I live

[Jacobus Loki]

........and will be around in the not-terribly-distant-future-I-hope.

In the meantime, I could not resist posting the link-

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/james ... l-warming/


Smug smile breaks into snickers, leading to giggles, segueing directly to chortles, guffaws, belly laughs and full-blown crying, laughing self sick, laying in the middle of the floor kicking legs in the air. The tears don't stop and a fewmet-eating grin is now frozen to my continence.

Gasps out between sobs of laughter mixed with relief.

See you!

[Gman Russell]

Jacobus, get yer ass back here! I need some Yardistani citizens!

[Aurangzeb Khan]

........and will be around in the not-terribly-distant-future-I-hope.

In the meantime, I could not resist posting the link-

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/james ... l-warming/


Smug smile breaks into snickers, leading to giggles, segueing directly to chortles, guffaws, belly laughs and full-blown crying, laughing self sick, laying in the middle of the floor kicking legs in the air. The tears don't stop and a fewmet-eating grin is now frozen to my continence.

Gasps out between sobs of laughter mixed with relief.

See you!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qw1DVj3r ... r_embedded

[Maksym Hadjimehmetov]

laughing self sick

[Chrimigules]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7nnVQ2fROOg

[Icebreaker]

I DON'T REALLY GET WHY THIS ISSUE POLARIZES CONSERVATIVES (PRESUMABLY JACOBUS) AND LIBERALS (CHRIMIGULES FOR SURE). PRETTY MUCH THE ONLY PEOPLE THAT SHOULD GET RILED UP ABOUT THIS ARE THE GUYS THAT APPARENTLY GOT FUCKED OVER A BIT ON PEER REVIEW, AND THE I.T. DIRECTOR FOR THE LAB THAT GOT HACKED.

WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME ENVIRONMENTALISM EFFECTED YOU ON ANYTHING REMOTELY APPROACHING A PERSONAL LEVEL? DO ONE OF YOU FUCKS OWN A HUGE INDUSTRIAL CORPORATION THAT I WASN'T AWARE OF?

[Jacobus Loki]

WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME ENVIRONMENTALISM EFFECTED YOU ON ANYTHING REMOTELY APPROACHING A PERSONAL LEVEL? DO ONE OF YOU FUCKS OWN A HUGE INDUSTRIAL CORPORATION THAT I WASN'T AWARE OF?

I drive a car. My house is heated with natural gas. I eat food that is fertilized, and hauled to the store in a truck. I use electricity, (that unfortunately is generated by burning coal. Any punitive tax will increase my cost of living substantially.

Any serious increase in taxation of motor fuel will put me out of business, and then I could go on the dole.

Besides, I don't like the idea of anyone running my life.

Now, I come down heavy on the global warming deal, but I've got oodles of ideas that are down-right socialist. But discussions of infrastructure and corporate management are often considered boring.

[Erik Mortis]

In the end none of it matters. Global warming or no. Not destroying the environment is just a good idea.

If the world isn't warming, it still doesn't give one a right to continue making a mess of the air, water and soil of the world.

[Aurangzeb Khan]

So long as we are dependent on this one planet for our survival it would be prudent to practice a more considered form of husbandry with regards to the environment we live in and the resources yielded.

[Harvey Steffke]

Everyone says that we should protect the environment, but nobody wants to give up their cars or their cool electronic gadgets. Industry isn't polluting for the heck of it; they're polluting because people want the stuff they make more than they want them to not pollute.

Environmentalism is something that can only truly be dealt with by a nation's federal government. Industry and the planet in general is simply too big otherwise. All the yahoos that bend over backwards at the cost of nearly ruining their own lives to protect the environment aren't making a single drop of difference.

[Aurangzeb Khan]

See - this is why there always comes a point when it is easier to kill people than convince them of your point of view after a reasoned discussion based on a summation of the available evidence. Robespierre or Stalin would have never had this problem. Although the problem for the climate scientists would have been to stay alive long enough to convince either man to murder and terrorise their fellows in the name of a cause other than the perfection of virtue or crash-industrialisation.

But joking aside, perpetual growth in population and rates of consumption driven infinite demand for finite resources within a closed system (the Earth) is bound to have adverse consequences unless restraint is exercised, an escape mechanism is found (off-world?) or some technological cure-all is discovered and implemented. Individual human rights have to be weighed against the possibility of stumbling into the sort of fun scenario that would have made Thomas Malthus blush (wasn't there a book called "The Road" along those lines?).

Finally in the interest of declaring hypocritical self-interest, all the worst measures should be implemented on people and groups I don't like.

[Hesam Jayatar]

As it was previously stated, I also agree that we should collectively practice a strong ethic of conservation, but not exclusively for the environment. Waste is money down the drain and any material, no matter how toxic could and likely will be of some use in the future. Personally, I don't blame the average motorist, given a cheap and easy option, people will take it because its prudent to do so. Most people cannot afford Hybrid cars whereas 10 year old clunkers are plentiful. Therefore, people will choose the option they can afford that most effectively suits their needs. Here's where we get into the industrial questions. I think most people can agree that industry is the greatest polluter besides war. However, our industry is completely necessary for human advancement. If someone can find a means to produce our technology at an equal or lesser cost without the use of petroleum products and chemical waste, I would join that cause in an instant. Until then, we need our industry to function. There is also that troubling issue of population, again as previously mentioned. With nearly 7 Billion people on the planet, all working toward bettering their lives through the most convenient means, it would not matter if the current population lived in the 21st century or the 8th century. The impact of an individual on their environment is always destructive. I'd also wager that modern technology has allowed an individual to make less of an impact on the natural environment than in previous centuries. think the ultimate issue is that we simply are exceptionally good at living and will only improve that ability. The trouble is that we've no where else to expand to. The solution I support (typically insane as it is), would be for us to stop investing our time and effort into useless environmental products and initiatives and start putting our global focus on terraforming Mars before we develop into an Ecumenopolis. It also might not help to alter society so that the number of children you have reflects your income, but sterilization of the peasant and criminal classes has never been all that popular. Anyway, I'll leave everyone to contemplate these population density images:





(Bosnywash: Population: 55 Million)


(QC-Windsor Corridor: Population 17 Million. Continued as ChiPitts including Chicago and Pittsburgh: 55 Million)


(Blue Banana: Population: 90 Million)


(La Sanjuana: Est. Population: 20 Million)


(Mexico City Valley: Est. Population: 20 Million)


(Taiheiyo Belt: Population: 82.9 Million)

Also:

Yangzte River Delta: Population: 87 Million
Pearl River Delta: Population: 50 Million
Beijing-Tianjin corridor: Population: 27 Million
Mumbai-Pune-Nashik-Surat-Vadodara corridor: Population: 37 Million

There's many more, this is just a few.

[Chrimigules]

Everyone says that we should protect the environment, but nobody wants to give up their cars or their cool electronic gadgets. Industry isn't polluting for the heck of it; they're polluting because people want the stuff they make more than they want them to not pollute.

I love public transportation. Screw cars.

[dr-spangle]

Hesam's argument seems to have a lot of logical flaws...

so, we're to put the effort into terraforming mars, not into.. say, making it cheaper to make products without petroleum products?

The energy, money and resources are better spent in making the current system renewable and sustainable, algae can make all the oil we need, more research will drive the price down further, research into higher fuel efficiency cars will also drive the cost down further.

Tax low efficiency cars a bit more, make more high efficiency ones which will make them cheaper, put that taxt straight back into renewable energy and biofuel production and research, and do it transparently, then it's all good.

tax on products for reasons like that should transparently go striahgt into fixing the damage that product does, i.e. tax on cigarettes and alcohol goes striaght into healthcare and a tad on policing. keep taxes separate as possible keeps less going into second homes for politicians in spain :P

[Chrimigules]

There was this program on PBS that was talking about making cars more efficient, and one of them was carbon fiber. The individual frame parts were all light enough that they could be lifted by individuals without equipment, but extremely strong and flexible. They had one piece that was smacked around a bit with a sledge hammer, and afterwards, it can some scruff marks but it wasn't bent or distorted or broken or anything. Problem for the past several years is that while car engines have become more fuel efficient, the cars themselves have on average become larger and heavier. So make them smaller and with superlight materials.

[Ryan]

Cars could be manufactured using carbon nanotubes. I did a lecture on the feasibility of this about a year ago. This is the same material suggested for use in constructing the space elevator.



The current problem is that it is both expensive and time-consuming to produce these. However, once made, they're virtually indestructible. You would have a vehicle that never deteriorates. Not only that, but it would be less than half the weight. Car companies don't want this because you would eventually saturate the market with indestructible vehicles that have extremely high fuel efficiency, and manufacturing would shift from making new cars to repairing/upgrading carbon nanotube vehicles. Therefore no investment (of any significant amount) is being made to promote this technology.

Want to talk about sustainability? Build homes out of this stuff - they'll never fall apart. You'd eliminate the need for lumber, not to mention hundreds of other products.

[Chrimigules]

We should probably make more stuff out of Aluminum and Glass. The first is the most abundant metal and the second is made out of the two most abundant elements in the Earth's crust.

[Hesam Jayatar]

Spangle, you misunderstood my point. I said that no matter what clean industry we focus on, we are still faced with over population. We could have the cleanest running industry running off of pure "clean burning dolphin giggles" but without a control on the population, it would be irrelevant. Population is the greatest environmental issue, without an effective solution for this problem, everything else is at risk, not just from an environmental standpoint, but also in terms of quality of life as a whole. So, I mentioned two possible solutions. Either we somehow enforce population control, or we begin looking toward the future of the colonization of space. These are not exclusive options, but the two I chose to mention.

[Harvey Steffke]

I was under the impression that terraforming Mars, while the stuff of great science fiction, was impossible for various physics and thermo reasons mostly having to do with it just being too far away from the sun.

But even if it were possible, and we were somehow actually able to pull it off without wrecking what we have left of the Earth, we'd never get Mars up and running to the point where we could exodus mass citizens to live freely on the surface before Earth's overpopulation caught up with it. The population of Earth is rising too rapidly. We're getting close to the point where famine, disease, and war are the only things that can "help" us now and unless world governments shape up and come up with clever policies to handle the issue (not impossible but not likely) then it's going to happen within our lifetimes. Far too short to be playing around with Mars.

Although this whole conversation is oddly reminiscent of Asimov's Elijah Baley / R. Daneel Olivaw robot novels that dealt with Earth's overpopulation and space colonies and how that turned out. I'd totally live on Aurora. Sigh, nothing hurts quite as much as getting hooked on an author's series of books when the author in question passed on when you were ten years old.

[Hesam Jayatar]

Like I said, those were just two options, I never said they were feasible. The number I heard was 250 years to terraform mars even if we were capable now.

[Chrimigules]

Population growth looks like it's in the process of correcting itself, though. The transition from a pre-industrial population to a post-industrial population seems to be roughly consistent in each example. The developing economy is able to sustain a larger population than it could before, and the population explodes as a result, until it overtakes the sustainable population mark, and then slowly drops in order to reach the equilibrium. And it accomplishes it all through fertility rate.



By the end of the 21st Century, Japan is expected to have a population size roughly the same as during WWII. The difference will be that it will be a population that has more successfully adapted to an industrial lifestyle, with an age distribution that is more sustainable. I mean, it looks like during the 22nd Century it'll drop some more, but it's already bottoming out, meaning that it's expected to reach that post-industrial equilibrium.

[Ryan]

Global populations will eventually have no choice but to correct themselves - either through man-made means such as birth control/regulation, or simply by biological limiting factors such as food production, living space, etc.

In the biological sciences we refer to this as a population carrying capacity.

There's a debate among most scientists as to what the Earth's actual carrying capacity is. That number ranges from as little as 500 million (for those who feel we've already surpassed our carrying capacity) and 800 billion (for those who blindly optimistic). A more agreed upon number these days is around 2-3 billion. And that's generally stretching things. Of course, China's population is expected to exceed 1.5 billion by 2050, so the rest of us had better make room for them.

[Chrimigules]

It also depends on the way we live. There was an article that Spangle had found and was talking about in #micronations a few months ago, where they had said how many planets the current 6.5 billion population would need to inhabit in order to sustainably live, depending on their standard of living, and then later reversed it to see how many people could sustainably live on this planet, also based on standard of living. The only lifestyle that could sustain all 6.5 billion people with room to spare was the Cuban standard of living.



And a nifty map for most of East Asia. Projected to return to the population in 2000 in 2040 or so, and then decline to about 800 million by the end of the century.

Of course, this loss of population is picked up by Africa:



BTW, the website I got these from say that the world population will peak in 2070, so we'll see how accurately things turn out then.

[Hesam Jayatar]

I was under the impression that birth rates in the West and Japan were continuing to drop. But if you're correct, then it means there is less of an issue than I had previously considered. Then there's a new problem. All societies on the planet cannot function at a post-industrial level unless we drastically change the way in which our society functions. This then suggests there will always be parts of the globe that are forever increasing their birth rates.

[Chrimigules]

I don't think that it's necessarily so that there will always be parts of the globe experiencing increased birth rates. It seems more that the technologies that have allowed for greater productivity in the developed core are still in the process of spreading, taking root, and growing in the developing periphery. That's why China and India's populations exploded after Europe, and Sub-saharan Africa's population is in the process of exploding while most everyone else's population growths are decreasing. The global population has to reach some sort of equilibrium eventually, though it looks like it'll be something in the 22nd Century.

Unless, of course, technologies are developed in the core which spawns another spike in the birth rate, but I kind of doubt it. It seems as if there are two developments that are behind the spiking of birth rates followed by decline. First is the agricultural revolution which allowed for the support of a larger population. Second is the development of an economy that reduces the number of impoverished, which decreases the birth rate as less women have less children at a later age.

Looking at the projected Sub-Saharan population growth, the lower reaches below the median are probably where population growth would go if more powerful economies develop in Africa earlier, and the upper reaches above the median where it would go if such economies develop later and more weakly.

I suppose that means people should be investing in the Nigerian and Botswanan economies, since those are the "powerhouses" of the Sub-saharan African economy.

[Hesam Jayatar]

Interesting!

Well, we've already heavily invested in the Nigerian economy. It's actually because of western investment that the economy exists at all. Unfortunately they've got some political issues to sort out first.

[dr-spangle]

Cars could be manufactured using carbon nanotubes. I did a lecture on the feasibility of this about a year ago. This is the same material suggested for use in constructing the space elevator.



The current problem is that it is both expensive and time-consuming to produce these. However, once made, they're virtually indestructible. You would have a vehicle that never deteriorates. Not only that, but it would be less than half the weight. Car companies don't want this because you would eventually saturate the market with indestructible vehicles that have extremely high fuel efficiency, and manufacturing would shift from making new cars to repairing/upgrading carbon nanotube vehicles. Therefore no investment (of any significant amount) is being made to promote this technology.

Want to talk about sustainability? Build homes out of this stuff - they'll never fall apart. You'd eliminate the need for lumber, not to mention hundreds of other products.

The big problem with that atm is that for anything decent it must be made atom by atom :P


or at least a few atoms at a time, certainly not a measurable speed of construction that could be considered useful.

also, have you heard about the 100miles per gallon x prize, a german company is entering who are trying to make a 100mile per gallon car by simply making a car that is super lightweight, it is 550KG, meaning doors would make it too heavy so the front of the car lifts up to get in...

and a video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLpeqMdMlqk

it is by no means the best method to making a 100mpg car, electric cars are by far the best, most certainly in a country like the UK :P

people complain about charge time, but people sleep right? it only needs charging for about 8 hours, so you just plug it in when you get home, bam. then do your daily commute and plug it in when you get home again. easy as pie. of course, if you're driving some massive route across a continent it isn't great, and people always present this as if it's part of the daily commute... it's not, they just like to be picky.

[Chrimigules]

Then invest in Botswana. They're better.

people complain about charge time, but people sleep right?

You don't.

[vasroe]

People love convenience. It's psychological. A gas vehicle that takes two minutes to fill up is more convenient, psychologically, than an electric vehicle that takes 8 hours to charge, even if the gas vehicle harms the environment more and costs more money.

Take for instance the iPhone. A few early adopters paid 399.99 for the first iPhone with a 39.99 monthly fee, but sales truly took off when the iPhone's price was cut to 199.99--and the monthly fee increased to 79.99. Psychological reactions can override financial considerations.

I hope the makers of the future generation of energy-conserving vehicles are aware of these factors. The start-ups probably are. The large, lumbering conglomerates might not be so in touch though, being less reactive to market pressures and the success or failure of any one project.

[dr-spangle]

Of course they're aware of the factors and they're still working damn hard to make a battery that charges up in less time, but even now an electric car is a perfectly feasible idea for most people, except for the price....

the price is honestly the most limiting factor at the moment, not the charge time, top speed, or some other rubbish excuse