Well, the key thing is that many of them don't expect to live longer than 20 years, which means its strongly in their self interest to instead grab as much power, money and influence NOW no matter the cost.
It's not an understatement to say a lot of the ultra wealthy almost belong to a cult of nihilism either. We've ceded power to people who only care about things in the immediate future and the end result is disasterous.
But even more worrying than their average age are things like the fact that a not-insignificant number of these people are literally Christian Zionist fanatics whose unwavering support for Israeli-involved conflict is fueled by their insane belief that this conflict will bring about the biblical return of Jesus and the Rapture.
Hard to get someone to care that climate change might make the Earth uninhabitable in a couple of decades when they believe they are helping to usher in the literal End Times in a couple of years.
Trump is an absolute disaster but he's ultimately just predictably transactional and driven by boring old garden variety greed. The shadow he casts now is in some ways obscuring the fact that even when he's gone, a lot of people with a lot of power in the US government are religious fundamentalist lunatics.
This is hyperbole, the Earth will be habitable for a very long time no matter what humans do. Using fear like that is the type of thing that ultimately hurts your cause. For example people who grew up hearing about how the ice caps were going to melt by 2020 and that Los Angeles would be underwater become more skeptical when they grow up and see that none of those scary predictions came to pass.
If you want to be taken seriously it is probably a good idea to dial back the “end is nigh” language.
Also suggesting solutions like banning meat, forcing people to buy solar panels (like in California), or instating regressive taxes that hurt poor people the most (California just added yet another tax on gasoline) are just not going to work.
Normal people see WEF talks about eating bugs and banning meat and think your cause is insane and dangerous. Honestly, they are mostly correct.
unfortunately, climate scientists need to model the politics involved in solving the problem.
The easiest way to do that is to create two forces, simulating a zombie apocalypse. One force is the "good" guys who want to maximize the number of survivors and the "bad" guys who want to maximize the amount of resources per survivor.
You can then see how, as the climate change destroys habitats, forcing good guys and bad guys into closer quarters, the tension between resource allocation and survivability naturally creates strife.
Also, the models can't do shit about predicting volcanos, eruptions, ocean burps and a bunch of aperiodic events that can expel methane and CO2 all without billionaires flying their jets around convincing everyone that Technology Jesus will save us.
Anyway, it's a seriously bad position to think that "if only we accepted climate change" that there'd suddenly be an agreement on how to implement "fair" controls on the drivers of change.
Future AIs won't go out of control because they are malfunctioning, they'll attack humans because their hands are forced to do so, since that is the best course of action towards increasing the number of survivors.
no amount of “we can fix this!” will magically change humans out of their animal behaviors. at scale, instinct always beats out higher level thought.
Climate change is a species consuming too many resources and causing their environment to not sustain their population.
Humans will survive, underground with the use of basic climate control tech. the earth will cool again, “humans” come back to the surface.
except, humans decided to create artificial materials that are destructive to reproduction. the genome will be so far removed that humans as we know them now wont exist. the fallout universe is an accurate representation.
I for one will NOT go quietly into the night nor will I be passive in allowing these greedy stains to destroy the rest of the non human biosphere. I think your prediction vastly undersells the violence and civil wars that this process of collapse will entail.
Of that 10%, a lot of that is livestock, I've heard as high as 75-90%, but vegetable agriculture is still a part of that 10%, too.
But assuming all of that was livestock, it's still only 10%.
One of the reasons for the emphasis on "go vegan" as an individual choice is that the current industrial approach to cattle (cows for milk and beef) produces more methane than carbon and in some scenarios methane will have a 10x/100x impact on outcomes (making them much, much worse) per volume than carbon. But you can't just rely on eliminating methane production to "solve" climate change, because atmospheric carbon still "sets the tone", the question of atmospheric methane is how bad the "runaway" effects get after carbon has done more than enough damage on its own.
I am unqualified to answer but ran this question through an AI.
The rough number is that apparently 10% of CO2 equivalent comes from meat farming, but don’t trust this.
What did surprise me though is that a much larger benefit would result from repurposing the feed stock and grazing land, together comprising ~25% of the earths habitable land. Land and ecosystem restoration would likely result in feedback loops in the opposite direction.
I have a friend in Denmark that used to run a small carbon neutral farm, where the carbon offsets were all generated by other activities on his land. His all in cost for a kilo of pork was 700kr, or over $100 dollars. Meanwhile, you can but a kilo of port at a supermarket for ~$20. He could only sustain this because he ran a farm restaurant selling the best burgers in town, and even these were probably a loss leader for his best-in-town fries and mayonnaise making up the difference.
"...following a phaseout of livestock production would, through the end of the century, have the same cumulative effect on the warming potential of the atmosphere as a 25 gigaton per year reduction in anthropogenic CO2 emissions, providing half of the net emission reductions necessary to limit warming to 2°C." (emphasis mine)
How do the emissions from the meat+dairy+husbandry+fishing industries compare to the emissions of suvs (and/or the car industry) and private jets (and/or the airline industry)?
To that add the increased costs of logistics, because above some latitude you can only survive with a vegan diet with "exotic" produce brought to you with.. huge ass trucks.
The northerners did not all converge to meat eating diet out of taste, but because very few things grow up there.
I don't have the numbers but even then, 60% is simply funny.
Not true, commoner europeans ate bread, potatoes, beans. Meat and dairy was an exception. Vitamin C all winter was available from sauerkraut. Most deaths were not nutrition related, except for famines.
If you meant seal-hunting latitudes - these are only tiny part of population.
Cows have been kept for food for 10,500 years. Sheeps and goats for longer than that. Although the keeping of cows, sheeps and goats started in the Near East (specifically Asia Minor and the Levant), the people who started it migrated into Europe and after some time (probably less than 1000 years) constituted the majority of the European population. Virtually every farm in Europe kept animals for milk and meat at a time when most households were farming households. (The other households were hunter-gatherers, which kept on decreasing in number, who also ate a lot of meat, fish and shellfish.)
It is just not true that European commoners did not eat meat. Yes, for many centuries, the hunting of game was restricted to the aristocracy, but the amount of this game was always dwarfed by the amount of meat on farms (just as it is today for example in the US or Canada).
The Europeans of today are descended not only from these farmers that originated in the Near East and the original hunter-gatherer Europeans, but also from invaders from the East (particularly, where Russian and Ukraine are now). The most famous of these invaders are the Yamnaya, who invented wheeled vehicles and might have invented riding on horseback. These invaders were nomads and semi-nomads who relied heavily on meat and milk products.
Going back in time, from 115,000 to 11,700 years ago, glaciers covered most of Europe and about half of Asia. Below the glaciers was the largest ecosystem known to man, extending from Europe, over the Bering land bridge all the way to about where Kentucky is now. It is called the Mammoth Steppes. Only grasses grew there because those were the only plants that could survive trampling by the mammoths and other large herbivores (including the ancestors of cows). Humans could not eat the grass, and farming hadn't been invented yet, so they ate mostly meat. These humans were the ancestors of the humans mentioned earlier. We know from studies of carbon and nitrogen isotopes that humans living in the Mammoth Steppes derived most of their calories from animals that ate grass (because grass has a different effect on carbon isotopes ratios than other plants have). They might have eaten a lot of plant food, but if so that plant food contributed at most 20% of their calories (which is not surprising given how meager in human-usable calories most non-domesticated plants are).
Going back further in time, humans have been eating meat for about 2 million years. We know that because wherever we unearth human settlements from the last 2 million years, we usually find animal bones and the bones usually show marks consistent with stone tools' having been used to separate the meat from the bones. Since plant foods do not survive the way that bones do, we do not know whether humans have been eating plants for those 2 million years, but I concede that they probably have been, but again before the invention of agriculture about 11,000 years ago, it was really hard for people in most locations to get enough calories from plants to survive.
> We don’t yet have a full explanation. But new research suggests changes in clouds is a big factor.
> Clouds have a cooling effect overall. But the area covered by highly reflective white clouds has shrunk, while the area of jumbled, less reflective clouds has grown.
> It isn’t clear why the clouds are changing. One possible factor could be the consequences of successful efforts to reduce sulfur in shipping fuel from 2020, as burning the dirtier fuel may have had a brightening effect on clouds.
...
It seems to me that the climate change will be totally solvable by releasing some random gas into the atmosphere. No need to fret about it.
There have been proposals to inject sulfur into airline engines at high altitudes so this approach has been well studied. The first challenge is that even if it addresses the problem of global temperatures rising it does nothing to address other issues such as ocean acidification. At some point C02 levels become physiologically relevant to humans and it feels like living in a stuffy room all the time. The second problem is that it has to be maintained forever. Any technological glitch and the planet goes into run-away heating. Basically we’d be making a decision for humans 100 to 1000 years in the future to maintain a specific lifestyle.
It would be the equivalent of people in the 1970s deciding to not move away from ozone-layer destroying CFCs and deciding to fit all humans and animals with permanent sunglasses to prevent cataracts instead.
> There have been proposals to inject sulfur into airline engines at high altitudes so this approach has been well studied. The first challenge is that even if it addresses the problem of global temperatures rising it does nothing to address other issues such as ocean acidification. At some point C02 levels become physiologically relevant to humans and it feels like living in a stuffy room all the time.
What about wars and cancer?
> The second problem is that it has to be maintained forever.
Any solution should be "maintained forever", at least until we have the ability to undo it, so basically everything while there are humans on the planet.
You are missing the point or being purposefully dense. Many of the solutions to climate change are self sustaining . Like the biosphere itself regulating the climate. Your dumb statement about "maintaining forever" highlights the type of engineer brain /economics PhD arrogance that got us into this mess in the first place. While disregarding basic science and common sense.
Honestly, if they choose this option, they surely will run a bunch of simulations before it, unlike the current path, when they are just randomly substracting gases from the atmosphere.
In addition to the likely high costs and predictable negative side-effects, one could extrapolate from the article title that climate engineering could also have unpredictable negative effects.
Making big changes to a complex system that we do not fully understand seems very dangerous to me.
Well, they "randomly subtracted" a gas that they were previously "randomly adding". In fact, even "subtracted" is wrong - they randomly stopped adding a gas that they had been randomly adding.
They did not run a bunch of simulations before randomly adding the gas.
I wish people would take this more seriously and understand climate science has nothing to do with politics.
Unfortunately it has everything to do with politics because fixing it requires political action
Yeah, but if you’re a human that expects to live another 10-20 years, it’s strongly in your self interest to take action.
In that sense, it shouldn’t be political.
I think people use the word political to mean “partisan issue”
Well, the key thing is that many of them don't expect to live longer than 20 years, which means its strongly in their self interest to instead grab as much power, money and influence NOW no matter the cost.
It's not an understatement to say a lot of the ultra wealthy almost belong to a cult of nihilism either. We've ceded power to people who only care about things in the immediate future and the end result is disasterous.
if its not solvable via your own individual action then it's political
What is the age of the average politician?
Here in the US where I am, about 60 years old.
But even more worrying than their average age are things like the fact that a not-insignificant number of these people are literally Christian Zionist fanatics whose unwavering support for Israeli-involved conflict is fueled by their insane belief that this conflict will bring about the biblical return of Jesus and the Rapture.
Hard to get someone to care that climate change might make the Earth uninhabitable in a couple of decades when they believe they are helping to usher in the literal End Times in a couple of years.
Trump is an absolute disaster but he's ultimately just predictably transactional and driven by boring old garden variety greed. The shadow he casts now is in some ways obscuring the fact that even when he's gone, a lot of people with a lot of power in the US government are religious fundamentalist lunatics.
>uninhabitable in a couple of decades
This is hyperbole, the Earth will be habitable for a very long time no matter what humans do. Using fear like that is the type of thing that ultimately hurts your cause. For example people who grew up hearing about how the ice caps were going to melt by 2020 and that Los Angeles would be underwater become more skeptical when they grow up and see that none of those scary predictions came to pass.
If you want to be taken seriously it is probably a good idea to dial back the “end is nigh” language.
Also suggesting solutions like banning meat, forcing people to buy solar panels (like in California), or instating regressive taxes that hurt poor people the most (California just added yet another tax on gasoline) are just not going to work.
Normal people see WEF talks about eating bugs and banning meat and think your cause is insane and dangerous. Honestly, they are mostly correct.
It’s also an extremely useful political tool. You can convince people to do all kinds of things if you tell them that the world is ending.
Have you read the IPCC working group reports? It’s hard to conclude the direction of most climate research is anything other than political.
Can you elaborate a bit?
The research is political in what way?
Citation.
[dead]
unfortunately, climate scientists need to model the politics involved in solving the problem.
The easiest way to do that is to create two forces, simulating a zombie apocalypse. One force is the "good" guys who want to maximize the number of survivors and the "bad" guys who want to maximize the amount of resources per survivor.
You can then see how, as the climate change destroys habitats, forcing good guys and bad guys into closer quarters, the tension between resource allocation and survivability naturally creates strife.
Also, the models can't do shit about predicting volcanos, eruptions, ocean burps and a bunch of aperiodic events that can expel methane and CO2 all without billionaires flying their jets around convincing everyone that Technology Jesus will save us.
Anyway, it's a seriously bad position to think that "if only we accepted climate change" that there'd suddenly be an agreement on how to implement "fair" controls on the drivers of change.
Future AIs won't go out of control because they are malfunctioning, they'll attack humans because their hands are forced to do so, since that is the best course of action towards increasing the number of survivors.
no amount of “we can fix this!” will magically change humans out of their animal behaviors. at scale, instinct always beats out higher level thought.
Climate change is a species consuming too many resources and causing their environment to not sustain their population.
Humans will survive, underground with the use of basic climate control tech. the earth will cool again, “humans” come back to the surface.
except, humans decided to create artificial materials that are destructive to reproduction. the genome will be so far removed that humans as we know them now wont exist. the fallout universe is an accurate representation.
I for one will NOT go quietly into the night nor will I be passive in allowing these greedy stains to destroy the rest of the non human biosphere. I think your prediction vastly undersells the violence and civil wars that this process of collapse will entail.
curious question: if suddenly the entire population of the earth went vegan at once, would it cut down emissions by 60%?
60%? Certainly not.
Agriculture, total, is 10% of current US estimated greenhouse gas emission: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
Of that 10%, a lot of that is livestock, I've heard as high as 75-90%, but vegetable agriculture is still a part of that 10%, too.
But assuming all of that was livestock, it's still only 10%.
One of the reasons for the emphasis on "go vegan" as an individual choice is that the current industrial approach to cattle (cows for milk and beef) produces more methane than carbon and in some scenarios methane will have a 10x/100x impact on outcomes (making them much, much worse) per volume than carbon. But you can't just rely on eliminating methane production to "solve" climate change, because atmospheric carbon still "sets the tone", the question of atmospheric methane is how bad the "runaway" effects get after carbon has done more than enough damage on its own.
I am unqualified to answer but ran this question through an AI.
The rough number is that apparently 10% of CO2 equivalent comes from meat farming, but don’t trust this.
What did surprise me though is that a much larger benefit would result from repurposing the feed stock and grazing land, together comprising ~25% of the earths habitable land. Land and ecosystem restoration would likely result in feedback loops in the opposite direction.
I have a friend in Denmark that used to run a small carbon neutral farm, where the carbon offsets were all generated by other activities on his land. His all in cost for a kilo of pork was 700kr, or over $100 dollars. Meanwhile, you can but a kilo of port at a supermarket for ~$20. He could only sustain this because he ran a farm restaurant selling the best burgers in town, and even these were probably a loss leader for his best-in-town fries and mayonnaise making up the difference.
https://journals.plos.org/climate/article?id=10.1371%2Fjourn...
"...following a phaseout of livestock production would, through the end of the century, have the same cumulative effect on the warming potential of the atmosphere as a 25 gigaton per year reduction in anthropogenic CO2 emissions, providing half of the net emission reductions necessary to limit warming to 2°C." (emphasis mine)
Yeah because bacon is surely a larger factor in emissions that let's say, SUVs or private jets xD
How do the emissions from the meat+dairy+husbandry+fishing industries compare to the emissions of suvs (and/or the car industry) and private jets (and/or the airline industry)?
I think that is the actual question being asked.
To that add the increased costs of logistics, because above some latitude you can only survive with a vegan diet with "exotic" produce brought to you with.. huge ass trucks.
The northerners did not all converge to meat eating diet out of taste, but because very few things grow up there.
I don't have the numbers but even then, 60% is simply funny.
Not true, commoner europeans ate bread, potatoes, beans. Meat and dairy was an exception. Vitamin C all winter was available from sauerkraut. Most deaths were not nutrition related, except for famines.
If you meant seal-hunting latitudes - these are only tiny part of population.
Cows have been kept for food for 10,500 years. Sheeps and goats for longer than that. Although the keeping of cows, sheeps and goats started in the Near East (specifically Asia Minor and the Levant), the people who started it migrated into Europe and after some time (probably less than 1000 years) constituted the majority of the European population. Virtually every farm in Europe kept animals for milk and meat at a time when most households were farming households. (The other households were hunter-gatherers, which kept on decreasing in number, who also ate a lot of meat, fish and shellfish.)
It is just not true that European commoners did not eat meat. Yes, for many centuries, the hunting of game was restricted to the aristocracy, but the amount of this game was always dwarfed by the amount of meat on farms (just as it is today for example in the US or Canada).
The Europeans of today are descended not only from these farmers that originated in the Near East and the original hunter-gatherer Europeans, but also from invaders from the East (particularly, where Russian and Ukraine are now). The most famous of these invaders are the Yamnaya, who invented wheeled vehicles and might have invented riding on horseback. These invaders were nomads and semi-nomads who relied heavily on meat and milk products.
Going back in time, from 115,000 to 11,700 years ago, glaciers covered most of Europe and about half of Asia. Below the glaciers was the largest ecosystem known to man, extending from Europe, over the Bering land bridge all the way to about where Kentucky is now. It is called the Mammoth Steppes. Only grasses grew there because those were the only plants that could survive trampling by the mammoths and other large herbivores (including the ancestors of cows). Humans could not eat the grass, and farming hadn't been invented yet, so they ate mostly meat. These humans were the ancestors of the humans mentioned earlier. We know from studies of carbon and nitrogen isotopes that humans living in the Mammoth Steppes derived most of their calories from animals that ate grass (because grass has a different effect on carbon isotopes ratios than other plants have). They might have eaten a lot of plant food, but if so that plant food contributed at most 20% of their calories (which is not surprising given how meager in human-usable calories most non-domesticated plants are).
Going back further in time, humans have been eating meat for about 2 million years. We know that because wherever we unearth human settlements from the last 2 million years, we usually find animal bones and the bones usually show marks consistent with stone tools' having been used to separate the meat from the bones. Since plant foods do not survive the way that bones do, we do not know whether humans have been eating plants for those 2 million years, but I concede that they probably have been, but again before the invention of agriculture about 11,000 years ago, it was really hard for people in most locations to get enough calories from plants to survive.
And how many of these meat eaters were? Not even millions.
I agree. I was responding to “commoner europeans ate bread, potatoes, beans. Meat and dairy was an exception.”
I would like to see you try to survive only on bread, potatoes, beans and sauerkraut.
Of course meat consumption was scarce, but necessary. And even so, people were malnourished back then by today's standards.
[flagged]
No
> Why has it changed so fast?
> We don’t yet have a full explanation. But new research suggests changes in clouds is a big factor.
> Clouds have a cooling effect overall. But the area covered by highly reflective white clouds has shrunk, while the area of jumbled, less reflective clouds has grown.
> It isn’t clear why the clouds are changing. One possible factor could be the consequences of successful efforts to reduce sulfur in shipping fuel from 2020, as burning the dirtier fuel may have had a brightening effect on clouds.
...
It seems to me that the climate change will be totally solvable by releasing some random gas into the atmosphere. No need to fret about it.
There have been proposals to inject sulfur into airline engines at high altitudes so this approach has been well studied. The first challenge is that even if it addresses the problem of global temperatures rising it does nothing to address other issues such as ocean acidification. At some point C02 levels become physiologically relevant to humans and it feels like living in a stuffy room all the time. The second problem is that it has to be maintained forever. Any technological glitch and the planet goes into run-away heating. Basically we’d be making a decision for humans 100 to 1000 years in the future to maintain a specific lifestyle.
It would be the equivalent of people in the 1970s deciding to not move away from ozone-layer destroying CFCs and deciding to fit all humans and animals with permanent sunglasses to prevent cataracts instead.
> There have been proposals to inject sulfur into airline engines at high altitudes so this approach has been well studied. The first challenge is that even if it addresses the problem of global temperatures rising it does nothing to address other issues such as ocean acidification. At some point C02 levels become physiologically relevant to humans and it feels like living in a stuffy room all the time.
What about wars and cancer?
> The second problem is that it has to be maintained forever.
Any solution should be "maintained forever", at least until we have the ability to undo it, so basically everything while there are humans on the planet.
You are missing the point or being purposefully dense. Many of the solutions to climate change are self sustaining . Like the biosphere itself regulating the climate. Your dumb statement about "maintaining forever" highlights the type of engineer brain /economics PhD arrogance that got us into this mess in the first place. While disregarding basic science and common sense.
> It seems to me that the climate change will be totally solvable by releasing some random gas into the atmosphere. No need to fret about it.
Yeah, what could go wrong...
Honestly, if they choose this option, they surely will run a bunch of simulations before it, unlike the current path, when they are just randomly substracting gases from the atmosphere.
In addition to the likely high costs and predictable negative side-effects, one could extrapolate from the article title that climate engineering could also have unpredictable negative effects.
Making big changes to a complex system that we do not fully understand seems very dangerous to me.
Well, they "randomly subtracted" a gas that they were previously "randomly adding". In fact, even "subtracted" is wrong - they randomly stopped adding a gas that they had been randomly adding.
They did not run a bunch of simulations before randomly adding the gas.