The climate change consensus extends beyond climate scientists

[redpoint5]

I'm surprised the liberal media even quote Pelosi, because she says the most embarrassingly foolish things. I mean, Trump saying we'll make Mexicans pay for a US wall is just pure comedy, so we expect them to quote that.

Then again, news/media are in the entertainment business, and people saying reasonable things isn't entertaining. At the end of the day, even liberal media are capitalists.

[NeilBlanchard]

Originally Posted by sendler

The Green Revolution of fossil fuel powered fertilizer, irrigation and land prep and machinery and processing and transport has more than doubled crop yields in previously underdeveloped areas since 1960. Returning to organic-permaculture style land use from the decline of fossil fuel and Phosphate availability either from depletion or "leave it in the ground" climate action, will result in lesser productivity. It is said that the Green revolution spared 1 Billion (1/3 of the world overpopulation) people from famine in 1970. We now have nearly 8 billion to feed.
.
.

.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Revolution

And this is not sustainable. We have already eroded away a massive amount of soil. Factory farming will collapse, and if we don't stop using artificial chemicals, then our society will collapse.

[redpoint5]

Stopping the use of "artificial chemicals" would surely cause society to collapse.

People have this misconception that the Earth is a magical Garden of Eden where everything is provided in just the right quantities for humans to flourish. Every aspect of nature threatens to destroy us. Ingenuity is what allows us to flourish.

Consuming more than we need to survive the next day is exactly what has brought our knowledge of science and technology. If we were cave dwellers, we wouldn't be having conversations about what to do about climate change, or be able to track celestial objects that could cause extinction.

That isn't to say we should consume without giving any thought to the consequences, but to say we should not use artificial chemicals is absurd. There's a reason we use them in farm production; because it's incredibly efficient. Boosting yields conserves land, reducing energy intensive farming, and delivers more desirable products at a cheaper price.

[sendler]

Originally Posted by NeilBlanchard

And this is not sustainable. We have already eroded away a massive amount of soil. Factory farming will collapse, and if we don't stop using artificial chemicals, then our society will collapse.

But this is the only way we have been able feed the world population. Which doubled since 1970 because of factory farming. People do not understand this. We have already kicked the can of starvation down the road due to factory farming back in the 70's. It is very naive to say that we must stop. That we can stop. Without starvation. Many people mean well by saying that we must return to sustainable practices, but do not understand the scale of population that has been artificially propped up by fossil fuels. Or what scale will remain without it.

[redpoint5]

Well sustainable is an imaginary conception anyhow. Nothing is sustainable indefinitely. Whenever the word is used, it needs to be qualified with a timeframe.

The fact is, scaling back resource consumption could have consequences that make the human race less sustainable due to slower progress of technology. It's easy to imagine us stuck with 1800s technology where 95% of us are farmers just subsisting, and being completely oblivious to a world ending meteor headed toward us. Just as easy to imagine is having developed technology that both detects the world ending meteor and averts it.

Sure, we don't need bottled water, and individually wrapped food items, and tons of other mostly useless junk, but it's basically impossible to distinguish what is waste from innovation from some sort of policy standpoint.

[oil pan 4]

I would consider the 700 year supply of depleted uranium that is already sitting above ground in Idaho in storage as sustainable enough.
That's not counting thorium, extracting uranium from sea water, ect.

[freebeard]

Originally Posted by redpoint5

Well sustainable is an imaginary conception anyhow. Nothing is sustainable indefinitely. Whenever the word is used, it needs to be qualified with a timeframe.

People who can code [] would say 'for certain values of sustainable'.

The fact is, scaling back resource consumption could have consequences that make the human race less sustainable due to slower progress of technology. It's easy to imagine us stuck with 1800s technology where 95% of us are farmers just subsisting, and being completely oblivious to a world ending meteor headed toward us.

Tell me more about 1800s technology. Like, what are these?

https://www.youtube.com/results?sear...power+stations



http://www.tart-aria.info/en/science-fiction-or-not/

Paris 1881. Russia, probably 1896

The electric arc lamp was invented in 1810 and commercialized in 1850. The Edison bulb in 1879.


The Oregon Railroad and Navigation Company's new steamship, the Columbia, was the first commercial application for Edison's incandescent light bulb in 1880.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas...Electric_light

[redpoint5]

Point is, nobody in the 1800s was going to observe a world ending meteor and then alter the outcome.

Scaling back the economy without unduly impacting innovation is very tricky.

It took exactly everything that has transpired in the past to arrive where we are today. If things could have been any different, they would have.

[freebeard]

Point is, nobody in the 1800s was going to observe a world ending meteor and then alter the outcome. Altering the outcome isn't a given in any case.

Any event that would cause us to forget astronomy and optics and cause mass amnesia would put us farther back than the 1800s.

Scaling back the economy without unduly impacting innovation is very tricky.

Bucky was saying we would surrender the decisions to computers in the 1970s.

It took exactly everything that has transpired in the past to arrive where we are today. If things could have been any different, they would have.

Two words: Streetcar Conspiracy

That last post was long on light bulbs. Have a look at the landing page here: Tartaria: English Version I could never get into Steampunk even with the airships, but Antiquitech with it's electrostatically resonant antennas in old photographs is another matter. The American 1800s from a Russian perspective:
Logistical theory of civilization. Part 4 "Chicago Massacre"

...the essential activity in the formation of the city, which most deserves detailed description, is the famous slaughterhouse of Chicago because its technological equipment was a miracle of the 19th century and its activities would give rise to a colossal structure of associated companies.

Well, the volume of wild meat running on the great American plains was so considerable that, by early 1865, Chicago had built a complex, unique for this time, with slaughterhouses, office buildings, stations and railroads that allowed the transportation of the cattle directly for the corrals designated
...
The assembly line was introduced into the slaughterhouse long before Henry Ford. The work was organized in such a way that each worker knew only one stage of the operation.

[big snip]

We are forced to describe each element separately but, in fact, everything happened simultaneously. In just 30 years, from 1840 to 1870, the population of Chicago increased from 4 to 300 thousand people. Chicago has become the second largest city in the United States, thanks exclusively to access to valuable resources and good transportation lines to New York Harbor.

Pagodas, being electrostatic resonators, predate the 19th century. Then there're the fireplaces:


http://www.tart-aria.info/en/history...rgy-fireplace/
These apparently had metal-lined flues with no smoke shelf. The back plate was a radiant heater.

[freebeard]

A potential black swan event:
www.businessinsider.com:If India and Pakistan have a 'limited' nuclear war, scientists say it could wreck Earth's climate and trigger global famine
They throw up an offer to turn off your ad blocker, but if you keep reloading the page, you can get to the abstract.


Meanwhile in 1790:


http://www.tart-aria.info/en/mysteri...-19-centuries/