ongoing ecological collapse thread

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Postby alaska » Tue Mar 05, 2019 10:35 am

yeah thanks for those posts nm. i believe that the ipcc report was conservative but god it's hard to wrap my head around a document that was so panicky and dire being actually conservative

i have a lot of the same questions about action. it's valenced a bit differently for me, i think. like, for the past few years i have sort of continually underestimated my own precarity, and it's still sort of counterintuitive how much time and energy i have to devote to making sure i'm ok in a rudimentary sense -- but it still really weighs on me. i regularly miss meetings and actions because i'm too worn out and depressed and it feels fucking bad

like, it's not a question of obligation, per se. all the politically engaged people i know tell me that i should take my needs really seriously and only get involved where it feels possible -- but it doesn't feel like it's about what i *should* do. it's just that if we don't do something, we're fucked, you know? like how important actually is my mental health or whatever

these are mostly rhetorical questions or whatever, i know you have to secure your own oxygen mask first or whatever, but man my mental health would be a lot worse during a widescale medication distribution failure or a fucking food shortage

anyway i signed up for boston extinction rebellion and when they asked if i was ready to be arrested i said "maybe" lol
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Postby my piano » Tue Mar 05, 2019 11:18 am

geo-engineering has to become the main plank. nothing else matters, if carbon isn't removed from the atmosphere all the reductions we can manage make no difference.
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Postby my piano » Tue Mar 05, 2019 11:57 am

like, i feel like the gap in understanding between denialism and emissions reduction as an corrective, end-point course of action is as wide as the gap between reduction and geo-engineering. tbh, i'm not willing to get arrested for an idea with no chance of success.
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Postby cartola » Tue Mar 05, 2019 12:08 pm

Coal ash poisoning our own drinking water.

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Postby alaska » Tue Mar 05, 2019 12:11 pm

yeah i mean for me a very realistic feeling middle-term endgame is extremely fast climate change followed by untested wide-ranging geoengineering from the US military etc. and then we all get cancer from all the aerosols in the atmosphere and there's a giant mirror in orbit fucking up photosynthesis along a certain latitudinal range or whatever

but the mass power built against private and state fossil fuel hegemony, even if it's currently aimed at cessation, might come in handy for applying pressure vis-a-vis geoengineering policy anyway? but idk how anything works
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Postby my piano » Tue Mar 05, 2019 12:13 pm

aerosol injection is a mitigation strategy it does nothing for sequestration. iron ocean fertilization needs to at least be fucking attempted.
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Postby my piano » Tue Mar 05, 2019 12:16 pm

my piano wrote:linked this in the potus thread

https://palladiummag.com/2019/01/28/anc ... e-climate/

It’s usually assumed that if we reduce emissions, then CO2 will steadily decline on its own due to natural sequestration processes. This is based on the notion of a set residence time in the atmosphere—essentially a guaranteed life cycle which these kinds of predictions can be based on—as if the pre-industrial climate was some kind of strong equilibrium to which excursions will quickly return.

But that’s not really how it works. In fact, the assumption that our pre-industrial climate was a robust equilibrium is an existentially dangerous one. If there’s more carbon around, the biosphere will just operate with more carbon in the cycle, including in the air, until some process causes permanent sequestration. To understand this, as well as the unusual and metastable nature of our current climate, we have to go back to the geological history of climate change.
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Postby my piano » Tue Mar 05, 2019 12:23 pm

and it seems cognitively dissonant to both be alarmed and anxious over the IPCC report being conservative but still being gunshy about geo-engineering. no one is going to come along with some magic civilizational diet that's going to catch on. we should be doing things that we know have a high chance of forestalling further irrecoverable damage, including aerosol injection. there literally is no alternative.
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Postby my piano » Tue Mar 05, 2019 12:44 pm

due to the ocean lag effect the already terrifying effects we're seeing are coming to us from ~the 70s. like yeah, we need to step off the gas, but if we don't hit the fucking brakes as well what's the fucking point.
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Postby junebug » Tue Mar 05, 2019 1:13 pm

building off nm's posts, I'm frustrated with how much coverage of climate change and ways that we can mitigate or stop it is based in scientific interventions. climate change is a social issue, just as much effort needs to be directed towards reimagining relationships and institutions. technological innovations won't do much if growth and consumption continue to be prioritized as social goals.
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Postby alaska » Tue Mar 05, 2019 1:15 pm

God i wish i were just ludicrously rich so i could bankroll like communist engineers
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Postby alaska » Tue Mar 05, 2019 1:20 pm

I agree jb

Technology exists within society, not vice versa

I think the left will have to reckon with whatever technological mitigation strategies are available but the only way they will be used anything like responsibly is if we change the society that is deploying them
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Postby my piano » Tue Mar 05, 2019 1:26 pm

Okay yes we have to walk and chew gum at the same time but while we figure out what shoes to wear can we please open up the fucking pack of trident? we are 100% fucked without mitigation/sequestration efforts, and they're not really a predominant part of the discourse currently.
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Postby naturemorte » Tue Mar 05, 2019 2:32 pm

chimp wrote:I agree with the thrust of struttin’ evil mushroom’s comment - do what you can but you shouldn’t beat yourself up too much. I don’t think it’s on you to generate a new framework of ecologically focused critical appraisal (though that would be a worthy project). Your suggestions with regards to Skype sessions and so on are just good sense


i'd be happy to get on board with someone else's project of decarbonizing the cultural sector, but i just haven't encountered it yet. the bigger picture here i think is that understanding what is at stake in reorienting my profession towards sustainability reveals how the project goes far beyond new protocols and new technology, but effectively involves a vast reshaping of ideas of value on a social level and a corporeal and cognitive retraining on a personal level. we have to learn to expect different things from our physical experiences, our organization of time, the horizon of our communities and our own mobility. i think doing that through one's work is more meaningful than through individual consumer choices, but it's fucking daunting is all.
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Postby naturemorte » Tue Mar 05, 2019 2:34 pm

i'm not deeply informed on this subject but it seems to me like biosequestration is a stronger option for mitigation than aerosols or other technology-based fixes, right?
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Postby junebug » Tue Mar 05, 2019 2:44 pm

my piano wrote:Okay yes we have to walk and chew gum at the same time but while we figure out what shoes to wear can we please open up the fucking pack of trident? we are 100% fucked without mitigation/sequestration efforts, and they're not really a predominant part of the discourse currently.


You can’t say “ok yes” to critiques and then ignore them.
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Postby my piano » Tue Mar 05, 2019 2:46 pm

from my understanding/reading on the subject any realistic approach involves both. aerosol injection increasing albedo would have an immediate impact on rising global temps, buying time which we very desperately need for sequestration efforts. ultimately sequestration is the only possible way to avoid the worst outcomes. the mess has to be cleaned up, the carbon is not going to go away on its own.

i'm not trying to negate the need for society/civilization to de-metastasize, but we are too far into this calamity to pretend we have the luxury of clean choices.
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Postby alaska » Tue Mar 05, 2019 2:47 pm

edit conversation happened while i was typing lol
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Postby my piano » Tue Mar 05, 2019 2:57 pm

bunejug wrote:
my piano wrote:Okay yes we have to walk and chew gum at the same time but while we figure out what shoes to wear can we please open up the fucking pack of trident? we are 100% fucked without mitigation/sequestration efforts, and they're not really a predominant part of the discourse currently.


You can’t say “ok yes” to critiques and then ignore them.


i didn't ignore your critique, i directly disagreed with it. current discourse around climate change is centered around and completely dominated by emissions reduction. it's ~40 years too late. YES it still needs to occur, but it is pointless on its own, the outcome will be the same.
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Postby my piano » Tue Mar 05, 2019 3:21 pm

a roommate stole my caffeine and i can't afford my meds for another couple days so probably just read the article i linked instead of trying to talk to me i guess
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Postby chimp » Tue Mar 05, 2019 10:57 pm

I actually agree with my piano that emissions reduction, practically speaking, is just not going to happen on a scale large enough to make a significant difference to planetary systems in the time we have available. We are going to have to engage with geoengineering in some form. I read an interesting book called “The Planet Remade” by Oliver Morton which argues that essentially we need to accept geoengineering in concert with emissions reduction strategies. Also that the only feasible form of geoengineering is aerosol injection.
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Postby chimp » Tue Mar 05, 2019 11:00 pm

As I recall his main criticism of BECCS is the incredible quantity of land and infrastructure that would need to be devoted to these projects, while aerosol deployment can basically start now at a relatively low cost. Also I think he talks about how iron fertilisation processes don’t really work nearly as well as was hoped
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Postby vhg » Wed Mar 06, 2019 7:15 pm

Rainbow Battle Kid wrote:new chris hayes pod ep is messin w me


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Postby jefe górgory » Wed Mar 06, 2019 7:19 pm

chris hayes ep was brutal. it was a real kick in the head for me though and i'm pretty thankful for that
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Postby vhg » Wed Mar 06, 2019 11:34 pm

finding it really difficult to do things like talk to friends about future plans with this stuff in mind. It seems very hard to get even very reasonable people to do more than nod and give weak agreement when I mention that the climate might be a major hurdle to me taking a new good job in the hottest and driest part of the country.

I've also been thinking about issues similar to those raised by naturemorte. In academia we are expected to travel a lot - conferences, invited talks at other institutions, etc. This is made worse by the utter shittiness of the job market and the fact that you're expected to go wherever the job is. You go to school, then you go to more school, you make friends along the way, then everyone moves all over the continent or world, and the only way you can maintain social connections is to fly all over the place. So many of my friends are constantly jetting between NY and the west coast if not Australia and other distant places. Personally, between work and much-needed trips to see family, I'll be making at least 6 long round-trip flights (2 cross-country) between Feb and the end of May.

Also increasingly realizing I don't think I want kids but that's a different post.
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Postby Chyet » Wed Mar 06, 2019 11:56 pm

While I agree with the geoengineering at this point, I think any of those efforts should err on the side of caution. Lets prioritize a massive shift in human behavior first and lessen the unforeseen consequences inevitable on such globally-significant actions. I do not think they are unavoidable but I think we should be very attentive to timelines insofar as justifying global engineering projects and on the other hand pretend like those projections don’t even exist in terms of the social and economic changes we need to undertake.

First, there is no real Malthusian crisis. There are crises for days, but there is no lack of land. We have wildly wasteful land-use patterns and, very relatedly, wildly wasteful farmer subsidies. eest perheps most basic idea; the suburbs should be permaculture bands. And, thought about this a lot, medium sized cities with ports don’t have a real purpose in the modern economy, Most do have some founding document that says they are for the benefit of local industry, so, given the broad powers and large budgets of small and medium sized ports I don’t think a food aggregator is such a bad port modernization project. Keep in mind how many ports buy 5 million dollar cranes for bi-monthly shipments, and how many install money-sink yacht club amenities for no real benefit at all.
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Postby tgk » Wed Mar 06, 2019 11:58 pm

corporations are already factoring in climate destabilization in their decision making for office locations it'd be foolish for us not to do the same thing with our own lives. my young coworker was really gung ho about settling his life in new mexico in the future but he learned more about the oglalla aquifer drying up and how fucked that region is going to be within his own lifetime and isnt so sure now. i suspect i'll never move far from the great lakes as being near the largest freshwater reserve on earth with a relatively stable climate will become more and more important as the years pass. i don't know how we'll prepare for climate refugees within the us in the coming years though.
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Postby Chyet » Thu Mar 07, 2019 12:06 am

tgk i deleted the first version of that post, because i started with,"i can't even get my friends to understand they shouldn't be buying property in arizona and the wholeheartedly believe in climate change" and i guess that is true for all of us. shit, i haven't considered too much the mass california migration to oregon/wa that has started but climate change will exacerbate. that is something the real estate agencies don't mention
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Postby tgk » Thu Mar 07, 2019 12:19 am

it's gonna be grapes of wrath shit but from all sides of the country not just dust bowl farmers moving to california.
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Postby chowder julius » Thu Mar 07, 2019 3:52 pm

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