When are we forced to do Geo engineering to get out of this?
The UK fell just short of highest temp (38.1 v 38.5) after it clouded over in the afternoon, but it easily beat the hottest July temp, previously 36.7.
Some hope for the US:
The push to regulate greenhouse gas emissions come as both Democrats and Republicans face pressure from their constituents, and in some cases the fossil fuel industry itself, to regulate carbon emissions that lead to climate change
.
RichVR
5600
I have a feeling lately that things will not be remedied. Things are already bad. But they become worse at a slow pace. Some people do not care. They will be dead before it gets really bad. The rest will actually acclimate themselves, a bit at a time. So that the norm becomes 100+ degrees F. More rain. Worse storms. Droughts and crops failing. But not all at once, so no worry. You end up with Soylent Green in real life. Food riots. Queuing for water.
But no change. Just cattle. Until death.
Because it gets little attention.
I think some of those people might have miscalculated.
KevinC
5603
I wish I was the type that could ignore all this and find ignorance in bliss, but I just can’t. Seeing those photos and reading that article have left me so depressed.
I get that we need timber. I get that the people doing the lumbering need jobs. I get that a beetle infestation has made things harder up there. But for fuck sake, I wish tax dollars could go to temporary subsidies while they replant sustainable forests to chop down instead of destroying this ecosystem. WHY must we be so fucking shortsighted?
They could be paid not to cut down trees. It just takes collective will.
We could replace so much of it with hemp production!
At least that is what Hemp manufacturers say.
They could be paid to plant trees, clean the forests so the inevitable fires burn less of it or a bunch of other stuff, but you can’t have government interfering with the market or it won’t be credible anymore.
Maybe “The End of History” was an adequate title after all.
I feel like the suffocation argument quite literally is more visceral than the temperature one. Every conservative i’ve tried that on seems to clam quick so far. It’s far less scientifically sound but had a way more immediate impact.
Saying the world ends if temperature goes up 10 degrees causes them to lol. Tell them that oxygen levels might plummet if the world goes up 10 degrees causes something like pondering.
Nesrie
5610
Just remember we’ve had several points in history when there really were thoughts, ideas that this was the end. There’s still hope even though we need to act.
Yeah trees are renewable and we know how to harvest and replant and maintain that system… but those forests are not.
I know that you know all the stuff I’m about to write, but just in case anyone gets into a discussion where someone is using that talking point, here’s the refutation:
Even if they don’t decompose for decades, they’re better in almost every respect than the one-use bags:
- The single-use bags take an equally long time to degrade in a landfill, but you’ll put far more of them in there over time and they’ll take up more space, cost more total energy to produce, and consume more petroleum (assuming you’re using the single-use bag regularly).
- If the single-use bags don’t make it into a landfill, they’ll degrade pretty quickly in the sun (a few months or a couple years), but they’ll turn into toxic micro-particles.
- Due to their light weight, a single-use bag will tend to fly away on the wind and end up in the water system where birds, fish and turtles will tend to eat them as they break down because the light plastics look like jellyfish, plankton, or algae.
- By contrast, a lost multi-use bag will tend to sink to the bottom of a stream or get buried under leaf-litter to begin it’s long decomposition; that’s bad, but at least it’s less likely to end up fouling a heron’s digestive tract.
- Reusable plastic bags are themselves recyclable in some areas (depending on the capabilities of your local recycling plant) whereas the single-use bags almost certainly are not; the energy required to recycle a single-use bag far exceeds the value of the recycled material, so practically no plants will actually recycle them – at best they try to more safely shred and bury them.
- Finally, the costs of cleaning up loose single-use bags are far more than the costs of cleaning the reusable bags that might make their way to your local highway shoulder – in 2017, California spent $8.5M removing single-use plastic from streets and streams; that’s tax money that could have been used for other stuff.
Timex
5614
Has anyone actually done the math on this, in detail?
Because I’m kind of curious… disposable plastic bags weigh essentially nothing. You’d need a TON of them to equal the weight of a single “real” bag. And they cost essentially zero to produce by comparison, since they’re just two sheets of plastic that are heat sealed and then cut on a press.
I’m just curious as to how much actual difference there is, given the significant weight differences and complexity of producing “real” bags vs. the plastic ones.
First, note that I said “room” (meaning volume) rather than weight.
But beyond that, yes, people have done the math on this. And at first blush it doesn’t look great for the reusable bags – they take more energy to produce, they’re heavier so they take more gas to deliver and cart around, and in terms of manufacturing they produce more waste to produce than a bunch of single-use plastic bags. So it’s not too hard to come up with a case where you have to use a heavy cotton bag 7100 times before you break even, environmentally.
But as with many environmental subjects, it is not just the raw production costs that you need to look at for return-on-investment, it’s the indirect costs to society and the planet
I think we had a pretty in-depth conversation on this about a year or so back, probably in this same thread with lots of good data and arguments on both side of the question.
Here is one aspect where shopping at Aldi has trained me well. I’ve been shopping there as my primary grocery store since the mid-to-late 90s. I used to just have boxes in the back of my car, so you put the groceries right in those boxes from the shopping cart, and then take the cart back to get your quarter back. Then at home, you use the boxes to unload the groceries in the kitchen, then take the boxes back to the trunk of your car.
But a few years ago I found some nice sturdy re-usable bags at a convention I attended, and those two or three re-usable bags are still going strong 4 years later, helping me bring groceries home from Aldi.
