12-01-2019, 11:41 AM
(12-01-2019, 09:23 AM)David Horn Wrote:(11-28-2019, 04:36 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: Climate emergency: world 'may have crossed tipping points’
Warning of ‘existential threat to civilisation’ as impacts lead to cascade of unstoppable events
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It's truly sad that the world is moving into two camps: one actively trying to fix what's broken, and the other actively doing just the opposite. The screw-the-world crowd thinks things will be just fine, and most will be dead long before the disasters arrive in earnest. I have no idea how to change that one iota.
If I were to ask any people about the consequences of global warming, then it would be the agronomists. The world depends heavily upon rich grain production in the north-central United States, the Canadian Prairie Provinces, east-central South America, and Ukraine for the foodstuffs that people not subsistence farmers eat. We are capable of techno-fixes for just about every problem except hunger. Food production is finely tuned for conditions that now exist. Should the world run out of oil, then I can hardly imagine any better place for the production of solar energy than Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Libya, Iran, and Iraq, major oil producers, will also be suitable for that. So will the Australian Outback, Namibia, and Botswana, South Africa, and the American Southwest, not to mention Egypt and Pakistan which also have hot deserts but little energy production.
We cannot charge ourselves with solar power; we must eat either plants or animals that have eaten either plants or a succession of creatures whose foundation is plants that have synthesized carbohydrates out of carbon dioxide, water, and solar energy. Synthesizing foodstuffs might be possible, but that will be economically feasible for a smaller population. Nobody wants to be part of the population that will be obliterated.
Maybe Humanity can adapt to a slow, pole-ward migration of climatic zones and an increasing inundation of fertile lowlands. Before someone speaks of wheat fields and potato farms in Alaska, one needs also contemplate the time necessary for the soils to have the nutrients to allow such in Alaska. That will take a couple centuries at the least.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.