“Lake”
Speaking of climate…Lake Oroville, 130 miles northeast of San Francisco.
The first photo is from 3 years ago. The 2nd photo was taken April 27 2021. The 3rd was taken last week.
California has descended deep into one of the worst droughts in its recorded history. And perhaps no single location shows more starkly how deep that really is than Lake Oroville, the state’s second-largest reservoir and a crucial source of water supply for the state’s farm and city water users alike.
San Francisco-based Getty Images photographer Justin Sullivan has been visiting the lake off and on since the driest days of our last severe drought, in 2014.
“Lake Oroville provided the most stunning and visible evidence of loss of water” during that five-year drought, Sullivan said in an interview with KQED Friday.
It’s the same now, with much of the reservoir’s shockingly barren floor exposed. Adding to the effect around parts of the lake: the charred skeletons of trees burned during last summer’s North Complex fires.
Situation normal: all fucked up.
Well, you see….>Climate Change is not real because the dinosaurs existed for millions of years and “emitted” all that flatulence (methane).
I was…dumbfounded. This came from a gym acquaintance (masked) who I considered smart…if eccentric.
Where I “agree” with the skeptics is towards all the “agreements” and “plans” and “policies”. There are SEVEN BILLION of us. And few of us want to return to the good ol’ days of hunting and gathering bands in the wilderness. Even if we could. Which seven billion can’t.
There is an annoying ad campaign running on YouTube now in which bratty kids shout at “CEOs” about “going electric” and “solving the problem”. Sorry, folks. Not every problem can be “solved”. That shows a degree of arrogance among the chattering classes that is silly. The numbers just aren’t there. The resources just aren’t there. Where do the brats (or the ad copywriters) think all the electricity is going to come from?
What happened to all that water? It must have evaporated into the air. I worry that there will be massive rainstorms over the remainder of the … year? Eternity?
This is one of my pet peeves, the readiness with which environmental activists with more passion than patience, more fervor than facts, insist that “going off the grid” is the solution to everything. Living off the land. Do they have any clue at all how much land we would need for 7 billion+ people to “live off the land”? And the amount of damage it would do to the wildlife already struggling to survive in fragmented habitats? As for “going off the grid”, that’s fine if you can do it, but there are lots of people who can’t afford it. And billions that aren’t even on “the grid”, using wood and manure and other environmentally destructive fuels to eke out a bare minimal existence.
Also, how many of the young (or older) wokesters have a clue about HOW to live off the land? How many of them have milked a cow? Shot a bison? Hoed a clean row for planting? Harvested? Ground their own grain? Made their own cheese? These are things I have done. I promise, it isn’t the fun bucolic life they picture.
Face it, we have to have cities. Unless we cut the population back to pre-Industrial Revolution levels, there is no other choice. And probably not unless the population reduces to pre-agricultural levels. Making cities less environmentally catastrophic would be a start…but again, many of the options for that bring up the question you raised about where does that electricity come from?
Much of the environmental advocacy looks to me like virtue signalling. I am better than you because I ride a bicycle to work! (No matter that your doctor says you can no longer ride a bicycle because of your shoulder replacements; that’s just selling out to big medicine. If you’d used Ajurvedic healing, your shoulders would have healed naturally! You are bad, I am good, look at me pedal!”) I am better than you because I use all the best products. Just look at my well-stocked middle-class cupboard, where I have dozens of “green” products in “biodegradable” plastic jugs! Yea, me!
The idea of working toward real solutions? Nope, that’s hard. And if you even mention the fact that none of this is solvable with 7 billion people in the world, you become a racist who wants to kill people to get the population down, and you want people of color to abort babies. Yeah…go straight for the hyperbolic over the top accusations. I can take it; I’m used to it.
iknklast: Bravo! I am a doomster, though, so my only caveat is skepticism there ARE solutions. Nature will take care of itself. At the cost of most of us, I fear.
Well the population *will* go down and it’s non-white (though supposedly Asians are “white” now) people that will do most of the going down. That’s fact, that’s reality. And reality isn’t fair or nice…
“You could say to the universe, this is not fair. And the universe would say: Oh, isn´t it? Sorry.
You could save people. You could get there in the nick of time. And something could snap its fingers and say, no, it has to be this way. Let me tell you how it has to be.”
― Terry Pratchett, Soul Music
Blood Knight: Snap of the fingers? A major volcanic eruption? Maybe the Yellowstone Caldera will go, directly affecting some of our more “conservative” states and possibly “solving” global warming for a decade or so? (I am not serious).
The best way to cut birth rates? Increasing the wealth, and health, of of poor people, particularly poor women. Increasing the material security of poor people reduces their need to have more children for family survival. Better health care means more children live to adulthood. Pension schemes would also mean less reliance on adult children looking after their aged parents, again decreasing the need for more children. A massive shift of wealth from rich to poor would be a good first step, but one that is long overdue. Not as sexy as capital intensive energy mega-projects either.
Profits will be protected before people or biodiversity. Too many vested interests are going to try to keep the old game alive, to hell with everyone else. How long they will be able to pull this off remains to be seen. In many countries, societies have been atomized into groups of autonomous, self-interested individuals, with constant pressure to privatise puplic services for the benefit of a few over the needs of the many. Perhaps we’ll see a rebirth of collective solidarity, with a renewed sense of mutual purpose and sacrifice for common good. We can hope.
Cities will be tough places to live in unless they can secure food supplies. Repurposing parking lots, urban parks, etc. to growing food would help, otherwise, food will have to be brought in from areas which may be increasingly reluctant to let it go.
As things get worse in richer places (never mind what happens to poorer areas, which will be bad, sooner, but disregarded because it’s not “here”), pressure will mount for more desperate, high-tech, quick fix measures. Watch for geoengineering projects which attempt to block sunlight from reaching Earth. Without the cessation of CO2 emmissions this will be a short term non-solution.
Exxon really fucked us all over when they buried their own research. We’ve lost four decades that could have been used to convert energy infrastructure to less harmful technologies. We could have carefully directed our last use of fossil fuels to create the infrastructure needed to step away from them, instead of intensifying our use and reliance upon them.
If we took this seriously, we would be on a war footing, retooling the economy, rationing goods, discouraging or banning unnecessary travel, production, and consumption. Our parents and grandparents did this to save our societies from the Axis powers in WWII, but haven’t as yet been bothered to do this to save ourselves period. It would seem that restraint, sacrifice, and solidarity are just too much to ask for. This is going to take more than recycling, using public transit, and installing some LED bulbs.
We have seen the enemy, and they are us.
I have been thinking about a big eruption and find myself wondering exactly how it’d shake out. As is I think we stand a damn good chance of having civilization collapse and then a rock or snowball ends humanity within the next ten thousand years.
And when they have more money, and fewer children, children will be more likely to survive because they have fewer children. They will be able to devote more resources to the ones they have. Absolutely. Which is why my family (6 kids) was living in filth, squalor, and poverty while the kids in my school (average 1.5 kids) were living in wealth. It takes money to raise kids.
But the biggest issue, I believe, is allowing women autonomy. Money is great, but if she has no control over that money, or over her body, her husband or her mother-in-law can demand more children and she has no choice. Giving women the choice nearly always reduces the birthrate (a fact that shocks my students who assume that it is the desires of women that drive all the births).
And access to family planning services that are affordable and accessible…and where women don’t have to tell everything to men in dresses.
But I wonder if that cut in birth rate will lead to a reduction in energy usage. With wealth and development there seems to be more energy demand. As James has pointed out, renewables will not necessarily make up the difference from reduced carbon sources of energy.
An extra 50 years of working on this problem would have been nice.