It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!
Subscribe to our Patreon, and get image uploads with no ads on the site!
Base theme by DesignModo & ported to Powered by Vanilla by Chris Ireland, modified by the "theFB" team.
Comments
The point is that we shouldn’t take the risk that “it’s just the sun causing it” while we still think we have a chance of minimising the problem but doing nothing because a handful of rich guys like V8 engines and cheap coal power plants.
I’m not trying to shut down the discussion - quite the opposite - but at this point we’ve had 40+ years of discussion and by all accounts from those actually studying it, we’re at a turning point which may the last opportunity we have to make serious reductions and have them actually make an impact on the outcome. Maybe they’re wrong and it won’t stop the warning, but the worst case is we won’t be wasting oil for power (itself a valuable, finite, raw material for other things), and we’ll have access to cleaner, cheaper energy which will just make everyone’s life better anyway.
The major players are already taking big steps - India and China are rapidly turning away from fossil fuels and towards solar & wind. But we have a media in the west who seems to think it’s ok to present an argument from 2 sides as if both sides are equally valid, when in fact one side is almost entirely correct and the other side thinks it knows better based on no real evidence, and won’t listen.
Getting to an end game of billions of sensors would not only be bad for the environment, but its culmination could result in running out of power for other things, the researchers say. And they say mankind should start addressing the problem immediately.
Currently the internet makes up a paltry 5 percent of worldwide electricity use, the students claim. But it’s growing rapidly. In fact, it’s growing at rate that’s faster (7 percent) than the overall global electricity consumption of 3 percent.
But at a time when we urgently need to reduce our impact, greenhouse gas emissions from aviation continue to grow. For example, since 1990, CO2 emissions from international aviation have increased 83 per cent. The aviation industry is expanding rapidly in part due to regulatory and taxing policies that do not reflect the true environmental costs of flying. “Cheap” fares may turn out to be costly in terms of climate change.
"Even if Google and others had led the way toward a wholesale adoption of renewable energy, that switch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions. Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach."
Google’s best-case scenario, which was based on the most optimistic forecast for renewable energy, would still result in severe climate change, because of continued use of fossil fuels and existing critical concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, which will continue to warm the planet even if we shut down every fossil-fueled power plant. NASA agrees.
In other words, two major points of the Google’s conclusion are:
There are projects on the go which aim to remove excess CO2 from the atmosphere and reuse it. Global Thermostat has been developing innovative tech to capture carbon. Climeworks is a Swiss-based tech company that is developing a way to extract CO2 from ambient air. There is little interest from governments in this tech.
So where do we go? I'm for having a reasoned debate rather than just virtue signally and telling people to fuck off.
Remember, it's easier to criticise than create!
Imagine you're driving a car on a long, straight road. In the distance there's what looks like a bend, and as it comes closer you start to realise it's quite a sharp bend. You look at the speedometer and notice that the car is speeding up - not much yet, but it's getting to the point where you're not sure if you will get around the bend. Then you look out of the side window and see that the road might actually be going downhill, and you ask yourself whether the car is speeding up because of that, or whether you've got your foot down too hard on the accelerator.
What do you do - do you keep your foot on the accelerator and hope you get round the bend anyway, given that if you don't you will crash, or do you take your foot off the pedal a bit until you've slowed down enough that you think you might be able to get around the bend, even if you're not certain whether it's the hill that might be making you speed up?
You'd have to be a complete idiot to do the first, wouldn't you? But that's essentially what human-cause climate change "sceptics" are suggesting... keep your foot down and if we crash, it's not our fault. And climate change deniers just say the speedometer is faulty. Who would you want driving if you're a passenger?
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
I think to deny the overwhelming evidence that we are affecting the climate is akin to being a Flat-Earther, but what pisses me off is governments always going for the soft targets.
Even Greenpeace have admitted that the ship which brings Volvo cars to the UK puts out more carbon emissions in that single journey than ALL 200 cars on board will over their entire combined lifetimes, but who gets hammered time and time again with emissions taxes?
Yup, motorists.
Remember, it's easier to criticise than create!
Remember, it's easier to criticise than create!
Remember, it's easier to criticise than create!
You'll probably laugh, but I'll mention it because this is a guitar forum... I have decided I will probably never buy another valve amp. It's not the only reason, and I know in the grand scheme of things it's a vanishingly small proportion of excess energy use, but valve amps are more wasteful than they need to be to do the job. They're slightly more energy-intensive to build than solid-state amps too, due to the extra transformer (or two, depending on design). As with many things there are some counter-arguments - valve amps are louder in relation to their power consumption so you can use a less powerful one, and if well-made will probably outlast less repairable solid-state ones, but overall I think it would probably be good to move away from this technology.
If the same thinking was applied to a lot more areas of life it would probably add up to a useful difference, and there are some where it's much more definite than that. I've also decided never to buy another incandescent light bulb (apart from special applications where there's no alternative) or CFL and switch to LED - but not all at once, only when the old bulbs fail. If everyone did that - many already are - it will make a significant difference.
If everyone simply drove slightly more slowly with less acceleration and braking then total fuel consumption would fall quite significantly for no real penalty - it doesn't even increase average journey time much because that's more limited by traffic than top speed. This actually happened when fuel prices peaked a few years ago, and although they're now back up to the same level, people have got used to it and have gone back to driving too fast.
"Take these three items, some WD-40, a vise grip, and a roll of duct tape. Any man worth his salt can fix almost any problem with this stuff alone." - Walt Kowalski
"Only two things are infinite - the universe, and human stupidity. And I'm not sure about the universe." - Albert Einstein
Your efforts are impressive on a ground level, but it also needs a vast majority get behind it - lobby politicians, making actual choices that encourage corporates to take action on a large scale.
But I dont really understand how we’re arguing about this?!
Remember, it's easier to criticise than create!
Remember, it's easier to criticise than create!
Some people have exactly the same attitude to climate change......it won't affect them and their grandchildren can worry about it when the time comes .
People are just as entitled to be selfish as they are magnanimous whether that's right or wrong.
I read somewhere (no idea how true )that a field with a large herd of over 100 cows does more Global warming damage in one day than all the vehicles in London in one day..........If that is actually true, and .if thats the case it puts it into perspective and I wouldn't have any hesitation buying a C63 AMG MERC if I could afford it........so call me selfish.
Remember, it's easier to criticise than create!