Yeah, because giving the government dictatorial powers has always resulted in such wonderful results for the environment.
I wish I understood this liberal delusion that giving the government more and more power is the solution to every problem when the history of the world shows just the opposite.
read my previous comment. the one where I say “the point is that each country is selfish”.
I’m in favor of action for climate change, but there’s literally no actions that humans could take that would approach even a tiny fraction of the destruction that natural phenomena have in the past and will in the future unleash on Earth. Detonating every nuclear weapon and burning every fossilized fuel source wouldn’t do close to the damage of the K-T impact, or several other impacts or supervolcano eruptions.
We need to protect the climate because changing it could be very bad for humans. The rest of life on Earth will be fine (overall – as some species die, others will evolve and arise to take advantage of new conditions), as it has been for hundreds of millions and billions of years, no matter what humans do. I don’t like the inaccurate hyperbole, because this solution needs good science.
I think I remember this conversation between Anikin Skywalker and Padme Amidala
Declan
I think we’ve seen a great model in the response to global ozone depletion.
We’re going through many of the same steps that went through, but eventually came together as an international community and implemented the Montreal Protocol which has been very successful.
And the solution then is to set up a dictator that looking at many of the powerful nations could be prone to follow quacks like Lysenko.
No thanks, as SmartAlecCat noted, history shows that once the issues are becoming undeniable most will do the right thing; it is true that we are still going to see a mess, but part of the solution should include mitigation and I’m an optimist that we can reduce the impact of the changes ahead once we do a concerned effort to deal with the issue.
To solve global warming we need to invest until renewables are cheaper and more convenient than fossil fuels. Once we do that, hopefully the market will take over.
That’s what I said. The biosphere is of astronomical value to us for obvious reasons.
What hyperbole? What inaccuracy? I’ve done my best to stick with the facts.
Lol. At least they could move to different planets if they ruined one.
Too late. Too slow. we’re 3 decades late and failing to reach even the shamefully modest targets that have been set. Targets that fall well short of anything reasonable. And current paris proposals are also woefully lacking.
Yes, we are going to see a mess. A horrible mess. Renewables are coming in too darn late.
It seems that you did not checked the link you are using, it does describe the problem, and it also shows a graph that shows what it can be done to avoid worse scenarios. While it is true that fulfilling the pledges by the governments can only lower the changes a bit, it is clear that the efforts from Bill Gates and many other industrialists that are realizing that their jobs are on the line too will make a big difference.
I will have to say it, your position that is “too late” is also what many contrarians and deniers out there are using now too.
We’re not “destroying our biosphere”, and the underlined part doesn’t even make any sense. However since you think that is a “matter of fact”, I’ll just ask for cite.
“Destroying the biosphere” is inaccurate and hyperbole. The biosphere will be fine, in the long run, no matter what humans do. Humans may not be fine, but the biosphere will be fine. Life will go on no matter what we do.
This is very reasonable and since the fate of us all is at stake I see no reason it can’t be a collaborative effort. How’s about every nation chips in a percentage of their gross domestic GDP in taxes to this end.
The discoveries found with is money are unpatentable and are a gift to the world like the Smallpox vaccine.
So, you’re just looking for affirmation. That’s not surprising. However, you might want to check out his recent threads before puckering up too much. 
Is it absolutely sure that we could not reach a Venusian state of affairs?
I don’t believe anyone holds this to be likely, but is it even possible?
No by anything humans could do.
No I don’t agree, for the same reasons that others have given.
First of all, your prophecies of doom are hyberbole, even if you say otherwise. “Humans, as a whole, have KNOWINGLY been destroying their planet’s ecosphere for 3 decades.” How do you define the “ecosphere”? What, precisely, do you mean by saying this?
Second, dictatorships do not have a good record on environmental issues or anything else. You give one person the power to force his will on a whole nation, and bad things tend to happen.
Third, you say that a hypothetical dictator can be replaced democratically within a few decades. That’s begging the question: what happens if the hypothetical dictator doesn’t want to be replaced by democracy? Since he has the power to force everyone else to do things, couldn’t he just force everyone to continue to respect his power?
Suppose we have a hypothetical dictator who was appointed by the Gozus of the world with absolute power, because they believe that he’ll reduce emissions. Instead, he chooses to increase emissions. What would the Gozus of the world do then?
It is very unlikely, and this is because when paleo climatologists look at the deep past they can see that when higher concentrations of CO2 appeared in the atmosphere there where corals in the Arctic circle and a rise of the oceans of hundreds of feet.
Currently with no controls of global warming gases scientists do expect to see a rise of the temperature to 4 to 6 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, leading to more later.
So, no Venus like hot house, but it will be hot enough to affect humans.
As I pointed before, we can prevent worse scenarios if we do a concerted effort, if not we can adapt in the end… with less people.
The problem is the bottle neck we are approaching and even if I’m optimistic that we can develop technology to adapt what many humans are doing now and the rise in xenophobia observed makes me wary. I foresee that the coming mass migration of people will lead to a lot of pain, unrest and even war as a result of the coming changes. If humans were perfect I would expect a lot of issues like that to be just an inconvenience once we have to face them, but I know enough of history and social science to be pessimistic about how nations will react to such an unrest.
Well, I rather do something to prevent such a future indeed, the earth would be fine indeed but while the earth changes to a new state we will not be. We need to protect our environment ASAP.
Naah. This idea that there’s some sort of homoeostatic balance is bunk. What we’ll have is a biosphere with a paucity of diversity for millions of years (think slimy oceans mostly full of jellyfish) - which is the only timescale that matters to us.
Yeah, on a ten-million-year timescale, the Earth will be fine. That’s irrelevant.
[QUOTE=Gozu]
If we had just learned about this 5 years ago, then I would also agree with your approach. The issue is that we’ve had 3 decades for the U.N to do something and everybody to agree but it didn’t work with global warming and we already ran out of time to keep the planet as it was. Now we’re just talking about mitigating the disaster.
We failed miserably. I’ve been tracking human efforts regarding Gwobal Wawming since the early 90s and it has been a series of crushing disappointments. I’m not going to put a positive spin on it. We done messed up, and we done messed up bad.
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Except that even today the public world wide isn’t behind the notion that global warming is caused by humans and that there is anything that can be done to ‘fix’ it…or, what, exactly needs to be done. Even assuming your world wide government dictatorship would try and implement whatever policy they (or you) THINK might help I have serious doubts whatever they tried would work because forcing such a plan down the throats of the world would lead to massive push back, to say the least. You’d be telling large regions of your empire (such as China and India) that, sorry, you guys need to take a decade or so off while we stop using your current power infrastructure and build something else for you. That’s not a problem, right? In the west, you’d need to tell people who have been in fear of nuclear power for decades that they better suck it up because we are going to build a shit ton of the things…oh, and they, too, must wait a decade or so while we roll these puppies out. Sorry about that. Oh, and no cars for joo either, mon…hope you guys can all bike to work, not that your works will still be in business.
Because if you are talking about time scales of 5 years then you’d have to go full bore draconian…hell, if we are talking time scales of 20-30 years it’s going to be pretty draconian. You just have an unrealistic view of how this would play out, as well as an unrealistic time scale for things to have changed, what the real costs would be, and about dictatorships to make stuff happen. You might want to actually LOOK at REAL dictatorships such as China, North Korea, Cuba, etc to see their track record on making stuff happen…then consider what it would be like to try and do something like you are proposing on a global scale.
I suppose the nuclear winter from putting down all the rebellions might counter act global warming at that, so maybe it would work after all.
“My fellow Earthicans…”