Ocean acidifcation .

[Singularity]

Originally Posted by Lake-Effect

...But there is a difference between skepticism ("I'm not yet convinced") and denial ("I'm going to oppose this no matter what I hear or see"). There isn't a copyright on the word, it's still in common use . Denial is the most accurate word, in many cases.

If I truly thought there were people here on these threads who could be persuaded, yeah maybe I'd tone it down. But there doesn't seem to be any; the stuff the "skeptics" throw out pretty much indicates a closed mind.

I hear you and respect where you're coming from. I'd just offer the observation that there will always, always be a % of people (typically in the singe-digit percentage) who are, from any perspective, just purely obstinate. Consider that perhaps you'll never change their mind (because I don't think it's possible)...but more importantly, you don't need to. Consider that you should have over-arching goals that "arch over" such obstacles.

While true, this is just a longer more erudite version of "you can't credibly speak about climate change because you're not a solar-powered vegan cycling cave dweller", and I don't buy it.

I don't mean to convey that one needs street credibility as evidenced by a vegan cave (cabin!)-dwelling lifestyle to speak on this subject, but rather that...in the effort of swaying opinion...that perhaps it'd be a more effective sales pitch to say "when I was younger, I didn't realize how short-sighted I was...I used to over-consume [etc] but now I'm working on reforming my habits and these are the good things I've immediately noticed".......as being more effective than, effectively "the sky is falling, everyone must join the collective effort, immediately build mass transit [etc]." I recognize that the former approach won't meet the must-drastically-act-now timeframe that the hard science suggests....but I think I recognize that it's the only possible workable solution.

I generally loathe the efforts of Al Gore and friends going back to his early days. If he and his friends simply said "hey everyone, we've got garbage lying all over the place, who likes that? What can we do? Hey, here's some ideas to immediately make your personal life better, I'm doing them too..." that Gore and company would have been much more successful. From my perspective, these thought leaders are more culpable to the problems on this issue than are the general public. It's as though the general public is being asked to drop everything immediately for an emergency created by a lack of adequate preparation by the thought leaders. And based on the harsh, unworkable nature in which the public is being addressed, I don't think they've sharpened their tools much, which makes me question their efficiency going forward (if that makes sense). I think this latter point is the perspective held by the skeptics/deniers/whatever.

Having more experience with the developing world, and possibly a true believer working in the field - don't beat me with it; please let us know where CC ranks in importance to the developing world, and what the most appropriate response would be from that perspective.

I don't mean to pretend to speak with any particular legitimacy with having a finger on the pulse of the developing world. Frankly I see little difference, ultimately, between rural developing people, high population-density slum dwellers in the developing world, and 75% of the people who live on my suburban street. Quite simply the majority of people are living in the moment. I tend to agree with/buy into a lot of ideas promulgated by the Frankfurt school of thought (e.g. Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man [of which many sailors are effectively exercising the great refusal described by Dante, but I digress from a digression]) which generally finds (my interpolation) that, in summary, AGW reformers will not succeed over business interests. It's just not possible, no matter how necessary reform needs to be. Quite simply the civilization won't sufficiently support it.

You're preaching to the choir here. And sort of making the case for CC action but broader; we can ignore all warnings and carry on full-tilt til something breaks, or we can be honest about what's happening and could happen, and try to moderate or change course.

So a point about cigarette smoking that gives me hope. So on the one hand nicotine is clearly a cognitive enhancing substance, arguably an essential nutrient for a lot of people. But the hope-providing point is how there has been such a dramatic cultural shift on the concept of smoking. If, 30 years ago you proclaimed "in 30 years, smoking will be seen as largely culturally unacceptable, smokers will be relative outcasts, no one will want to smoke cigarettes" people would call you nuts. But look how society has changed WRT smoking in such a short time. This smoking ~outlier social change phenomenon gives me hope that large-scale change can occur in short order with appropriate societal cues. The million dollar question for CC folks is how to develop those cues in consumeristic societies which (per Franfurt school, etc, thought) are both the majority in both the developed and developing countries. The concept of development itself means that the country has created a consumeristic environment. Really a catch 22.

In the meantime, there's currently enough Monopoly money still rolling around that we could easily spare some to further incentivize the development of cleaner and more sustainable technology. These in turn could be future sources of "wealth" and jobs, in both the developed and developing countries.

I hear you, but I'd suggest that the only playable monopoly money is held, as it has always been, by the sub-1%rs of society. Quite frankly 80% of the 99% is living paycheck to paycheck in the US while people in developed countries around the world have little to no wealth. IF the CC people co-opted with "we are the 99%r" community, I think this would be the source of the needed capital. Otherwise you're trying to get blood from a turnip (which at this point in history is about to experience a drought probably like we've not seen in 100 years).

The idea that AGW will "do everyone in" is wrong, and the pro-AGW side is atfault for often implying that.

Going back to the exceedingly poor on earth. The village types (who aren't within a few feet of sea level). These are the people who, in totality, will be least effected by AGW, but who will, per capita, disproportionately produce GG. It occurs to me that these are the people whom will have the least amount of buy-in (as they can't afford it in the first place). So, somewhere between the villager and the city dweller is a boundary, tipping point, where CC policy buy-in is economically feasible-ish. But human nature being as it is (see Frankfurt school stuff), it's awfully difficult to ask people to sacrifice lifestyle when they see that other people are NOT sacrificing lifestyle, even when the latter people ALREADY lead a diminished lifestyle existence. The cognitive bias that explains this escapes me at the moment, but it's the scarcity principle that explains the phenomenon where everyone thinks that everyone else is exercising free-rider privileges, no matter how poor the others are. It's the logic of "they're poor because they chose to be poor...no matter...they have to sacrifice as much as I do...even if it puts them in a harder position."

...I'm not telling you that we must put "all efforts into mitigating AGW". I'm saying we need to get past denial (especially organized institutional denial), and address the legitimate concerns of skeptics, and go from there.

Again, there's always the flat earth component. You legitimize them by giving them attention. If you provide a better product...a better philosophy...then people will follow you. If you find yourself mired in the opposite narrative, either the opposite narrative is correct, or you're a really, really bad salesman.

I think that many of the things on that list are cases of spending differently, not more, and that payback on many of them is actually quite fast. Simple example - bike lanes in cities.

I've known a few bike riders who've been hit by cars (and one that hit a parked car and broke his neck). In my math, I consider the millions of dollars associated with bike wrecks as an opportunity cost. Not saying that bike paths are cost-negative, but rather a lot of externalities are routinely absent (in my estimation) from a lot of the analysis on policies to make things better (particularly when business is involved in instituting the policies (again, reference Frankfurt school thoughts).

Again, please share your perspective on what priorities the developing world have, and where they coincide or conflict with the mitigation of AGW.

To summarize much...the modern western economy "health" is predicated upon the growth of consumption, pure and simple. Every politician runs on a platform of more "growth." Growth (i.e. new buildings, roads, restaurants, jobs, iPhones) quite simply provides more AGW than can be prohibited by instituting every conceivable mitigation policy that I can imagine. Growth can't be ~carbon neutral. We've all heard, and it's true, that if you hand a poor person a $100 bill in the developing world that he's prone to go buy a smart phone. No difference in the developed world. I don't see the fiscal-policymakers (reference the sub 1%rs above) doing anything to reduce the supply of money. I hope I'm wrong, but if history is a teacher, it takes revolution to get there, which I neither hope for nor see happening any time soon.
So to the "cigarette" phenomenon...best I can hope for is promoting minimalism...FIRE...Mr. Money Moustache-type personal finance ideas that encourages less consumption. Doing more with less. Best I can tell this movement is getting more traction every day (at least in the US).

As a single-point philosophy to reduce consumption, consider introducing people to Ivan Illich's observations about the absurdity of cars. This Illich-car heuristic can be applied to all sorts of other personal decision-making. The below snip is from this page; the numbers may be a bit exaggerated, but the logic is clear.
The model American male devotes more than 1600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly installments. He works to pay for gasoline, tolls, insurance, taxes, and tickets. He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it. And this figure does not take into account the time consumed by other activities dictated by transport: time spent in hospitals, traffic courts, and garages; time spent watching automobile commercials or attending consumer education meetings to improve the quality of the next buy. The model American puts in 1600 hours to get 7500 miles: less than five miles per hour. In countries deprived of a transportation industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to go, and they allocate only 3 to 8 percent of their society's time budget to traffic instead of 28 percent. What distinguishes the traffic in rich countries from the traffic in poor countries is not more mileage per hour of lifetime for the majority, but more hours of compulsory consumption of high doses of energy, packaged and unequally distributed by the transportation industry.

[newhaul]

Originally Posted by GordMay

Except, none of your "actual climate pronouncements' cartoon, actually represent historical reality. Repetition won't make it so.

actually we have been down this road before .

http://www.cruisersforum.com/forums/...ml#post2938028

[newhaul]

Originally Posted by Lake-Effect

You really don't understand the carbon cycle at all, do you?

you are extremely mistaken I do understand it very well .

Now if I don't eat the vegetables I'm not taking in the carbon that the plants have sequestered they instead get to keep that carbon when they die and are incorporated into the next layer of dirt .
What am I missing

[newhaul]

Originally Posted by Lake-Effect

While true, this is just a longer more erudite version of "you can't credibly speak about climate change because you're not a solar-powered vegan cycling cave dweller", and I don't buy it. I've deliberately avoided discussing what we do personally, because I believe that the required response is a collective one, and that voluntary individual action will never be sufficient. Same as private charity has not eliminated hunger.

.

And yet if each person were to personally do one thing each day the world would change without the need for the unwanted governmental intrusion in our lives.

For example if each person were to pickup 1 extra piece of trash on the ground each day soon there would not be any trash on the ground to pick up
That is a personal choice . If government said you must do it nothing would get done.

[GordMay]

Originally Posted by newhaul

ok if you say so . Humans eat plants ( directly and indirectly via meat) so we are releasing otherwise sequestered carbon.
So we do contribute to the co2 in the atmosphere abet it is part of the " natural " carbon cycle. If we had half the number of people we would actually likely reduce the human based sources of atmospheric co2 by 75% thereby restoring balance to the system.
Or at least that's what the people pushing the eugenics movement seem to be saying.

The carbon dioxide, we exhale, does not contribute to global warming, for the simple reason that we also take up an equivalent amount of carbon dioxide from the air - every atom of carbon in the exhaled carbon dioxide comes from food that was recently produced by photosynthesis.

Accordingly, since all the carbon dioxide we exhale originated in carbon dioxide recently captured by plants during photosynthesis, we are not disturbing the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere by breathing.

I don’t believe there is much of a eugenics movement left today (to take any position on anything), and I haven’t noted the modern genetic engineering crowd pronounce on climate change.

Eugenics is a movement that is aimed at improving the genetic composition of the human race - not about climate science. Historically, eugenicists advocated selective breeding (& involuntary sterilization of ‘undesirables’) to achieve these goals.

[Singularity]

It depends:

[GordMay]

Originally Posted by newhaul

... Now if I don't eat the vegetables I'm not taking in the carbon that the plants have sequestered they instead get to keep that carbon when they die and are incorporated into the next layer of dirt .
What am I missing

You're missing THIS:
During their lifetimes, plants generally give off (at night) about half of the carbon dioxide (CO2), that they absorb (daylight photosynthesis) from the atmosphere, although this varies a great deal between different kinds of plants.
Once they die, almost all of the carbon, that they stored up in their bodies, is released back into the atmosphere (as CO2).
When a plant dies, it rots as decomposers, like bacteria, fungi,and insects eat away at it. Those decomposers gradually release almost all of the tree's stored carbon back into the atmosphere as CO2. Only a very small portion of the carbon in the plant ends up staying in the soil, or washing out to sea, without changing back into CO2. Thus the carbon is in a balanced cycle.

Fossil fuel formation, on the other hand, is a process that takes place over the time span of hundreds of millions of years, to produce a variety of fossil fuels including coal, oil, and natural gas. Although all of the produced materials begin as organic material, they are transformed over a large time span, due to burial by sediment, pressure, and temperature. Thus the carbon is sequestered.

[newhaul]

Originally Posted by Singularity

It depends:

like that didn't come from a push toward veganism.

https://sustainablediet.com/shrinkin...rbon-footprint

Humans are carnivorous by design we need meat in our diet.

[newhaul]

Originally Posted by GordMay

You're missing THIS:
During their lifetimes, plants generally give off (at night) about half of the carbon dioxide (CO2), that they absorb (daylight photosynthesis) from the atmosphere, although this varies a great deal between different kinds of plants.
Once they die, almost all of the carbon, that they stored up in their bodies, is released back into the atmosphere (as CO2).
When a plant dies, it rots as decomposers, like bacteria, fungi,and insects eat away at it. Those decomposers gradually release almost all of the tree's stored carbon back into the atmosphere as CO2. Only a very small portion of the carbon in the plant ends up staying in the soil, or washing out to sea, without changing back into CO2. Thus the carbon is in a balanced cycle.

Fossil fuel formation, on the other hand, is a process that takes place over the time span of hundreds of millions of years, to produce a variety of fossil fuels including coal, oil, and natural gas. Although all of the produced materials begin as organic material, they are transformed over a large time span, due to burial by sediment, pressure, and temperature. Thus the carbon is sequestered.

but some is sequestered isn't it .

[newhaul]

Originally Posted by GordMay

[B]

I don’t believe there is much of a eugenics movement left today (to take any position on anything), and I haven’t noted the modern genetic engineering crowd pronounce on climate change.

Eugenics is a movement that is aimed at improving the genetic composition of the human race - not about climate science. Historically, eugenicists advocated selective breeding (& involuntary sterilization of ‘undesirables’) to achieve these goals.

actually the eugenics Crap is alive and well just staying just outside of the light .

[GordMay]

Originally Posted by newhaul

but some (carbon) is sequestered (by dead decaying plants) isn't it .

My name’s Gord, not Bill, so I don’t want to get into parsing the meaning of is ‘some’; but I will throw you a bone*.

Scientists agree that today’s warming is primarily caused by humans putting too much carbon in the atmosphere, like when we choose to extract and burn coal, oil, and gas, or cut down and burn forests.

*So, population reduction, if it brings an attendant consumption reduction, would probably reduce carbon emissions - but not from leaving plants to die in the ground. One complication is that fertility decline tends to increase GDP per capita, as families invest more in human capital for each child.

Overpopulation has been a controversial factor in the climate change debate, with some pointing out that an American is responsible for 40 times the emissions produced by a Bangladeshi and that overconsumption is the crucial issue. researchers blamed overpopulation and overconsumption on the “biological annihilation” of wildlife which has started a mass extinction of species on the planet.

According to this study*, the biggest ultimate climate impact is having one fewer child, which the researchers calculated equated to a reduction of 58 tonnes of CO2 for each year of a parent’s life.
“The climate mitigation gap: education and government recommendations miss the most effective individual actions” ~ Seth Wynes and Kimberly A Nicholas
➥ https://iopscience.iop.org/article/1...48-9326/aa7541

I don't entirely buy it; but there it is, and who am I?

[Reefmagnet]

Talk about not seeing the forest from the trees.


If man made global warming is a thing, it transpires that on average every human on the planet is adding some fixed unit value of sequestered carbon to the atmosphere.


Therefore, it stands to reason, that every new person will add, on average, that same value of sequestered carbon to the atmosphere and that every deceased person will stop adding this average contribution.


So, if the population increases, the net contribution of sequestered carbon to the atmosphere will increase and vice versa if the population decreases.



Sure, new generations may consume less or they may consume more. In either case it doesn't matter because they will never achieve zero emissions.

[jackdale]

Originally Posted by Reefmagnet

Talk about not seeing the forest from the trees.


If man made global warming is a thing, it transpires that on average every human on the planet is adding some fixed unit value of sequestered carbon to the atmosphere.


Therefore, it stands to reason, that every new person will add, on average, that same value of sequestered carbon to the atmosphere and that every deceased person will stop adding this average contribution.


So, if the population increases, the net contribution of sequestered carbon to the atmosphere will increase and vice versa if the population decreases.



Sure, new generations may consume less or they may consume more. In either case it doesn't matter because they will never achieve zero emissions.

They only way in which humans can be adding sequestered carbon is from ingesting fossil fuels. Plants STORE carbon for a very short time. Sequestration is long term.

[newhaul]

Originally Posted by jackdale

Plant STORE carbon for a very short time. Sequestration is long term.

And prey tell what are fossil fuels?

[GordMay]

Originally Posted by Reefmagnet

... man made global warming is a thing, it transpires that on average every human on the planet is adding some fixed unit value of sequestered carbon to the atmosphere.

Therefore, it stands to reason, that every new person will add, on average, that same value of sequestered carbon to the atmosphere and that every deceased person will stop adding this average contribution.

So, if the population increases, the net contribution of sequestered carbon to the atmosphere will increase and vice versa if the population decreases.

Sure, new generations may consume less or they may consume more. In either case it doesn't matter because they will never achieve zero emissions.

Indeed.
But:
Among the top 10 absolute emitters, only two countries have per capita emissions that are below the world average. Canada, the United States, and Russia all emit more than double the global average per person. On the other end of the spectrum, India’s per capita emissions, for instance, are only one-third of the global average.
So, we/re not all average emmiters.

Originally Posted by newhaul

And prey tell what are fossil fuels?

Fossil fuels is are buried combustible geologic deposits of organic materials, formed from decayed plants and animals that have been converted to crude oil, coal, natural gas, or heavy oils by exposure to heat and pressure in the earth's crust over hundreds of millions of years.