The climate change consensus extends beyond climate scientists

[sendler]

This article Resilience.org posted today is worth a close study including all of the linked references. This is one to print onto paper and go through with a highlighter. The summary is the same. Degrowth of the world economy is required to avoid catastrophic collapse.
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https://www.resilience.org/stories/2...he-reason-why/
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[freebeard]

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

Ephemeralization, a term coined by R. Buckminster Fuller, is the ability of technological advancement to do "more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing," that is, an accelerating increase in the efficiency of achieving the same or more output (products, services, information, etc.) while requiring less input (effort, time, resources, etc.). Fuller's vision was that ephemeralization will result in ever-increasing standards of living for an ever-growing population despite finite resources. The concept has been embraced by those who argue against Malthusian philosophy.

[sendler]

Reminds me of Specialization or Reductionism where someone learns more and more about less and less until pretty soon they know everything there is to know about nothing. We need more people with a sound systems view to guide us.

[freebeard]

In "The Wellspring of Reality," the introductory essay to his seminal 1975 volume Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking (public library), Fuller decries specialization as the enemy of synergy and proposes a reframing of culture that could "get all of humanity to educate itself swiftly enough to generate spontaneous social behaviors that will avoid extinction." At its epicenter he places the value of wide curiosity and generalist knowledge.

http://www.brainpickings.org/2013/03...r-synergetics/

[redpoint5]

Lots wrong with the article, but the general assumption is correct, that a rate of increase is not sustainable, and that includes technological advancement to solve our problems.

I would argue that the way we take conventional “all-purpose” money for granted is the main reason why we have not understood how advanced technologies are dependent on the appropriation of labour and resources from elsewhere. In making it possible to exchange almost anything – human time, gadgets, ecosystems, whatever – for anything else on the market, people are constantly looking for the best deals, which ultimately means promoting the lowest wages and the cheapest resources in the global South.

Of course we understand that advanced technologies rely on resources. The fact that we allocate resources using a medium of exchange changes nothing except convenience. It sounds like he thinks the baker is supposed to be bartering 100,000 loafs of bread with the "house maker". It's not money precisely that allows advanced technologies, its specialization brought about by abundance of material goods and free time.

"Since the 19th century, all-purpose money has obscured the unequal resource flows of colonialism by making them seem reciprocal: money has served as a veil that mystifies exploitation by representing it as fair exchange."

Money has been around way longer than the 19th century, so obviously isn't to blame for "unequal resource flows and exploitation". In nature there is no money, and animals still receive unequal resources because life's not fair. It doesn't take the invention of money for self-interest to cause problems. Every technology is susceptible to be used for good for for bad.

The author thinks buying local groceries is going to solve our problems, but doesn't show his work at all. There's no chance that a fleet of pickup trucks roaming the fields and streets delivering "local" goods is more energy efficient than enormous machines harvesting and transporting food, even halfway around the globe. Just about the only way some small and local operation is more efficient is if it's in your own back yard, and you used sweat to do the work... which brings us back to the 18th century when 95% of people were subsistence farmers.

The meaning of life isn't to merely extend the number of years humans hang around; it's to explore and push the limits. If barely eating enough to get through the years until our eventual early death is what life is about, then we're no better than any other animal, and if anyone thinks we're no better than any other animal, they are profoundly confused.

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by sendler

Reminds me of Specialization or Reductionism where someone learns more and more about less and less until pretty soon they know everything there is to know about nothing. We need more people with a sound systems view to guide us.

I struggle to find my place because I lack the focus to specialize in anything. Tangent interests always pop up when studying something that lead me well astray of intensely learning the minute details of something. Because of this, I'm a generalist, and there's not much use for general knowledge because there's tons of people that can do specific things much better than I.

[aerohead]

Originally Posted by redpoint5

No security force has ever bailed me out, except perhaps for holding other nations and enemies of the state at bay. I sleep soundly because there is a sphere of protection and dedication to act against evil around me. That, and most people are not malevolent most of the time. If the police announced a walkout tomorrow, I'd be just fine, as well as any neighbor within my observation.

The real trick is knowing if you've been bitten by a rattlesnake, or pricked by a thorne. They have different levels of urgency.

Just because there has been loss of life does not mean a new code or requirements are necessary. Ladder falls are among the most deadly things we face, yet we don't place a ban on ladders. Their utility outweighs the loss we suffer, not to diminish the tragedy of those who have lost loved ones.

The salient fact of Turing isn't that he was gay, but his many accomplishments, just as the fact that I'm straight has nothing to do with anything except for the gender I find attractive.

My Japanese-American ancestry likewise is not of any interest with regard to my accomplishments (or failings). I consider myself Native (US) American culturally. The group I most closely identify with is the collection of cells comprising my body; that is to say myself, being the smallest minority group there is; an individual.

The security issue would be germane to the top 20% of the income spectrum,of which Adam Smith averred to.I don't know if you and your's would be subject to assault,murder,kiddnapping,ransom,etc. simply because of your position in the food chain.This is a very real concern for the wealthy.
My comment about safety was in the specific context of building codes.Everyone we encountered was predicated on loss of life.If for no other reason than to protect insurance company shareholder profits.
The comment about Turing is,that in my Republican household upbringing,I was exposed to racism,bigotry,anti-semitism,homophobia,etc.,and everyone except W.A.S.P.s were held in contempt just for being on the planet.Physical violence against these groups was a topic for casual conversation.
The point is,the irony,that, it is exactly these marginalized persons who made terrific contributions to mankind,whereas many of my own family,who hated all these people,made very little,if any difference,in bettering the world,even though quite a few fed pretty high on the food chain,sucking off the military industrial complex.

[aerohead]

Originally Posted by redpoint5

I used Netscape before IE was a thing. That was the straw that broke the camel's back for Microsoft's antitrust lawsuit if I recall correctly. Microsoft's claim was that IE was an integral part of their Windows OS, and the claim by Netscape and the government was that Microsoft was engaged in monopolistic practices by offering the browser for "free", and not providing a provision to remove it.

Netscape lives on as Firefox, a browser which I used early on until finally switching to Chrome (again, I hear the cringes from freebeard).

What does freebeard use, Torbrowser?

As an aside, I listened to a podcast that said if you choose to use a browser other than the default, you're more likely an independent thinker.

The whole point of the comment,was that the technology was borne out of socialism,not free-market capitalism.
The laissez-faire folks love to slam Big-Government and socialism,when every day they are a direct beneficiary of it.

[aerohead]

Originally Posted by sendler

Interesting how whenever anyone tells you something that you don't want to hear, you tend to attack them personally.
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The IPCC is apparently even waking to the reality that wishful thinking about the timeline for decarbonization or hoping for the future possibility of massive bioenergy with carbon capture and storage does not make it pragmatically possible. There is new discussion promoting a required degrowth of the world economy.
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https://mronline.org/2019/08/30/degr...cal-abundance/
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"The primary reason for this problem is that economic growth is projected to drive energy demand up at a rate that outpaces the rollout of clean energy capacity (Raftery et al., 2017). This has already presented a problem in the 21st century. Today the world is producing 8 billion more megawatt hours of clean energy each year than in 2000, which is a significant increase. But over the same period, energy demand has grown by 48 billion megawatt hours. In other words, new clean energy capacity covers only 16% of new demand. It is of course technically possible to scale up clean energy output to cover total global energy demand (Jacobson and Delucchi, 2011). But the question is whether it is feasible to do so at a rate that is fast enough to respect the carbon budget for 1.5 or 2°C, while at the same time growing the global economy at the usual pace.

We can assess this question by looking at projected rates of decarbonization. If we assume that global GDP continues to grow at 3% per year (the average from 2010-2014), then decarbonization must occur at a rate of 10.5% per year for 1.5°C, or 7.3% per year for 2°C. If GDP slows down and grows at only 2.1% per year (as PWC predicts), then decarbonization must occur at 9.6% per year for 1.5°C, or 6.4% per year for 2°C. All of these targets are significantly beyond what existing empirical models indicate is feasible (see Hickel and Kallis, 2019). A few brief examples will serve to illustrate this point. Schandl et al. (2016) indicate that decarbonization can happen by at most 3% per year under highly optimistic policy conditions. The C-ROADS tool (developed by Climate Interactive and MIT Sloan) projects decarbonization of at most 4% per year under the most aggressive possible abatement policies: high subsidies for renewables and nuclear power, plus high taxes on oil, gas and coal. In a recent review of existing evidence, Holz et al. (2018) find that the rate ofdecarbonization required to meet the Paris targets is “well outside what is currently deemed achievable, based on historical evidence and standard modelling.”

IPCC scientists and authors have been aware of this problem for some time. In the Fifth Integrated Assessment Report (AR5), they dealt with it by assuming the future existence ofspeculative “negative emissions” technologies. The theory is that while business-as-usual growth will cause emissions to exceed the carbon budget in the medium term, that is fine so long as we find a way to remove carbon from the atmosphere later in the century. The dominant proposal for achieving this is known as BECCS, or bioenergy with carbon capture and storage. BECCS entails developing large tree plantations around the world to absorb CO2from the atmosphere, harvesting the biomass, burning it for energy, capturing the emissions at source and storing the waste underground. In AR5, the vast majority of scenarios for 2°C (101 of the 116) rely on BECCS to the point of achieving negative emissions.

BECCS is highly controversial among scientists, however. There are a number of concerns. First, the viability of power generation with CCS has never been proven to be economically viable or scalable (Peters, 2017). Second, the scale of biomass assumed in the AR5 scenarios would require plantations covering land two to three times the size of India, which raises questions about land availability, competition with food production, carbon neutrality, and biodiversity loss (Smith et al., 2015; Heck et al., 2018). Third, the necessary CO2 storage capacity may not exist (De Coninck and Benson, 2014; Global CCS Institute, 2015).

Anderson and Peters (2016) conclude that “BECCS thus remains a highly speculative technology” and that relying on it is therefore “an unjust and high stakes gamble”: if it is unsuccessful, “society will be locked into a high-temperature pathway”. This conclusion is shared by a growing number of scientists (e.g., Fuss et al., 2014; Vaughan and Gough, 2016; Larkin et al., 2017; van Vuuren et al., 2017), and by the European Academies’ ScienceAdvisory Council (2018).

Responding to these concerns, the IPCC (2018) has for the first time published a scenario for reducing emissions in line with the Paris Agreement that does not rely on speculative negative emissions technologies. Developed by Grubler et al. (2018) and known as Low Energy Demand (LED), the scenario works by reducing global energy consumption by 40% by 2050, which makes it much more feasible to achieve a transition to 100% clean energy. The key feature of this scenario is that global material production and consumption declinessignificantly: “The aggregate total material output decreases by close to 20 per cent fromtoday, one-third due to dematerialization, and two-thirds due to improvements in materialefficiency.” LED differentiates between the global North and South. Industrial production and consumption declines by 42% in the North and 12% in the South. Given improvements in energy efficiency, this translates into industrial energy demand declining by 57% in the North and 23% in the South.

The LED model represents a “degrowth” scenario–a planned reduction of the material and energy throughput of the global economy. Its inclusion in the IPCC report as the only scenario that does not rely on questionable negative emissions technologies suggests that degrowth may be the only feasible way to achieve the emissions reductions required by the Paris Agreement. This is a major milestone in climate mitigation theory. What is appealing about this approach is that it not only addresses emissions and climate change, but also reduces ecological impact across a range of other key indicators, including deforestation, chemical pollution, soil depletion, biodiversity loss, and so on (Rockstrom et al., 2009; Steffen et al., 2015)."

None of the presented material reflects any command of United States,or world history,and the measures already recorded pertaining to the extraordinary resources that have been marshaled to deal with 'war.'
We'd be talking about going to war with climate change.Orders of magnitude beyond anything mentioned.Something only the Ulysses S.Grant's and Abraham Lincoln's of the world would comprehend.

[freebeard]

The comment about Turing is,that in my Republican household upbringing,I was exposed to racism,bigotry,anti-semitism,homophobia,etc.,and everyone except W.A.S.P.s were held in contempt just for being on the planet.Physical violence against these groups was a topic for casual conversation.
The point is,the irony,that, it is exactly these marginalized persons who made terrific contributions to mankind,whereas many of my own family,who hated all these people,made very little,if any difference,in bettering the world

You were exposed to the out-group xenophobia that 99.4% of humanity acts out, if not expresses.

There is additional irony in that the Left now embodies those traits today.

Witness "Get woke, eat folk", the BDS movement, Contrapoints being de-personed, and Marianne Williamson realizing that the rabid attacks all come from her side.