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I think it would take a whole lot more "Damage" to make it unlivable for people - not that we're incapable. But we could very well have our attitudes adjusted by a giant volcano eruption.

At some point, the sun will take away our atmosphere - what happens between then and now (aside from near extinction events) is a matter of our own manipulation and us keeping ourselves playing with things. as we get in to carbon capture in the future, then it'll be something else. And something else after that, and so on.

It would be a fun thing to take up a pool to see if anyone can guess what the next crisis will be after carbon.
I'll say it will be food shortages first, as the climate warms we'll have no rain for months and then a month of none stop heavy rain and flooding, oh wait a minute sorry that's already started. We've got about 50 years before everyone wishes we had another 50 years to fix it. Seriously we are in deep shizzle.
 
It would be a fun thing to take up a pool to see if anyone can guess what the next crisis will be after carbon.

Probably a raw materials shortage, especially rare elements needed for the high tech we will have to create in order to continue living here or exploring the galaxy.
 
I'll say it will be food shortages first, as the climate warms we'll have no rain for months and then a month of none stop heavy rain and flooding, oh wait a minute sorry that's already started. We've got about 50 years before everyone wishes we had another 50 years to fix it. Seriously we are in deep shizzle.

We really aren't.
 
I'll say it will be food shortages first, as the climate warms we'll have no rain for months and then a month of none stop heavy rain and flooding, oh wait a minute sorry that's already started. We've got about 50 years before everyone wishes we had another 50 years to fix it. Seriously we are in deep shizzle.

I haven't seen what you're talking about. I'll bet there's more news of extreme weather events since there's more news now and more sharing of information.

I just looked at local historical data from about 150 years ago and got a 30 year mean precip of 37 inches.

I checked the last 30, and it's 39.6

It looks like we have fewer drought years in the later span. While we do have local goofs telling us that we have more drainage issues now than we did in the past due to the "more intense rainfall from climate change", they seem to fail to report the reason for serious problems. For example, along the local highway here is a conduit that's about 10 feet in diameter. For years, we had flooding problems halfway through the stretch of highway "due to climate change and more intense rain events". And then about five years ago, a parking lot caved in due to underground erosion (the conduit had collapsed, culvert, whatever you'd like to call it). They fixed it and no roadway flooding since. And I haven't heard anyone here talk about climate change affecting the roadway (but I'm sure they have something else it's affecting).
 
by the way, please tell me something accurate -something measurable that I can check in two decades.

(another entertaining one in the last couple of years - fender is no longer going to offer "Swamp ash" guitars in their standard line because they want to be more ecologically responsible and the delta where ash comes from is going underwater due to "rising sea levels".

...I figured I'd read about it, and what's happening is the following - ash is increasing in price and the land where it's more commonly harvested in low density billets is sinking.....but that's the key word - it's sinking and since we've introduced flood control through river management, the natural floods that refresh the delta aren't occurring, so it's not getting layers of silt deposited in the delta territory. Thus, it's sinking and nothing is continuing to build it up.

Fender took the chance to virtue signal and gave a factually false explanation, as well as probably a false reason for not using the wood - they're not using the wood because to them, another $20 of wood cost on a $1500 guitar is something they just won't absorb. I can almost guarantee they'll be willing to add $100 or $200 to a limited run guitar, and they'll forget when they acquire a huge lot of wood at wholesale that it used to be eco responsible not to use "swamp" ash).
 
At the risk of an overly long post, I'll condense it for those that don't read the whole thing.

A very close friend of mine worked for 18mths at Rothera base in Antarctica, while he was there as the base Electrician he had plenty of time to get to know what really is happening and everything you hear about ice melts and Carbon dioxide being released from the melting ice is nothing short of frightening.

Since he returned home the breaking of the ice sheet/shelf resulted in the whole base having to be moved or risk loosing it to the Antarctic ocean as a crack was traveling in a direction that would have separated a huge slab of ice with the base on it.
This is happening because the sea temperature is rising and the ice melt increases the sea level around the world, as the ice melts it releases more Co2 and methane into the atmosphere which traps heat and warms the ocean further which melts the ice faster which the releases more gas and so on.....

So if you think this is some sort of conspiracy to get you to give up your car then your wrong, you WILL give up your car but only when it's too late to make a difference.

There's a frozen country, sorry the name escapes me, where they drill the ice and set light to methane gas and it burns for days with flames shooting from the ice as is better to do that then let the gas escape into the atmosphere.

Ok beer o'clock.
 
I started taking steps to reduce my carbon footprint 20 years ago which had nothing to do with electric vehicles. Instead it involves changes to how you approach travel and fuel usage. I'm unconvinced that the current approach to battery powered vehicles works or is sustainable - at least in part because of concerns I have about the production of lithium and other rare metals used in the manufacture of EVs (e.g child labour in the mineral mines, etc) and the environmental impact of refining the raw materials. I seem to recall reading at least one article which demonstrated that in terms of carbon footprint, taking the manufacturing carbon footprint into account, an mid sized EV would take 10 to 12 years to better a conventional petrol car.

Of all of you guys going on about personal EVs, just how many of you would give up driving your personal car and instead use public transport? All the time. How many of you (in the UK) actually live within commuting distance of your workplaces? If you want to be sustainable you don't buy an EV - you just stop non-essential driving. And at the end of the day most driving in cars is non-essential. That's what I actually did a 6 years ago and I can tell you it is one **** of a wrench. Yes, I still use a van to take my kit onto site at the start of a job (and off it at the end of the job - I hire a secure site vault for the duration and avoid sites with poor security) as well as to go to the inevitable call outs , because i am never going to get half a tonne of kit and materials on the train, but my annual mileage is now well under 4000 miles - down from 16k plus in 2010.
 
Less travel just means people working nearer home. There's plenty of scope, not just the internet - I remember travelling off to work in Nottingham on a biggish job a few years back, only to discover that a Nottingham firm was working just down the road from where I lived. We must have been passing each other in opposite directions on the A52
 
And your attitude is exactly why we are going to be in unnecessary trouble.
Of course, it's all my fault. I don't know why I couldn't see it before, I will immediately sell my EV and by a Bathurst VXR8 as I've always been a petrol head and I'll take down my rain water reclamation system so my £100 p.a. water bill goes back up to £600 and remember to leave the lights on when I go out and of course leave the tap running when I brush my remaining teeth. Then I'll be just like you.
 
Our horizons may be limited by personal relationships - children, grandchildren, great grand children. No one we will ever meet in our lifetimes is likely to be around in 150-200 years - probably rather less as I am already 60+.

The less plausible the future "catastrophe" and the more selfish/self absorbed we are, the less important immediate action seems..

Prosperous developed bits of the world need not worry too much - they can afford to "fix" the environment for many decades to come. The rest of the world will not be able to avoid the impact of sea level rise, drought, floods, pollution, habitat destruction etc.

There are too many people on the planet - the somewhat fatalistic proposition that a mass cull needs to happen is harsh but possibly realistic. We just hope that we can personally avoid it.

In my mind there is no doubt that the climate is changing:
  • consuming in 3 centuries fossil fuels which took 300m years to lay down is unstable
  • consuming other natural resources and materials which will be unavailable or unaffordable in the next 100-200 years is unsustainable
  • delaying action until adverse changes are evident to an uninformed casual observer will be too late, or the cost of reacting or mitigating will be very "painful".
A bit like ignoring a roof with a possible leak - leave it long enough and carpets, curtains, plaster furniture will need replacement. Then the wood rots!

I was going to use a covid lockdown analogy about the impact of leaving action too late. I then realised views on this are somewhat divergent!
 
Material shortages have already started, the blocking of the Suez canal had substantial repercussions with ships missing their allotted port times and having to leave with half a cargo still on board, the shortage of containers is having a massive effect on the costs of raw materials, check out Travis Perkins just for one.
 
I know we've drifted of topic about EV's, but I don't think that's a bad thing, as its highlighted a bit about renewable and usage. But a lot of this has been about personal consumption of energy, which although is important, its not the whole picture.

How many times have you walked through town of an evening, to be greeted with shops, closed for the day, but with fully lit window displays, or wandered into a 24 hour supermarket, with half a dozen customers in, along with 24 hour service stations and late night businesses, even off licenses, newsagents etc that's not accounting for glaring shop signage.

If we stepped back from this pervasive 24/7 culture, even if only to 18 hour culture, we forced businesses extinguish lighting and signage within 30 minutes of closing, that in itself is going to reduce load massively.

We bang on about personal usage, but given the growing levels of fuel poverty, do you really believe masses of the public really waste so much energy, when with prices rising continually rising most people are trying to save energy, not out of wishfulness for the environment, but purely out of necessity.

You can only use what you can afford,

I think there is more businesses and industry can do, but they must be forced into it, as consumers are priced into energy poverty, but businesses just up their prices to cover energy rises, but the consumer can only cut usage.

There is a diminishing return on consumer led efficiency, as we are already fast approaching the point that we just can't do more or we've done what we can within budget.
 
Might be ok if I lived in Norfolk or somewhere else flat, everywhere around here is uphill.

You can buy them with an electric motor, or install one yourself. Sadly, I decided to sell it when I moved to the UK from Germany, and buy a car instead. If the roads in the UK were as cycle friendly as Germany, I wouldn't need a car.
 
I haven't seen what you're talking about. I'll bet there's more news of extreme weather events since there's more news now and more sharing of information.

I just looked at local historical data from about 150 years ago and got a 30 year mean precip of 37 inches.

I checked the last 30, and it's 39.6

It looks like we have fewer drought years in the later span. While we do have local goofs telling us that we have more drainage issues now than we did in the past due to the "more intense rainfall from climate change", they seem to fail to report the reason for serious problems. For example, along the local highway here is a conduit that's about 10 feet in diameter. For years, we had flooding problems halfway through the stretch of highway "due to climate change and more intense rain events". And then about five years ago, a parking lot caved in due to underground erosion (the conduit had collapsed, culvert, whatever you'd like to call it). They fixed it and no roadway flooding since. And I haven't heard anyone here talk about climate change affecting the roadway (but I'm sure they have something else it's affecting).

Temperature and weather changes
A 2012 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report confirmed that a strong body of evidence links global warming to an increase in heat waves, a rise in episodes of heavy rainfall and other precipitation, and more frequent coastal flooding.

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia › wiki › Cli...
Climate change in the United States - Wikipedia
 
Temperature and weather changes
A 2012 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report confirmed that a strong body of evidence links global warming to an increase in heat waves, a rise in episodes of heavy rainfall and other precipitation, and more frequent coastal flooding.

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia › wiki › Cli...
Climate change in the United States - Wikipedia

Something measurable, predictive. Not calling it after the fact.
 

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