power plants with no regard for safety 3) shut down the coal plants 4) throw everyone who protests in prison
Obviously, this isn't done because all of these steps are politically impossible. But it just goes to show - if we were serious about this, we'd have picked the low-hanging fruit already. If we haven't even picked the low-hanging fruit yet, how can you say it's impossible?
> To close, what has humanity done to convince you that we’ll 100% restructure our society to collaboratively solve this crisis “once it gets bad enough”?
It's like people procrastinating their homework until 5 minutes before the deadline. Eventually they'll get it done.
Matter of preference I guess. I like to hope humanity will continue to learn things about and explore the broader universe rather than descent into feudal oppression (or some-such) in the ashes of our former civilization, but whatever.
> I don't know what you mean here - are you suggesting mass migration is inevitable?
At this point, that's the conclusion, yes. Climate impacts cause incredible destabilization for folks who rely more closely on their local environment (subsistence farmers and the global poor generally), and yes - disruption leads to mass migration.
> No, I mean spraying dust into the atmosphere to make it darker, so less sunlight comes in.
.... yes, an emergency uncontrolled experiment to solve some of the symptoms of a global problem. The global economy as it currently exists is geoengineering at an absolutely monumental scale.
Also, your reply is just incredibly baffling and frustrating, to the point that I half think you're not being serious. "Oh, we'll just spray some dust in the air and reflect more sunlight to solve the problem" - it's ludicrous, and nobody serious who studies geoengineering shares your attitude. I do believe we're going to have to engage in geoengineering, but it's not something to be taken lightly (and the experts who study it generally agree). Never mind the fact that even if your "solution" worked, it wouldn't solve things like ocean acidification, and would at best buy us some time... while having potentially unforeseen consequences on cancer rates, crop production, solar efficiency, etc.
> It's like people procrastinating their homework until 5 minutes before the deadline. Eventually they'll get it done.
Talk about unearned optimism. Not everything is a problem you can just go "fix".
Probably fair to say that it's not low hanging fruit then.
I think a lot of time is being spent on finding politically correct solutions, but maybe we'll come full circle back to your solution after wasting a lot of time with fancy solutions that don't have a significant enough effect.
I've also taken an amateur interest in ecology and the natural sciences, and once you actually learn a bit about the species around you, the loss of habitat and biodiversity we're undergoing becomes a staggeringly obvious fact that most people are just completely oblivious to.