am honestly scared for the future. what are we supposed to do?
LETS GOOOOOO LINE GO UP BABYYYYY 📈📈📈📈🤑🤑🥇🥇
jokes aside, time to dismantle capitalism. I’m not religious or spiritual but HOLY FUCK THE FUCKING PLANET IS ANGRY WITH US
As a man from southeast asia, i say goodbye to yall, I don’t have a good feeling about the upcoming semester…
If you’re not good at collective action, just blow up oil and gas infrastructure, power plants, etc
We are passed a habitable and comfortable zone for a diverse world. Its gone.
Governments allowed power companies, automakers, and petrochemical companies and now big tech corporations to trash an entire planet. We sped to our ruin starting in the late 19th century. When Edison turned on a power plant and tried to hide the smoke and tar from inspectors. In 150 years through greed and avarice. Gone.
When humans learned about the damage, we basically swept it under the rug.When corporate labs found out about it, they buried the lead, bribed, and attacked any alternative. The evidence is there and it’s quite damning. Not only to companies like Exxon who knew, but to anyone claiming money and power are good. That things like moral ambition or affective altruism justify actions. New veneers for a rotten age.
I am, sadly, convinced it won’t start to incite action - real change -until its really bad. The political and educational climate is not supportive.
Tragically, we almost got there. We had a template with the Ozone solution. Even a pretty shit company had an alternative product. CFCs were widely regarded as a bad move and people believed the scientists. You don’t hear about the hole in the Ozone and of you’re young enough, you probably have no idea it was a problem. Alf, the stupid fuzzy alien TV sitcom, even had an episode calling a CEO to ask him to get rid of CFCs. And we did it. Politics, advocacy, and even business for its own gains of course, did it. And we were almost there as early as the Carter era with climate change. Alas, solar on the white house roof is the perfect symbol for our potential change. You can look up what transpired.
Kyoto and Paris were great. Renewables were coming. The Petrol States (especially KSA and Qatar) killed it all because the people in charge of our governments were, frankly, cowards unwilling to fight back. Unwilling to hold other nations, companies, and voices who were lying.
Someone, somewhere, can start to heal this. But it’ll take a worldwide political revoltution to stop the bleeding. Frankly, again, we can’t convince people the earth is round right now so I’m not optimistic.
I’m convinced the only reason they agreed to switch off CFCs was because they had an alternative that was cheaper to produce.
Social media was the death blow
who knew you could commodify others attention spans?
There have been revolutions the world over the last 2 years. I really think Gen z is going to tip the scales. There are a shitton of them, and they are mightily pissed off.
It won’t be soon enough to save most people or life on the planet but I think we might just save SOME. so there’s that. :)
I think we’re all scared for the future. Make what life we have left as good as possible for as many people as we can affect.
Life will recover with other forms when we’re gone.
In 200,000,000 years yes. This does not console me. They are wiping out all life as we have known it for our entire existence as a species. They will likely displace mammals as the dominant lifeform, as they will be FUCKING DEAD. Maybe it will be a new cenozoic with insects taking over again. But regardless, my hatred for them is unbridled and uncontainable. It is overflowing and my bloodlust grows day by day.
We owe it to all life on the plant to make meat crayons of these demons. Drag them behind cars until there is literally nothing left.
what i wrote wasn’t to console. i hate it as much as you do. But what good is a fantasy?
Get the popcorn it’s gonna be fun!
At this point I’m kind of hoping the AMOC shuts down for a bit:
“The crucial Atlantic current system that brings warmth to Europe has slowed 14 per cent in 30 years, according to an analysis of how much heat the ocean is releasing to the atmosphere”
Holy fuck.
This is a chaotic system with a lot of contributing factors and creating correlation from causation would be difficult to impossible, but I wonder how much AI datacenters are contributing to this. Thermal pollution is actually a huge deal, and if take into account the amount of thermal energy put out by, say, global air travel, than global temperature deltas should be much greater than they are. Datacenters have been proven to be quite efficient at creating thermal pollution, so it stands to reason that creating more thermal pollution could be responsible for much of the temperature delta.
This also holds a bit of hope for us: not all of global warming is caused by green house gases (yes, most of it is, but not all), but rather some of it is simply caused by thermal pollution from burning fuels or even using electric heaters. Because of this, climate change is likely, to some extent, partially reversible if only by stopping the mass-scale dumping of thermal energy into the atmosphere. Again, it’s realistically impossible to draw causation from the data, but “rebellions are built on hope.”
There’s almost no “new” datacenter (i.e. clancker training super-computer) running because they all have no power and other infra issues. Only a few of Musk’s run on diesel generators. I’m pretty sure compared to other industries and runaway processes the impact is still negligible.
F*ck those things, don’t get me wrong but I don’t think they are the cause. Yet.
we are doomed to uncertainty is what you are saying?
Yeah, pretty much.
At the very least, I can hope that once most of us humans die from starvation after most of the ecosystems on which our food sources depend are degraded, maybe then, global temperatures will begin to stabilize and even recede to a place where recoveries are possible.
Am I missing something or does this completely miss the first law of thermodynamics?
All energy generated is ‘thermal pollution’, whether you use it to run a heater, move a boat, or dig a hole in the ground.
That’s actually exactly my point. I once went through and estimated how much the atmospheric temperature would increase by burning kerosene for jet fuel. It wasn’t accurate and I didn’t take a lot of variables into account, but it was a very noticeable increase. The point is, dumping mass amounts of heat into the surroundings can have a noticeable effect on ambient conditions, hens my question, “how much of this is caused by data centers?”
humanspiral@lemmy.ca is correct, this is a minuscule effect in comparison to solar warming. At the end of the day, the problem with global warming is pretty simple. A body in space can only remove thermal energy by radiating it out (black body radiation). This is a fixed value and quite easy to calculate for a sphere. However, parts of the atmosphere absorbs and re-radiates some of that black body radiation back to earth, this is what keeps it at a livable temperature and not significantly below the freezing point of water. Co2 and methane are two gases that absorb and re-radiate that energy back to the ground, hens the concern surrounding them. But the system is more or less fixed, and adding thermal energy will result in a change to the system’s overall energy state.
If you approach the problem from this stand point, your goals shift slightly from “reduce emissions” to “reduce energy usage.” However, that’s not profitable.
Solar heating input is 10000 times larger than all energy consumption. Solar energy is also net 0 thermal emissions, and less net thermal gain at low albedo solar capture, than fuel based energy. The problem with GHG emissions is that they reduce the heat loss of the planet. Albedo (white roofs and ice caps) help with global cooling too.
Yes, it is too late to stop it.
But every 0.1 degrees makes a difference. So if you care, efforts are still worthwhile. There is no hope for civilization to survive as we know it, but the less we emit the better chance something liveable is waiting on the other side.
In short, you, me and everyone alive today and their kids and their grandkids and probably more…are absolutely fucked. We have to try to care about people who won’t be alive for 100 years yet. But that’s still worth it.
Absolutely. We are too late to stop severe effects of global warming over the next decades. We are not too late to minimize how bad its gonna be.
Atmospheric aerosals are already emitted into the atmosphere in huge quantities and are already cancelling out some of the effects of CO2 buildup. By deliberately increasing these, deliberately adding aerosols intentionally, rather than as a byproduct of combustion. The cost would be pretty affordable, and we could completely eliminate the extra heat retention of our higher CO2 levels.
Obviously there are risks, but it’s not like we haven’t already been adding huge amounts of aerosols to the atmosphere with little negative effect. It’s not a perfect solution, but it sure as hell is better than the alternative.
But people have weird attitudes about it. The same folks who are firmly convinced that climate change has now doomed us all will often oppose atmospheric engineering efforts like this based on vague fears about messing with forces we don’t understand. Obviously any technique will have unintended consequences, but when the alternative is civilization and biosphere collapse, it seems pretty damn silly to be worrying about hypothetical unforeseen consequences.
“Weird attitudes”? “Vague fears”?
Spraying chemicals in the air does nothing to fix ocean acidification, which will collapse marine life, which will make life hell on shore as well.
And will indirectly make the ocean acidifcation problem worse, since people will continue using fossil fuels.
If it even works at all, which is far from certain.
And blocking the sun won’t have any adverse affects on plant life? You know, the primary carbon sink?
I do believe that something like what you’re suggesting is going to be necessary to avert the total collapse of civilization as we know it. However, the part that trips many up, including myself, is that what you are proposing is a last ditch effort which should be taken after all other reasonable steps have been taken. I think we’ll get to the point where that discussion is necessary, but first we need to do what we can to limit emissions. If we don’t then we’re just going to give those with the power and influence to make changes an excuse not to.
In short, we can’t even get the world to agree to address the problem in a reasonable timeframe. That step has to be behind us before we start seriously considering geoengineering in pretty much any form.
The effort to prevent climate change pales in comparison to the effort it would take to plan, deliver, and maintain, a controlled aerosol program like that.
The math has been done, I will see if I can find the source. If you’re going to go through that much effort, you may as well just prevent it.
Also, termination shock. There is no free lunch. If the aerosol program ever stops or fails, the rebound effect of the increased solar energy in a now even more CO2 warmed world…every year you’re loading that bomb with more and more explosives.
Everything I’ve seen is the cost would be quite manageable. Sure, you’re talking billions a year. But the figures I’ve seen are that it could be funded by something like a fraction of a penny per gallon of gasoline sales. It would require international cooperation, but it might be as simple as just adding an additive to jet fuel.
Termination shock is a legitimate fear. But again, the cost is relatively cheap. It’s not something we can’t continue to fund even if we have a major depression or a world war.
I couldn’t justify rolling the dice on this if the stakes weren’t so dire. But look at it. We’re literally talking about the near-certainty of complete societal and ecological collapse from climate change. I’ll trade “possible death” for “certain death.” It’s not the perfect solution, but we are well past the point of perfect solutions.
And moreover, it gives us what we really need: TIME. We have a path to a carbon-free future. But a planetary civilization is the slowest of ships to turn. We’re trying to completely revamp the very material foundations of our entire lives. Solutions like atmospheric CO2 removal are not practical with today’s technology. But, in principle, with sufficiently cheap power and good enough automation, meaningful direct air capture should be possible.
For example, by 2050 the world will be pretty awash in solar panels. Project the production curves forward, and we’ll be sitting on a massive abundance of cheap available power. Especially in the summer time, we’ll have access to vast amounts of otherwise wasted power. And if you had really good automation and robotics by then? Maybe then it becomes possible to affordably construct an industrial complex that would rival the current world’s petrochemical complex…all just to take CO2 out of the air. Totally impractical now. But 2050? Or 2100?
Or, in the worst case, you don’t need to sustain this forever. My understanding is that the main mechanism that governs the timing is ocean currents. It would take about a thousand years for ocean currents to move enough water up to the surface and back down to return atmospheric CO2 to pre-industrial levels, but we’re talking a task on the order of centuries, not forever.
A $300/ton carbon tax (with dividend) = $3/gallon tax on gasoline, would be a zero cost solution to global warming. Encourages carbon capture after renewables/H2 economy. There are snowpiercer solutions, but snowpiercer consequences are concerning.
Communist Revolution. Get that ass out the chair.
Literally, the moral and logical answer to your question is to lead a bloody revolution and end this by force tomorrow to prevent absolutely as much poison from leaking out as possible. Not because it will save human lives necessarily (although I think the rates of death from such a revolution as compared to a few decades of worsening conditions before we get to the same point of lowered emissions is just about a wash), but because it could possibly save some measure of biodiversity which will allow for the POSSIBILITY of humans continuing as a species in some randomly calmer areas among the chaos.
That being said, I have been thinking that for a long time and haven’t worked myself up to trying it. Dying painfully is kind of scary, even if you don’t like living.
We all have to face that fear and we will. I have faith in humanity, shaking as it is.
For one, we’re going to need a bigger chart.
We can always change the scale. Logarithmic scale is always an option. At least, up until the total collapse.
Right now I’m building a knowledge base to hopefully create processes to enzymatically catalyze chemical reactions. Most importantly reactions that incorporate CO2 into sugars and nitrogens into amino acids (and atmospheric nitrogen into, well, not atmospheric nitrogen). If successful we wouldn’t have to rely on increasingly unstable/extinct environmental systems for nutrition and materials because we could create nutrients and other plant-based stuff in some sort bio-reactor-like machine.
It’s difficult because mostly I just want to walk into the sea as I often think it’s mostly too late for any sort of intervention.
This sounds interesting. Could you share an example of how that works?
The idea is to cut out photosynthesis from the food chain. I mean, we have hydroponics, but those require nutrient washes which AFAIK still rely on plants which means it’s still susceptible to environmental damage/collapse. As well, using energy to power special light bulbs just to convert them back into energy in a plant is kind of silly imo.
Take the biosynthesis of Vitamin A for example; the reaction that produces it is catalyzed by an enzyme called retinal dehydrogenase which uses NAD+ to remove the hydrogens from retinal (hence the name!) and produces retinoic acid (AKA Vitamin A). Without the enzyme this reaction can still happen, just it would take millions of years to produce one molecule (catalysis).
The NAD+ is turned into an NADH (NAD+ is like an empty dump truck, NADH now has the hydrogen and the electron from the reactant), but the NAD+ was ‘created’ via photosynthesis (I still don’t know exactly where the NAD+ comes from), so my goal, as it were, is to create standardized set of reactions to produce compounds like Vitamin A in standard conditions (room temp and pressure). The enzymes themselves are created in different ways, perhaps directly after transcription (from the RNA polymerase (RNAp)) or afterwards when two clumps of proteins are brought together somehow (enzymes making enzymes?).
In short, I want to create a “cellular matrix” in like a steel chamber or something. The electrons produced by photosynthesis would instead come from, say, a solar panel or whatever; then one would just have to supply normal air (with nitrogen) and water, to create their food instead of attempting to grow plants in increasingly non-viable conditions. I imagine it producing something like tofu that also has all the nutrients and sugars one would need for the day. This still might require as much land as a factory, but it could also be just another appliance one can have in their kitchen.
There is certainly a whole lot of issues to overcome, most I don’t even know about right now, but if it works people won’t have to rely entirely on capitalist systems to feed themselves. Hopefully not at all.
Also this is like the first time I’ve written it out. Some things I haven’t studied in a while (or at all really), so they might not be exactly right.
we need more people like you
o7
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