WTF Climate Change News

Ishina

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Trump Administration Guts Endangered Species Act


A comment that sums it up:
I am a Wildlife Conservation and Biology student at Colorado State University. I have held nothing but disdain for our president and his administration for his entire term, but the crippling of the ESA is what broke me. I spent the morning nearly in tears brought on by anger. To those who are not familiar with the law, the Endangered Species Act is the main source of power that conservationists have in protecting American wildlife and the habitats they depend on. Without this law, there is little that can be used legally to protect biodiversity in this country. The biologists and ecologists of America are able to do what they do because of the ESA. Our president and the lobbyists that influence him have taken power away from those that work to preserve the incredible ecosystem Americans have the privilege of living in. If there is a time to get get angry and fight for change, now is the best time. If there is anyone who shares the ire I feel right now, I say act now. Volunteer for your local Democrats. I don't care what kind of person we have to elect, I cannot bear the thought of re-electing our current president and allowing more of what happened today to happen tomorrow. I've had enough, and I hope everyone else has too.
 

Bartholomew Gallacher

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So I've finally figured out why I'm so annoyed by the "Ditch your air-conditioning" article; it's the second part of the title: "You'll be fine".

The author wants to scold coddled Americans for squandering energy on AC, without a realistic assessment of the price we'll pay for giving up that "luxury" as he has deemed it, because he personally can do without it. We may very well have to do as he says to reduce our carbon footprint, or simply because our energy grid can't handle the load, but let's be honest about the cost. Many people, perhaps most, will adjust to some degree, but there will be illness and death for those people -- the young, the elderly, the sick -- who can't regulate body temperature as well as a fit young man sitting at his desk writing articles.
Yeah, morons which are just unaware about technic and science. It takes typically much less energy to cool a room compared to heat it. Of course it depends on the devices, too.

So I really do wonder why this genius does not also suggest the migration from all people of Alaska to somewhere more with a mild climate, and the people of Norway as well? And while we're at it, let's evacuate all of Saudi Arabia, Iraq and other hot countries too!
 
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Sid

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This A/C discussion shows perfectly where the main problem is: As soon as we (general we) have to consider steps that drastically interfere with our personal lives, things become complicated and we try or simply have to hang on to what we have. No matter if it is the A/C, car use, plane travel, ordering and consuming stuff from all over the world, eating no or less meat, moving closer to work, recycling, the use of disposable plastics and other packaging, the use of fossil fuels...... We all tend to be defensive about our own particular lifestyles.

Why FFS needs a tiny country like mine to be the second largest exporting nation of agricultural stuff right after the continent sized USA and ship it all over Europe and byond?

It is mainly the others who have to do something, let industry, government, the circus clowns, my neighbors solve it... that is much easier and more convenient.
All changes needed seem impossible to do. We are (still) not willing, able, capable to take the steps that are at least needed.
 
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Beebo Brink

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All changes needed seem impossible to do. We are (still) not willing, able, capable to take the steps that are at least needed.
Humans are capable of mobilizing for the greater good and making great sacrifices -- as has been demonstrated all too many times for every world war that has ravaged the globe. But there usually has to be a clear and present danger, or someone charismatic enough to make that threat seem real, and so far climate change has not touched the emotions of enough people to move them at a visceral level. I think that time will come, it's in our DNA to rise to challenges in the midst of disasters like hurricanes and earthquakes and war.

We're getting closer to that point. We're not there yet.

The risk is that by the time people are face-to-face with the existential crisis of climate change, there won't really be enough time left to make a difference.
 

Bartholomew Gallacher

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Why FFS needs a tiny country like mine to be the second largest exporting nation of agricultural stuff right after the continent sized USA and ship it all over Europe and byond?
Because it's got good soil, is flat and your people are good at farming, also innovative?

Aside that, the Netherlands are so densely populated with 413 inhabitants per square kilometer, that this fact is even more amazing.
 

Soen Eber

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Because it's got good soil, is flat and your people are good at farming, also innovative?

Aside that, the Netherlands are so densely populated with 413 inhabitants per square kilometer, that this fact is even more amazing.
And the Dutch famine in the waining years of that war people keep talking and talking and talking about. Post war Europe frontloaded a lot of policies and incentives towards food production (for obvious reasons), and once you advantage an economic sector it develops a dynamic and continuity all its own, especially if it is viewed as essential by the generation that launched it to the point where it has become a sacred cow.
 
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Soen Eber

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Humans are capable of mobilizing for the greater good and making great sacrifices -- as has been demonstrated all too many times for every world war that has ravaged the globe. But there usually has to be a clear and present danger, or someone charismatic enough to make that threat seem real, and so far climate change has not touched the emotions of enough people to move them at a visceral level. I think that time will come, it's in our DNA to rise to challenges in the midst of disasters like hurricanes and earthquakes and war.

We're getting closer to that point. We're not there yet.

The risk is that by the time people are face-to-face with the existential crisis of climate change, there won't really be enough time left to make a difference.
Also inertia. The red-blue divide is essentially one of timng. Do people come together after a disaster, or before? If your thinking is "we'll get insurance companies and the federal government to help us rebuild and cheap immigrant labor to do the construction and Walmart to contribute toilet paper and cases of water", you are not going to put the money and effort into prevention quite so much. Both sides see their approach as self reliance, however.
 

Brenda Archer

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We can mitigate a lot of problems by transferring technology and wealth from rich places to poor ones, including a switch to renewable energy sources, better water systems and locally controlled food production.

Is this going to prevent climate change? No. Can it slow it down enough? Probably not.

It is still worth doing. If the argument is that climate change can only be averted by sacrificing the poor, the old and the sick, that runs against people’s moral instincts and they will look for a conspiracy of selfishness to explain it.

But if mitigation of the impacts of climate change on the disadvantaged is *part of* the package of fighting it, than people fighting for planetary survival can frame it as a humanitarian argument. So: solar powered air conditioning for everyone who needs it. There’s actually enough wealth to pay for at least a lot of it. Whether there’s enough political will and foresight to leverage that wealth is a different question, of course.

Will this save civilization? No. But letting fear and tribal consolidation run their bloodthirsty course adds the destruction of war to the destruction of climate change, which makes a much more damaged situation for whatever survivors may be left.

So I don’t buy the argument that sacrifice by the already disadvantaged part of the consumers can save the planet. That’s really just a drop in the bucket. Retooling the systems that are currently using fossil fuels is going to require political will, even though the economics of such changes are good. Defending the forests and oceans will require political will. That’s a series of decisions to be made by the powerful, while blaming humble people who are trying to save their lives is just scapegoating. Or perhaps it’s trying to think we have more power than we do.

When you have dying people in a hospice and you know they’re not going to be saved, you try to make them comfortable. Humans need to try to do what they can to help each other. Technology has insulated the elites from the consequences of their actions - we’re not going to unseat these people by flooding the streets waving our pitchforks.

But what we *can* do is demand compassionate, humanistic care for each other at every level. The malignant narcissists that run society are propped up by the damaged and the fearful. The rest of us will have to rebuild society around these broken people. Let’s not normalize their paranoia, let’s work around it. Even if we’re all going to die, it makes more sense to slide into that as humanely as we can, than to be tricked into thinking there’s a human sacrifice that can avert the will of the Fates.
 

Kamilah Hauptmann

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But what we *can* do is demand compassionate, humanistic care for each other at every level. The malignant narcissists that run society are propped up by the damaged and the fearful.
Bingo. That which brought us here in the first place. A broken and violent society of cyclical abuse.

Thread about that:


I'm not crossing the streams here, it's all tied together in a mess of generational abuse.

And an essay:
 

Sid

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Because it's got good soil, is flat and your people are good at farming, also innovative?
It is because it had bad soil around the major cities.
And yes, that made innovative and created a system that is totally not natural: Green houses.
The plants in there don't even grow on soil, as known outside outside the green houses.

Yes, the farmers can control climate for most part in those green houses, they can harvest more times then outside every year, but they use huge amounts of energy to accomplish that.
And now The Dutch Flower Group exports about 300 million flower bouquets to the British supermarkets every year and even more to Germany. The bloody things are even flown to New York on a dally basis.
And we vasty pollute to grow them (light and temperature control all year round) and to transport them. And need vast amounts of drinking water.

What might be positive in the long term:
"Dutch scientists close to 'breakthrough' method of growing crops in deserts"

 
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Beebo Brink

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But what we *can* do is demand compassionate, humanistic care for each other at every level. The malignant narcissists that run society are propped up by the damaged and the fearful. The rest of us will have to rebuild society around these broken people. Let’s not normalize their paranoia, let’s work around it. Even if we’re all going to die, it makes more sense to slide into that as humanely as we can, than to be tricked into thinking there’s a human sacrifice that can avert the will of the Fates.
And your leverage for this demand is what?

Civilizations rarely fail in an orderly, humane and compassionate way. Which is not to say that acts of altruism are absent, just that they are individual rather than institutionalized because the institutions no longer exist.
 
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Brenda Archer

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And your leverage for this demand is what?

Civilizations rarely fail in an orderly, humane and compassionate way. Which is not to say that acts of altruism are absent, just that they are individual rather than institutionalized because the institutions no longer exist.

This isn't a political demand. Pitchforks in the streets cannot dislodge an elite protected by modern technology.

Stochastic activism can work both ways. Just as Twitler can incite stochastic terrorism by seeding ideas in poisoned ground, people can do a lot to slow down bureaucracies by doing other than what authorities demand. It doesn't have to be all people, or most people. It just needs to be a general stubbornness. History has shown that when a population gets resistant to cooperation, that can have some effect.

It doesn't even have to be dramatic. Part of the fall of Rome was the gradual loss of belief in its institutions. That energy went instead to the Church and eventually caused a realignment of the culture that was followed by the politicians. Later cultural shifts inevitably disestablished the Church. In the same way, bureaucracies cannot go on leading where people refuse to follow.

If people volunteer for humanitarian aid and ecological work, it's going to be very hard to block them. The PR of trying to stop someone from planting a tree or setting up a small solar grid in a friendly but poor country would be quite nasty. Who could oppose such a thing? But a large enough number of people doing such things could be the nursing in our metaphorical hospice.

We're done, or we're not done. Little people won't be making that decision. That doesn't remove all our agency for action, even if our time is short.
 
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Galen McGinnis

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A pre-buried population, that will save time, and potentially deep earth fertilizer; win-win ?
 

Beebo Brink

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If the climate apocalypse kills 7-8 billion people, will we be turned into oil someday?
 

Sid

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The ones that drop dead in shallow green algea-rich water...... likely, yes.
 
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Bartholomew Gallacher

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If the climate apocalypse kills 7-8 billion people, will we be turned into oil someday?
No, it takes a little more than dead organic material - the ground of a sea, where tons of it are getting accumulated and turning into organic slime, tons of sediments layering above of it, making tons of pressure, heat and pulling out much of the oxygene. Rinse, wash, repeat.

Since most of the dead human bodies would be on land, all corpse eating organisms would just be doing their job and eating us until the bones would remain.
 
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