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Climate Change & Natural Disasters Thread

myDeaconmyhand said:
I think that’s an over simplistic interpretation of habitable. We don’t use our natural resources in a way to maximize habitability, but to maximize profit. If you consider fresh water to be the main resource that makes land habitable, then much of the western US should not be habitable now, and will soon be uninhabitable again. Las Vegas is one of the fastest growing cities in the nation, yet 4/5 of its water supply comes from a Lake Mead which is quite literally disappearing before our eyes.
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I used a double negative when I didn't mean to. My bad.

Why aren't we further along with desalination than we are? The ocean is rising and will soon threaten more coastal cities. Why don't we figure out how to use more seawater vs. massively overuse rain/snowmelt runoff & aquifers? I understand desal is currently expensive & energy intensive, but wealthy Middle Eastern countries (who have no water) are investing in plants like crazy. Seems like that should be very high on our technology/infrastructure needs list.

There's an interesting recent pipeline proposal from the Pacific to the Great Salt Lake, with many possible diversions along the way (including possible desalination plants). Would help a lot of areas, and re-cover the toxic lakebed that is already causing the SLC metro to have some of the worst air quality in the world. It would be a monumental task and is certainly unlikely to happen, though.
 
myDeaconmyhand said:
Ultimately I think most “overpopulation” arguments are spun out from gross capitalist eugenics viewpoints, but in the case of America we literally do have large populations of people living in arid desert land that we have irresponsibly irrigated, and as desertification takes hold those populations will sooner than not have to migrate.
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Good post. We don’t have too many people. We have too much capitalism hoarding resources.

If we invested in making those places inhabitable long term, we could but is it really worth it?
 
I don’t argue with the other points, but I also feel we have way too many people. Almost all our planets problems improve if there are fewer of us. Nature is resilient but she can be overwhelmed.
 
It’s not the number of people. It’s what they’re doing to the planet.
 
What they are doing isn’t going to change. It’s only going to expand.
 
Tobacco Road said:
I don’t argue with the other points, but I also feel we have way too many people. Almost all our planets problems improve if there are fewer of us. Nature is resilient but she can be overwhelmed.
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It’s more about capitalism and greed than it is about abundance. Most of the damage to the planet has been done by rich Europeans seeking more riches.

Having said that planetary birth control would help many many problems.
 
tigerswood said:
I used a double negative when I didn't mean to. My bad.

Why aren't we further along with desalination than we are? The ocean is rising and will soon threaten more coastal cities. Why don't we figure out how to use more seawater vs. massively overuse rain/snowmelt runoff & aquifers? I understand desal is currently expensive & energy intensive, but wealthy Middle Eastern countries (who have no water) are investing in plants like crazy. Seems like that should be very high on our technology/infrastructure needs list.

There's an interesting recent pipeline proposal from the Pacific to the Great Salt Lake, with many possible diversions along the way (including possible desalination plants). Would help a lot of areas, and re-cover the toxic lakebed that is already causing the SLC metro to have some of the worst air quality in the world. It would be a monumental task and is certainly unlikely to happen, though.
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Pumping that water would also be energy intensive.
 
Alright I get being energy intensive isn’t ideal but we need water so ….. just do it?

Although we can stop growing pistachios
 
MHBDemon said:
We can stop watering golf courses.
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Most golf courses are irrigated with reclaimed water and many coastal courses have switched to grasses that can be fed with brackish water.
 
only stat I can find (from 2014) says that 13% use reclaimed water

genuinely curious about this since the received knowledge is that golf courses are a tremendous waste
 
I stand massively corrected on that.

I fully support courses cutting back and going brown. Turf doesn't have to be emerald green to be playable.
 
Course I grew up on used river water from the Cape Fear. Not sure how they managed that set up.
 
BacktoBack said:
Course I grew up on used river water from the Cape Fear. Not sure how they managed that set up.
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A pump with a screen on the pipe? I've used lake water to water my lawn for 15+ years. It's water. Unless you are right at the end in the salty part, the grass is not looking for Fiji water.
 
You realize not every golf course is located in a place enduring a drought, right ?
 
birdman said:
It’s more about capitalism and greed than it is about abundance. Most of the damage to the planet has been done by rich Europeans seeking more riches.

Having said that planetary birth control would help many many problems.
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1.5 billion of the world's 8 billion people live in China which produces 30% of all global CO2 emissions, while EU emissions are declining. I'm sure you want to blame American consumerism or colonialism or something, but it's a global problem and China is a global player. BTW, the US is #2 and India is #3.
 
Ideal sustainable world population has been estimated by "The world's most renowned population analyst [who] has called for a massive reduction in the number of humans and for natural resources to be redistributed from the rich to the poor." at 1.5 to 2 billion people. (2012)

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/apr/26/world-population-resources-paul-ehrlich

Cambridge economist, Sir Partha Dasgupta, says (2021):

Justice toward other species can be plugged into Dasgupta’s model. For example, assuming we reserve half the Earth primarily for the use of other species, the range of optimal global human populations shrinks from 0.5 – 5 billion to 0.25 – 2.5 billion people. Beyond any such calculations, adding a direct moral responsibility to avoid extinguishing other species strengthens our duty to effectively address human overpopulation.
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https://overpopulation-project.com/...an-population-an-eminent-economist-weighs-in/

Three Stanford ecologists stated (1994):

Until cultures change radically, the optimum number of people to exist on the planet at any one time lies in the vicinity of 1.5 billion to 2 billion people, about a third of the present number, three California ecologists estimated in an article published in the journal Population and Environment.
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https://news.stanford.edu/pr/94/940...change,the journal Population and Environment.

However, it can be assumed by The Tunnels that all of these estimates are based on eugenics and racism and that all discussions of world overpopulation should be backward looking instead of forward looking.
 
#thanoswasright

#hulkshouldhavesnappedanotherhalfaway
 
Climate Change & Natural Disasters Thread

BiffTannen said:
However, it can be assumed by The Tunnels that all of these estimates are based on eugenics and racism and that all discussions of world overpopulation should be backward looking instead of forward looking.
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That was a well balanced post with informative sources and needless snark. I actually wrote a paper on The Population Bomb for a science class, its very good book and scary as hell, and it’s gotten a ton of liberal pushback. I don’t disagree with any of the sources you posted. You seem to have misunderstood my anecdotal point about “capitalist eugenics” - which is that most western references to “overpopulation” are criticisms directed specifically at impoverished third world countries, or poorer uneducated populaces.
 
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