Well, except in this case, you’ve been living in the basement for thirty years now, and multiple small fires have already come and gone without much fanfare. But still nobody has dealt with the radon leak, and we’re more worried about the next hypothetical small fire.
I mean, I get it, it’s only human. But that doesn’t magically make the problem go away.
I’m convinced that Trump knows quite well that climate change is real, and his anti-green policies are intended to hurry things along. Why else such interest in taking over Canada and Greenland? He sees money to be made by exploiting newly available arctic resources, and doesn’t give a damn who else in the world is harmed.
Which makes things all the worse for our prospects. There’s zero chance that he will “come to his senses” and change course. We’re screwed.
You’re definitely giving him too much credit.
Given the way climate change is progressing, international collaboration isn’t a viable path forward anymore anyway. The only question is who suffers, and how much.
In a fair world, the biggest producers (e.g. China and US) would suffer the worst effects. But we don’t live in a fair world. It’s going to come down to “us vs them” for various values of “them”, and if climate change is already set in stone, then probably each country’s only rational response would be to hoard as much resources and quality-of-life as they can into the future, whether that’s water or cobalt or arable land… the rest of the world be damned.
For all of Trump’s faults — I’m no fan of the man — he is certainly more willing to sacrifice the rest of the world for U.S. gain. In times of crisis and uncertainty, selfish strongmen like him always seem to win the populist mind. What’s the point of trying to help any other nation, much less the planet as a whole, when it’s too late anyway? Too bad for them; we have the money and the firepower to help our kids get a leg-up over them. If the rest of the world is fighting over desert scraps, well, great, that’s more cheap labor we can outsource to with the occasional airdrop of food and filtered water.
(Not my philosophy. Just saying how in a dog-eat-dog world, that would be an easy sell.)
You’re right, it doesn’t magically go away. But are you really surprised talk about climate change has all but disappeared recently? We didn’t all collectively decide it wasn’t important, but we’ve got more immediate concerns right now. You can see that, right? You understand why we’re talking about other things right now, right?
Sure, I don’t dispute that. That’s just the background context. But I’m still wondering, “Ok, so let’s not forget this other thing that’s been in the basement… should we circle back to it at some point? What do we do about it now, if anything?”
Do the countries just ignore it and pretend like nothing is happening? I suppose prevention and reversal are out of the question now, but I feel like at least we should be talking about mitigation and adaptation, etc. I know states & municipalities are taking it upon themselves to enact policies, build up sea barriers, lifting highways, etc. Maybe that’s all there is to do, and maybe we won’t even get that for much longer…
If it has, I’ve never heard or read anything.
I suspect modeling would be at best inaccurate. There’s only a couple data points (Mount Tambora, Krakatoa) and not enough accurate data even from them. Set off too few nukes, and it might not do anything. Set off too many, and…well, no more worries.
And of course where? Set off 100 10Mt nukes in, say, the Sahara desert. Lots of particulates to blast sky high, not many people. But would Algeria, Libya, Chad really be willing to go along with that? Even for “the greater good”? All signs point to no.
Maybe the US should just launch a giant space parasol. It would probably work, and really, even today, who else could do it?
Redoing post.
You quoted the first past of my post but not the second part. We have to slowly decrease the fertility rate to below the replacement rate of 2.1. What else do you expect us to do? Do you want us to appoint you to be the one who goes all around the world and kills everyone you don’t want to live? Do you want us to appoint you to be the one who goes all around the world and chooses who shouldn’t have children? Yes, we have to do many things beyond just slowly bringing down the fertility rate.
It’s not an issue of who I “don’t want to live”; it is a problem with exceeding the Earth’s carrying capacity, which isn’t just land or fresh water but all of the resources which we are extracting, synthesizing, and using (with those activities powered by fossil fuels) to sustain this population beyond the rates at which those resources are naturally replenished, often by many orders of magnitude. Regardless of what anyone wants, the result is almost certainly going to be mass famine and lethal conflicts with and between migrating populations, especially when effects of climate change reduce agricultural yields in high producing areas.
And while the developed nations are (rightly) vilified for taking far more than their share of resources and producing vastly more of pollutants, it is an issue that will affect people in developing nations whose populations have grown beyond sustainable food yields, again notwithstanding the impact of climate change (and other issues like the collapse of fisheries) on sustainable local food production.
“…slowly decreas[ing] the fertility rate to below the replacement rate of 2.1” isn’t going to be a fast enough drawdown to avoid famines. That is a harsh reality of many of the predictions I’ve seen of realistic model-based predictions of agricultural decline and climate impacts.
Stranger
As others say, that is giving him too much credit.
The flaw in that way of thinking, that we could get lovely weather in Greenland, is that the problem of not controlling emissions remains. Sure, we will get into trouble, but it can be manageable because knowing that we controlled emissions leads to more likely outcomes and preparations that we can do.
Not doing anything now only means that the problems become worse, and the uncertainty does grow.
Then the expected “lovely” weather will not remain that, because there is no control of the emissions. We will overshoot any expected nice weather conditions that one could see in some locations, while many areas will be affected in the negative.
So give us a complete (yes, absolutely complete) plan for everything the world has to do to survive.
Again, when i said that we should slowly decrease the fertility rate to below the replacement rate, that doesn’t mean that I think that that is all we should do. When I suggest one part of a plan, it doesn’t mean that it should be the entire plan. We have to do many things. I can’t fit everything we need to do in one post. If you pay me enough to make to worth my time to write an entire book or or a series of books about everything we need to do, that might be worth it.
I’m not suggesting that Trump actually understands climate change or its impacts. Just that he think that arctic melting = grift opportunity = good.
Yes, I know; that was just a reply to his “thinking”.
I do not have a plan, and frankly have become more pessimistic as these problems are blithely ignored or denied with no national or transnational authority making any systematic attempt at developing resilience in critical agricultural and industrial systems.
Stranger
Really, I still see people talking about it plenty. Just not as much with the ongoing Trump disaster.
Chinese have the wrong skin color, and are Communists (in name at least, which is enough); they are slated for genocide, not alliance. And whatever happened Russia would be on the eventual target list, along with literally everyone else. That’s what fascists are like. Something Putin, a Russian should realize given what happened with Nazi Germany.
Any World War III ends with the nukes flying and civilization collapsed. At which point nobody will care about climate change all that much.
Even then, how long until the mutant cannibal cults rediscover steam power and fossil fuels? If our species survives at all, maybe with a limited historical record, rebuilding and re-industrialization seems only a matter of time, no? Few hundred years later and we’re back and at it. It took us, what, a couple hundred to increase our population by several billion?
I doubt we’d be any more collaborative the second time around…
And where, just out of curiosity? You have cooler friends than I do 
The thing is though, and I am not accusing anyone in this thread of doing this, is that “overpopulation” is a convenient framing for wealthy, (comparatively) sparsely-populated countries like the US, Canada and Australia.
But if you look at carbon footprint, land, energy, fresh water use etc, the world would be in the same situation it is today with 8 billion humans as it would be with ~1.5 billion Americans.
And I don’t want to pick on America, apparently some wealthy European nations like Luxembourg don’t even get to a billion (cite).
Now obviously I don’t want us to all live in squalor, as many in the world sadly still do. My point is just Westerners reducing their carbon footprint, and yes, China cutting down on coal, would make a much bigger difference to the planet than (non-apocalypse level) population drops.
Likely never, since the fossil fuels will be gone or inaccessible. And that’s assuming that agriculture is even possible in the new climate regime; something we don’t know, since humanity has never existed during one of the planet’s warm periods. It’s entirely possible the future is a humanity that regresses to the hunter-gatherer tribe stage and stays there until we go extinct.
It’s not just an issue of carbon footprint, or even per capita use of resources, though. While I agree that the wealth nations consume far more resources and produce more waste (in terms of atmospheric carbon, phosphorous and nitrogen runoff, persistent heavy metal and complex hydrocarbon-based residues, et cetera), and in ways that are using up resources ‘external’ to their own local environments, the reality is that any population that has grown beyond the capacity to provide sustainable food, energy, and basic resource needs is at risk should the system of global distribution fail, and aside from some very isolated tribal groups (which are themselves largely at risk because of climate changes beyond their influence or control) that is essentially all human populations.
The celebration of the ‘Green Revolution’ which allowed populations to grow essentially without limit or risk of famine (except due to political machinations there is no reason anyone in the latter half of the 20th century should have gone hungry) also encouraged a dependence upon external food and resource supplies and abandonment of traditional sustainable farming and resource use for urbanization. It isn’t a matter of fairness or the injustice that a fraction of the world’s population has access to the majority of its energy and material resources; once unsustainable resources are consumed to a point that they create restrictions in food production or other goods critical to the maintenance of that society, everybody rich and poor will suffer (although of course the poor will suffer sooner because the wealthy will take control of resources by political manipulation, economic dominance, and if necessary military force).
Archeologists and anthropologists marvel at how the natives of the American Southwest were able to live in such austere conditions for centuries “in tune with nature” but the reality is that they had to live that way within the means of their environment, and when that environment changed due to persistent drought, many of those peoples migrated, were subsumed, or died off because of a lack of resources. That the wealthy top two billion consume more is making that happen faster (and driven by the ‘carbon pulse’ of hydrocarbon ‘fossil’ fuels) but any population using resources as a non-sustainable rate and without awareness of the need for conservation of critical resources through minimization, recycling, replacement, et cetera is going to face the reality of resource constraints at some point.
We’ve become so accustomed to not worrying about resources because our access to apparently ‘unlimited’ and virtually free hydrocarbon energy gave us an ability to process and use resources that would have been unaccessible or too difficult to utilize into complex systems by previous societies but we are now coming to real limits (and the consequences of injected masses of carbon into the atmosphere that took tens or hundreds of millions of years for life to sequester) and trying to draw down the last remaining dregs of accessible resources from oil shales and tar sands. Even if you could persuade the top two billion to live like the other three quarters of the world’s population, there just isn’t the capacity to produce food and other resources at scale without access to those energy resources, and despite all the fanfare about renewables (which, to be frank, are great and should be expanded as much as feasible) they are not anything close to a comprehensive replacement for hydrocarbon fuels in industry, transportation, materials fabrication, et cetera.
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