'Massive Amounts' of Carbon Sequestered for Centuries Released By Clearing Indonesia's Peatland (msn.com) 130
"Indonesia has been clearing tens of thousands of acres of densely vegetated peatland for farming, releasing massive amounts of carbon that had been sequestered below for centuries," reports the Washington Post, "and destroying one of the Earth's most effective means of storing greenhouse gases."
The country is home to as much as half of the planet's tropical peatland, a unique ecosystem that scientists say is vital to averting the worst results of climate change. Government leaders have made halting efforts to protect peatlands over the last two decades, but three years ago, when the pandemic disrupted food supply chains, officials launched an ambitious land-clearance operation in a push to expand the cultivation of crops and cut Indonesia's reliance on expensive imports. By transforming 2,000 to 4,000 square miles of what environmental groups say is predominantly peatland into fields of rice, corn and cassava, the government projects that it will achieve self-sufficiency in food... But disrupting the peatlands comes with devastating, likely irreversible costs for the climate, say environmental experts and activists.
"To restore these vast areas of peat forest being destroyed will take years and huge investments in labor and funds," said David Taylor, a professor of tropical environmental change at the National University of Singapore who has researched peatlands in Asia and Africa. To do it on the timeline that global leaders have set for the world to achieve net-zero emissions? "Near impossible," Taylor said... While peatlands make up just 3 percent of the Earth's land, they store twice as much carbon as all the world's forests combined, according to the United Nations. When peatlands are drained, layers of aged biomass that are exposed to oxygen-rich air decay at an accelerated rate, releasing carbon from bygone eras into the atmosphere.
Even worse, when the weather turns hot, unprotected peat dries out, becoming combustible. Already, environmental activists and villagers in Kalimantan, the Indonesian portion of the island of Borneo, say peatlands cleared by the government are fueling more-intense wildfires... Left intact, peatlands are naturally protected against fire. Once degraded, however, they produce infernos that are notoriously difficult to put out because they can travel underground, feeding on dried biomass yards below the surface.
Tropical peatlands are also threatened by development in Peru and Africa's Congo Basin, according to the article. But they add that there's something especially ironic about Indonesia's government project. "Research shows that tropical peatlands tend to be too acidic to grow crops.
"Indonesian environmental groups, including Pantau Gambut and WALHI, said they have documented widespread crop failures in areas targeted by the government's project. Rice planted in some peat-rich areas has had less than a third of the yield of rice planted in mineral soil, according to the groups' analysis."
"To restore these vast areas of peat forest being destroyed will take years and huge investments in labor and funds," said David Taylor, a professor of tropical environmental change at the National University of Singapore who has researched peatlands in Asia and Africa. To do it on the timeline that global leaders have set for the world to achieve net-zero emissions? "Near impossible," Taylor said... While peatlands make up just 3 percent of the Earth's land, they store twice as much carbon as all the world's forests combined, according to the United Nations. When peatlands are drained, layers of aged biomass that are exposed to oxygen-rich air decay at an accelerated rate, releasing carbon from bygone eras into the atmosphere.
Even worse, when the weather turns hot, unprotected peat dries out, becoming combustible. Already, environmental activists and villagers in Kalimantan, the Indonesian portion of the island of Borneo, say peatlands cleared by the government are fueling more-intense wildfires... Left intact, peatlands are naturally protected against fire. Once degraded, however, they produce infernos that are notoriously difficult to put out because they can travel underground, feeding on dried biomass yards below the surface.
Tropical peatlands are also threatened by development in Peru and Africa's Congo Basin, according to the article. But they add that there's something especially ironic about Indonesia's government project. "Research shows that tropical peatlands tend to be too acidic to grow crops.
"Indonesian environmental groups, including Pantau Gambut and WALHI, said they have documented widespread crop failures in areas targeted by the government's project. Rice planted in some peat-rich areas has had less than a third of the yield of rice planted in mineral soil, according to the groups' analysis."
But ... but ... (Score:1, Troll)
... they are non-European! How can we do anything other than applaud and laud what they do?!?
Oh wait, this means we are supposed to pay them not to, right?
Re:But ... but ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Iceland has the exact same problem, and we're European.
Well, not "exact" same - in our case, rather than clearing vegetation over bogs, we drained them with ditches (likewise for agriculture). The government incentivised it for much of a century; people drained them even when they didn't have plans to use them. The growing availability of excavators made it a relatively simple process.
One of the first people known to have spoken out publicly about it was our Nobel laureate, Halldór Laxness, criticizing the mass destruction of bird habitat. It was only more recently that we came to understand the CO2 impact of removing cold low-oxygen water from all this organic matter.
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Your bogs are nothing next to what your volcanoes are doing. What are you doing to end volcanic eruptions? Do you realize how much environmental harm you're doing by ignoring the volcano problem?
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There are in the ballpark of 50 eruptions on Earth per year which together produce a combined around 0,3 GT of CO2. Iceland normally averages one eruption every 2,5 years or so, though it's been more as of late, and let's just assume ours are more CO2 rich than average, so let's just say 10MT of CO2 per year on average. This page by contrastsays that Iceland's volcanoes only emit 1-2MT of CO2 per year [phys.org]. Though again activity has increased recently as Reykjanes has returned to activity, and there's also no
Re:But ... but ... (Score:4, Informative)
Some nuance:
* Draining bogs does stop their methane emissions. But the impact is much smaller than the CO2 impact, even though methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas, just because of the scale of the CO2 emissions. And methane's mean atmospheric residency time is just a couple decades
* Volcanoes actually cause cooling in the shorter term, due to all the SOx and PM that they emit - quite a lot, actually. Hence the term "volcanic winter". Back in the late 1700s Laki caused so much cooling (despite its high latitude, which makes it much harder) that the Mississippi froze at New Orleans and there was ice in the Gulf of Mexico.
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Let's also not forget 1816, the year without a summer.
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Holy shit, relax, it was a joke, but thanks for the info.
How could they tell, since your jokes are indistinguishable from your posts?
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Congratulations, you have been wooshed.
I am a humor-impaired Aspie, and even I could tell that the volcano remark was a joke.
Trolling for teh lulz [Re:But ... but ...] (Score:3, Informative)
If you read all of iAmWaySmarterThanYou's posts as jokes they would make a lot more sense, but in fact, no, he's just trolling for responses because he gets his lulz from how people waste their time answering his ignorance with facts.
I expect he considers that funny.
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Whoosh! It was a joke, son.
Your jokes are indistinguishable from your posts.
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There is a reason the meme, "The left can't meme" exists.
Yes, the reason is that the reich wing is humorless and bland, peaked in elementary school, and thinks "I know you are but what am I" is a mic drop.
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The point of OP is that since Indonesia is not on the villains list, it is very hard to blame them.
Yet the only people talking about the "villains list" are the people complaining about the villains list.
How about we all just work together to solve our problems?
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Because the benefits of clearing land at the schwerpunkt are obvious, and the benefits of not clearing it are diffuse and not economically rewarded in any meaningful way.
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The point of OP is that since Indonesia is not on the villains list, it is very hard to blame them.
Yet the only people talking about the "villains list" are the people complaining about the villains list.
How about we all just work together to solve our problems?
Sure - now how do we get Indonesia to not cut up and use all their peat land?
I use the oceanic plastics problem as an example. People blame the US and Europe, even though we are less than 10 percent of the problem. The government in the Philippines is at least trying. China doesn't care, and Thailand apparently doesn't either.
Things like that are a cultural thing. We recycle a lot of stuff here in the USA because even if not some high motives as protecting the earth, we just try to keep landfill was
Re:But ... but ... (Score:5, Insightful)
What is your solution?
1. The West should stop PAYING Indonesia to destroy the peat bogs. This will SAVE us money. The bogs are not being drained to grow rice. They are being drained to produce palm oil, which is SUBSIDIZED by Western taxpayers. This is a dumb policy.
EU biofuel subsidies driving palm oil production [iisd.org]
2. More investment in GMO rice, so less farmland is needed. Also, breed better tilapia and chickens for protein. This will help all tropical countries.
3. Encourage more education, especially for girls, which is the most cost-effective way to lower birthrates. At 2.2 BPW, Indonesia is already very close to the replacement level (2.1 BPW), but reaching that goal sooner will help.
4. Encourage American corporations to shift manufacturing outsourcing from China to Indonesia. Labor is cheaper in Indonesia, they are not a geopolitical rival of America, and they have a massive workforce most concentrated on Java. The foreign earnings from manufacturing will help them buy food instead of draining bogs and shift people off the farms and into the cities. Urban people have fewer babies, so that helps too.
5. Stop being hypocrites. Coal burning in North America and Europe is a WAY bigger problem than bog draining in Indonesia. So maybe we should clean up our own act before criticizing others.
BPW=Births Per Woman.
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Lowering birth rates below replacement is not a good thing. Anyone encouraging that is asking for societal collapse.
GMO rice is controversial because of the onerous patent protections that come with some GMO products. Also some countries won't import GMO products, though that may not be a concern here.
As for palm oil, interesting that the summary doesn't mention it.
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A Japan-level birthrate can lead to societal collapse. Indonesia going from 2.2 to 2.0 will not. But it will make it easier to feed all their people.
GMO rice is not patented. Patents are a bigger problem with conventional hybrids than with GMOs.
Indonesia does not restrict GMO crops. That's mostly an EU Dunning-Kruger thing.
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Lowering birth rates below replacement is not a good thing. Anyone encouraging that is asking for societal collapse.
GMO rice is controversial because of the onerous patent protections that come with some GMO products. Also some countries won't import GMO products, though that may not be a concern here.
As for palm oil, interesting that the summary doesn't mention it.
FTFA: "By transforming 2,000 to 4,000 square miles of what environmental groups say is predominantly peatland into fields of rice, corn and cassava, the government projects that it will achieve self-sufficiency in food"
Yeah, Seems odd that environmentalists are participating in the claimed fraud. Usually they like to be ecologically responsible. So throwing money at a government that is willing to lie to the world about what it is doing would be a great way to enrich people who have nothing to do with t
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What is your solution?
1. The West should stop PAYING Indonesia to destroy the peat bogs. This will SAVE us money. The bogs are not being drained to grow rice. They are being drained to produce palm oil, which is SUBSIDIZED by Western taxpayers. This is a dumb policy.
While a subsidy is dumb. I take it that it is our fault that Indonesia is destroying peat bogs purposely for money? Ands it is your position that the statement in the article is a complete lie? The statement is:
"By transforming 2,000 to 4,000 square miles of what environmental groups say is predominantly peatland into fields of rice, corn and cassava, the government projects that it will achieve self-sufficiency in food"
They are committing fraud, not growing food, and saying they are. You should let t
Re:But ... but ... (Score:5, Interesting)
... they are non-European! How can we do anything other than applaud and laud what they do?!?
Oh wait, this means we are supposed to pay them not to, right?
I get your point. It is similar to how oceanic plastic pollution is blamed on The USA and Europe.
Despite the provable fact that the leading countries in this problem are in rough order Phillipines, China, Thailand ans some countries in Africa.
Using plastic derived and formed in their respective countries.
I get UN Environment reports, and it is grimly amusing how they do a tapdance around the fact that the designated "good" countries cannot be blamed by narrative, and some like China, just ignore everything. So somehow someway this is the US and Europe's problem.
The admonitions tend toward telling teh evilz westerners to stop using plastic straws, then slipping in the cleanup efforts in the countries that are the real problem.
Um... you do know (Score:2)
It's disingenuous as fuck to blame them for a system we set up. Like when you're driving through a town where the highway's speed limit suddenly drops 15mph. It's a rigged system.
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It's disingenuous as fuck to blame them for a system we set up. Like when you're driving through a town where the highway's speed limit suddenly drops 15mph. It's a rigged system.
Thinking that somehow it is anyone else's responsibility for the people who are using the plastics and throwing the empties in the river is perhaps not well thought out.
These people could recycle plastics, no matter where they are made, or what equipment it is made on, or where the equipment comes from. That's the problem. They don't recycle the plastics that are produced and used in their own countries.
And at least in the Philippines, the government is working hard to get people to recycle. But it is
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What good countries? The west already dug up all our peat long ago.
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What good countries? The west already dug up all our peat long ago.
Hmm, you didn't read the article about Indonesia I guess. Indonesia id digging up peatland. Or is Indonesia a part of the west now?
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The article is condescendingly calling out Indonesia now but forgets we already dug ours up long ago. That's called hypocrisy.
If we expect them to preserve their peat, which we should, then we are the ones to pay for it ... indefinitely. Either that, or we need to replenish our own peat bogs.
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The article is condescendingly calling out Indonesia now but forgets we already dug ours up long ago. That's called hypocrisy.
If we expect them to preserve their peat, which we should, then we are the ones to pay for it ... indefinitely. Either that, or we need to replenish our own peat bogs.
Why? Indonesia is a sovereign country, and if they want to dig up their peatlands and de-sequester every molecule of CO2 and methane in them, why shouldn't they be allowed to do as they please with their peat. It isn't ours, it is theirs, and they own it.
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Ah-ha. Why was the article even written then?
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Ah-ha. Why was the article even written then?
Probably because some people don't think that is a good idea.
It is probably a little jarring to many who might possibly believe that there is only one allowable blame target.
I'm not certain of your location, but you do that yourself. Saying the US is being hypocritical because we dug up our peat bogs long ago.
Truth is, we're working to map and preserve them - even in other countries. https://www.fs.usda.gov/featur... [usda.gov] If you want to do some blaming, here's some info. The US is a real piker in the pea
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This is a joke right? If they were keeping that CO2 in Indonesian skys you'd have a point, but we all share the same atmosphere.
Follow the posting arc.
After evanh decided to blame it all on the USA - the standard move when one has no argument, I made a shock post.
But there is a bit of a point there. The USA is supposed to swoop in and throw money at Indonesia, with posters claiming that we must fix things ourselves. We must Educate Indonesian women so they stop having children, and claims that Indonesia is digging up all of their peatland to create palm oil for export to their enemies here un the US and Europe. I'm not certa
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To be honest, the USA is building new pipelines to pump crude into new plastic factories as we speak, so yes, USA is well responsible as a polluter.
Except making plastic is not the same as using it and throwing into the nearest river after you empty it. And you don't see the rivers of plastic here.
I'd done the research a couple years ago. The facts are that the USA and Europe produce somewhere around 10 percent of the planet's plastic pollution. Not something to brag about, but that means that there is 90 percent of it coming from somewhere else.
The research shows that the Philippines are number one, China and Thailand are close, and countries in
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Commons tragedy (Score:5, Insightful)
Government leaders have made halting efforts to protect peatlands over the last two decades, but three years ago, when the pandemic disrupted food supply chains, officials launched an ambitious land-clearance operation in a push to expand the cultivation of crops and cut Indonesia's reliance on expensive imports.
It's difficult to look at the big picture with an empty dinner plate.
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Absolutely... who cares about tomorrow if I can't live today? And if of course, like anyone, I'm too proud to depend on others, because nobody in their right mind would like to be in debt to the "west"
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Indonesia has a per capita GDP of about $5,000, which is not poor by Asian standards. Economically, they're doing okay.
Most cleared peat bogs produce palm oil for export, not rice.
Ironically, some countries subsidize palm oil as a biofuel, believing it reduces CO2 emissions. That's a dumb policy.
Disclaimer: I've been to Indonesia. The people there are very friendly, and the food is great.
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How about sharing a few apartments with Indonesia?
Why? Indonesia doesn't have a housing crisis. ... unlike say some European countries.
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This just delays that empty dinner plate and makes it much, much worse. It is difficult to survive long-term without strategic planning.
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Starve today for a better tomorrow?
Tempted to make this quote my .sig ;)
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pandemic disrupted food supply chains
Root cause right there.
Meanwhile, the Amish went right on farming. And refusing vaccinations. Some died, but most lived. Meanwhile, the first world went into a panic. Basically trying to save the lives of everyone with co-morbidities.
Pay up or Shut up (Score:2)
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Global Warming overwhelmingly affects Europe and North America.
...but not particularly more overwhelming than it affects the rest of the world.
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Nature has built in negative feedback loops. Hot places cant get any hotter as heat increases rainfall so it cant really cross 45 celsius.
Even if this were true, humidity increases as well, and humans die at a mere 35 degrees at 100% humidity.
Only the climate of cold places is changing noticeably.
The temperature change is higher at high latitudes (but not zero even at low latitudes). Effects, however, are seen at all latitudes.
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Global Warming overwhelmingly affects Europe and North America.
Actually, the people getting the worst of it are in Africa, especially in the arid regions south of the Sahara.
The drying climate in Mali, Niger, Mauritania, Chad, CAR, Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, and northern Nigeria is leading to famine and civil war.
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Global Warming is increasing rainfall in the Sahara. The Sahara has been greening over the last 20 years.
Citation needed.
Google shows plenty of articles about the Sahara drying out and expanding.
Here's one: Sahara, has grown by 10 percent since 1920 [nsf.gov]
I see none about it "greening".
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https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citation... [nasa.gov]
Which is true for most of the world as well.
https://www.nasa.gov/technolog... [nasa.gov]
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Entropy is entropy (Score:1)
That is nothing. What about all that Cambrian Carbon in coal .... there is no easy way out of this. Whether environmentalists like it or not, at some point we are going to have to resequester much of our carbon artificially. And FWIW, carbon is not the biggest problem. Aside from Methane, we just use a lot of energy and it's form doesn't matter that much in the end. It all ends up as heat. We have turned earth into a garden and we need to start thinking of it that way.
It is kind of pointless to go fr
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No problem. The Pierson's Puppeteers already had that problem lots of years ago, and they solved it by simply moving their planet a bit further from their sun. We just concentrate on developing the needed tech. Properly fed Indonesians sure could help into that.
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https://uncommondescent.com/ex... [uncommondescent.com]
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There is an easy way out - Just let mother nature have her land back.
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If we actually were generating enough power that the heat made a significant difference... well, we're already going to have to sequester the last 100+ years of extra CO2 we released, we could just sequester a bit more and make the planet cool more rapidly to even things out.
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It is not just our body heat. It is our civilization and machines and farms. What I said was correct. We are just shifting the heat imbalance from point to point and we generate a lot of heat in a paper thin atmopshere. It is not "basically zero". That is the understanding of an undergraduate.
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Whether environmentalists like it or not, at some point we are going to have to resequester much of our carbon artificially.
That is not a question of "like". It is a question of "possible". And it is not possible for the foreseeable future. Maybe in 100 or 200 years, but currently, we do not have the tech or the industrial base or the consensus on it. This idea is nothing but grasping at straws.
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Whether environmentalists like it or not, at some point we are going to have to resequester much of our carbon artificially.
Why? Carbon is an awesome element. It can be used in so many ways. Could you imagine a chain made out of perfectly aligned carbon atoms connected to a carbon weight in Earth orbit?
Where would you get the carbon you need when it is all sequestered away? If you are pulling carbon from the atmosphere, use it. Could you imagine using carbon bricks for building? Carbon roads?
So... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: So... (Score:3)
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Empathize with the Indo leaders they need to appease constituents now or they will lose.
The leaders were mainly appeasing the developers so they can get bribes. We all know the leaders do not care 1 bit about the farmers who will use the land. The leaders, developers and people selling the land are the winners. I doubt they care if the new farmland can grow anything.
And this is not just an Indonesia issue, this happens everywhere.
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...try to make their food supply more robust by contributing to the conditions that'll make growing stuff more difficult. Sounds like a great plan!
Humans can be amazingly short sighted. And I suspect that things will get much worse before they get better.
I guess that statement was a bit of a trueism. The amount of CO2 and methane being de-sequestered isn't leaving the atmosphere any time soon, and present day activities are just making it worse. Even here in middle PA, this winter is like the last decade or more. We are in what has always been the coldest part of winter - the last week in January, first week in February. Looking out my office wind
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Typical human mode of operation. Done something stupid? Try to fix it by doing something even more stupid!
More solar panels! More wind farms! (Score:3)
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Don't worry, world population is already shrinking, except Africa and that'll get there in a few more decades.
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Since most of that's in extremely poor nations, I doubt they're contribute much to the increased temperatures. We're probably past the point of no return, anyway. This planet, too, will be for the machines.
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I'm saying the rate of growth is shrinking. China and India both started shrinking last year.
Really the only place that's still growing very fast is Africa, as very poor people are uneducated and religious, and so don't use contraception. Or apparently, have much else to do. :D
Total unscientific BS (Score:2)
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I'm fairly sure we've established (Score:2)
There is insufficient caring to induce meaningful action.
All the short-term economic incentives push us to burn everything for fuel and damn the future, so that's what we're going to do. "Sacrifice now, benefit later" is not really something people are good at, Indonesian or not.
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Indeed. This does unfortunately also mean that people are not good at long-term survival. Essentially this is on par with eating the seed grain, just on a longer time-scale.
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They're not burning it for fuel. They're clearing it for use as farmland. So solutions that address the problem as one of energy (let's use solar and wind) are destined to fail.
I'm not sure how much land Indonesia holds back for other environmental reasons. But perhaps some tough choices must be made and they need to let go of some.
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>They're not burning it for fuel.
I recognized I was not 100% right after I submitted the post.
However, in this context I was going more for the general attitude of 'burn it all down' rather than suggesting the peat was actually being burned for fuel.
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And now I've totally skipped an entire word in my clarification post.
"I was not 100% clear right after".
Ugh.
The audacity (Score:2)
Subsidies (Score:2)
Log in your eye (Score:2)
Yeah, the third world has a long way to go in its environmental destruction until they reach the levels we've already achieved in our developed countries. And it's not going to stop. But hey, buy an EV, it will make you feel better.
So how many Gt? (Score:2)
Re: I see the tide turning in the comments (Score:2, Interesting)
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What atmospheric CO2 level optimizes Earth's human carrying capacity?
Can you define what that metric is, how do we measure "human carrying capacity"? Do those people ask that question because otherwise you're both just circling each other with empty rhetoric.
The issue with climate change isn't a CO2 number that goes up, it's the effect it has on the way we have structured things for a couple centuries now. The amount of CO2 isn't what going to kill us, people aren't going to be choking on the atmosphere but we've spent the better part of 150 years building a world in one t
Re: I see the tide turning in the comments (Score:2)
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Ok but how do you measure that? Is it an IPCC report or someone's report? This is just a new statistic as far as I know.
The food supply kinda moves with the population and CO2 supply in the air isn't the single largest mover in agriculture yields, I don't even know where to rank it. Is it enough of an increase to offset the negatives of a hotter climate?
Also I have heard all that, that information actually is climate reports, the issue generally is the upsides are smaller and much longer term and the downsi
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The wealthy elite would be far, far, far less wealthy with 1B than 8B
Also those elites would also know that population in developed nations is already declining and if they wanted to slow population growth they would take measures to develop the rest of the world faster in which so many of those overlap with the climate solutions.
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Cool, so it doesn't exist for humans because we are not deer and our food supply and other things needed for survival are not dependent 100% on the local environment.
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It's not a useful metric. The important thing isn't 'how many', it's 'where'. A warming globe shifts the locations where food can be grown, even if increased CO2 increases their size slightly. We may well end up in a stable state that supports a higher human population eventually, but if we have to go through massive social upheaval, wars, and mass migration to get there, I personally wouldn't say that's a good thing.
Of course, you never hear about any of this since those in power want to manipulate you so
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Re:I see the tide turning in the comments (Score:4, Informative)
What scientists have said "We're all going to die, everyone panic!"?
Since when was concern about global warming a major concern in the 1960s?
The models have been incredibly accurate [nasa.gov].
Sea levels continue to rise at forecast rates [blogs.egu.eu].
Climate change is increasing the rate of natural disasters and their severity - an extra $143B in costs in the past 20 years [nature.com], primarily in the most recent years, and 37% of heat-related mortality [nature.com] from 1991 to 2008, to randomly pick a couple of numerous aspects of this.
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There wasn't much scientific literature on climate around 1970, and of what there was, the overwhelming majority was predicting warming [wikipedia.org]. "Global cooling" was a press phenomenon, not a science phenomenon.
FYI, it's kind of hard to run a climate model on a 1970 computer.
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I believe that's an exaggeration. It's really only been about 45 years, though an argument could be made for 50.