A few centuries. If only. Of course, they might be right if we didn’t quadruple the population in the span of a century.
Coal consumption is quadruple now, and oil and gas are both on the same scale. Easy to turn those centuries into decades by increasing emissions 6-fold.
Blaming population is also inaccurate. The new people are largely not wealthy (both country by country and within each country) and contribute less to the totall emissions than a quarter of the upper 10%.
Yeah the biggest problem is that for the people with all the money, not burning fossil fuels isn’t as easily profitable and that’s all that matters.
It is ridiculous to say population has nothing to do with it. We were pretty darn wealthy in the 1960s with very energy inefficient technology, and we still burned less than half the fossil fuels we burn now.
Yeah, the super rich use too much, but most people are just trying to live a reasonably comfortable life.
If I try to make a sandwich and spill 3+ times the amount of jam in the process, is that reasonable? Even in the existing system western - and american in particular - inefficiency is appealing.
I do not follow what point you are making. Methane leaks are a huge problem, but they do not come close to 300%.
If you are talking about efficiency, well, that is just the laws of thermodynamics. 100% efficiency is just not possible. But we are doing far better than we used to.
First off: The App bugged out and I can’t be arsed to write this all again, so this will be terse.
I’m aware of the Carnot-cycle.
But we are doing far better than we used to.
I wholeheartedly disagree. Or rather I pose the question: Efficiency in what regard? If we measure it as ensuring a good, nurturing life with minimal resource usage, we categorically don’t.
As an example, cars and longish distance travel: The average American commuter has to travel long distances to get to work, to socialize and run errands. This is mostly due to sprawl/zoning laws/big cars and bad public infrastructure. Spending this long time in traffic increases stress and makes people time poor. A lot of their earning are spend on paying off the car, gas and maintenance. Even more is spend by the public to maintain and build roads. The roads are heat trapping and increase run off speed, pedestrians are put at risk, the commuter gets fat. There are many know-on effects which can be reduced or eliminated by creating density.
Another example is food. A lot of it wasted (directly), much more is wasted by being “converted” to animal protein for human consumption (trophic-level).
Another is housing size and electricity usage.
The western societies - and the US in particular - waste a shit ton of resources to gain a very mediocre quality of living experience.
Or asked another way: Should efficiency of something be measured by how resource-intense it is to satisfy a “first-order” need of people, or by the n-th-order demand we established and want a drop-in-replacement for now (similar to trophic-levels)?
I wholeheartedly disagree. Or rather I pose the question: Efficiency in what regard? If we measure it as ensuring a good, nurturing life with minimal resource usage, we categorically don’t.
I don’t think anyone defines efficiency that way. You seem to be moving the goalposts. My point is today’s cars, furnaces, hot water heaters, air conditioners, and so on are far more efficient today than they were in years past.
As an example, cars and longish distance travel: The average American commuter has to travel long distances to get to work, to socialize and run errands. This is mostly due to sprawl/zoning laws/big cars and bad public infrastructure. Spending this long time in traffic increases stress and makes people time poor.
And that has nothing to do with efficiency. And much of it is a matter of opinion. Many also find city living stressful, living on top of other people and having less privacy. I do not particularly like my commute, but living in a dense apartment where I can hear my neighbors fart and having to be in packed public transit are no better.
It seems WFH is another solution. The pandemic greatly reduced carbon emissions. People could live in comfortable homes and not have to commute.
Another example is food. A lot of it wasted (directly), much more is wasted by being “converted” to animal protein for human consumption (trophic-level).
At times. But animals live on things that humans cannot eat, including grass. Factory farming is bad, sure. But we have turned to it because we have so many more to feed. We have eaten animals for millennia. Saying that it is now suddenly a problem is ridiculous.
Another is housing size and electricity usage.
Actually, household electrical use has been flat to falling. And the largest users are Southerners with intense AC needs. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=49036
The western societies - and the US in particular - waste a shit ton of resources to gain a very mediocre quality of living experience.
Have you seen how non-western societies live, especially the poor? You would not be calling our way of life mediocre.
Or asked another way: Should efficiency of something be measured by how resource-intense it is to satisfy a “first-order” need of people, or by the n-th-order demand we established and want a drop-in-replacement for now (similar to trophic-levels)?
So no distinction between a second-order need and, say, a 12th-order want? That is a false dichotomy. There are reasonable levels of comfort people should be able to avail themselves of. Let’s stop the rich from flying private jets and building multiple mansions rather than go after regualr people. I am sorry, but I am not content with only first-order needs met.
My point is, this planet has only so many resources to go around, and each person needs some to live a full life. So to provide that, we need to shrink the denominator so there is more to go around. Infinite growth is just not possible. We are in an overshoot: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Overshoot_(population)
You seem to be moving the goalposts.
I am not. I elaborated what I meant. Life in all developed countries could be better than it is and less-resource-intense at the same time, even without further adoption of drop-in-replacements.
My point is today’s cars […} and so on are far more efficient today than they were in years past.
Cars could be much more energy efficient than they are. Not accounting for the inherent step up by going electric. E.g. in Germany a study showed basically all stransmission, combustion etc. gains where nullified by the weight increase by the fetishization of oversized cars. And these cars grew by a multiple-fold of the “nessecary”-weight increase due to safety, before you comment on that.
Many also find city living stressful, living on top of other people and having less privacy.
If the externalized costs are fully internalized (as in, indirect costs now and the climate costs, which are largely unaccounted), I have no problem with that way of living. But surburbs would be quite empty if their inhabitants didn’t live off urbanites.
We have eaten animals for millennia. Saying that it is now suddenly a problem is ridiculous.
Since you are such a fan of the idea of overshoot (e.g.: I got mine, keep the gates), I hope you are aware of all the fertilizer we use in the process. The % of animals only fed on non-agarable land is miniscule in the grand scheme of things. We are running out of fertilizer early because of unsustainable farming practices and animal-based eating practices.
Have you seen how non-western societies live, especially the poor? You would not be calling our way of life mediocre.
Mediocre compare to what we could do we the same resources, if used with a little more foresight.
Actually, household electrical use has been flat to falling. And the largest users are Southerners with intense AC needs. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=49036
Well, I meant US compared to Europe. Congrats on not drifting off even further, but you still use more than twice the amount of electricity we use, for a non-better standard of living.
I am sorry, but I am not content with only first-order needs met.
The first order needs I “coined” are not basic needs as defined by maslow. They can be more. But society is better off reducing it’s dependence of additional levels of cruft which are a burden to pretty much everybody. There is room for living in suburbs (when surbanites pay their share), off grid, or lavishly. Even for some kind of “unnessary” things, but not on this widespread of a scale. And this feeds nicely in the Carnot-cycle point you made: Every widely adopted, big layer of unnesary conversion translates to a loss of usable energy in the process. These are big wins, hidden in plain sight.
Let’s stop the rich from flying private jets and building multiple mansions rather than go after regualr people. […] My point is, this planet has only so many resources to go around, and each person needs some to live a full life. So to provide that, we need to shrink the denominator so there is more to go around. Infinite growth is just not possible. We are in an overshoot: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Overshoot_(population)
This is such an elitist argument. “Everybody” wants the carefree “Après moi, le déluge” lifestyle the US has. And if everybody lived like the average american, we would way more fucked now than we currently are. Remember, the US emitted ~1/5th of all co2 emissions our current global civilization has ever emitted. Offloading the production to China and plateauing in raw-usage is just not cutting it. Europe is doing the same shit. But since you started even higher, your transition is even easier. Patting yourself on the back your little improvements where so much is on the table is like being proud of not beating your wife to death every week anymore, only every fortnight into a coma.
I’m confused about your grouping of fractions in the last sentence, did you mean that 90% of the population contributes less than 25% of total emissions compared to the other 10%. Or 90% of the population contribute less than 2.5% of the population (quarter of the upper 10% as you have written). Either way I believe it, but if it’s the latter meaning maybe combine your values to 2.5%
Yep, this is a real thing that was actually printed in a NZ newspaper.
Here’s the same text in an Aussie newspaper.
The text was originally a caption for this article in the March 1912 issue of Popular Mechanics.
The earliest use of the term “greenhouse gases” was in 1896. In April of that year, a paper by the coiner of the term, Svante Arrhenius, became the first published to suggest a link between CO2 and long-term climate variations. He would in his later work explicitly suggest that burning of fossil fuels will cause global warming.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences in their tribute to Arrhenius wrote,
While Arrhenius’ prediction [of warming] received great public interest, this typically waned in time but was revived as an important global mechanism by the great atmospheric physicist Carl Gustaf Rossby who initiated atmospheric CO2 measurements in Sweden in the 1950s.
In other words, in the 1890s-1920s, the idea of the greenhouse effect and anthropogenic global warming were widely known and popular and received public interest, but fell out of favor shortly thereafter. One must wonder why.
(Links and quotes courtesy of Snopes)
The concept of atmospheric greenhouse effect was proposed by Joseph Fourier in 1824.
Thank you for the correction, I guess I misunderstood what Snopes and the RSC was saying.
So I guess that means that by next year we’ll officially hit the 200th anniversary of the world’s worst “told you so”.
I think Fourier hadn’t made the link with industrial production of CO2. It’s also often the continuous work of a community and people tend to pick the one scientist that is closer to them culturally to personnify the discovery.
“Wait no, this is not the Fourier Transform I was talking about!”
The effect may be considerable in a few centuries
Yeah, we did a speedrun! Ah shit.
Eleventy-first*
Joseph Fourier in 1824 reasoned based on physics that Earth’s atmosphere kept the planet warmer than would be the case in a vacuum. Fourier recognized that the atmosphere transmitted visible light waves efficiently to the earth’s surface. The earth then absorbed visible light and emitted infrared radiation in response, but the atmosphere did not transmit infrared efficiently, which therefore increased surface temperatures. He also suspected that human activities could influence the radiation balance and Earth’s climate, although he focused primarily on land-use changes. In an 1827 paper, Fourier stated,[15]
The establishment and progress of human societies, the action of natural forces, can notably change, and in vast regions, the state of the surface, the distribution of water and the great movements of the air. Such effects are able to make to vary, in the course of many centuries, the average degree of heat; because the analytic expressions contain coefficients relating to the state of the surface and which greatly influence the temperature.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_climate_change_science
Nerds will immediately recognize this guy. Not too surprised a brilliant guy like this would have a correct theory about greenhouse gases.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Fourier
Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier (/ˈfʊrieɪ, -iər/;[1] French: [fuʁje]; 21 March 1768 – 16 May 1830) was a French mathematician and physicist born in Auxerre and best known for initiating the investigation of Fourier series, which eventually developed into Fourier analysis and harmonic analysis, and their applications to problems of heat transfer and vibrations. The Fourier transform and Fourier’s law of conduction are also named in his honour. Fourier is also generally credited with the discovery of the greenhouse effect.[2]
Next time you see this:
Thank mister JF. (Of course, Fourier analysis has had far wider reaching impacts and he had other contributions, obviously)
It’s worth adding that Fourier transforms allow pitch-shifting and time-stretching of audio, so he’s also ultimately responsible for Autotune. Thanks, Jean-Baptiste!
Here I was, happy to learn about a scientist / philosopher whose name I recognized from the audio world. And now you made me hate him. /s
…bodes well doesn’t it.
wow that’s crazy
