#Climate Change: Is it getting hot in here or is it just all of us?
If we are going to be able to tell the next generation we didn’t just sit by and watch the world go to hell we need to start being more proactive, especially since we can’t depend on the government to do the right thing right now.
#Trump Picks Top Climate Skeptic to Lead EPA Transition
…and…
#Climate change may be escalating so fast it could already be ‘game over’, scientists warn
It might be a tough day to discuss this, but we all deal with bad news in different ways. I find hope in working towards a better tomorrow.
But in all seriousness, I think liberal leaning states (especially the west coast) are going to have to pull their weight. Even just improvements in California can have a wide ranging effect across the nation.
Maybe we could create a environmental legislature coalition (think ALEC but good) between California, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, and maybe Alaska and Nevada. It might at leasts counteract the crazy that begins to occur once President Fuckface Von Clownstick takes over the EPA.
Don’t forget Idaho. Especially Northern Idaho. Those people love hunting and fishing. And the EPA helps to make sure that their 12 point bucks aren’t covered in industrial waste.
I think it’s possible to pitch it to them.
Then again, they also have a lot of Rolling Coal assholes.
The stupidest fucking thing I saw in the paper today:
While Trump concentrated on hot-button campaign issues, I realized that he was also headed in positive directions on issues most important to me, the survival of science and environmentalism. In one magnificent turn of the political winds, Americans ditched the Orwellian world of Obama doublespeak, where everything had become the opposite of what it really was.
‘Obama science’ and ‘Obama environmentalism’ are sad footnotes to history. We will no longer be led by a person dedicated to misusing science for ideological and political purposes, lavishing huge amounts of money on institutions and scientists who supported the science that he considered politically useful and denigrating as “flat-earthers” and “deniers” any scientists who dared disagree with him.
“Something something, liberal Portland biased liberal bla bla media!”
Bullshit. The Oregonian is reliably conservative, and the Willamete Week is running to the silicon valley idea of ‘left’ as fast as it can. I wish I was insulted that the Oregonian would even consider publishing that shit, except this is par for the course for their editorial Board.
Honestly, I don’t think anything we do will make a difference either way. The kind of investment that would be necessary is way more than people would agree to, even if there wasn’t an anti-environmentalist in charge of the US.
Since the planet may not be able to support human life indefinitely and life on other planets is not possible with current technology (at least for everyone on the planet), I think we should make a kind of internet that allows people to live on it full time, interacting with others as they would in the real world. To make things more efficient, people should be gathered together underground, almost like in a library, where the machines can look after their physical bodies and allow for a more immersive experience. Meanwhile the surface should be allowed to grow wild, without influence from humans at all. Machines would be able to control nuclear reactors and other sources of power to keep them safe and provide energy for the stored humans. You would be ‘online’ all the time, so you wouldn’t have to take care of your bodily needs at all – the machines would give you exactly as much nutrition as you needed and take care of waste. People could live their lives as they wanted, with children*, jobs, homes, everything you would do normally – you probably wouldn’t even notice that you’re not physically there.
While this may seem extreme, I also think we should find a way to provide permanent cloud cover across the earth during this time, in order to reflect solar energy and allow the earth to cool slowly over a hundred years or so.
*This is another reason why everyone has to be grouped in one big library – in order to preserve the human race, people need to continue having children. This could be done through artificial insemination, and the physical child would never live outside of the network. Everyone would look the same as they do in real life, in order to ensure a smooth transition with normal relationships once disaster is averted
Seriously though, if things really are even close to this bad, what is there left to do but try to find the best way to adjust? In the absence of large scale carbon sequestration fast (which would require a lot of energy and still might not make a difference), all of this is already in process based on the damage we’ve already done. Even drastically reducing emissions (which we’re not doing, and definitely won’t be doing now that Trump is in power) wouldn’t change that reality. Changing things in California wouldn’t be good for the planet, it just wouldn’t be as bad as it would be otherwise.
One of the worst things is that fossil fuels and environmental damage from them aren’t just a small side effect of our civilisation - they drive our economy and we put a huge amount of resources into extracting and exploiting them. Actually doing something to protect the planet will never be this profitable, and we need to exert the kind of effort that we did to get us into this mess. It’s not that action is pointless, but I think it goes against human nature (or at least our nature under capitalism) to change things meaningfully.
I’m not a climate scientist (or a scientist at all), but if these accounts describe the reality facing us I don’t think we’re dealing with a problem that has a solution. I hope it’s just sensationalism and the ‘sceptics’ are right. But you can’t share an article suggesting that we’re going to have runaway global warming and offer solutions promising slight changes to the status quo. “Our” planet wasn’t built for us, species don’t tend to cope with large scale climate change well and this is change beyond any scale since life on earth started.
