> Or seed the atmosphere with sulfur dioxide
That's not solving the situation, that's temporarily mitigating some effects with poisons for a short term and at the same time emitting a ton of emissions from a lot of flights.
> global warming is bad (but manageable)
Warming, or better climate change, is only one of the symptoms of the overshoot. We've managed almost zero, nil, zilch in past 50 years (coal is still at 82%).
> but pre-industrial society is far, far worse
Calling mitigation strategies return to pre-industrial society ... i don't have words for that. But if we don't start solving it, and fast (yesterday was late), the nature will solve the problem for us. One way is better than the other.
If you're interested where else you're wrong, you should really spend some 30 mins here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qPb_0JZ6-Rc
> That's not solving the situation, that's temporarily mitigating some effects
Yep, I clearly identified this is a temporary mitigating measure to buy us time for the real solution, which is the following:
>> And then we'll have to get crackin' building those nuclear power plants (as well as building out solar and wind and geothermal and tidal and storage).
But it is a mitigating measure that will work and will allow us to get to the actual solution, which is rapidly building out nuclear power (and others).
And of course, if you know that this scenario is possible, then you probably also start to understand why governments aren't as panicky about the whole situation as you seem to be.
And yes, the mitigation is for the most immediate short-term effect, the rise in temperature. We will still have to get the Carbon out of the atmosphere, for example to avoid Ocean acidification. But we have more time for that. And it will likely need quite a bit of energy (see the nukes).
And no, not going to listen to 30 minutes of someone ranting about the collapse of civilisation. We had the club of Rome with the same message in the 70s, and they were comically wrong. If there is something of actual substance, please make the point yourself here. So far you haven't.
In particular, I am still waiting for even a hint of shadow of an argument how building out nuclear power and other non-fossil energy sources, while at the same time mitigating the worst effects of global warming, will get us to a pre-industrial society.
So not ecosystems restoration (habitats restoration, reforestation and afforestation, wetlands restoration, streams and rivers restoration, sustainable land management, conservation and protected areas, plant-based diets, ...), but attempts at geoengineering with aerosols like sulfur dioxide, or mirrors in space, or whitening the clouds. The potential problems are enormous.
Solar radiation management is also an ungovernable technology. Even if we knew how to reflect the sun's rays, that means deciding on what is an international "best temperature". So what if cooling down the US means massive drought in China? What if China deploying this causes rainfall in India to drop? The Earth's climate is interconnected and block the sun's rays in one area affects another.
It seems obvious to me that this technology could cause massive conflict (violent maybe) over what is the best way to use it.
Anything to avoid doing the right thing.
> We had the club of Rome with the same message in the 70s, and they were comically wrong
There you're wrong again.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332655753_Limits_Re...
"We unravel the arguments that have raged for forty years in its aftermath and explore more recent findings which relate to the original hypothesis. There is unsettling evidence that society is still following the ‘standard run’ of the original study – in which overshoot leads to an eventual collapse of production and living standards. Detailed recent studies suggests that production of some key resources may only be decades away. Certain other limits to growth – less visible in the 1972 report – present equally pressing challenges to modern society. We highlight, in particular, recent work on our proximity to ‘planetary boundaries’ and illustrate this through the challenge of meeting the Paris Agreement on climate change. We also explore the economic challenge of a ‘secular stagnation’. If the Club of Rome is right, the next few decades are decisive."
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2021-08-16/revisiting-the...
https://advisory.kpmg.us/content/dam/advisory/en/pdfs/2021/y...
"I conducted a data update to Limits to Growth (LtG), best known from the 1972 bestseller that forecasted a scenario of global societal collapse occurring around the present time if humanity did not alter its priorities. Empirical data comparisons since then indicated that the world was still heading for collapse. My objectives were to examine whether this was still the case based on the most recent data, and whether there was opportunity left to change that trajectory. My research benefited from improved data availability, and included a scenario and two variables that had not been part of previous comparisons. I collected data from academia, (non- )government agencies, United Nations entities, and the World Bank. This was plotted along four LtG scenarios spanning a range of technological, resource, and societal assumptions. From these graphs and two quantitative accuracy measures, I found that the scenarios aligned closely with observed global data, which is a testament to the LtG work done decades ago. The two scenarios aligning most closely indicate a halt in growth over the next decade or so, which puts into question the usability of continuous growth as humanity’s goal in the 21st century. Both scenarios also indicate subsequent declines, but only one—the scenario in which declines are caused by pollution, including greenhouse gas pollution—depicts a collapse pattern. The scenario with the smallest declines aligned least with empirical data, however, absolute differences were rarely big and sometimes insignificant. This suggests that it’s almost, but not yet, too late for society to change course."
> If there is something of actual substance, please make the point yourself here
You're the one who should decide whether to stay ignorant or learn more on your own. You can't reasonably expect that someone will compress such complex and diverse topics into few social media comments. Few hours of attention and learning could possibly completely change your viewpoint ;)
> how building out nuclear power and other non-fossil energy sources
I'm not against that, and I'd tend to agree with you on that. But there are people who are more knowledgeable about energy (i'm more interested in biodiversity and agriculture) and more sceptical of the idea / possibility. One of them is Sid Smith ... you'd find those arguments in a well known talk of his https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5WPB2u8EzL8
>I'm not against that, and I'd tend to agree with you on that.[..]
Glad you agree with my central point. Not exactly sure what all the ranting is about, then. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I haven't heard of Sid Smith and am not sure why I should have. Apparently some obscure random retired math professor who rants about collapse. I checked the video where he talks about nuclear, and there he just repeats talking points that are either wrong, irrelevant, or both. So same old same old. (I used to vote green, but them being instrumental in the worst environmental/economic and foreign policy decision of the last 50 years in Germany is putting a damper on that). Not sure why I should listen to the rest, but I might just for curiosity, though given what I've seen it is unlikely to be substantive or enlightening.
> So not ecosystems restoration. ... anything to avoid doing the right thing
Where did I say that? Nowhere, that's where. Please keep your straw men to yourself.
> Solar radiation management [problems]
And where did I write this was "good"? That's right: nowhere again. I said "bad, but manageable". And we know that it is manageable because we actually have data. Lots of it. From quite a number of volcanic eruptions.
Again, is this good? No. But it does mean that the doomsday scenarios people keep painting are wrong. The earth will not become uninhabitable due to runaway global warming, because we know how to stop that. And again, the ways of stopping it are certainly less than ideal, but they exist and are even fairly predictable.
Regarding the Club of Rome and LoG: sorry, but no. Their original claim was resource exhaustion on a fairly tight timeline, and resources are not becoming exhausted, and certainly not on anything like their timeline. See the Simon / Ehrlich wager, which put that theory to the test, and was lost in all resource categories.
And no, a political position statement by the UK green + labour parties is not evidence. The KPMG piece that claims to validate the original actually does nothing of the sort. In fact, it has to completely discard the original model's predictions:
"Around 1990, it became clear that non-renewable resources, particularly fossil fuels, had turned out to be more plentiful than assumed in the 1972 BAU scenario. Randers therefore postulated that not resource scarcity, but pollution, especially from greenhouse gases, would cause the halt in growth. "
This is in the "Updates to the LtG" section. Some "update". LOL.
"Remember the stuff we said about resources becoming depleted? Yeah, that was complete bunk. We now know that it is pollution. How do we know this? Well, because of the perfect forecasting record of our models that we just had to discard"
You can't make this stuff up.
See:
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/economic-growth...
And you still haven't told me how "my approach", the one you agree with, leads to going to pre-industrial civilisation.
I never said that you did. I did, and you're taking it out of context.
>> Solar radiation management [problems]
> And where did I write this was "good"? That's right: nowhere again. I said "bad, but manageable"
You're misquoting youself.
You said that climate warming is bad, but manageable. And I don't agree with you there.
> See the Simon / Ehrlich wager
This bet was over a relatively short timescale and on a very narrow selection of resources, and so doesn't definitively prove or disprove the larger issues raised by the Club of Rome.
> You can't make this stuff up. See:
Lomborg views are very controversial, and even this article has some serious problems.
- resource abundance - while it's true that predictions about running out of certain resources haven't come to pass thanks to technological innovation and more efficient usage, this doesn't mean that all resources are infinite or that extraction doesn't have environmental costs. Extraction and use of fossil fuels, for instance, is one of the leading causes of climate change
- innovation - innovation isn't guaranteed to solve all problems, dependence on it to resolve issues of resource scarcity or environmental degradation might be risky
- economic growth - exponential economic growth is unsustainable in the long term given the finite planet
- pesticides and organic farming - he oversimplifies the issues, organic farming isn't solely about avoiding pesticides - it's also about soil health, biodiversity, and long-term sustainability
- pollution: is still a major problem worldwide, particularly in developing nations, he doesn't address climate change (a form of pollution) with poses massive risks at all
> "my approach", the one you agree with
You're misquoting me again. I tend to agree that nuclear should be a part of the solution. However, based on the opinions of more knowledgeable experts in the field, I'm not entirely convinced that it's possible or feasible on the scale and timeline required.
I'm not with you on your stance on solar radiation management. In my opinion, it's not a solution at all, and it would be extremely irresponsible and almost stupid to even attempt it.
Sure, I don't have any sources to back up my claims - just as you don't, and that's fine. That's why the White House is calling for further studies, not the implementation of the idea, while a number of experts express serious concerns and strong reservations about this "solution".
Dismissing SRM technology, Prof Joeri Rogelj of Imperial College, London, called it “irresponsible, dangerous and a threat to the manageability” of our survival, saying: “It is not a solution but an extremely dangerous band-aid that covers up the global warming problem without healing it, creating a false and unwarranted sense of climate safety while the core of the problem continues to fester.”