Dealing with the environmental crisis, Walter style

[Burnout]

I had a rough night worrying about the environmental crisis.  Then I thought, just get a few nuclear bombs to wipe out our civilisation, and the planet will recover from all our pollution.  Blow up the planet to save the planet.  I started to feel much better after that.

This is symptomatic of a wider problem with me.  I really identify with Walters mental health issues.  I?m thinking of getting an audio book on the Vietnam war.
A week ago I sent out a load of emails to my long suffering friends, warning that a no deal Brexit for the UK was gonna be like Narm.

Rather than becoming more dude, I worry I am being more like Walter.  Or rather Walter is just reinforcing my own issues.  Any ideas what to do about this?  Going bowling is not an option for me.  Thanks

[DigitalBuddha]

What environmental crisis would that be, dude?

[Burnout]

Oh I don?t know, the mass elimination of species, the huge amount of plastic pollution  both in the oceans, and in land fill, a warming planet which is likely to cause rising sea levels.  This combined with temperatures around the equator making it too hot to grow food, combined with mass flooding will cause a mass migration of people bringing about wars followed by the collapse of our civilisation.

That kind of thing.

[BikerDude]

Wouldn't nuclear bombs make it worse?
Let it run it's course Dude.
Sit back and enjoy the show.
You can't be worried about all that.

Besides as George Carlin explained "the planet will be fine. The people are fucked!"

[Burnout]

Yes, the fact that humanity is fucked is what is making me feel anxious.
Still maybe I should just try and do what I can for the environment and not worry about it too much, since the collapse will likely happen after the year 2100.
If I had kids, I?d probably be a nervous wreck by now.  Things are going to get tough for the next gen, and I don?t mean Star Trek.

[BikerDude]

Yes, the fact that humanity is fucked is what is making me feel anxious.
Still maybe I should just try and do what I can for the environment and not worry about it too much, since the collapse will likely happen after the year 2100.
If I had kids, I?d probably be a nervous wreck by now.  Things are going to get tough for the next gen, and I don?t mean Star Trek.

I don't think that things are as bad as we are led to believe.
I think here in the US we have 2 groups of screaming nuts that both express extreme and unreal versions of reality.
They both profit by inflaming and overstating the situation.
The world is not going to end any time soon.
We have serious problems that will have effects but taken on the whole human progress is marked by our upward progress.
Sure it's strikes and gutters but when said and done we will continue to improve.Including the environment.
Air pollution is nowhere near what it once was and once upon a time the rivers used to catch on fire because they were so polluted.
CO2 is of course a big concern. But we will deal with it. It's not the apocalypse the some would have you believe.
Not even scientists suggest that it is. It's a problem. But not the crazy "the world will end in 12 years" nonsense.
Things have always been gradual improvement and will continue to be.
At least until this latest generation who seem to genuinely constitute a skip in the firing of the cylinders.
As long as we don't lose sight of the prize and take some giant steps backwards.
Which admittedly we are in danger of doing.
Mostly because of this preposterous tendency to oversimplify our own histories and reduce it all to our imperfections while ignoring the obvious fact that things have consistently gotten better and better and better.
Rather than pick up the standard and continue the charge they seem to want to point their fingers and call everyone names and stomp their feet demanding the other people fix the world. And it's an attitude that has become acceptable.

This is a College professor today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fTYz50MLMM

[Masked Dude]

I agree with BikerDude on this one. As you said, nuclear weapons would wipe us out and the world would be fine. That should help you realize that it's not as fucked as the screaming ones say. We know nuclear weapons cause horrendous damage to the world, yet it would be OK. Well... wouldn't it stand to reason the world would be OK without the nuclear damage?

And, yeah, we need to work on pollution. Yeah, there's ingested and digested plastics. But as BD said, the air pollution is better than it has been in the past. We're understanding that we need to make changes. I'm old enough to remember the same people in the late 1970s and early 1980s saying by 2010 we'd be in the worst Ice Age ever because of the same things that they're saying are making us hot now.

It will take time to clean up our mess, but the world won't end in 10 years or 12 years or even 100 years. The ones making the movies and the PowerPoint presentations are making money off of humans while they're flying around in their private jets and driving around in their fuel-inefficient limousines, using the fossil fuels they tell us are bad. So, yeah, they're making money while not doing the changes they say. If they truly believed in what they're saying, wouldn't they just live stream these things instead of using those fuels nonstop?

Humans are relatively young. I think humans are around 200,000 years old. We're still infants when viewed from an evolutionary point of view. We'll learn to clean our rooms and not shitting on our homes soon.

[BikerDude]

I agree with BikerDude on this one. As you said, nuclear weapons would wipe us out and the world would be fine. That should help you realize that it's not as fucked as the screaming ones say. We know nuclear weapons cause horrendous damage to the world, yet it would be OK. Well... wouldn't it stand to reason the world would be OK without the nuclear damage?

And, yeah, we need to work on pollution. Yeah, there's ingested and digested plastics. But as BD said, the air pollution is better than it has been in the past. We're understanding that we need to make changes. I'm old enough to remember the same people in the late 1970s and early 1980s saying by 2010 we'd be in the worst Ice Age ever because of the same things that they're saying are making us hot now.

It will take time to clean up our mess, but the world won't end in 10 years or 12 years or even 100 years. The ones making the movies and the PowerPoint presentations are making money off of humans while they're flying around in their private jets and driving around in their fuel-inefficient limousines, using the fossil fuels they tell us are bad. So, yeah, they're making money while not doing the changes they say. If they truly believed in what they're saying, wouldn't they just live stream these things instead of using those fuels nonstop?

Humans are relatively young. I think humans are around 200,000 years old. We're still infants when viewed from an evolutionary point of view. We'll learn to clean our rooms and not shitting on our homes soon.

Yeah the people who are repeating the "12 year" meme forget that the last predicition was that unless we fixed things by the year 2000 we were screwed.
These people are beginning to look like the guys with the sign yelling over traffic that the end is near.
And it's important to note that scientists DO NOT support this 12 year bullshit.

Don't get me wrong. I think global warming is real, caused by man and a very serious problem.
But I suspect that the world 12 years from now will look like today plus the difference  between today and 12 years ago.
Worse storms more often. It might make the Bahamas and other areas essentially uninhabitable. More probably the tourist industry there will totally collapse and the entire area will be plunged into poverty. Tornadoes will get worse and worse. Sea rise will displace some areas. Etc...
All serious problems but not the end of the world.
I suspect that the worst short term potential problem would be a pandemic.
Rising temps increase mosquitoes and other vectors for disease.
We are on a serious trajectory toward a major pandemic. But in a way that would be nature righting it's self.
Restoring balance to the force.

Actually it's funny. Recently I've gotten into foraging. Including for mushrooms.
We had a big flush of honey mushrooms at our camp. I had never seen anything like that.
A huge collection of yellow mushrooms at the base of a pine. Naturally I had to figure out what they were and I sought out the identification forums online. What followed was a couple months of collecting and identifying shrooms. But the point is that it turns out that the honey mushrooms are bad news for the pine. And the whole area had tons of them. Pines and honey mushrooms causing a root rot disease because they are saporific.
I actually thought about how the shrooms are just like man. How we don't stand outside nature. We are both a product of and a part of nature.
The reality is that our impact was inevitable. Because we are humans. This is what humans do. And maybe part of what humans do is to learn from our mistakes and make the necessary changes. Probably not. We are too selfish. We don't do anything till the issues bite us personally in the ass.
But nature will deal with us. The world will survive. Just like the forest. Ups and downs. Strikes and gutters.

Here's a greatest hits of all of the BS predictions over the last decades.

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/18-spectacularly-wrong-predictions-made-around-the-time-of-first-earth-day-in-1970-expect-more-this-year-3/

Oh and BTW
Check out the shrooms. They are just amazing amazing life forms.
It's a very cool thing to get your head around. There is something very elemental and spiritual in them.
Not just the magic type.
Check it out..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPqWstVnRjQ

This will blow your mind.
The guy in the video above actually believes that fugal networks are sentient.
And intelligent.
I have been having some issue related to long term use of Ibuprofin.
Basically my liver is not as good as it could be.
Turns out that honey mushrooms have compound that is very effective at healing liver damage.
OK. That weird I guess. I personally had never before seen any such explosion of shrooms in my backyard.
Well one day a couple of weeks later I got out of my car at work and all over the lawn next to where I park my car every single day was a huge flush of Suillus Brevipes. Short stemmed slippery jacks. They are even better at healing liver damage. I filled 2 plastic shopping bags with them. And even though there were pines all the way around the parking lot (which these are associated with in a positive rather than soporific) the only flush was right next to my parking spot. Which I use every single morning.
Am I suggesting that mother earth rendered up it's love for me when I needed it?
If I was from any of a number of primitive cultures the idea would not be out of line.
Nothing in my world view makes this idea anything but lunacy. But it feels really really great to entertain the idea.
Mother nature's arms around me. It's a pleasant thought. The shaman would not find this out of line.

Suillusplacidus- Derived from Suillus family of mushrooms
Irofulven or 6-hydroxymethylacylfulvene is a novel semisynthetic anti-tumor agent derived from the sesquiterpene mushroom toxin illudin S of Suillusplacidus. Human liver cancer cells (HepG2 cells, Hep3B cells, and SK-Hep-1) were preferentially killed by suillin. Liu et al. (2009) found for the first time that suillin induces apoptosis in HepG2 cells as characterized by DNA fragmentation, phosphatidyl-serine externalization, activation of caspase-3, -8, and -9, depolarization of mitochondrial membrane potential, as well as release of cytochrome c into the cytosol. Suillin also causes significant increases in the protein levels of Fas death receptor, adaptor FADD protein, pro-apoptotic protein Bad and a decline of Bid.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3339609/

[BikerDude]

Of course they wouldn't find this odd either...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c6lYmOt8xPQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7rMqTMtmz0

Lotta in's and out's. Lotta strands.

[DigitalBuddha]

Oh I don?t know, the mass elimination of species, the huge amount of plastic pollution  both in the oceans, and in land fill, a warming planet which is likely to cause rising sea levels.  This combined with temperatures around the equator making it too hot to grow food, combined with mass flooding will cause a mass migration of people bringing about wars followed by the collapse of our civilisation.

That kind of thing.

Well dude, we just don't know...............

[Burnout]

Well the majority of scientists seem pretty convinced.  It?s not like it?s a few crackpots on acid. 
Oh wait, that?s us.

[BikerDude]

Well the majority of scientists seem pretty convinced.  It?s not like it?s a few crackpots on acid. 
Oh wait, that?s us.

Scientists (and all sane people) are convinced that global warming is real and caused by humans.
But zero legitimate sources support this ridiculous time frame that the left bangs away with over and over.
And at this point they have sunk so low that they are trotting out 15 year old girls rather than scientists.
And this shows the agenda. The pathetic use of kids to play on people's emotions and fears rather than stand up and make a case.
This is how they operate. They should be ashamed. And BTW it's not just on this issue.
We have two ridiculous extremes to choose sides from.
One is led by ridiculous deniers and the others are led by people who like to insist that they are backed by science but never seem to actually have any real scientists and instead they rely on kids and people making wild claims that consistently prove to be false.

Real science paints a picture that is very serious but not the end of the world in 12 years.
I really wish that it was possible to have real work on the issue but it seems that the room is overwhelmed by a couple of groups of toddlers screaming nonsense at the top of their lungs and it makes an progress impossible.
We are having bad effects and that will continue. But it is not the end of the world any time soon.

[DigitalBuddha]

Here's like an opinion, man................

Australia PM adviser says climate change is 'UN-led ruse to establish new world order.

Tony Abbott's business adviser says global warming a fallacy supported by United Nations to 'create a new authoritarian world order under its control.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/australiaandthepacific/australia/11591193/Australia-PM-advisor-says-climate-change-a-UN-led-ruse.html

[Burnout]

Climate change: ?Clear and unequivocal? emergency, say scientists
By Matt McGrath Environment correspondent
From
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-50302392

A global group of around 11,000 scientists have endorsed research that says the world is facing a climate emergency.

The study, based on 40 years of data on a range of measures, says governments are failing to address the crisis.

Without deep and lasting changes, the world is facing "untold human suffering" the study says.

The researchers say they have a moral obligation to warn of the scale of the threat.
◾'Regret' as US begins exit from UN climate accord
◾Quit 'coal addiction', UN boss warns Asia
◾Climate change 'making mountaineering riskier'

Released on the day that satellite data shows that last month was the warmest October on record, the new study says that that simply measuring global surface temperatures is an inadequate way of capturing the real dangers of an overheating world.




So the authors include a range of data which they believe represents a "suite of graphical vital signs of climate change over the past 40 years".

These indicators include the growth of human and animal populations, per capita meat production, global tree cover loss, as well as fossil fuel consumption.

October was the warmest such month on record according to new data

Some progress has been seen in some areas. For example, renewable energy has grown significantly, with consumption of wind and solar increasing 373% per decade - but it was still 28 times smaller than fossil fuel use in 2018.

Taken together, the researchers say most of their vital signs indicators are going in the wrong direction and add up to a climate emergency.

"An emergency means that if we do not act or respond to the impacts of climate change by reducing our carbon emissions, reducing our livestock production, reducing our land clearing and fossil fuel consumption, the impacts will likely be more severe than we've experienced to date," said lead author Dr Thomas Newsome, from the University of Sydney.

"That could mean there are areas on Earth that are not inhabitable by people."

How does this differ from other reports on climate change?

The study echoes many of the warnings that have been reported by scientists including the IPCC. The authors set out to present a clear and simple graphical picture of a broader ranger of indicators that can drive home to the public and to governments that the threat is serious while the response has been poor.

Tree loss needs to stop if countries are serious about climate change

Where it differs is in showing that while things might be bad, they are not hopeless. The researchers show six areas in which immediate steps should be taken that could make a major difference.

These are:

Energy: Politicians should impose carbon fees high enough to discourage the use of fossil fuels, they should end subsidies to fossil fuel companies and implement massive conservation practices while also replacing oil and gas with renewables.

Short-lived pollutants: These include methane, hydrofluorocarbons and soot - the researchers say that limiting these has the potential to cut the short-term warming trend by 50% over the next few decades.

Nature: Stop land clearing, restore forests, grasslands and mangroves which would all help to sequester CO2.

Food: A big dietary shift is needed say researchers so that people eat mostly plants and consumer fewer animal products. Reducing food waste is also seen as critical.

Economy: Convert the economy's reliance on carbon fuels - and change away from growing the world's gross domestic product and pursuing affluence.

Population: The world needs to stabilise the global population which is growing by around 200,000 a day.

So who are the scientists who have endorsed the report?

Some 11,000 researchers of all types and varieties from 153 countries have endorsed the research

The authors say they didn't target individuals so there is a marked lack of some of the bigger names in climate change research.

All the details of who's signed the endorsement have been published online.

"We have rising emissions, rising temperatures, and we've known this for 40 years and we haven't acted - you don't need to be a rocket scientist to know we have a a problem," said Dr Newsome.

What do the authors want to happen now?

The researchers are fed up because multiple climate conferences and assemblies have failed to produce meaningful action. However they believe that the growing, global protest movement offers hope.

"We are encouraged by a recent global surge of concern - governments adopting new policies; schoolchildren striking; lawsuits proceeding; and grassroots citizen movements demanding change.

"As scientists, we urge widespread use of the vital signs and hope the graphical indicators will better allow policymakers and the public to understand the magnitude of the crisis, realign priorities and track progress."

So what about human population growth?

The idea of trying to influence human population growth is highly controversial and has been deemed too hot to handle by UN negotiators. The authors say that looking the other way is no longer an option.

Human population growth needs to be addressed, say the authors

"It is certainly a controversial topic - but I think that population should be talked about when considering human impacts on the Earth," said Dr Newsome.

"It's important when presenting these results to look at some positives, and one of the more positive things that we've pulled out of this data is that there is now a slight decline in birth rates at a global level."

[Masked Dude]

If you're referring to the claim that 97% of scientists agree, you have to understand where that came from.

That figure started in 2009 when a master's student at the University of Illinois created a survey of two questions. It was sent out to 3200 scientists.. Only 79 of them were self-reported climate scientists with more than 50% of their peer-reviewed papers about climate change. Of those, 77 agreed that global temperatures had generally risen since 1800 (without quantifying how much) and that humans were a contributing factor. Now, were they directly responsible or was the mere presence causing any rise? Because in huge cities, it is hotter, partially from the presence of warm-blooded life.

Since then, the number 97% has been latched onto with such vigor as never seen before. And there is a lot of evidence that solar activity goes through ups and downs, too. That's something we can't control no matter what we do.

Science isn't built on consensus, either. Most people don't understand the scientific method, and that's where people prey on us with headlines and PowerPoint presentations. To be a bona fide theory, it has to make predictions that come true. The predictions made like no polar bears, ice ages, no polar ice, coasts moving inward by miles, etc. made over a decade ago still haven't come true.

I'm not saying we shouldn't do anything. I'm just saying that despite what we read, there is empirical evidence that we don't have the whole story. It seems every month is always the hottest one on record, yet if you look at temperature records, they don't agree.

And the world won't end in 10-15 years.

So do we have an effect on it? Of course. Can we work on what we're doing? Yes. Are we 100% to blame? Seems unlikely.