Don't worry Random... we have Scott Pruitt taking care of all of your deep concerns. The Supremes killed the internet sales tax loophole today, that of which I am firmly in favor of their decision. So much has been destroyed by the internet already, the rotting corpse of the music industry is the one that haunts me the most, to this very day. Did you see Mick Mulvaney today? This cheese pizza analogy was classic... also notice the great Scott Pruitt to his left... say it with me... "Drain the Swamp"!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRr-drtPhlA

Don't worry Random... we have Scott Pruitt taking care of all of your deep concerns. The Supremes killed the internet sales tax loophole today, that of which I am firmly in favor of their decision. So much has been destroyed by the internet already, the rotting corpse of the music industry is the one that haunts me the most, to this very day. Did you see Mick Mulvaney today? This cheese pizza analogy was classic... also notice the great Scott Pruitt to his left... say it with me... "Drain the Swamp"!!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRr-drtPhlA

 

 

The music industry has been a rotting corpse since the 1920s. It's just more obvious now. 

 

Nearly all the "cures to climate control" are an economical weaker variety of already established technologies.

Climate control? Really? That's not possible. The best we can do is create competitive fuels that are CO2 neutral, or better yet, result in more CO2 removed than will be burned back into the atmosphere. That is of course, if CO2 is still the problem... if that has changed I'm not aware of it. And, if "nearly all the cures are an economical weaker variety"... then you guys have much more work to do before attempting to force it on people. Let me say it a bit clearer... we don't want anything that is more expensive, or ineffective for our needs. We will keep what we have if that's the case, and things don't work out well for governments that force the people to the will of someone else. Especially us here in the USA. We kind of like marching to our own drummers... yeah, that's plural... everyone has their own here. 

 

 

Climate change, unsure how I typed out "control" in that one

 

CO₂ is very much still a problem, doubt it will ever not be (unless you like acid rain?).

 

Basically you are railing for an economy blindsided in short-term projections and profits. You'd advice buying a 1$ cheap iron screwdriver now (and next year, and next year, and next year, ..) over buying a 15$ galvanised steel screwdriver that will likely outlive your grandchildren. If you don't buy the cheapest possible commodity every time, I want to hear your "excuse" why you bought a more expensive one!

 

You want more proof of the private sector not always being for our society's best interests? Just this year we not only discovered but also found the cause of a spike in CFC's (the ozone depleting molecule's) emissions, it was due to cheap and nonenvironmental dismantling of old (western) refrigerators and airco's. All done for a quick profit while possibly negating decades of work to prevent our ozone layer from being thinned to dangerous levels.

CO2 is very much still a problem

Still a problem? I thought it was the problem... what we exhale is so bad, Obama's EPA labeled it a poisonous gas. Glad that's over, but if there is another problem you must get it out there, because it looks like they are solving the carbon dioxide situation.

 

I still have the same screwdrivers I bought 40 years ago... but I did have the option of buying cheaper ones at the time. If you ban the cheaper ones from being sold, what do you think happens to the price of the expensive ones when there is no longer any competition? The price goes way up. Then what happens? Government regulations. Then what happens? No one wants to make screwdrivers anymore because there is no profit. What happens next? Government subsidies, more debt, and we all go belly up because you wanted everyone to buy the same fucking screwdrivers. Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.

You know, I'm not even gonna with this any more. This shit is literally my field (There's a reason I know about the project you linked) and while I don't recall what besty does, I remember it being chem eng/chem sci related and this is a big damn topic for that in general. 

 

You are *extremely* misinformed on this topic. Wherever you're getting your information from is either equally misinformed or outright lying to you. 

 

Also betsy, your analogy is flawed. This isn't cheap screwdriver vs expensive. This is having "Discount Dan" do the electrical in your house at for his slumlord special rate, vs actually spending the time and money to have it done to code.  One costs you more, but also doesn't involve having your house burn down because a metal paperclip shorting the breaker box is cheaper than a breaker, and set it up so you're putting 90 amps through substandard aluminum wire. 

 

Naturally certain people whined about government overreach and suppressing competition when folks decided "maybe houses burning down in preventable fires is bad".

LOL! I would never have "Discount Dan" do my electrical that is not up to code... I wouldn't be able to sell my house. What you guys really need to do is get everyone in your field, and all the chemical engineers together, and create a bubble for you all to live in. Then you can stay away from all our barbeques, cars, planes, plastic, refrigerators, Jacuzzis, air conditioners, all our red meat, and everything else you find so damaging and offensive about us. You can all be safe within your brilliance, and we can be left alone to die with our ignorance. We can all agree to part ways because of irreconcilable differences. Choose California... Please!

 

CO2 is very much still a problem

Still a problem? I thought it was the problem... what we exhale is so bad, Obama's EPA labeled it a poisonous gas. Glad that's over, but if there is another problem you must get it out there, because it looks like they are solving the carbon dioxide situation.

 

I still have the same screwdrivers I bought 40 years ago... but I did have the option of buying cheaper ones at the time. If you ban the cheaper ones from being sold, what do you think happens to the price of the expensive ones when there is no longer any competition? The price goes way up. Then what happens? Government regulations. Then what happens? No one wants to make screwdrivers anymore because there is no profit. What happens next? Government subsidies, more debt, and we all go belly up because you wanted everyone to buy the same fucking screwdrivers. Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.

 

 

If you think this 1 piece of tech solves our CO₂ issue, we would have solved this issue decades ago (as the tech is that old!).

 

You keep thinking some dystopian pseudo-communist world order is being created to combat some arbitrary issue trumped up by nearly all scientists the world over. The entire line about this killing capitalism is flawed beyond reason, trying to say the EU is already such a place just shows the idioticy in such statements. We still run on a mostly capitalist economy, we just have added certain regulations to strengthen and/or protect our society and its future, the USA does the same!

 

 

Also betsy, your analogy is flawed. This isn't cheap screwdriver vs expensive. This is having "Discount Dan" do the electrical in your house at for his slumlord special rate, vs actually spending the time and money to have it done to code.  One costs you more, but also doesn't involve having your house burn down because a metal paperclip shorting the breaker box is cheaper than a breaker, and set it up so you're putting 90 amps through substandard aluminum wire. 

 

Naturally certain people whined about government overreach and suppressing competition when folks decided "maybe houses burning down in preventable fires is bad".

 

Just making the point of having foresight, something Lys clearly shows as having, but only when it is economical. Well Lys, you got kids, those are economical at all, why you wasting your own $$ on them? >_>

 

also, FREEDOM!!!

 

LOL! I would never have "Discount Dan" do my electrical that is not up to code... I wouldn't be able to sell my house. What you guys really need to do is get everyone in your field, and all the chemical engineers together, and create a bubble for you all to live in. Then you can stay away from all our barbeques, cars, planes, plastic, refrigerators, Jacuzzis, air conditioners, all our red meat, and everything else you find so damaging and offensive about us. You can all be safe within your brilliance, and we can be left alone to die with our ignorance. We can all agree to part ways because of irreconcilable differences. Choose California... Please!

 

Only fringe idiots, which "our side" ostracizes, are the ones demanding your scaremongering level of change. Moderation is a key word in all of this, so is enviromental.

 

 

If you think this 1 piece of tech solves our CO2 issue, we would have solved this issue decades ago

If carbon dioxide is the problem, like everyone in your field has been complaining about for decades, then yes, this one piece of tech is the solution. You appear to think we can't build enough to do the job. I hate using the same words of empty promises as Obama, but yes we can, and it's a serious compromise that I can support... because it actually does something about the problem.

 

If there is another problem that is causing the apocalypse, you better start talking about it because the carbon dioxide excuse has run it's course. Maybe you guys can throw together some quick graphs, and get some tenured egghead to make the case to Congress that it's not just carbon dioxide... Thanos has all the Infinity Stones, and if we don't send all our money to the Paris Climate Accord immediately... the world will come to an end.

jfc lys.

 

 

Ok so let's try to break this down. I don't have time top sit here and write the full thing at once, so you'll get it in parts.

 

Let's start with the sensationalized apocalyptic scenario. It can happen, and in fact it caused the single greatest extinction event in earth's history so we should consider it a really big gun held to humanity head, but at the moment we're a long ways off from it being an issue. 

 

So CO2 isn't the strongest greenhouse gas. Of the "common" atmospheric gases, methane is about the worst of them, we just produce so much less of it than CO2 that it's a minor issue (and the release of it into the atmosphere of it has leveled off since the late 90's anyways).  However the earth has a massive amount (somewhere in the neighbourhood of a Tera Tonne trapped in metastable reservoirs in deep ocean ice. tl;dr version, methane and water can combine to produce methane hydrate, which can freeze. As  methane hydrate cycles through the ocean, some of it gets into the ocean  sediments and freezes there, where it remains trapped.  If you had the cool chemistry teacher in high school, you might have got to light some methane ice on fire as a demonstration. Same Stuff.

 

The key issue here is that this stuff is *frozen*. Which of course carries the implication of "can melt". As the oceans warm, this stuff can melt, causing the methane to be released. IF this happens on a large scale it is a run away event, with the release of that much methane providing significant positive feedback to the warming effect. We're pretty sure this has happened at least twice in the earth's history and damn sure of one of those. 

 

This is bad in it's own right since it significantly accelerates the warming of the earth, however if the runaway goes on long enough, it also comes with a couple major side effects for the ocean, namely significant increase in ocean acidity and a significant decrease in available oxygen in the ocean.  I don't know if you've kept fish, but you may have noticed they're temperamental little bastards who need a fairly narrow range of environmental conditions. A severe case can and will result in the extinction of  upwards of 90% of marine life. And if fish don't like those conditions anaerobic bacteria do, most relevant to us are sulfate-reducing and  methanogenic bacteria. The former releases hydrogen sulfide into the atmosphere (which is pretty bad for terrestrial life) and the later release more methane. This itself kicks off another feedback loop, as marine life dies off, their corpses sink into the deep ocean waters, where decomposition pulls more oxygen out of the water, leading to greater anoxia. In the worst case scenario those anaerobic bacteria  begin to dominate the chemistry of the oceans and the oceans begin emitting massive amounts of poisonous gas. 

 

At this point, we've probably already started to see a feedback effect between the atmosphere and the biosphere. North America in particular is vulnerable to this, the 1930s and the dust bowl provided a fairly minor example. The american and canadian prairies were, not that long ago a littreal desert. If this hasn't happened already, that release of hydrogen sulfide will be more than enough to start choking life out on the continents. It's possible enough gas is released to bascily fumigate the continents. More likely it just starts to kill off plant life, which reduces biomass available as food to herbivores and insects, and the food chain collapses in on itself. 

 

 

This is not hypothetical. This has happened, and it resulted in the single greatest mass extinction in the earth's history, and even life that was effectively immune to past extinction events (namely plants and insects) or more weakly effected (sea life) was massively reduced. At the Permian–Triassic transition, what is now Siberia saw the single largest volcanic event we know of thus far. By the time it ended area only slightly smaller than the contiguous united states (or about the size of australia if you prefer) covered with volcanic rock averaging about half a kilometer deep. This would have been rough enough, but unfortunately for life Siberia has of the richest and most easily accessible coal and gas fields in the world, and 250 million years ago they were vastly richer still. Were, because this volcanic activity was more than sufficient to light those  coal and gas fields on fire. By time they burned themselves out  somewhere between 10000 and 100000 billion tons of CO2 was released into the atmosphere,  kicking off a cycle of global warming and climate change leading to the P–T)extinction event, or more  colloquially The Great Dying. Upwards of 90% of all species went extinct. 97% of all ocean life died. 70% of terrestrial life, including insects died. It ended the synapsid and the other proto mammals and lead to the dominance of Archosaurs (ie dinosaurs and a few other things) for the next 200 million years. Plant life died off to such an extent that there are no coal beds worth talking about dating to the early triassic period. The extinction event that did in the dinosaurs 200 million years  later despite itself being one of the worst in history was minor in comparison.   

 

 

 

Fortunately, this at least is not an immediate concern. While exactly what level of CO2 release was needed to set the earth on that course, the general consensus is that humanity is a good couple orders of magnitude of having released that much. This isn't to say that we're not capable of it, our release of CO2 into the atmosphere has thus far followed an exponential growth pattern, and if we don't check that then over the next couple centuries it will become a much more prominent threat. If we do reach that tipping point, we'll no more be able to avoid the consequences than if you put a gun to your head and pulled the trigger. It's a threat to be taken seriously, and we don't solve the issue humanity goes the way of the dinosaurs.  But we have time to disarm that particular time bomb and if it does go off we'll have absolutely earned it.   

 

 

Of more disastrous consequences will be much lower levels of warming leading to the melting of the antarctic ice sheets and that mentioned atmosphere-biosphere feedback effect leading to megadroughts in North America. But this is quite enough typing for now. 

Earth is about 4.5 billion years old and has experienced a few episodes of life ending events. Our planet regenerated life every time. If you believe you can stop this from happening again, the Thanos thing would be more convincing. There are just some things that are not in our ability to control. Just like all of us humans, the planet will eventually die. The sun can explode in a massive ball of radiation, or merely burp and burn us up at any time. We can't do anything about it.

 

The only real path to take is to learn how to live off this planet. It's the only shot we have for a chance to keep the human race from eventual extinction. It's not the most enjoyable thing to talk about. I will support things that improve life, and I'll support things to maintain our civilization, but that's on our terms. I will not support other countries, other governments, or massive behavior overhauls because someone with their own agenda cries that we're all gonna die if we don't do what they say. I'll just flip them off and continue to live my life the way I want to. Many of my fellow Americans have died in the past to ensure my continued ability to do just that.

 

If you think this 1 piece of tech solves our CO2 issue, we would have solved this issue decades ago

If carbon dioxide is the problem, like everyone in your field has been complaining about for decades, then yes, this one piece of tech is the solution. You appear to think we can't build enough to do the job. I hate using the same words of empty promises as Obama, but yes we can, and it's a serious compromise that I can support... because it actually does something about the problem.

 

If there is another problem that is causing the apocalypse, you better start talking about it because the carbon dioxide excuse has run it's course. Maybe you guys can throw together some quick graphs, and get some tenured egghead to make the case to Congress that it's not just carbon dioxide... Thanos has all the Infinity Stones, and if we don't send all our money to the Paris Climate Accord immediately... the world will come to an end.

 

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CO₂ is 1 of the issue (as also outlined by RH), and while this 1 piece of technology is a definite step forward, it will at best remedy 1 factor of our issue. Not to speak about this being both a stopgap on 1 factor AND having only localized effects (sure the atmosphere is all connected, but it is also vast!).

 

Perhaps I should throw some more wiki pages at you, but I sense it is a meaningless effort on my part. A combination of "only 1 problem" with "1 fix-it-all or bust" will get us nowhere.

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Earth is about 4.5 billion years old and has experienced a few episodes of life ending events. Our planet regenerated life every time. If you believe you can stop this from happening again, the Thanos thing would be more convincing. There are just some things that are not in our ability to control. Just like all of us humans, the planet will eventually die. The sun can explode in a massive ball of radiation, or merely burp and burn us up at any time. We can't do anything about it.

 

The only real path to take is to learn how to live off this planet. It's the only shot we have for a chance to keep the human race from eventual extinction. It's not the most enjoyable thing to talk about. I will support things that improve life, and I'll support things to maintain our civilization, but that's on our terms. I will not support other countries, other governments, or massive behavior overhauls because someone with their own agenda cries that we're all gonna die if we don't do what they say. I'll just flip them off and continue to live my life the way I want to. Many of my fellow Americans have died in the past to ensure my continued ability to do just that.

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Again we are not stating that everything dies, nor even that humanity will. But society sure will change, and some societies on our Earth are better protected from these changes then others (so hello immigration!). We are discussing the changes due to HUMAN interaction with our enviroment, we offcourse can't stop a Siberian traps mass extinction that RH gave as example. We are discussing making sure our current impact is both dimished, historical ones negated and making sure our future interaction is as unimpactfull as possible.

 

Second alinea, I have colourized for emphasis. The green part is "our" stances, the red part is the historical fallacy that got us into this mess. Our entire planet, our biosphere, our human civilization, it is 1 interconnected and interdependent system (or organism if you'd like), you CAN NOT decry both a complete lack of empathy towards our communal future while thinking you personal will be fine.

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If you had the cool chemistry teacher in high school, you might have got to light some methane ice on fire as a demonstration.

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We never had that cool teachers, but I do recall seeing a '70-'80s (aint sure) video clip of a deep-sea digging rig hitting a deposit and its aftermath: a boiling/burning ocean. Sadly can't seem to find the clip again

I did have the cool chemistry teacher, but I went to private military school, so we cut everything open and blew everything up. It's also where I learned how to tweek arithmetic to gain a desired result.

 

I also learned that doctors are a species of their very own. They truly believe they are superior humans. More often than you know, they really have no clue what is ailing you, but they will never admit it because they fear of giving the impression that they are just as stupid as the rest of us. They will always have a diagnosis, and they will always have a solution... even if it's wrong. After 4 different doctors, and thousands of dollars later, you will make your own diagnosis and the solution is there is no cure, and you will just have to live with the problem they didn't have the honesty to inform you that they just don't know what it is. So, I am extremely skeptical of anyone that nails up a piece of paper on the wall that says they are smarter than I am.

You be nailing alot of papers in this thread boy...

The only things I have nailed up are pictures of my family, a Beatles picture, a picture of a Gibson Flying V that says "Play Hard", a framed picture of the 9/12/09 march on Washington DC, an American flag, and a wood sign that says "Alcohol... Because no great story ever started with someone eating a Salad"... you now know what is on the walls in my man cave.

The easiest solution: kill all humans.

The easiest solution: kill all humans.

I'll compromise... let's just kill the bad half.

Doubt there is a "bad half", perhaps a "shitty 1%"

 

also, Beatles? As american? I act surprised.

I have mad respect for The Beatles. I own pretty much everything, and they were the beginning of it all for me. Legendary.

Which half is the bad half?

 

How about we just line everyone up and let the fastest survive?

Which half is the bad half?

 

How about we just line everyone up and let the fastest survive?

Score one for catching my sarcasm. Can't run as fast as I used to, but I'm a better shot, so I win anyway