Climate Change/Mass Extinction Megathread

[DGuller]

I switch back and forth between heat to 22C and then AC to 10C.  I think it's too unfriendly to the environment to just keep it at 22C all the time.

[grumbler]

You need to get better at virtue signaling.

... but no matter how hard we try, none of us will get to your exalted level

Well, at least you try your hardest.  In all modesty, I don't try at all.

[Jacob]

You need to get better at virtue signaling.

... but no matter how hard we try, none of us will get to your exalted level

Well, at least you try your hardest.  In all modesty, I don't try at all.

It's awe-inspiring to be in the presence of such incredible natural talent like yours.

[Eddie Teach]

I switch back and forth between heat to 22C and then AC to 10C.  I think it's too unfriendly to the environment to just keep it at 22C all the time.

Jeebus. That's too cold.

[garbon]

I still have a fan on to sleep as my apt likes to stay between 23-25c until later in the year.

[Richard Hakluyt]

Older people, especially those with high blood pressure, need to be careful about not heating their living space sufficiently. There is a risk of the blood thickening and causing clotting; it is one reason why there are excess winter deaths, few of them die of hypothermia but there are more heart attcks and strokes.

https://ukhsa.blog.gov.uk/2019/01/16/how-your-body-copes-with-cold-weather/

[Tamas]

22C is way too hot.  I would be thinking of turning on the AC at that point 

I keep indoor temp at about this, 21.5-22C during winter.

You need to get better at virtue signaling.

I have to defend these Northern freaks of nature - people here do genuinly think it's normal they keep their homes at around 18C during the day.

EDIT: I had an immigrant ex-colleague who had the theory that this is due to British parents exposing their babies to the cold so their heat receptors get all messed up.  I wouldn't go that far.

[The Brain]

I hope you low-temp guys never travel to Russia in winter. Indoor temps would fucking kill you.

[Josquius]

if things go bad enough they we drop to a pre-industrial age we have more to worry about then finding oil to restart

Sure. But I'm talking on a geological time scale rather than a human one here.
Less Fallout and more clean slate and many hundreds of thousands of years from now man ( or octopus)  has to start again.
We've burned through all our easily accessible resources to get us to an industrial level of civilization. That just doesn't seem possible to happen again on earth given the expected life cycle of the sun and how long this stuff takes to form. We have passed the point of no return and must now either be the space sperm we were born to be or wait until our civilization collapses.

As an aside point this I believe is a brilliant never used Sci fi plot point. Less aliens that develop nukes then kill themselves or whatever and more aliens on a resource poor planet that just don't have the capacity to ever get to an industrial level.

[Berkut]

What really depresses me about all this is that my pessimism is not at all based on any doubt about our ability to handle this crisis, as large as it is.

I am very sure that we could absolutely deal with this. I don't even think it would be that hard in theory. Super easy, barely an inconvenience!

Nope. My pessimism is completely based on what appears to be our collective decision that we simply don't want to.

[The Minsky Moment]

I hope you low-temp guys never travel to Russia in winter. Indoor temps would fucking kill you.

No problem then, just stay outdoors.

[The Minsky Moment]

We've burned through all our easily accessible resources to get us to an industrial level of civilization.

That's not only incorrect, its almost the opposite of the problem.  There are still very considerable amounts of readily accessible fossil fuel resources given current technology.  It's burning them that is creating the problem.  The problem is not scarcity of burnable (and carbon generating) resources but their pesky abundance and our reluctance to quit them.  Our challenge is not running out of resources but generating the political will to leave them in the ground.

The sun is constantly delivering 174 quadrillion watts to the Earth.  Even after reflection and efficiency losses, there is plenty of available energy to harvest without burning a thing, and without having to do fancy things like transmit energy from collectors in orbit. Nuclear generation is 70 year old technology that can supply large amounts of constant power on demand without emission.  It is simply a question of making the enormous investments in infrastructure that are required to speed up what would normally be a leisurely transition of energy regime.

[Josquius]

We've burned through all our easily accessible resources to get us to an industrial level of civilization.

That's not only incorrect, its almost the opposite of the problem.  There are still very considerable amounts of readily accessible fossil fuel resources given current technology. 

Kind of snookered yourself there.

Current technology is far ahead of 18th century technology.
The problem you outline is that our ability to extract harder to get resources keeps increasing which keeps prices affordable.
Knock everything back to square one and we're no longer running ahead of accessible resources.

[Agelastus]

We've burned through all our easily accessible resources to get us to an industrial level of civilization.

That's not only incorrect, its almost the opposite of the problem.  There are still very considerable amounts of readily accessible fossil fuel resources given current technology.

I thought Tyr was talking about the outcome if global warming led to a civilizational collapse; that we had exploited the easily accessable resources that were usable with a lower level of tech and thus would not be able to bootstrap our way back up.

That the current society was the only chance we had to develop and maintain a high tech society for our species because of the depletion of resources that can be accessed at a lower level of tech than the current one.

I first saw this idea expressed in a novelisation of the Robotech series (Harmony Gold's butchered Macross version) from the 1980s. Not a particularly scientific source but the argument seems reasonable on the surface.

[mongers]

22C is way too hot.  I would be thinking of turning on the AC at that point 

I keep indoor temp at about this, 21.5-22C during winter.

You need to get better at virtue signaling.

I have to defend these Northern freaks of nature - people here do genuinly think it's normal they keep their homes at around 18C during the day.

EDIT: I had an immigrant ex-colleague who had the theory that this is due to British parents exposing their babies to the cold so their heat receptors get all messed up.  I wouldn't go that far.

I had a bit of a shock earlier, the heating came on for the first time in several weeks, I think the thermostat was set to about 15.5C* and it's been a noticably colder day today. 


* I think it's heat sensor is significantly off, the downstairs temperature was probably 2C warmer.