Global warming aside, as a Canadian, I'm disappointing in what our government has down to protect our sovereignty in the Canadian northern archipelago.
Had we invested in a navy base in the north, and a few ice breakers, then we could have been the owner of the "panama canal of the arctic".
We would have a monopoly on what traffic goes through the Canadian archipelago which would help offset the cost of policing the north.
We would be able to do things like prohibit oil tankers and other hazardous materials if we wanted.
At this point I think we've all but given away any claim to being able to dictate who travels through our northern islands. The arctic will be policed by the American's and Russians, and used heavily by ships travelling to the east coast of the US and Europe from China.
Hopefully at the least, we'll be able to push for things to protect the arctic waters like no resource mining, think offshore oil rigs, and no oil tankers travelling through those waters.
Harper's administration, though losing focus on the issue by the end, was keen on enforcing the Canadian Internal Waters claim [1][2]. Trudeau, not at all [3].
To the detriment of Canadians, major players around the rest of the world consider these waters international waters, and on the international level, might (or the lack of response thereof) leads to facts-on-the-ground, as we've seen time and time again.
That's because a majority of Canadians have a visceral negative reaction to any military spending. We're happy to claim the Arctic, but not if it involves money, and definitely not if it involves money for the military. Which is, IMO, ridiculous. When it comes to territories like that it's "pay up or shut up".
Canada does not have a population large enough to actually have stewardship over the territory contained within its borders. The tax base simply isn't there. Effectively Canada is a 100 Km or so strip to the North of the United States a bit wider in some places. If you want to really claim all the land up North that is barely in use you'd need a population at least 10x the present one and even then it would be a stretch.
Infrastructure and defense costs are closely related to surface area and border length if you want to keep world class powers out of your backyard.
As long as the US thinks the northwest passage is an international passage then no amount of bases or ships would matter. Canada simply can't win that fight.
There are just too many ways for US to exert soft pressure on Canada: softwood lumber, NAFTA repeal, extra tariff and transit charges for oil sand output. (admittedly that last one might be a good thing for Earth)
The panama canal of the arctic won't be the northwest passage, it's going to be the eastern passage over russia. The NWP water is too shallow, badly cartographied, you still risk getting caught in ice and it has very dangerous storms. Shipping companies would rather take a few more days to get to the pacific than take a big risk.
This is correct. The only passage open the last few years has been the Lancaster Sound route which is not suitable for shipping. The Prince of Wales Strait is the only viable route, but hasn't opened up fully the last number of years.
In contrast, the Northeast passage has opened up every year for the last 10+ years and offers huge gains for ships from Asia to Europe. From wikipedia, the difference between Suez and NEP for Yokohama to Rotterdam is 37% shorter.
How much of a military presence do we really need, in order to enforce regulations over shipping traffic though? Surveillance by spotter planes / drones, combined with the threat of legal action against the ship's owners, ought to deter all but the most hardcore bastards.
For them, in theory, a rare single cruise missile from Norad ought to suffice. Even then, you could start with a warning shot, and bill the ship's owner for the missile.
For more complicated missions, we could fly out a small inspection or police team in a flying boat. Instead of relying on arrays of 20cm cannons for protection, they would depend on the above mentioned system (which is similar to the Norad system already in service).
> The arctic will be policed by the American's and Russians
As it always has, because we don't have the millitary power or population to defend any of our own territory. The US does that for us. It's unfortunate Canadians have been unable to expand in our own territory over the few hundred years Europeans have been in this place.
> It's unfortunate Canadians have been unable to expand in our own territory over the few hundred years Europeans have been in this place.
Personally I disagree - I think it's fortunate that there are still large swaths of undeveloped natural territory in Canada, particularly the northern provinces. It might be cold up there, but it sure is beautiful.
I agree we should have a stronger military presence up north but I don't see how that changes anything. Its still Canadian territory and Canada still gets to control who goes through there.
> Its still Canadian territory and Canada still gets to control who goes through there.
In theory. In practice Canada has neither the resolve, the funds or the strength to put that into practice. I'm not sure that's a bad thing either, the fact that Canada technically owns it but does not start drilling like mad or doing other bad stuff that far up North at least keeps things roughly as they are for now.
I've often wondered how long Canada can stay an independent country. I doubt it can last 100 more years, unfortunately. Some patriots in 1837 asked this very question as well, wondering why we shouldn't just join the USA and benefit from "more of everything" without sacrificing democracy. They were hanged.
The way Trump has acted towards Canada, talking about NAFTA etc, made me think of someone who has an eye for the territories up north...
Looking at the situation right now I'd think the opposite. It seems dubious for the U.S. as it is structured right now with its internal political tribal conflicts to last 100 more years, whereas Canada is more stable and internally harmonious now than it was for most of the 20th century.
Quebec separatism is mostly quiet. There's a left/centrist government in Alberta for the first time, reducing provincial tensions between the west and central Canada. Trade links with Europe and Asia have been broadened or are broadening. The economy remains spmewhat tepid but stable.
Meanwhile the U.S. itself has progressed closer and closer into the depths of right wing extremism, and shows no signs of healing.
Call me when you support increased military spending. Because that's what it'll take, and that's one of the few things Canadians universally don't think is all that important.
Eh, history is long and moves in unpredictable ways. Just wait until the U.S. breaks up and Canada annexes the BosWash megalopolis and the West Coast, and then suddenly Canada will be policing the northwest passage again.
I can see the western states coming in to closer economic union with the west of Canada. I don't see Canadian influence dominating, though. There's too many people to the south. California alone has more people than all of Canada, for example. But there are common cultural elements from Canada all the way down to northern California. So a regional culture arising as a unifying agent, technically across country lines? I can picture it.
(SoCal is different, but that is neither here nor there in this case.)
There's that pesky Federal law that prohibits states from making their own arrangements with sovereign nations, but that does little to inhibit the actual flow of people or business.
The concept you should have a moral right over something you did not create (ie a canal) that can reduce thousands of miles on ships journeys over the open ocean is fucking bullshit and goes against international law to boot.
2017: "On current trends, the Arctic ocean will be largely ice-free in summer by 2040."
2009: "[S]cientists at Cambridge University predict the Arctic ocean will be largely ice-free during the summer within the next ten years (i.e., by 2019)"
Those headlines are talking about different things, the article is already largely ice free in the summer is already true with only 28% being covered year round. As to your 2007 example the direct quote was "My thinking on this is that 2030 is not an unreasonable date to be thinking of."
Don't forget 2040 is only 22 years away, on that time scale weather becomes important not just climate.
While it seems clear all the sibling comments thus far want to point out how inaccurate your comment it, I fell it's an important factor in the general malaise about climate change.
Of any number of people who read headlines only some subset of those read the articles, and even fewer of them remember what the article said.
They literally have been saying, for at least a couple decades before I started paying attention, the world is going to end, for one reason or another, quite soon now.
I thought that if the world was going to end we were meant to lie down or put a paper bag over our head or something.
it might point out that they are wrong and that they don't know what is really going on? which would not surprise me when talking about weather topics.
On a sobering note, the Arctic is a tremendous shortcut for shipping, and despite its vast and remote coastline, it's surrounded solely by states with a strong rule of law, making piracy unlikely.
Cargo traffic between will re-orient from the current crop of chokepoints like Suez and Malacca; the Panama Canal will see a decline of Asia-Atlantic traffic and a rise in intra-Americas traffic; and more shipping overall will be conducted in waters adjacent to the coasts of Russia, Canada, US, Norway, and Greenland (Kingdom of Denmark).
Even without additional exploitation of the Arctic, changes like this will affect the strategic priorities of states.
> the Arctic is a tremendous shortcut for shipping
The Economist article says, "the much-vaunted sea passages are likely to carry only a trickle of trade". Do you have any information on the prospective volume of trade?
> it's surrounded solely by states with a strong rule of law, making piracy unlikely.
For another reason too: Piracy usually is conducted by people.
> Do you have any information on the prospective volume of trade?
Not really, though COSCO (a top-5 shipper by capacity and market share [1]) expressed interest again in 2016 [2], sending 5 ships through; they were the first Chinese shipping company to send a ship this way in 2013 [3], and express a continued interest almost every year -- like in 2015 [4].
Russian forecasts are extremely ambitious to the point of being pure wishful thinking [5]. There are some challenges with the route [5][6], and not all shippers are on board, and of course global shipping has just had its lowest growth in years [7].
How do we square this statement from the article "In the past 30 years, the minimum coverage of summer ice has fallen by half; its volume has fallen by three-quarters. " with this chart of global sea ice -- http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily.... From the chart, looks like sea ice is down a little bit, but not only by a few percent, not by half. So are there massive gains in sea ice elsewhere in the world, areas where sea ice has nearly doubled?
Also how do we square the statement about the decrease in volume with this statement from a year and a half ago? "However, very little ice thickness information actually exists." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015GL065704/full How do we actually know how much volume has fallen in the last 30 years if two years ago "very little information on thickness actually exists"?
I don't really understand the appeal of this article when it doesn't link to any sources. The article doesn't tell us what the actual new information prompted the article and where that new information came from.
When it's summer in the arctic, it is winter in the antarctic, whose area of ice is necessarily going to vastly outweigh the other when you add them together. So the trend will be less visible.
Just looking at arctic ice extent in summer, on that page, you can see the trend.
The coupling between climate and sea ice is more complex in the southern polar regions, and the increase in sea ice there is also likely to be an artifact of global warming. But this may explain why a global chart doesn't show the sharp decrease you'd expect.
and the increase in sea ice there is also likely to be an artifact of global warming.
Was there anyone predicting in the 1980s or 1990s that with global warming arctic ice would decline while antarctic ice would increase? Was anyone predicting this before the observation occurred? How do I know that the idea that global warming causes an increase in southern ice is not just an after the fact rationalization?
I'm not a "denialist" by any stretch, I believe CO2 causes warming. I believe the scientists probably know at least somewhat of what they speak (although I am skeptical of timelines).
That being said, what is feasible to do? Stop eating hamburgers? Drive Teslas? Carbon Tax Credits derived in meetings attended by people who arrive in jets? There just isn't a practical solution in sight. There really isn't. Just feel good type measures that don't solve the problem and wont. Never mind that the science is a bit unclear on exactly what, when and how much.
It's a global problem. The "globe" hasn't been able to effectively work together to solve much simpler problems like drugs and human trafficking at any scale. And this is a bigger problem requiring more collaboration.
I'm sorry, for all the hand wringing effective solutions are just not going to happen. No how, no way. Not in a timely manner.
The only "real" solution in sight that I see is a massive population decrease through war or famine or plague. Or else sudden loss of civilization and technology which will produce the same thing.
Is that price worth the benefits? I may consider this when "timelines" actually turn out as predicted. Until that time I'm driving a car and eating hamburgers. And living somewhere away from coastlines.
Personally I think we are way past prevention and rapidly approaching the last hope for mitigation of climate change. The answer doesn't have to be a massive population decline - measures like reducing our emissions from power generation (https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis... - 29%) and more electrified transportation would have a real impact. It is unrealistic to assume dramatic lifestyle changes will help us but instead of wasting billions of wars and walls we could be investing in renewable energy and more efficient use of carbon fuels. Instead we have an administration pushing hard in the opposite direction - investing in coal and oil, removing fuel economy improvements, and destroying the ability of organizations like NASA to even observe the effects of climate change. It's madness.
> measures like reducing our emissions from power generation and more electrified transportation would have a real impact.
This always confuses me, because human CO2 emissions are about 3% of natural emissions. If the planet were so sensitive to +/- 3%, wouldn't it have gone past the point-of-no-return millions of years ago? But here we are today, and the ice core data shows wild fluctuations over periods of tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of years that greatly exceed anything we've experienced.
On a personal scale, at least: live close to work, and save as much money as you can; the amount you spend is a tolerably good measure of your carbon footprint.
The ideal would be to live close to work, save money, and do a bit of backyard bio-sequestration (like growing dwarf hazelnut trees and burying the nuts' hulls); but it's not likely that you'll have a backyard if you're living close to work. Cities with compost collection are the next best thing on this score, then.
This is on all of us not just the climate science deniers and the profit hungry corporations, selfish individuals, crazy governments, or, uninformed individuals. It is not enough to protest, give speeches, start "green" companies, and whatever else we do to feel good about "doing something for the environment."
If only we could have enough courage to curb our uncontrolled consumption of resources. Why is it so hard for each one of us to just reduce our intake by, say, just 15% to begin with? How about eating less, not changing cell phones every ear, shopping less, driving less, and a hundred other things we can reduce?
In the end nature always wins. We are either with her or against her!
> It is not enough to protest, give speeches, start "green" companies, and whatever else we do to feel good about "doing something for the environment."
I have to disagree. Please keep doing something good for the environment. Please keep making companies that replace old harmful ones. Keep protesting to politicians and by all means, keep doing speeches to inform the public.
> just reduce our intake by, say, just 15%
Everything I know about psychology tells me this advice won't work. You need to provide an alternative or you'll be fighting a losing battle against habit and enjoyment.
But I should dogfood on my own advice here, so here's what you should do instead:
- Give people specific advice on habit changes instead, ie. switch from beef to chicken, from chicken to fish and from fish to vegetables.
- Tell people HOW to change electricity provider (if your country or region allows it)
There's a good argument to be made that it's actually the opposite of hurting yourself if you do the things the grandparent listed: "... eating less, not changing cell phones every year, shopping less, driving less."
But of course nobody wants to hear that either, it's considered preaching about personal choices.
Apart from the tragedy of the commons problem, it's also hard because we don't know if the benefits will outweigh the costs. As far as I've heard, the science doesn't answer that accurately enough to actually make a decision. We might be better off with global warming than with a premature end to oil and coal.
Bear in mind that global warming isn't the end of the world, it's just a change. Humans will certainly adapt and carry on. The problem is the costs might be inconveniently high - or they might be tolerable.
you are likely referencing a report that concluded the costs for stopping climate change were higher than the costs of dealing with the consequences. The report that I read on that topic came to its conclusions by valuing people's lives in dollar figures and putting those lives at less value for anyone in developing countries.
So, yeh, if you think poor climate refuges have no value then you are right we should take no action.
The problem is that those holding onto power have politicized climate change so that those not paying close enough attention wrongly conclude that we don't need to take action.
Shouldnt we analyze what creates the emissions and try to have a more focused attempt at fixing the problem? It's great if consumers reduce consumption by 15% across the board, for example, but knowing if the problem is from driving gas gusslers, eating meat, etc. might help us focus on changes that will make the most difference.
I own almost nothing, and have lived on less than 400$ a month for the past 4 years.
A bike, a laptop, speakers, a table and chair, a mattress, two fans, a backpack, minimal clothing, and some sports-related stuff are the only things of mine that are worth > $10.
I ride my bike most days and leave the car at home. I eat beef one meal a month instead of 4-5 times a week. I pay more for electricity from completely renewable sources. I tend to buy used clothes and I stopped running servers at home years and years ago.
Imagine a bunch of little compromises multiplied by millions of people, that adds up.
The article is actually very good, without being alarmist, giving the facts:
the arctic will be ice free within many of our lifetimes
there are two main feedback effects from an ice-free Arctic that we know will be bad, but there is uncertainty in how bad they will be:
(1) the albedo effect means less of the suns energy will be reflected back into space by white ice and warming will accelerate due to darker water absorbing more energy
(2) the clathrate gun hypothesis - how much of the methane in the Arctic basin that is trapped as ice clathrates will be released into the atmosphere (methane is about 8 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2).
The other main point of the article is that the Arctic sea ice melting is unambiguously bad. Ignore the opening of the NE-passage. It's all-round bad news for us and our progeny.
Readit News
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Arctic_Archipelago
Had we invested in a navy base in the north, and a few ice breakers, then we could have been the owner of the "panama canal of the arctic".
We would have a monopoly on what traffic goes through the Canadian archipelago which would help offset the cost of policing the north.
We would be able to do things like prohibit oil tankers and other hazardous materials if we wanted.
At this point I think we've all but given away any claim to being able to dictate who travels through our northern islands. The arctic will be policed by the American's and Russians, and used heavily by ships travelling to the east coast of the US and Europe from China.
Hopefully at the least, we'll be able to push for things to protect the arctic waters like no resource mining, think offshore oil rigs, and no oil tankers travelling through those waters.
To the detriment of Canadians, major players around the rest of the world consider these waters international waters, and on the international level, might (or the lack of response thereof) leads to facts-on-the-ground, as we've seen time and time again.
[1] http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/the-north/myth-... [2] http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/franklin-find-as-much-ab... [3] http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-obama-arctic-1.39059...
Infrastructure and defense costs are closely related to surface area and border length if you want to keep world class powers out of your backyard.
There are just too many ways for US to exert soft pressure on Canada: softwood lumber, NAFTA repeal, extra tariff and transit charges for oil sand output. (admittedly that last one might be a good thing for Earth)
In contrast, the Northeast passage has opened up every year for the last 10+ years and offers huge gains for ships from Asia to Europe. From wikipedia, the difference between Suez and NEP for Yokohama to Rotterdam is 37% shorter.
For them, in theory, a rare single cruise missile from Norad ought to suffice. Even then, you could start with a warning shot, and bill the ship's owner for the missile.
For more complicated missions, we could fly out a small inspection or police team in a flying boat. Instead of relying on arrays of 20cm cannons for protection, they would depend on the above mentioned system (which is similar to the Norad system already in service).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sirius_Dog_Sled_Patrol
Sure, there's a bit more to it than that, but Denmark is a lot smaller than Canada, and has unremarkable military spending, even for its size.
As it always has, because we don't have the millitary power or population to defend any of our own territory. The US does that for us. It's unfortunate Canadians have been unable to expand in our own territory over the few hundred years Europeans have been in this place.
Personally I disagree - I think it's fortunate that there are still large swaths of undeveloped natural territory in Canada, particularly the northern provinces. It might be cold up there, but it sure is beautiful.
In theory. In practice Canada has neither the resolve, the funds or the strength to put that into practice. I'm not sure that's a bad thing either, the fact that Canada technically owns it but does not start drilling like mad or doing other bad stuff that far up North at least keeps things roughly as they are for now.
The way Trump has acted towards Canada, talking about NAFTA etc, made me think of someone who has an eye for the territories up north...
Quebec separatism is mostly quiet. There's a left/centrist government in Alberta for the first time, reducing provincial tensions between the west and central Canada. Trade links with Europe and Asia have been broadened or are broadening. The economy remains spmewhat tepid but stable.
Meanwhile the U.S. itself has progressed closer and closer into the depths of right wing extremism, and shows no signs of healing.
(SoCal is different, but that is neither here nor there in this case.)
There's that pesky Federal law that prohibits states from making their own arrangements with sovereign nations, but that does little to inhibit the actual flow of people or business.
2009: "[S]cientists at Cambridge University predict the Arctic ocean will be largely ice-free during the summer within the next ten years (i.e., by 2019)"
http://www.voanews.com/a/a-13-2009-10-15-voa41/414370.html
2007: Arctic summers ice-free 'by 2013'
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7139797.stm
The date for the Arctic becoming "largely ice-free" appears to be receding about as fast as break-even fusion power. :-)
For example, that 2007 article:
"In the end, it will just melt away quite suddenly. It might not be as early as 2013 but it will be soon, much earlier than 2040."
Which lines up with the 2017 article.
Cutting edge science is not headline-friendly!
"My thinking on this is that 2030 is not an unreasonable date to be thinking of."
Deleted Comment
Don't forget 2040 is only 22 years away, on that time scale weather becomes important not just climate.
Of any number of people who read headlines only some subset of those read the articles, and even fewer of them remember what the article said.
They literally have been saying, for at least a couple decades before I started paying attention, the world is going to end, for one reason or another, quite soon now.
I thought that if the world was going to end we were meant to lie down or put a paper bag over our head or something.
Deleted Comment
Cargo traffic between will re-orient from the current crop of chokepoints like Suez and Malacca; the Panama Canal will see a decline of Asia-Atlantic traffic and a rise in intra-Americas traffic; and more shipping overall will be conducted in waters adjacent to the coasts of Russia, Canada, US, Norway, and Greenland (Kingdom of Denmark).
Even without additional exploitation of the Arctic, changes like this will affect the strategic priorities of states.
The Economist article says, "the much-vaunted sea passages are likely to carry only a trickle of trade". Do you have any information on the prospective volume of trade?
> it's surrounded solely by states with a strong rule of law, making piracy unlikely.
For another reason too: Piracy usually is conducted by people.
Not really, though COSCO (a top-5 shipper by capacity and market share [1]) expressed interest again in 2016 [2], sending 5 ships through; they were the first Chinese shipping company to send a ship this way in 2013 [3], and express a continued interest almost every year -- like in 2015 [4].
Russian forecasts are extremely ambitious to the point of being pure wishful thinking [5]. There are some challenges with the route [5][6], and not all shippers are on board, and of course global shipping has just had its lowest growth in years [7].
[1] https://www.alphaliner.com/top100/ [2] https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/arctic-industry-and-energy... [3] http://barentsobserver.com/en/arctic/2013/08/first-container... [4] https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinese-shipper-cosco-to-schedu... [5] https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/arctic-industry-and-energy... [6] http://www.platts.com/latest-news/shipping/moscow/feature-de... [7] http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2016/08/20/490621376/a...
Also how do we square the statement about the decrease in volume with this statement from a year and a half ago? "However, very little ice thickness information actually exists." http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015GL065704/full How do we actually know how much volume has fallen in the last 30 years if two years ago "very little information on thickness actually exists"?
I don't really understand the appeal of this article when it doesn't link to any sources. The article doesn't tell us what the actual new information prompted the article and where that new information came from.
When it's summer in the arctic, it is winter in the antarctic, whose area of ice is necessarily going to vastly outweigh the other when you add them together. So the trend will be less visible.
Just looking at arctic ice extent in summer, on that page, you can see the trend.
The coupling between climate and sea ice is more complex in the southern polar regions, and the increase in sea ice there is also likely to be an artifact of global warming. But this may explain why a global chart doesn't show the sharp decrease you'd expect.
Was there anyone predicting in the 1980s or 1990s that with global warming arctic ice would decline while antarctic ice would increase? Was anyone predicting this before the observation occurred? How do I know that the idea that global warming causes an increase in southern ice is not just an after the fact rationalization?
That being said, what is feasible to do? Stop eating hamburgers? Drive Teslas? Carbon Tax Credits derived in meetings attended by people who arrive in jets? There just isn't a practical solution in sight. There really isn't. Just feel good type measures that don't solve the problem and wont. Never mind that the science is a bit unclear on exactly what, when and how much.
It's a global problem. The "globe" hasn't been able to effectively work together to solve much simpler problems like drugs and human trafficking at any scale. And this is a bigger problem requiring more collaboration.
I'm sorry, for all the hand wringing effective solutions are just not going to happen. No how, no way. Not in a timely manner.
The only "real" solution in sight that I see is a massive population decrease through war or famine or plague. Or else sudden loss of civilization and technology which will produce the same thing.
Is that price worth the benefits? I may consider this when "timelines" actually turn out as predicted. Until that time I'm driving a car and eating hamburgers. And living somewhere away from coastlines.
This always confuses me, because human CO2 emissions are about 3% of natural emissions. If the planet were so sensitive to +/- 3%, wouldn't it have gone past the point-of-no-return millions of years ago? But here we are today, and the ice core data shows wild fluctuations over periods of tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of years that greatly exceed anything we've experienced.
Deleted Comment
On a personal scale, at least: live close to work, and save as much money as you can; the amount you spend is a tolerably good measure of your carbon footprint.
The ideal would be to live close to work, save money, and do a bit of backyard bio-sequestration (like growing dwarf hazelnut trees and burying the nuts' hulls); but it's not likely that you'll have a backyard if you're living close to work. Cities with compost collection are the next best thing on this score, then.
You _believe_ CO2 is a greenhouse gas? How sure are you about 2 + 2 = 4?
If only we could have enough courage to curb our uncontrolled consumption of resources. Why is it so hard for each one of us to just reduce our intake by, say, just 15% to begin with? How about eating less, not changing cell phones every ear, shopping less, driving less, and a hundred other things we can reduce?
In the end nature always wins. We are either with her or against her!
I have to disagree. Please keep doing something good for the environment. Please keep making companies that replace old harmful ones. Keep protesting to politicians and by all means, keep doing speeches to inform the public.
> just reduce our intake by, say, just 15%
Everything I know about psychology tells me this advice won't work. You need to provide an alternative or you'll be fighting a losing battle against habit and enjoyment.
But I should dogfood on my own advice here, so here's what you should do instead:
- Give people specific advice on habit changes instead, ie. switch from beef to chicken, from chicken to fish and from fish to vegetables.
- Tell people HOW to change electricity provider (if your country or region allows it)
- Tell people to VOTE for the environment
Because if you do it and no-one else does then you're hurting yourself for basically no reason. It's a coordination problem.
But of course nobody wants to hear that either, it's considered preaching about personal choices.
Bear in mind that global warming isn't the end of the world, it's just a change. Humans will certainly adapt and carry on. The problem is the costs might be inconveniently high - or they might be tolerable.
So, yeh, if you think poor climate refuges have no value then you are right we should take no action.
The problem is that those holding onto power have politicized climate change so that those not paying close enough attention wrongly conclude that we don't need to take action.
A bike, a laptop, speakers, a table and chair, a mattress, two fans, a backpack, minimal clothing, and some sports-related stuff are the only things of mine that are worth > $10.
Imagine a bunch of little compromises multiplied by millions of people, that adds up.
What about you?
the arctic will be ice free within many of our lifetimes
there are two main feedback effects from an ice-free Arctic that we know will be bad, but there is uncertainty in how bad they will be:
(1) the albedo effect means less of the suns energy will be reflected back into space by white ice and warming will accelerate due to darker water absorbing more energy
(2) the clathrate gun hypothesis - how much of the methane in the Arctic basin that is trapped as ice clathrates will be released into the atmosphere (methane is about 8 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2).
The other main point of the article is that the Arctic sea ice melting is unambiguously bad. Ignore the opening of the NE-passage. It's all-round bad news for us and our progeny.