The climate change consensus extends beyond climate scientists

[freebeard]

It's only a matter of time.

Our President said to Obama of his first term "it will be like you were never here." If he gets a second term it may be like China was never there.

Man-made climate change is a fact, and deniers defy truth.

Is it Okay to think we may not be doing enough? Given the Milankovich cycle and all?

Past performance does not guarantee future results.
____________

..and we now know that...melting more quickly changes the polar albedo. Is that cool or what?

[redpoint5]

I just listened to a podcast hosted by Niall Ferguson with guest speaker Peter Thiel. Peter suggests an economic contraction or at least a stagnation might be on the near horizon due to slowing technological advancement.

Certainly we've plucked the low hanging fruit of science and technology, so that means that further improvements will be more difficult. There is some speculation based on Moore's Law that technology will advance at an increasing rate, since we can leverage existing technology to solve increasingly difficult problems, but so far that remains to be seen. Moore's Law has died. Intel has missed their own roadmap for producing 10nm transistors in quantity, and it isn't likely they will get much smaller. We may be at the beginning stages of technology stagnation, which would mean a slowdown in the problems we're able to solve.

[sendler]

Most of the low hanging oil has been plucked. We are now fracking to get what we need. These wells are expensive and deplete very quickly. Copper, Phosphorous, rare earths. Water, soil, seafood. Everything is being overtaxed. It will be a miracle of modern sapience if we can implement a whole new social system to share what we have left among 9 billion people enough to retain social cohesion without all out civil world war of poor versus the walled countries and then cities of elites. Millions of people have started walking already.

[redpoint5]

There is no war in a nuclear society; only MAD (mutually assured destruction).

[sendler]

"Capitalism relies for its functioning on a logic of infinite growth, fossil fuel combustion, and colonial resource extraction abroad. The drive for infinite economic growth exhausts the world’s finite resources and creates increasing waste and pollutant by-products which necessarily ends up crossing planetary boundaries and undermining the world’s biosphere. The capitalist economy’s growth imperative relies on the high efficiency of polluting fossil fuels to sustain itself, manifested in the stark rise in carbon emissions and global warming since the industrial revolution. The capitalist economy is historically built on colonial resource extraction abroad and has only survived by these same means. Still today, the fuels and resources for the Global North are obtained by means of gross human rights violations, exploitative work conditions, and localised ecological degradation in the Global South. It is this system of infinite growth that is currently driving the planet to climate breakdown and ecological Armageddon.

However, without this increasing growth, the economy falters and even collapses in recession, putting shops out of business, pushing communities into unemployment, and creating grim economic hardship and social fallout. This creates an impossible dilemma for those running society’s political institutions – they are unable to keep the economy afloat and tackle climate breakdown at the same time"
.
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2...reen-new-deal/

[redpoint5]

Agreed that continued economic growth is unsustainable and leads to pollution and resource scarcity problems. I see no link to colonialism being responsible for this state of the world though.

My best guess is that technological innovation and continued world improvement in standard of living will result in more rapid decline in population growth, which will eventually go negative at some point. A stabilized population is perhaps the primary key to so-called sustainability.

[freebeard]

Originally Posted by sendler

Capitalism relies for its functioning on a logic of infinite growth, fossil fuel combustion, and colonial resource extraction abroad.
[snip]
However, without this increasing growth, the economy falters and even collapses in recession...

This one instantiation of capitalism. Which is corrupted by the central banking system sucking it dry.

A better world is possible.

[redpoint5]

No point in complaining about the current state of affairs without proposing a better alternative. Usually easier to tweak something that's working than to burn it all and start over.

[NeilBlanchard]

The Paris Accord: What is it? And What Does it All Mean?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sr2J_1J9w3A

[redpoint5]

So the US is on track to meet the Paris Accord despite declaring that we are no longer agreeing to it, and some other countries that have agreed to it are not on track to meet their agreements?

The thing about agreements is they are meaningless without enforcement. I'd drop out too until the problem to be addressed is clearly defined, the solution also clearly defined with cost / benefit analysis done, participation from enough countries to meet the objectives, and legal remedies for failing to meet those agreements.