5517

We used to talk about reforestation with the Amazon.

And then the Right laughed about it and cheered the destruction of said forest.
It doesn’t matter what your solution is, they’ll move the goal posts and cheer while they do it.

5518

Well it’s a given that “the right” are worse than useless in the quest to keep Earth habitable. One soldiers on nonetheless.

5519

Climate change will break the right soon enough. They won’t be taken seriously when they eventually hop on the Save-the-Earth-Train. At least not by sane voters.

5520

Is it just a given that the Right is just the Slytherin of the real world.

5521

BAck to our old subtopic of Nuclear Plants and waste, this article looks at the shuttered San Onofre plant and its 3.6 million pounds of waste in light of the Ridgecrest quake(s):

There can be no core meltdowns at San Onofre, because its reactors have been shut down for seven years. Nuclear fuel has been removed from them. Atoms are no longer split at the site.

Instead, the risks at San Onofre center on how its 3.6 million pounds of highly radioactive waste — produced over some 40 years of generating electricity for California — are stored and safeguarded.

Currently, the majority of San Onofre’s radioactive waste cools in spent fuel pools adjacent to the reactor domes. Those pools are far more vulnerable to the elements than the dry storage systems that will eventually house the waste, and where it will likely remain for decades until the federal government finds it a permanent home — but that’s another story.

‘Concrete monolith’

While pools require electricity and water to keep fuel cool, dry storage systems do not. Earthquake-inspired power outages could cripple pools, but not dry storage systems, which are deemed “passive.”

San Onofre’s dry storage employs massive slabs of concrete designed to withstand more than twice the ground-shake as the spent fuel pools and the reactor itself. Inside those dry systems — designed by Holtec and Areva — nuclear waste is housed in steel canisters.

The thickness of those canisters continues to be a matter of some debate, but experts say that the sooner nuclear waste moves to dry storage, the safer Southern California will be.

5522
5523

They mentioned Spruce beetles killing trees due to a longer warm season.

Something similar is happening in Minnesota’s northern forests. Pine borer beetles are becoming a greater menace because warmer winters don’t kill as many beetles.

It’s also affecting moose. Minnesota is the southern edge of moose habitat so warming affects them a lot. Parasites that would be killed by winter instead survive. The parasites kill the animal or weaken it so it dies from other causes.

If Alaska warms enough their moose population could be in trouble, too.

5524

This is how you make conservatives into environmentalists!

5525

I mean… That’s awesome.

5526

This is great… Is it actually possible? Let’s get that US military budget dropping dirt-piercing projectiles.

5527

Thinking… thinking

You know what, fuck it. If it gets them on board then I’m all for tree missiles.

5528

It seems cool

5529

“We had to bomb the forest in order to save it oh never mind.”

5530

You have to remember in part that climate change would not be 100% bad for literally every place on earth.

Just by way of example, I have a friend in Northern Wisconsin who is telling me about how they are literally getting another growing season for crops that they never used to get.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m scared of climate change and just how badly we may be making life for whoever is still around in a few years. But there are large swaths of land that are marginal now that could actually become fertile, for example. Is that going to offset losing huge amounts of land to sea levels and the general death and human misery caused by climate change? Not even close. But economically, the impact may not be as huge as people think.

Remember Germany at the end of WWII, where their production actually increased somehow while they were driven to literally manufacture in caves? Humans find ways to continue to strip resources and make shit, even if those ways are ones we really don’t want to have to do.

Remember, the statistic was talking purely about the economy, not about human misery and suffering. That’s one of our general problems that is leading to climate change. We’re obsessed with production, not so much about whether we are happy or healthy.

5531

I still have trouble reconciling the apocalyptic stuff and reports like this, but I can think of a few factors.

  1. The report is looking 30 years ahead but the warming figures are for 80 years ahead. So the actual warming by 2048 would be more modest, and a lot of bad shit to come in the balance of the 21st century and beyond.

  2. They aren’t looking at hard-to-quantify effects and politically destabilizing effects, most of which are likely to be bad.

  3. The aren’t considering bad feedback scenarios where we get a lot more warming than we bargained for.

Sometimes the same numbers can be spun very differently, like “this will cost trillions!” versus “4% change in output”. Mostly though I think it comes down to something akin to the street lamp effect: looking at putting numbers on things that are relatively easy to quantify (so not to far in the future, no nonlinear effects, dollars and cents) where the majority of the risk is in the hard-to-quantify areas.

5532

I wasn’t aware that the major constraint on reforestation was physically planting the trees. It’s primarily a question of land use, as I understand it. It’s no good planting trees if they just get chopped down for grazing land or palm plantations.

5533

In a weird way, I think that climate change is akin to a person’s individual healthcare and finances.

As humans, we just do not do well with things that we intellectually know are very bad, but that are not here today. We know that we are going to die from consuming too much sugar and other bad foods, and not exercising enough. But we feel fine today. And we want to play video games, drink beer, and eat doughnuts today. So we just kind of put it out of our mind, because yes it could happen, but it’s way down the road, and we feel fine.

Same with personal finance. We know we will need enough money to retire. We know that going to that private college and racking up $200,000 in loans is silly. But all of the pay back stuff, all of the “some day I won’t be able to work and will need a big pot of money to retire” is way down the road. So we buy a nicer car than we need today, we buy another video game even though we have 100 in our backlog, and we just keep whistling past the graveyard.

Then, the icing on the cake for climate change is that it is a collective problem, a tragedy of the commons. I actually can choose to go exercise today, and I’m the only one who controls that. But if I give up the comfort of my SUV, and everyone else keeps driving them, I feel like I’m the only fucking one surrendering anything, and it won’t mean a damn thing.

5534

I don’t know. The problem is that countries with wealth and power (and nukes) will lose fertile lands, and countries who gain fertile lands don’t have wealth and power. I don’t think it takes much imagination to predict how that will work out. Never mind the climate refugee problem, we’re going to have wars for territorial acquisition like the good old days.

5535

Agreed on the climate refugees and conflict. I think that the only countries that will gain fertile lands are Canada and Russia though

5536

Yeah, the “winners/losers” things is pretty much just based on physical, relatively easy-to-model stuff, and fails to include the more speculative sociological stuff.

Hey, Mr. Montana ranch owner, your scrubland will become much more fertile if the moderate predictions about climate change come true.

Ooh, that sounds pretty good.

It’ll become wetter, and more temperate, and you’ll be able to grow several crops on the land each season.

Yeah, that’s really good.

And because a large chunk of the great plains will become desert, your land will become the new breadbasket of North America.

Wow, I’m gonna be rich!

And of course since the previous breadbasket will be wasteland, the food grown on your land will be all the more valuable.

REALLY rich!

Actually, large swaths of central and southern North America will be effectively uninhabitable.

Oh. Man, I honestly feel bad for those poor people.

Most of those people will still be alive.

That’s good.

Just homeless and starving.

Bummer.

And well-armed. And looking for a new place to live and for food.

Um…

Really, they’ll have no choice but to move north.

Good thing I pay my taxes! The government will make sure law and order prevails.

There’s very little chance that the US government will survive the mass-migrations and starvation in any form that you recognize.

I be rich though. The rich people always land on their feet.

Yeah, sure.