You can't argue with "the truth" here. Global warming has been a mainstream scarecrow for decades now.
In truth, it was just a way to slow down the growth of rival industrialized countries, or countries that are yet to industrialize. By promoting expensive, inefficient "clean" energy sources (but not nuclear!), they are stunting the growth of developing nations.
You think? To me it looks like it handicaps developed countries more. For one thing, many developing countries simply ignore the limits, or aren't even close to them yet. Also they have much more choice in choosing their technology stack - they can if they want invest in wind and solar and nuclear. First world has lots of money already sunk in old style generation, and needs to replace it - at much higher levels of consumption.
So, in addition to ignoring the very solution nature gave us, you argue that we must bury the dead plant matter because the CO2 will be released back into the atmosphere if we don't.
You realize there are bacteria and insects that eat this matter and that it is used as a fertilizer?
You clearly have no idea how the carbon cycle works, or why fossil fuels are a problem do you?
The carbon being released when burning fossil fuels was previously stuck under ground due to various geological processes. Near as we can tell, over 10’s-100’s of millions of years and due to very disruptive (and relatively unique) geological processes.
Once released into the air again, it will keep cycling between plants and the atmosphere (increasing total average atmospheric co2) until something sticks it back under the ground.
That’s the problem.
Trees, photosynthesis, etc. only temporarily change things. Eventually all the living things rot, burn, or get eaten and digested, and it all ends up back up in the atmosphere again. If there are active/current geologic processes putting some of that carbon back underground where it can’t get back into the atmosphere, it appears to be small in effect and slow.
Everything we see appears to not be doing that. It’s easy to verify in most cases too. A forest permanently storing carbon would be sitting on hundreds of feet of it. it’s typically 3-6 ft at most.
That fossil carbon has to go back under ground or it will go back into the air sooner than later. And continue to be a problem long term.
And near as we can tell, those historic geological processes aren’t happening anymore, at least not at any scale we can rely on here, or timeline that helps us at all.
1. Fossil fuels can't just run out because they are produced continuously by dead matter decaying over time. It's in the name.
2. Carbon dioxide is good for the plant life. Plants are literally "breathing" it and producing oxygen. As with everything in nature, this is balanced by the fact that animals breathe oxygen and release...you guessed it, carbon dioxide.
3. Vulcanic eruptions all over the planet release three orders of magnitude more CO2 than all of humanity combined over a period of one year. These eruptions happen in the Earth's oceans, as well, where they are more frequent as there is simply more ocean floor than there is land on the surface.
So, please stop with the disinformation already. Or just reduce the carbon footprint in the most developed countries in the world and leave the developing world to go through the fossil fuel phase that those countries went through.
> Fossil fuels can't just run out because they are produced continuously
They can if your rate of consumption is higher than the rate or production. Also this is irrelevant as the objective is to reduce their consumption.
> Carbon dioxide is good for the plant life
I think it is safe to say we are already well equipped with it. Also, as per you next point, natural production yields enough of CO2 to sustain the life, which is proven by the fact that this life exists in the first place.
> Vulcanic eruptions all over the planet release three orders of magnitude more CO2 than all of humanity combined over a period of one year
A quick fact checking yields these numbers: volcanoes produce about 0.3 billion tons of CO2 every year in average. Consumption of fossil fuels alone yields about 35 billion tons of CO2 every year [1], so about 100x more. Also, regardless, if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.
"I think it is safe to say we are already well equipped with it, and whatever our plans for its reduction are, we won't eliminate it."
The CO2 current levels in the atmosphere are 0.04%. Levels in the past were well above 1%.
"As a point of reference, pre-industrial CO2 levels were around 280 parts per million (ppm) and today, we stand near 420 ppm.
The most distant period in time for which we have estimated CO2 levels is around the Ordovician period, 500 million years ago. At the time, atmospheric CO2 concentration was at a whopping 3000 to 9000 ppm! The average temperature wasn’t much more than 10 degrees C above today’s, and those of you who have heard of the runaway hothouse Earth scenario may wonder why it didn’t happen then. Major factors were that the Sun was cooler, and the planet’s orbital cycles were different."
> At the time, atmospheric CO2 concentration was at a whopping 3000 to 9000 ppm! The average temperature wasn’t much more than 10 degrees C above today’s
You talk like +10C is nbd. Are you aware of how much landmass was covered by water during that time?
I'm no expert but that would cause human civilization to take a dramatically different form if not outright extinction.
The article debunks the CO2 quantity from only one such emission. There are hundreds of active volcanoes on the Earth's surface and possibly thousands more in the oceans.
> 1. Fossil fuels can't just run out because they are produced continuously by dead matter decaying over time.
I love this comment for being the perfect example of how something can be technically correct, while also being completely wrong on every conceivable level.
Yes. Fossil fuels are derived from natural ongoing processes (some are at least, coal formation may be over forever), but at a painstakingly slow rate that it is meaningless to any point being made when people talk about "running out of fossil fuels". "Running out of fossil fuels" implicitly refers to human timescales. Not geological ones. Everyone understands this when discussing this topic. So either you are painfully ignorant on the subject of how fossil fuels are formed, or are intentionally trying to derail discussions surrounding the actual problems we face.
"there is a curious lack of verifiable quantitative data in your comment"
Sorry, the climate-change megalomaniacs have skewed every discussion about this in the mainstream media. You will have to search for the data in the alternative sources.
"because to the rest of us it looks like you are mistaken"
I don't see any big changes when compared to the last 30 years, do you?
What I do see is one big hysteria by the first-world countries who are imposing expensive, inefficient green energy on the rest of the world. Curiously, they are not doing anything to reduce the emissions they produce.
I knew there were climate skeptics, but this is the first time I encounter such lunacy in the wild.
Let me ask you this - the US economic boom is largely attributable to slavery and WW2 decimating its rivals and forcing them to agree to quasi-vassality. Should we bring back slavery and start a new world war? So that it's "fair" for the developing countries?
"the US economic boom is largely attributable to slavery and WW2 decimating its rivals and forcing them to agree to quasi-vassality. Should we bring back slavery and start a new world war? So that it's "fair" for the developing countries?"
Ah, another strawman I have to argue on the internet. I did not say that, so don't put it in my mouth, please.
Tell me why you think that things science already confirmed are "lunacy" to you?
The US did benefit from slavery and the fact that most of Europe ended up destroyed in WWII.
However, it did not use green energy to build up its huge industry. It used fossil fuels. If it did use carbon-free energy sources, I would have agreed and wouldn't be such a climate-change skeptic now.
Not an American, so I don't really want to engage in your culture wars, but still... your comment is very Chomsky-ite.
The slavery part is questionable. While slavery made money for the slave owners, the South as a whole was poor and couldn't keep up with the North when it came to actual economic activity. That is why they lost their war of survival.
Looking at other slave-owning societies of the 1800s, none can be described as particularly rich today. One of the reasons why slavery died out in the Western world was that it was becoming uneconomical in a world that was shifting from agriculture to industry. Even the Nazis often lost money on their slave-operated industries; people are just too clever not to be able to sabotage such subtle operations if they hate you enough. Slavery is really only economically efficient in sex, back-breaking work in the fields or mines, or possibly household help.
"Quasi-vassality" is a Putinesque formulation. Neither Japan nor Germany are in any sense of the word American vassal states. They are kept in the American-led coalition mostly by their self-interest, because taking part in a global trade network is, for industrial powers like those two, much preferable to not doing so. And if they find any American political or military action questionable, they stay out of it, unlike actual vassals, who were usually compelled to provide manpower for their liege's wars.
Neither Japan nor Germany engaged themselves in Vietnam or Iraq, for example.
> While slavery made money for the slave owners, the South as a whole was poor and couldn't keep up with the North when it came to actual economic activity. That is why they lost their war of survival.
This is 100% false. The South was wealthy as fuck. The North and South had a very important trade relationship where they both benefited. The southern plantations grew the cotton that the northern industrialists profited from.
> One of the reasons why slavery died out in the Western world was that it was becoming uneconomical in a world that was shifting from agriculture to industry.
This isn't true as far as I know. The South tried to replicate slavery with Jim Crow because the free and cheap labor was immensely profitable. The South fought the Civil War because they were fighting to protect their right to slavery since it made them so rich.
No, the average Southerner was fairly poor. The rich oligarchy was rich, but that is a tautology; the same situation applies in contemporary Gabon or Equatorial Guinea, two countries that are very clearly not wealthy as fuck.
"The South tried to replicate slavery with Jim Crow because the free and cheap labor was immensely profitable."
If it was immensely profitable, could you name me some big corporations that were built on the top of it? You can't. The South was the sick man of American economy. All the innovative businesses of the Gilded Age were built on free labor.
John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Mellon, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Flagler, Henry Huttleston Rogers, J. P. Morgan, Leland Stanford, Meyer Guggenheim, Jacob Schiff, Charles Crocker, Cornelius Vanderbilt - show me a Southerner among them. The furthest one was born in Pennsylvania.
lol didn't expect anybody to respond to this argumentatively since it's fact but then again we're on hacker news. i'm not meaning to flex, but i have a degree in southern history. not even gonna bother to argue after reading this:
> If it was immensely profitable, could you name me some big corporations that were built on the top of it? You can't.
Wealthy in what way? I’m sure the South had massively rich plantation owners and bankers, but like most resource extraction economies I suspect monetary velocity was lower and the general public was much poorer and less educated. Extraction economies usually amass a lot of static wealth but are poor in terms of dynamic wealth.
The relationship with Northern capitalists would have been similar to what you see today with petrostates, resource extraction states, and vendors of cheap labor.
Had the South survived I would suspect it would be much poorer today than the North as its economy would probably get stuck in extraction and labor exploitation. Chattel slavery would probably have ended when fossil fuels were discovered at large scale and it might be a petrostate now.
"Had the South survived I would suspect it would be much poorer today than the North as its economy would probably get stuck in extraction and labor exploitation"
You do know how the US economy works today? You know why everyone accepts the US dollar, a literal piece of paper, in exchange for real, tangible goods?
Because they will be sanctioned and bombed to oblivion if they don't. Now, tell me how this is not a "wealth extraction" economy.
Whoa. You are overestimating the American military capacity by a lot.
There are regionally used strong currencies like the Euro. Us Euros mostly do our internal trade in, well, Euros, without being bombed or even sanctioned. That is quite a lot of trade.
Aside from the Euro, there isn't much of a competition in the international arena. China wants to control the renminbi tightly, which precludes its wider adoption as a reserve currency. UK is a shadow of its former imperial self, and so is the pound. The Japanese economy is too weak for the yen to be a serious competitor.
And with currencies like the rupee, you will find that few people outside India are willing to trust them. Russians now sell a lot of oil to India for rupees (and note that there does not seem to be any initiative to bomb India for engaging in this trade), but then are basically forced to use those same rupees to buy stuff from India again, and Indian exports aren't a great match for Russian economic needs.
"That is how the world economy used to work, before the petrodollar."
The petrodollar is about 50 years old, and international trade grew IDK, fivefold? in that period. No surprise that the previous patterns don't hold any more. There is a difference between a market of three villages and a market of fifteen villages. If the # of connections between corporations and nations grows quadratically, it becomes infeasible to juggle around dozens of different currencies. The market will trend towards dominance of one.
"Euro is irrelevant outside of Europe."
But Europe is fairly relevant in the world. About 20 per cent of forex reserves worldwide are kept in Euro, it is the only serious, though not peer, competitor to the USD in this regard.
"Russians now sell a lot of oil to India for rupees (and note that there does not seem to be any initiative to bomb India for engaging in this trade), but then are basically forced to use those same rupees to buy stuff from India again".
That is how the world economy used to work, before the petrodollar.
Now, Saudis or Qatar or pick your favorite Middle eastern monarch sell oil to US and everyone else in exchange for $USD. Since oil is used in nearly every other product line, either for transport or actual product, now world trade depends on how much $USD you have to buy said oil.
>>Because they will be sanctioned and bombed to oblivion if they don't. Now, tell me how this is not a "wealth extraction" economy.
TIL, people buy iphones and use facebook, because they are afraid to be bombed otherwise.
You know there is a good reason why even rich and powerfull people from Russia or China don't want to keep their wealth in their home currencies. And it's not because they are afraid to be bombed by Americans.
Which they want to have out of their self interest and not because they are forced too. And no, they are not occupied by any definition. Ukraine is an example of a country which is partially occupied by a foreign force.
There is something like 40 thousand American soldiers in Germany. Way, way too little to influence actual policy of a rich country with > 80 million people.
I speak German and I can guarantee you that American military presence has approximately zero influence on German politics.
This is not how an "occupied" country works. You know how an occupied country looks like? Like Czechoslovakia after 1968. The Soviet troops were permanently stationed there to cow our own Communists into submission to the Moscow line. Once it became clear that Gorbachev was no longer willing to actually use them for this purpose, the regime disintegrated within a few years.
"I speak German and I can guarantee you that American military presence has approximately zero influence on German politics."
Then why the fuck did they put sanctions on Russia? Why the fuck did they agree to buy a much more expensive liquid gas from the US when they had a cheaper alternative that allowed them to have such a great economy? And why did they not react when Nord Stream pipelines, the source of that cheap gas, got blown up?
What, they just sucked it up and said "hell, it's worth it, at least Russia is bad!"?
They tanked their own economy because Uncle Sam told them to do so, and not a single rational decision has ever been made by the German government since February 2022.
Spoiler alert: not everyone elevates money and economy über alles. What you call "rational" I would call "endlessly cynical".
Russian invasion of Ukraine destabilized security relationships in half of Europe and quite a lot of Germans are sensitive about it. Your view that German economy matters the most and the Russian imperial project is morally irrelevant is mostly carried by AfD, which attracts about a quarter of the total vote. I would say that another quarter of the German population genuinely doesn't care that way or the other, but that still leaves about a half which considers Putin an evil guy and does not want to maintain tight contact with him, much like you don't just invite gangsters into your business for some money.
Granted, the balance of views in Germany is nowhere near as one-sided as in Poland where 90 per cent of people hate and loathe and fear Putin as a mortal enemy, but still. German nation as a whole isn't in mood to make happy deals with Putin and the actions of the politicians reflect that mood.
Try to argue your point without calling me names (in one case a dictator, in another case a professor who got prizes for his peace efforts) and maybe I'll read what you have to say.
> use their brains more, instead of relying on stupid chatbots
As someone with a diagnosed mental illness (ADHD), chatgpt has helped me more than adderall (prescription scheduled 2 stimulant).
As skeptical of web 3.0 stuff (crypto, nfts etc) as i usually am (just like yourself), chatgpt/llms seems like they have actual value (the valuation might be bubble but should revert to a positive average unlike nfs after the hype wears off).
"They potentially broke up a great company and product for nothing."
Wake up, the AI chatbot craze phase is over. Find some other ways to boost your productivity that are more reliable and will not turn your brain into pudding.
Chatbots assistants make you too reliant on a service which reliability you can't control.
First, there is the fact that ChatGPT and it's cousins require an active internet connection, unlike some other tools that similarly boosted human productivity (like a calculator program).
Second, it is server-based utility. Meaning, even if you have internet connection, server might be down for some reason.
Third, while training your mind to be reliant to ChatGPT, you gradually lose the patience and ability to think outside the box. If your first move when you face a problem is to ask ChatGPT for a solution, then it's no good.
The third one may seem like harmless since we are already using Google, but it's not. Google still requires you to filter the data and go through each listed page manually. In other words, you still are using your brain somewhat. With chatbots, you lose even that "do it yourself" analysis.
They're probably referencing Iraq and I'm not sure it was raw resource extraction as it was so much removal of a competitor (whatever the name of the Iraqi state oil company was) and more than that, enabling sales of equipment, consulting, etc. It wasn't as simple as some 1800s colonialism, it was advanced wealth extraction worthy of the 21st century.
Ok. So the US spent $3 trillion[0] on a war in Iraq to get some consulting contracts from a country with a GDP of $36 billion[1]? And didn't invade Saudi Arabia, which actually has oil? How much wealth do you estimate the US extacted from the war?
While I don't lend credence to it being that simple, it's worth noting that the people making that profit aren't the ones paying for it, and the ones paying for it aren't using their own money.
>The Europeans were starting to loosen Iraqi oil sanctions
Any links I can read about this? I'm open to the idea that suppressing Iraq's oil industry was the main objective of the war. I don't like claims about "the US's quest to take other nations oil" being that it never happened either in Iraq or even Iran. At least when I ask for a source I can never get one. To me the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were mainly about projecting power, not oil. Certainly not Afghanistan because there is little to no oil there in the first place. Even regarding Iraq it is OPEC that sets the price and I doubt they would let Iraq greatly reduce the market price. It would have to be as you say: people with connections using the US's power to suppress competition. Many people online, however, seem to have the idea that US foriegn policy dictates collecting oil and that the US is stealing trillions of dollars of oil from various third world countries. I think the US gains a lot more from war to project power. Iraq for the most part today is a US ally. And if we are looking for people who would gain from the war it would more likely be Lockheed than Exxon. Lastly, there is no reason to say that US oil companies staged the war exclusively. It is possible that eg. SA were also involved or the main initiators.
I'm sorry, but Saudis were the biggest losers in removing Saddam.
Removal of Saddam removed one of the biggest adversaries of Iran. Now Iranian Revolutionary Guard can freely move from Tehran to Beirut and support the rebels in Yemen.
>Wasn't Iraq about to switch away from trading the oil in USD ?
I don't know. Do you have a source for that claim? Preferably from before the war started. (Later is fine too.)
>But let me flip your argument -- why did the US invade Iraq?
This doesn't flip the argument. That would only be the case if not being able to explain the war meant that it therefore was started for oil. These are not two sides of a coin. Simmilarly I wouldn't say that if we can't explain Iraq then it must have been to find aliens.
>The US has/had troops stationed in Saudi Arabia and Saudi Arabia was in the US's pocket at that time
And what percent of the oil profits did the US get? If the claim is that the US will invade for oil then being in the US's pocket, whatever that means, is irrelevant. But I think you answered your own question here. The US likes having countries "in it's pocket." It wants to station troops in other countries. These are legitimate -- here I don't reffer to moral legitimacy -- national objectives. Skimming contracts or suppressing oil fields is not a legitimate national objective. If there are groups in the US (eg. Exxon) that are so powerfull they can make the US go to war without a single national objective achieved then they could simply take the $3 trillion directly. I think your point about the petrodollar is interesting, although I'd like to see some more evidence.
East India Company is surely one of the biggest plagues ever on mankind. As the name says, it was a private megacorporation, with it's own navy and private army.
Nation states kill for the ideals. Private companies that have the power of a state kill, enslave and pillage only for more profit.
In truth, it was just a way to slow down the growth of rival industrialized countries, or countries that are yet to industrialize. By promoting expensive, inefficient "clean" energy sources (but not nuclear!), they are stunting the growth of developing nations.