Unwardil -What is your one main argument against AGW?

[JustBusiness17]

You fucking imbicile! I have lost all my patience for you Unwardil. This is my final comment to you. All future comments will be about you!

What kind of effect will worsening droughts have on the world?

How will increased dependency on fossil fuels affect the economy as prices continue to rise?


Where the fuck are you even getting your sweeping assumptions about this shit? There are a miliion different ways that this problem can be solved and you suggest they all somehow result in famine and financial crisis... Guess what? We're headed there anyways. Maybe if you shut the fuck up and took some time to away from internet debating, you would see how skewed your perspective has become.

There are only four plausible futures for our planet...


Which way are you taking us?

 

[OnkelCannabia]

Yes, see, I don't sensor where I get my information from. I hear something from somewhere, then I'll think, hey, does that make sense or doesn't it?

Does turning food into fuel increase food prices by lowering food supply?

Yes.

Does increasing the global cost of food cause famine in the developing world?

Yes.

Are we doing that in an effort to reduce CO2?

You betcha.

What kind of food are we turning into fuel (I assume crops)? How much crop do we want to use for fuel? Does it outweigh the tremendous loss of crop yield due to GW? Is stopping GW contigent on using crop as fuel? If so, can you provide evidence for this claim? Sorry, but your argument reeks of slippery slope.

Also, you seem to be underestimating the potential impact of climate change. You think the media is just full of doomsayers? Try this:

Scientist: Warming Could Cut Population to 1 Billion

COPENHAGEN , A scientist known for his aggressive stance on climate policy made an apocalyptic prediction on Thursay.

Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, said that if the buildup of greenhouse gases and its consequences pushed global temperatures 9 degrees Fahrenheit higher than today , well below the upper temperature range that scientists project could occur from global warming , Earth's population would be devastated. [UPDATED, 6:10 p.m: The preceding line was adjusted to reflect that Dr. Schellnhuber was not describing a worst-case warming projection. h/t to Joe Romm.]
"In a very cynical way, it's a triumph for science because at last we have stabilized something,- namely the estimates for the carrying capacity of the planet, namely below 1 billion people," said Dr. Schellnhuber, who has advised German Chancellor Angela Merkel on climate policy and is a visiting professor at Oxford.

At that temperature, there would be "no fluctuations anymore, we can be fairly sure," said Dr. Schellnhuber, exercising his characteristically dark sense of humor at the morning plenary session on the closing day of an international climate change conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. [Earlier post: The conference organizers have sought to jog policymakers with a stronger assessment of global warming's risks, but some scientists warned the approach could backfire.]

"What a triumph," Dr. Schellnhuber said. "On the other hand do we want this alternative? I think we can do much, much better," he told the conference.

Dr. Schellnhuber, citing his own research, said that at certain "tipping points," higher temperatures could cause areas of the ocean to become deoxygenated, resulting in what he calls "oxygen holes" between 600 and 2,400 feet deep. These are areas so depleted of the gas that they would badly disrupt the food chain.

Unabated warming would also lead to "disruption of the monsoon, collapse of the Amazon rain forest and the Greenland ice sheet will meltdown," he said.
But on the bright side, he noted, in a joking reference to the meeting's Danish hosts, the retreat of the sheath of ice covering Greenland, which is Danish-controlled territory, "would increase your usable land by, I don't know, 10,000 percent."

"But I'm not sure whether you want to do this," he said.

http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/13/scientist-warming-could-cut-population-to-1-billion/

 

[Unwardil]

See, that's the thing.

I didn't say how certain are we that CO2 is causing warming, I said how certain are you that this warming is imminently going to kill us all.

Not even the most radical climate-changists dare to put an absolute time scale on that. They say things like, oh, could be 20 years, could but 200 years. THEY DON'T KNOW and yet, they're the first to say that we need to immediately reduce CO2 emissions.

Now here's the problem I have with this anyway even given the above logic.

If we are going to be doomed in 20 years, then what are the chances that we're in time to actually reverse the process?

Pretty much nil. The world as a whole is steadily increasing it's CO2 emitting (China and India recently becoming much more industrialized and a lot richer has a lot to do with this) so if that's the case, we're screwed unless we take inhumanly drastic measures that no one is going to ever agree to.

But if it's 200 years, then surely there's no big rush and we'd actually be better off to burn more in the short term in an effort to turbo charge the developing world past the population growth curve where economic factors tend to level off population growth.

If it's somewhere in the middle then we've certainly got time to think of a better solution that doesn't jeopardize all potential prosperity in the developing world.

For every single eventuality, reducing CO2 seems like a really really stupid idea.


Now, would you look at my solutions?

Solution number 1) Separate food production from natural cycles by moving farming into controlled, vertical farms. Droughts? Bring em on!

Solution number 2) Use the same vertical farming technology to produce bio diesel from sea scum in the short term and in the long term, construct massive orbital solar collectors, thus eliminating the need for fosil fuels in the developed world and reducing the price of fossil fuels enormously, allowing the developing world to develop even faster.


My solution gets more ambitious even.


Build self contained habitats which can be separated entirely from the outside world and run on internally generated power alone without even sunlight being required and generally work towards a time when all the essentials of life will be completely divorced from natural terrestrial cycles such as weather, seasons, climate, you name it. Humanity's main evolutionary strength has always been our ability to either change ourselves to suit the environment or to change our environment to suit us. I'm only proposing taking that ability to the next level.

Screw nature.

Screw earth.

We don't need them. They're like an abusive spouse, we should divorce them as soon as possible and be done with them. Trying to fix AGW is like the abused wife apologizing for making her abusive husband angry. Dump his worthless ass, we're better off alone.


Now, as for the fuel, yes, it's corn, we make ethanol with it and it's already inflated global food prices by something like 250% in 10 years.

 

[Unwardil]

There are only four plausible futures for our planet...

Ok...

Only 4 plausible futures?

Do you get off on being ironic, calling me an idiot and making a claim like that?


Video instantly lost me and here's why.

Two statements he makes very early on and only one of them can be true.

1: We are on a planet that supports us.

2: 1/3 of species are under threat of extinction.


Think about that for a second.

...No, really think about it.


So which is it, does the planet support life? Or does life exist despite what the planet throws at it.

If we rely on nature, we give our selves a 66% survival rating. NOT GOOD ENOUGH.


Now, my plan puts us in none of those worlds, but it's not an adjacent future. It's IS an adjacent future to their selfish bubble scenario, IF the selfish bubble scenario had a drive towards expansion into space and towards sustainable energy.

What is the biggest enemy of sustainable energy? Exponential population growth. You can't construct a system that will have any longevity if you have to support a population growing at an exponential rate. You'll always have to build more to keep up with demand so things like wind and solar which take twenty to thirty years to pay back the investment are just not feasible in rapidly growing countries. In order to maintain their growth, they need fossil fuels....

But see, industrialized countries don't have that problem. Industrialized countries always reach a state of population equilibrium. So if we ENCOURAGE this kind of growth in developing areas, it's actually going to eventually bring down the global population growth rate which is such a nuisance to anything sustainable.

In the imortal words of Doc Brown... 'You're not thinking fourth dimensionally'

 

[JustBusiness17]

I'm afraid the world faces many challenges as we move into the future. Possibly the most iminent is a tinfoil shortage...

 

[Aught3]

Screw nature. Screw earth.

An anti-earther, I guess there's a first time for everything.

Okay, the first thing that strikes me about your proposed solutions is how incredibly expensive all of them will be. I thought you were against a massive outlay of capital to fix this problem, remember economic growth? The cost on developing countries? Not raising food prices? It seems your solutions are no better than the ones you rail against, at least in the terms you consider important.

Solution number 1) Separate food production from natural cycles by moving farming into controlled, vertical farms. Droughts? Bring em on!

Solution number 2) Use the same vertical farming technology to produce bio diesel from sea scum in the short term and in the long term, construct massive orbital solar collectors, thus eliminating the need for fosil fuels in the developed world and reducing the price of fossil fuels enormously, allowing the developing world to develop even faster.


My solution gets more ambitious even.


Build self contained habitats which can be separated entirely from the outside world and run on internally generated power alone without even sunlight being required and generally work towards a time when all the essentials of life will be completely divorced from natural terrestrial cycles such as weather, seasons, climate, you name it. Humanity's main evolutionary strength has always been our ability to either change ourselves to suit the environment or to change our environment to suit us. I'm only proposing taking that ability to the next level.

Solution 1: I actually like the idea of vertical farms. The big benefit I see is in a large reduction in transport costs, with everything located in a city there is no need to send trucks back and forth collecting produce from farms miles outside of town. However we are still going to require water both for the vertical farms themselves and for general use in our homes. This does nothing to solve the problem of droughts that you seem so keen to 'bring on'. Plus these facilities will require large amount of fertilisers and power to run, remember we are trying to decrease our use of fossil fuels not increase it.

Solution 2a: Again I like the idea of producing bio-fuels from marine algae. I think it's potentially quite viable buts it's not currently economical so a lot more work needs to go into developing this technology before it can reasonably become a solution to the problem.

Solution 2b: This is a big WTF. I can't even begin to understand what your thinking is on this one. How does having a massive satellite help provide energy?

Solution 3: A bit drastic and ultimately foolish, imo. At present we are completely reliant on the Earth to provide almost everything we need to survive. Basically you're advocating that we cut ourselves of from the rest of the planet and you expect us to generate unlimited energy without any outside input. That violates the laws of physics. Ecosystems provide us with incredibly valuable services including oxygen generate and waste disposal and recycling. To just let that service vanish without trying to save it seems to me to be incredibly naive and at worst suicidal.

 

[Unwardil]

Maybe I made the orbital satellite solar cells comment a post before that.

Anyways, it would be a space based solar power generation system which could either laser or microwave beam energy to collectors on the ground.

Does that make a bit more sense now?

Then with all the electricity we could ever need available at our finger tips and provided by the sun, directly without having to pass through the atmosphere first to collect it, it would then be possible to build the enclosed habitats which, except for the microwave/laser collectors, be totally separated from the outside world if it became necessary and run perfectly smoothly regardless of any climactic considerations.


Now then, the reason why vertical farms would ultimately be immune to drought is that all the irrigation concerns would be dealt with by deep sea pipelines and the water would be filtered on site. You'd be able to use the salt for other things anyway and there's all kinds of good stuff in sea water that's got other industrial uses, event for farming, it's mostly the salt that's harmful, but that's simplicity it's self to extract. Because you'd be taking the water from a deep sea pipeline the environmental impact would be negligible and it would never run dry. Ever.

Also, conveniently, you'd have developed a handy dandy high volume water filtration system to deal with sea water. Droughts become irrelevant.

As for the power generation, MOSTLY what they need that for is for producing light and that's where Bio engineering can help out by designing crops that need much less sunlight and instead use more water (assuming we've got the on site sea water filtration version here). On site power generation would seem the obvious solution which is why the first one should be built near the ocean and in an area with very powerful tides.

Otherwise, you've got Hydro as a good option, though not the best, or even nuclear. Ultimately, if you recall the goal of putting massive solar generation in orbit, it won't even be an issue and it's only a short term problem to be overcome and to get the project started. Hell, you might even have to go with natural gas or something like that.

Power in the initial stages is certainly an engineering stumbling block to overcome.

As the technology got better, you could expect to see the yields become abundant and once the initial cost of the facilities was paid off, it would actually cause a massive drop in food prices because of how bountiful they would be.


Now, where did I ever say I was against spending money on solutions? Quite the opposite, we should spend lots, but we should spend it on investments like vertical farms, things that, in the long run, are going to pay for themselves. In the short run, they create high tech jobs and in the long run, they pay back their investments by the resources they produce.


Now, to clarify, I'm not an 'anti-earther' what I am is an 'anti-reliance-on-the-earth...er'.

My position is this, Spaceship Earth was never designed with us in mind. We evolved to fit the earth, not the other way around. The trouble is, the Earth can't make up it's mind if it's a sauna or an iceball, but we're intelligent creatures right? I think we can make a better spaceship. Infact, we've been doing it to a small degree since we came down from the trees, I'm only advocating that the time is now for us to take the next step. Wean ourselves from mother nature's fickle and bilious teet.


Now then, all this stuff will have the same effect on the developing world that say, building the CN tower had. None, because at first, they'll all be little more than romantic ideas. It's not like we're going to abandon traditional farming over night and suddenly switch to only vertical farms. There will be no need for it in the short term and besides the technollogy will likely be quite flawed at first. But once it gets over the teething troubles, it'll become far more cost effective to build a vertical farm than to maintain traditional farms and when that happens, food prices are going to go way way down because these things will be everywhere and they'll be so good at what they do they'll have to be limiting their supplies just to stay cost effective.

 

[JustBusiness17]

We should just build a ladder to heaven :lol:

 

[Unwardil]

We should just build a ladder to heaven :lol:

Japan's already investing in an orbital solar collection array.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/09/japan-space-based-solar-power-satellite-21-billions.php

 

[JustBusiness17]

We should just build a ladder to heaven :lol:

Japan's already investing in an orbital solar collection array.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/09/japan-space-based-solar-power-satellite-21-billions.php

 

[Unwardil]

Frankly, what makes you think the notion of reducing global CO2 emissions even to equilibrium with natural sequestration is any less ridiculous than what I'm proposing?

 

[JustBusiness17]

Frankly, what makes you think the notion of reducing global CO2 emissions even to equilibrium with natural sequestration is any less ridiculous than what I'm proposing?

From climate sceptic to climate pro. Why won't you discuss this with climate scientists?

 

[Aught3]

Frankly, what makes you think the notion of reducing global CO2 emissions even to equilibrium with natural sequestration is any less ridiculous than what I'm proposing?

Okay, so your not opposed to spending vast amounts of money as long as it goes to industry and helps create jobs. I agree with that and vastly prefer it to the idea of creating a new market where people who are no help rake in profits. As to why reducing CO2 emissions is a better idea it is because we can do it (or at least make a good start) right now with our current level of technology. We don't have to wait for the experiments with the first vertical farm, or solar array, or (almost) hermetic living environment. We can start implementing the solution now and, as a bonus, we don't trash the Earth which has and still does provide valuable services for our society. I'm just not willing to throw that all away and risking it all on the chance that human ingenuity might save us if worst comes to worst.

 

[Unwardil]

But, see, we can do all the things I'm proposing too, they're just not yet economically feasible to implement as a replacement for the existing systems. They will never become so unless we research into how to make it happen.

Now, the Bio domes/space colonies/whatever are a very far into the future thing and there are a lot of steps to that process that I didn't even bother to elaborate on because frankly, they're beyond the adjacent possible. We don't know for sure what technollogies will take and which ones won't so we don't know how things will go beyond the adjacent possible, there's too many variables.


But we can have an overarching goal to the whole thing such as 'Reducing and ultimately completely weening our dependence upon natural terrestrial system.' And we can move towards that goal in a number of areas and then let it see where it takes us, always keep the main goal in mind. We can't plan exactly how it'll go which is why most of my ideas are centered around things that we are currently, theoretically able to do.


We can purify sea water.

We can put solar cells in space and beam the electricity generated back to earth with microwaves (it's inefficient at the moment, but we can do it)

We can make Bio Diesel from sea scum.

We can grow tomatoes in deep caves using nothing but geo thermal energy to provide the light.


All these things we can already do, meaning that none of my ideas are theoretically impossible and are therefore only in the realm of good old fashioned engineering challenges to make it cost effective.

We can't yet build a space elevator, we can't yet make hermetically sealed habitats which run entirely off orbital solar power generation, we can't yet mine mineral rich asteroids to make that vast orbital solar array in the first place and we haven't built a space elevator so doing anything in space is going to be expensive so those are all pure fantasy at the moment... But we have the choice to steer the world into an adjacent future where they are only engineering challenges to be overcome.



Reducing CO2 to sequestration equilibrium on the other hand is pure fantasy.

We do not have the technology to produce half the world's current power needs without fosil fuel supplementation, even if we switched over to 100% bio fuels, we lack the farming infrastructure to keep up with even 1% of the current demand and how, pray is that going to happen when all the farm land is being bought out to plant trees to sequester carbon?

Or how about the ingenious plan to dump loads of nitrates into the arctic ocean to encourage the growth of photosynthetic plankton. Talk about your ecological disaster waiting to happen and what pray is the benefit to anyone in doing things like that anyway? Might as well take your hard earned money, tie it to a brick and lob it into the deep ocean for all the good it does anyone.

Then there's the ever present problem of what to do with the developing world or states that refuse to abide by the carbon taxation system. Do we sanction countries who refuse to stop burning fosil fuels? When people start dying from the sanctions, who's responsible? Do we tell india 'Yeah... Sorry, but we can't let you keep on with your ecconomic growth because we think it might be killing the planet.' What do we do when they tell us 'Hhahaha funny westerners, Go fuck yourselves and come again!' Do we enforce our will militarilly?

These are not engineering problems to be overcome, they are geo political problems and those are ever so much more difficult to deal with because they play by an ever changing set of rules.

That's why the CO2 reduction scam is pure fantasy. My ideas are just science fiction.

And I hate to tell you but driving a hybrid car and putting more insulation in your house is not 'making a good start'. That's simply being economically pragmatic. If 5/6ths of the world's population all jumped into the ocean, that would be making a good start. Not that I'm agains't hybrid cars (though, actually I sort of am because they suck, but that's another issue entirely) and I'm certainly not agains't saving money on heating bills by insulating your house properly, but don't fool yourself into thinking this is saving the planet. It's saving nothing but a little small change.

 

[JustBusiness17]

It sounds like you've made liberal use of your Popular Mechanics subscription and are a frequent visitor of Wired.com. You're vision is just a little extreme and seems highly reliant on ideals. I'm sorry but I'm not willing to throw in the towel on planet Earth to gamble on one man's manic ramblings...

 

[Unwardil]

It sounds like you've made liberal use of your Popular Mechanics subscription and are a frequent visitor of Wired.com. You're vision is just a little extreme and seems highly reliant on ideals. I'm sorry but I'm not willing to throw in the towel on planet Earth to gamble on one mans manic ramblings...

Never read it and never visited the site.

But see, I'm not asking you to believe my solution will work, only to consider it.

Think about this however.

How willing are you, right now, to live a life style that is 100% carbon neutral? Research what it would entail and tell me under what circumstances you'd ever agree to live like that.

Go on.

Then ask yourself how many people in the world do you think would answer the same way as you.

Once you've done that, tell me that you still think CO2 reduction is a good idea.

 

[JustBusiness17]

You're right. The Earth is fucked and there's no point in making any changes until we can live on the moon...

 

[Unwardil]

Fine, duck the question that exemplifies the very crux of the whole CO2 reduction strategy problem with a half baked witticism. Clap your hands over your ears going la la la la content in the knowledge that now that we've figured out that CO2 is the problem the rest is really all just a formality.

Now it's me that's done talking to you I'm afraid. This entire thread has been a series of you trying to put words in my mouth anyway so f-it.

 

[JustBusiness17]

CAR~BON~IFER~OUS

 

[darthrender2010]

CAR~BON~IFER~OUS

lol