I'm doing my part in combating global warming by commenting here.
It's really helped a lot since we discarded the old paper-and-pencil method of Unfogged commenting.
I tried to read the OP link and just gave up after a sentence. The papers surely are just swapping out the place names in a template at this point. Nothing ever changes.
The reporting around this seems to be seriously misleading. It's all "scientists used to warn about 2 degrees being the tipping point, now it's only 1.5". But as I understand it that's not the point at all. It's just that nobody asked the IPCC to look specifically at a 1.5 degree rise before. It's not that the numbers have changed, in other words, they're just pointing to a different place on the axis.
"Everybody talks about the weather climate but nobody wants to do anything about it."
"Nobody ever mentions the weather
Can make or break your day
The guy who became famous for his sweater, then infamous for his online past, asked a question about energy and the environment at one of the debates. The fact that he could ask that and still have some doubt about which party to support was a depressing sign the Democrats can't even own that issue; the fact that I had to specify in my search that I wanted to see his question and not read about his meme fame is a depressing sign of how quickly everyone went back to not caring about the environment.
The guy who became famous for his sweater,
Fred Rogers?
then infamous for his online past,
wait, what?
7: Well, he worked(works?) for a coal plant operator.
8: I didn't have any idea who fa could be talking about either. I had to google to refresh my memory.
I can't remember the names of at least a third of people I went to school with, but I remember Ken Bone's name.
Also totally on topic because we're all fucked.
I thought the extended description was more informative than his name. But I did have to double check that I correctly disambiguated him from the basketball coach with the same name.
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Very nice massage-therapist-hippie guy in our neighborhood decides that we should have a block party. He's very organized, works insanely hard lining it all up - food permits, permits to close the streets, hiring two bands, letting everyone know, and so on and so forth. He had a raffle to raise money. Party was Saturday, and it was totally lovely.
I just talked to him: his costs were $850 and the raffle brought in $200. I'm feeling overwhelmed, like I ought to bail him out, at least to some extent, because I suspect $650 might really break him, whereas we can technically afford a big chunk of that, but it's waaaay disproportionate to what I'd usually spend on a charity of this sort. Argh.
I don't know how to find out exactly how screwed he is by this shortfall.
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17 Wait, it's not the basketball coach? Now I'm really confused (though it may just be the bourbon).
18 Can you chip in a significant chunk (like 200 or 250 USD) and get some other people to chip in like 50 or 75 to make up for it?
Yes, chip in but don't do all the bailing.
20: that's probably the right approach.
Give $134.76. That way he'll assume you used a formula and are thus fair and knowledge.
4: I don't think this is correct; at least I had a long talk with our guys this afternoon and their spin was that earlier estimates had underestimated the dangers of 2C. That will be much less tolerable than we had hoped. Part of the problem is the tipping points like clathrates in the arctic and the moment when the amazon logging reaches the stage that it's no longer a carbon sink on aggregate.
Fucking gloomy
how are other people's teenagers taking this? ours refuses to learn to drive, and i suspect he'll be giving up meat soon. plus the political organizing. does it come up at all in discussions in other families?
People don't think about synthetic or algae based food a lot when they talk about climate change. Fake meat can be helpful in the short term, but mostly I mean that the nearly worst scenarios become a lot less catastrophic if we're no longer dependent on agriculture. Synthetic food is farther along than negative emissions tech I think.
26: my teenager, being relatively well-adjusted (I have no idea how that happened), is using a time-honored coping strategy: denial. He texted me, immediately after reading the Times story, the following, "Nobody is going to make any real progress toward doing what actually needs doing--smashing capitalism--until it's too late. In the meantime, I'm not going to worry about engaging in any bullshit virtue signaling that won't make a real difference. Fortunately, humans are incredibly adaptable animals. We've undertaken mass migrations because of climactic constraints or shifts many times in the past, and we'll like do so again in the next century as the earth continues to warm. It'll suck, but everything sucks."
The truth is that he's heard me say the stuff after "difference" many times before, so he was probably just throwing me a bone (from the steak he ate while driving his Escalade) to assuage my guilt.
I don't remember the context, but it was some Youth Ambassador-Something type thing. I remember being sad that they all qualified their statements at the end with, 'but I guess we'll get through somehow and you guys tried'. I wished they'd felt free to express the rage they should be feeling.
Maybe they keyed your car while you were listening to the talk.
Joke's on them. My car is so beat and dented that keying it would hardly be distinguishable.
26: A long time ago I read an article about children in extreme Christian cults. One teenage boy said that he was totally loooking forward to the rapture, but he prayed that it wouldn't happen before he got his drivers license. That's sort of my son's attitude to global warming. Not the looking forward to it part.
algae based food
At least now I don't have to wonder what my personal "burn shit down" moment will be.
Fish in general are algae-based in some sense.
I bet somebody is working on dill-flavored algae at this very moment.
28: What makes him think he'll be one of the migrating ones, rather than one of those cleared to make room for them? I skimmed this morning a really technical paper on the genetic background of the Scythians, from Stockholm university, all full of enthusiasm for their genetic diversity, and all the way I was thinking "How do you suppose they acquired it?"*
Related: a paper on the Yamnaya / corded ware cultures pointing out that only mitochondrial DNA is left of their predecessor populations in the parts of Europe that they settled.
*When I wasn't totally bewildered and out of my depth
re: 38
Yeah, I read the New Scientist article. The basic assumption being that all of the men in the Iberian peninsula at the time they arrived were killed or otherwise prevented from having offspring.
In the British Isles it wasn't just men. It was basically everyone.
Whereas the AS migration shows evidence of much more intermixing, yes?
I think there's some debate about the size of the population transfer. But yeah, it was basically an elite who then intermixed with the local population, rather than a wholesale population replacement.
What about Scythians from other universities?
26: If I had that conversation with my teenager, I would laugh so hard.
Speaking of Vikings, today is Lief Erikson Day. Traditionally observed by going to Canada and then leaving with hardly a trace of your visit remaining.
Do they make you cut sods and get shot by Natives and stuff?
Take only sagas, Leif only footprints
Fortunately, clathrates may not be a problem:
https://www.usgs.gov/news/gas-hydrate-breakdown-unlikely-cause-massive-greenhouse-gas-release
Clathrate is just such a great word.
I was trying to work out how we could get the global warming and the return of fascism to cancel each other out but I think we're going to have to throw strong AI into our apocalypse soup to make it work.
Fascism > nuclear winter. Easy-peasy.
49: Kevin Drum is spitballing ideas for how to get fascism and climate change to cancel each other: https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/10/carbon-dioxide-is-shriveling-mens-balls/
38: he doesn't believe that, and thus the denial. He's relatively optimistic--or perhaps merely evinces relative optimism to keep me from feeling even guiltier--at a societal rather than a personal level.
47: most of the methane released by gas hydrates never reaches the atmosphere. Instead, the methane often remains in the undersea sediments, dissolves in the ocean, or is converted to carbon dioxide by microbes in the sediments or water column
Seems like that's still a problem in that it would reduce the ocean's efficacy as a carbon sink? But maybe a problem on the order of, is it worse for 20,000 Scythians or 30,000 Scythians to come to town.
or perhaps merely evinces relative optimism to keep me from feeling even guiltier
My teenage son is also an optimist. He informs me that his generation will be able to fix things once my generation is dead.
Fortunately, we now have tools to control the kids. They either listen to the olds or we turn them into right-wing memes that imply they have no social life.
As National Geographic taught me, the Scythians fired from their recurved bows arrows with such force and skill as to pierce their targets' skulls clean through. And made excellent gold ornaments for their horses. All in all, a fine way to be exterminated.
I just wanted to applaud 46. Thanks Ginger!
26: my oldest is refusing to learn how to drive; it's easier to balk in narnia as the test is very hard, and then on the wrong side of the road for america. we got her an az learner's permit but there wasn't enough time to do it. also, she's ranking potential colleges by amount of political activity rather than the biology and chem she's actually going to study. not ideal. of course I don't know how to drive, so, glass houses and so forth.
Not really on topic, but my grandmother never learned how to drive until she was in her 60s, when she moved to my transit-less hometown. It really shows that you can learn to do something at any age. Unless you consider that she ran into things like utility polls and the post office.
Perverse. Couldn't she at lest have run into the disutility polls? The ones doing marketing or whatever.
Poles show the GenAm spelling varies widely.
Good piece of public art posted on NUMTOT: "If you say you believe in 🌍warming but you are against 🚲 lanes because they remove 🚗 parking, you are a global warming action denier."
The sub-literacy makes it so much more convincing.