Climate Change

[ysabetwordsmith]

Here are three articles about different aspects of climate change, why they are bad, and what you can do ...


Climate-change-triggered 2023 mega-landslide caused Earth to vibrate for nine days

A landslide in a remote part of Greenland caused a 200 meter (650 foot) mega-tsunami that sloshed back and forth across a fjord for nine days, generating vibrations throughout Earth, according to a new study. The study concluded that this movement of water was the cause of a mysterious, global seismic signal that lasted for nine days and puzzled seismologists in September 2023.

He added: "As a landslide scientist, an additional interesting aspect of this study is that this is the first-ever landslide and tsunami observed from eastern Greenland, showing how climate change already has major impacts there."


Well, that's disturbing. 0_o


How El Nino and mega ocean warming caused the greatest-ever mass extinction

Mega ocean warming El Nino events were key in driving the largest extinction of life on planet Earth some 252 million years ago, according to new research. The study has shed new light on why the effects of rapid climate change in the Permian-Triassic warming were so devastating for all forms of life in the sea and on land.


Just in case you thought global warming wasn't that big a deal. Bend over and kiss your ass goodbye.


Path to prosperity for planet and people shrinking rapidly, scientists warn

Our planet will only remain able to provide even the most basic standard of living for everyone in the future if economic systems and technologies are dramatically transformed and critical resources are more fairly used, managed and shared, a new report shows.

While humans have a sense of what fairness is, many of them do not wish to apply it. Most of the societies that excel at fair distribution of resources -- like Turtle Island's gift economy -- have been overrun by expansionist, capitalist ones.


The only way to provide for everyone and ensure societies, businesses and economies thrive without destabilising the planet is to reduce inequalities in how critical Earth system resources, such as freshwater and nutrients, are accessed and used -- alongside economic and technological transformation.

In other words, break capitalism. It's all about inequality. It's also based on limitless growth in a finite system, which is the philosophy of the cancer cell. I don't think people will give it up willingly. And in a global context where money talks, the megacorps and billionaires will decide what happens. They certainly will not choose to give up the vast majority of their wealth so that other humans can survive, let alone the environment.


To reach this space, the paper calls for change in three areas. Firstly, a push for changes to how we run the economy, finding new policies and funding mechanisms that can address inequality whilst reducing pressure on nature and climate.

Well, we could establish survival needs as human rights: food, clean water, shelter, health care, etc. We have the capacity. People just damn well don't want to do it.


Secondly, more efficient and effective management, sharing and usage of resources at every level of society -- including addressing the excess consumption of some communities which is limiting access to basic resources for those who need them the most.

The problem with this is that the people with excess have all the power.


Thirdly, investment in sustainable and affordable technologies, which will be essential to help us use fewer resources and to reopen the Safe and Just Space for all -- particularly where there is little or no space left.

This seems to have the most potential. At least it's a place to start.


Things you could do ...

5 Ways to Improve Tree Equity in Our Communities

10 Ways Businesses Can Fight Poverty In Their Community

15 Ways To Support Social Justice & Civil Rights

How to Take Climate Action in Your Community

Inequality Is Increasing. What Can You Do?

Realistic Ways You Can Fight Climate Change Today
This one has fun sliders for different levels of cost, time, and effort. \o/

Solutions to poverty that actually work


And just in case you want to tilt at that windmill ...

12 Economic alternatives as strategies

Explore Cooperatives

Find Community Supported Agriculture

Find, Join or Start a Credit Union

Find a Worker Co-op

Food Co-op Finder

From freecycling to Fairphones: 24 ways to lead an anti-capitalist life in a capitalist world

Hour Exchange

Post-capitalism

Top 19 Alternatives to Capitalism (video)
 

Comments

[siliconshaman]

Western capitalist society is a cancer, and I think it's stage 4 . (it's already metastasised that's for sure!)

[acelightning73]

I remember when the
"Club of ROme" published a book about how the world's climates were changing, and what we should do about it.They thought we were going to overpopulate ourselves into extinction. And a lot of hippies and neopagans came up with the idea that humanity was a virus infecting Gaia. I don't think so - human beings evolved to suit the environment we live in. I think maybe it's our job to MAKE SURE we don't destroy ourselves and every other living thin.

[siliconshaman]

Well, if you view each individual as like a separate cell making up the body of Gaia, then humans very much fit the clinical definition of a cancer.

Climate change is a symptom of this.

Granted, it looks like our population might well plateau at around 10 billion before it starts declining, absent any outside influence... but current data indicates that there's no way in hell our planet can support that many people even in the short term... and fairly good odds that climate change induced food and water shortages plus other man-made disasters will start capping off population growth long before we even reach that mark.

I'd love to say it's our job to figure out how to live in harmony with our world... but the vast majority of people don't seem to be capable of it.

Gaia will prevail however... so we're just screwing ourselves really.

[acelightning73]

So why did Gaia evolve us? She gave us plants to photosyntheisize CO2 into food and give off oxygen while they do so? She gave us an ozone layer to block cosmic rays and excess solar UV. She gave us weather to make sure that plants could survive trauma. She gave us brains that could invent technology, and our use of our ability is no more "unnatural" than the way bowerbirds build their nests, or bees their hives. So why isn't Gaia correcting the North Atlantic Circulation, or the greenhouse effect. Or are we just counting on Gaia to evolve a plague that will wipe out all human life, to cure her cancer?

At least Neopagans, Native cultures, and aging hippies are trying to live in harmony with our world. (How can we terraform Mars if we don't know how to terraform Earth?)

I'm waiting for the Vulcans to show up and teach us logic.

[siliconshaman]

We're movers. We rearrange the environment, like elephants, but we do it on a much vaster scale and intelligently, i.e we can analyse and plan what we do. We can make large scale changes far faster than 'natural' process do.

The problem is, we've lost the notion of stewardship and use our abilities to exploit the natural for our own selfish gain instead. No, actually that's not quite right... a few greedy people make others exploit the natural world for their selfish gain.

Cancer cells will often co-opt other normal cells to feed them. Like a tumour forcing healthy vascular tissue to grow more blood vessels by hijacking the hormonal signalling, thus feeding the tumour.

Gaia is working to try and deal with the problem, that's what climate change is. But we work on decades or at most century long time scales, and Gaia's response are on the millennial or epoch scale.

We're way too fast growing for her to cope.

[acelightning73]

We're designed to have a selfish, acquisitive curiosity - it helps us survive. But "we're in need of ...self-restraint". And I think Gaia is being unnecessarily harsh about it.

Or maybe we're just rowdy and destructive teenagers.

I'm not going to bother trying to live to 100 if there won't be any place to celebrate it.

[siliconshaman]

Oh it's not that bad! Climate change will impact a lot of places fairly lightly, you're actually in one of the better locales to avoid the worst.

I dunno if even the worst case scenarios would be enough to completely collapse civilisation. I think what we regard as 'normal' will cling on in a number of places, with changes of course, like adopting greener tech, growing more food locally and organically and so on... Same way as when the Roman Empire collapsed, life went on pretty much unchanged for a lot of the more far-flung citizenry for centuries afterwards, slowly morphing into what we call the middle ages.

Besides, You've got a birthday party to attend in one of the lunar colonies.

[acelightning73]

Well, the place I live gets flooded and loses electricity every time there's a coastal storm munching its way up the Atlantic coastline. And when the sea level rises, NYC is going to be thoroughly screwed.

Yes ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

... and we're still a few MPH short of Category 8 hurricanes, too.

The sensible thing to do would be to focus building on the inland side of coastal cities. The ocean might rise, but it's still gotta make a beach somewhere. You can just roll back until it settles.

Of course, people don't want to do that, so they're wasting the best time they have to get ahead of the problem.

If you don't want to deal with coastal storms, then you can move inland, but humans tend to prefer settling near water. So you're looking at lake and riverfront, and there's less of that.

Re: Yes ...

[acelightning73]

I'd have to go almost to the Pennsylvania/New Jersey line to reach terrain that would be mostly out of reach of tsunamis. Simple flooding rains were enough to drown my car two years ago. But they installed new storm drains on our street, and the last heavy rainstorms didn't form any standing water. But I'm still not keen on being right next to the ocean. (We had to move out of our former house which we had to sell, and this rental was the first thing we could find quickly that we could afford.) A lake would be okay, but there aren't many around here. I suspect this is just one of those problems we'll solve when we HAVE to.

Re: Yes ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> But I'm still not keen on being right next to the ocean. <<

Check elevation maps. If you can find a house on a hill, it's less likely to flood; and if you have your back to the ocean with a hill between you, that will buffer a great deal of storm activity. Upward and inward is better if you can manage that.

>>I suspect this is just one of those problems we'll solve when we HAVE to.<<

Sadly so -- and by then, people won't have the resources to address it all at once.

Re: Yes ...

[acelightning73]

That depends on when and where we have to move. Id like to stay near the New York metropolitan area; all my life I have lived with the City "just over the horizon" from me, making it easy to have adventures. And how my physical health is - I may need some degree of "assisted living" as I go on. But I set Google Maps to "topo" and saw where the higher ground begins. I'm too close to the ocean, and a small rise in sea level will do what Superstorm Sandy did to my house a few years ago.

Re: Yes ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

Well, at least you know to look for higher ground.

As for assisted living, consider hiring someone to come to your home. It's consistently cheaper and better for health, up until someone needs major medical care all the time.

Re: Yes ...

[acelightning73]

My mother-in-law was dying of lung cancer, and refused to die in a hospital. We had just moved to this house when she needed full-time care. We set up with a hospice team to come to our house, and had her in the spare bedroom, I'd feed her, change her diaper, give her medicine on schedule, change the channel on the TV for her, and generally wait on her hand and foot. She had had caregivers coming to her home before she moved in with us, and she had to fire each one - one stole from her, one didn't come the instant she was summoned, one had a bad attitude. She also found fault with the way I took care of her. She had never forgiven me for not being beautiful and rich enough to marry her son. And I'm sure she was utterly enraged by having to depend on my for everything during the last days of her life. I don't want to find myself in the position she was in when I can no longer get out of bed. And Medicare won't pay for home care, which is why she caught her carer stealing from her.

[see_also_friend]

>>The problem is, we've lost the notion of stewardship and use our abilities to exploit the natural for our own selfish gain instead.<<

Not everyone. That's actually a main tenant of my religious subculture, and we evolved from a whitefella majority culture.

Well ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

>> So why did Gaia evolve us? <<

Speed, precision, and opposable thumbs.

Humans have higher cognition well suited to noticing and solving problems (if they choose to do so). They can act much faster, and more precisely, than previously evolved methods of addressing problems in the biosphere. Plus, opposable thumbs give them much better means of making material changes when needed.

Case in point:

* Gaia notices that a given area needs more or better topsoil. It takes about 100 years -- in good conditions -- to generate a layer 1 inch thick.

* An uneducated human will naturally generate a midden of food scraps and human effluvia that quickly rot down into compost. Plus it will be full of seeds that humans have swallowed and shat out.

* A human who knows about compost can do it much faster and better.

-- A lazy human can throw together a brown/green compost pile, let it rot down in place without turning, and after about a year it will be finished and ready to plant.

-- An average human with a shovel can finish a pile of compost from start to finish in 2-3 months. A little more thought gives you a multi-bin compost system so you have at least an adding bin and a using bin; or an adding bin, waiting bin, and using bin; or all three plus an empty extra so you can turn the waiting bin by tossing it into the next bin.

-- An industrious human, with a black compost tumbler in warm weather, can do it in 10 days to 2 weeks, and dump out a cubic yard of fluffy black compost.

Of course, we still haven't managed to make a solar panel near as efficient as any green plant, but hey, the algae were the first to harness fire and have about a billion year headstart on us.

>> She gave us brains that could invent technology, and our use of our ability is no more "unnatural" than the way bowerbirds build their nests, or bees their hives.<<

LOL yes.

>> So why isn't Gaia correcting the North Atlantic Circulation, or the greenhouse effect. Or are we just counting on Gaia to evolve a plague that will wipe out all human life, to cure her cancer? <<

1) She's entirely capable of solving problems. She just moves slower than humans do, because she is bigger. You don't see an elephant trying to race a hummingbird.

2) If you consider the greenhouse effect a fever to kill off an infection, it's working and now is not the time to take aspirin.

3) A plague is entirely possible and is one of several standard methods for controlling a runaway population.

However, another is already in high gear and working great, and humans are starting to panic over it. Every species has a range of natural density where it is healthy and comfortable. Approaching the low end, individuals get lonely, cling to each other, and fight less; they also get hornier and want to procreate more. As overcrowding sets in, the opposite happens. They fight more and fuck less. While it is possible for humans to manipulate technology to help infertility, they have not really figured out a reliable way to influence psychology of wanting children, and flailing attempts to do so have had results that are erratic at best and brutal at worst.

Fertility rates are declining in most places. According to the UN, in 1990, the average number of births per woman globally was 3.2. By 2019, this had fallen to 2.5 births per woman; by 2050, it is expected to decline further to 2.2 births.
Notably, a fertility level of 2.1 births per woman is necessary to avoid a national population decline over the long run (not including net immigration).

As of 2010, about 48% (3.3 billion people) of the world population lives in nations with sub-replacement fertility.

Now, if you're a capitalist, this is panic-inducing because that system requires economic growth in order to continue working. But if you are a biologist, you go, "Thank fuck, the safety valve is activating."

Also, pardon me while I laugh my ass off at China's problems. It took me less than a minute as a child in 1980 to pin the leading problems of infanticide, wife raiding/trafficking, and the 4-2-1 problem causing economic collapse. And I'm bad at math! But I beat China by decades; they thought this was somehow a good idea. 0_o I'm still laughing at their woes, because they shot themselves in both feet and now have no way to recover.

Yes ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

This fits my observations.

[greghousesgf]

if global warming is at least partially caused by overpopulation maybe our culture should, I don't know, stop treating people who don't want kids as if we're criminals or freaks?

Yes ...

[ysabetwordsmith]

I agree that's a good idea, and indeed, you will find many childfree and supportive people among environmentalists. Each person had a right to make their own reproductive choices, and it's not okay to pick on anyone for theirs.

Capitalists, however, cannot afford that. Regardless of their family planning politics, their economic system requires growth or else it falls apart.

It's no accident that America has turned to sexual slavery at a time when its birth rate is only 1.6 children per woman, well below the 2.1 replacement rate, let alone growth. It costs a tremendous amount of money just to birth a baby, and a great deal more to raise it to 18, plus college fees now required in order to participate in society. Most people simply can't afford that, regardless of whether they want kids.