Posts by Lucy Stewart
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
My theory is that Lucy is the first visible manifestation of some emergent Iain Banks-style AI, like HAL, but nicer.
As long as you're lulled into a false sense of security, it's all good.
Strategically, yes, argument focussed on relatively mild[sic!] scenarios probably works in the medium term. What I think will happen longer-term and what could be done now, realistically exist at different levels and timescales, so I don't disagree with you.
One day, of course, the sun's going to expand and the planet will be left to the microbes (and then not even them). That's the really depressing long-term. Hopefully we'll be out of the solar system by then; as you say, it's the only long-term survival strategy. But it'd be nice if we could keep this planet habitable for our species for a while first.
How about we throw in some uncertainty principles like, technology and aliens, or alien technology:)
Since it's Friday, apropros of this, did anyone watch V on Wednesday (Firefly alumni!)? Was anyone else gobsmacked at the amount of conservative propaganda crossed with wingnut conspiracy theories?
-
Niven and Pournelle lied to me about the need for space exploration to avoid asteroid strikes? Lucy, you're destroying all my childhood beliefs.
Yeah, well, tough. ;)
More seriously, it's something we absolutely need to be concerned about, but funding for good telescope coverage will do way more than manned exploration, as sad as I am to say it. Of course, we're still pretty much screwed for ways to stop anything sizeable - or most things that aren't - but forewarning is a nice first step.
I can only go on what you actually write Lucy and you were coming across as very unrealistic about the biosphere's carrying capacity which is why I thought some nasty reality was an appropriate response
As I have repeatedly said, I do not disagree that climate change is serious or that we could do some very grim things to the only planet we've got (grim from our perspective, anyway.) Thanks for the education, but I do actually know a wee bit about past climate change.
Which is why I say that your Venus and Younger Dryas scenarios are vanishingly improbable, without other factors at play, and not at all what we need to be most concerned about when there are so many other effects of climate change that are perfectly motivatory (and less likely to give people disaster-movie flashbacks.) Call that unrealistic if you will.
-
Well, in about a billion years (well before the Sun really gets going as a red giant), not so laughable as solar flux increases. Venus, it seems, might have had oceans, and plate tectonics depends on oceans providing water to lubricate the subduction of the plates. In a real runaway greenhouse effect, the seas evaporate, the H2O breaks up under UV radiation, solar wind blows away the H2 and the O says hello to C and then we get the ninety Bar CO2 atmosphere.
Oh, sure, there are condiitions it could happen under. But as a result of human activity? I'd put it in the same place as worrying about a Ceres-sized asteroid crashing into the planet - could happen, maybe even will happen but a) we don't have the faintest idea of how to definitively stop it and b) there are a number of much more immediate dangers which need to be addressed first.
Do we then end up having to terraform Earth through geoengineering?
After having gone through quite a lot of the current literature on geoengineering (the ocean-fertilising forms, anyway) this actually frightens me more than anything else. The logic of following up dumping trillions of tons of carbon and nitrogen into the atmosphere with attempting to meddle with the system with no real idea of the end consequences escapes me entirely, especially when it involves mucking with the bottom of the ocean food chain. One of the proposals involves urea fertilisation. Because that's working so well in the Gulf of Mexico, guys - OH WAIT. The carbon-scrubbing things are better, but not remotely economical.
It's not that we shouldn't be investigating it, it's that it needs to be a method of last resort, rather than a handy way to avoid having to cut emissions.
-
So Lucy's faith that the planet and life will save is has been hollow since about 1850 when we began to seriously outstrip their ability to absorb what we were producing.
You implied we were on the road to turning into Venus. Or starting another Younger Dryas. Neither of those are particularly viable scenarios, given current conditions, and the Venus one is actually laughable.
I know the climate can be tipped quite quickly, and in ways that would be deeply uncomfortable for the continued existence of civilisation, or even humanity. Continued carbon emissions are not the way to go, and we need to be aware of the consequences - and that doesn't include the effect of things like the way we've doubled the reactive nitrogen available to global geobiochemical cycles.
But that doesn't mean the whole planet is going to become a barren high-pressure hellhole, and that's precisely the sort of hyperbole which is deeply unhelpful to public debate.
-
There is no physical reason why the earth cannot go the same way if we push enough CO2 into the atmosphere.
1) Plate tectonics.
2) Life.
3) Finite sources of human-usable carbon.We learn from some lake cores that the last time the Gulf Stream shut off the big freeze took mere weeks to happen and hundreds of years to turn around.
Yes - in a world with the Laurentide ice sheet to cap the North Atlantic with fresh water. It's possible, and it's possible very fast, but we'd have a hard time managing it.
It's not that I disagree with your basic point - the Holocene has been relatively stable, and climate changes can be triggered quite fast - but the current doomsday scenarios are more mundane and less Roland Emmerich than the ones you're describing.
-
My favourite recommendation is that to increase wages to catch up with Australia, we need to reduce the minimum wage
Well, if there are a lot of very rich and very poor people, the average wage could still catch up, right? I guarantee they're talking mean, not median, when they say average. Let alone mode.
-
You can agree that the science is about as settled as its ever going to get (and from my layman's perspective I'm not seeing any grand hoax exposed), while still arguing about the political response. That easier to get?
Much more so, and I agree with you entirely, but I'm still at a loss as to how you got there from the sentence you quoted.
-
That Gracewood woman is incorrigible. I recall a similar event at the closing party for a certain Wellington web conference.
The next step, clearly, is the White House.
-
I haven't bothered reading the report, but did they include any evidence that their suggestions would actually achieve what I thought was the goal - parity with Australia by 2025?
If we sacrifice enough poor people to the Gods of the Market, they will gaze favourably upon our unworthy selves, and lo, we will be transformed. Possibly with an unexpected discovery of mineral wealth.
-
Science should not treated like a subset of ideology or a political strategy.
I wasn't saying it was?
By "things" I meant aspects of the natural world and global geochemical cycles, rather than the politics of the matter. There's some damn interesting debates to be had there, and some that are quite important for determining policy (e.g. whether we will see a "carbon fertilisation" effect on crops.) There needs to be room to have those debates without having to stop to explain every five minutes what is *not* in question.