Our oceans broke heat records in 2018 and the consequences are catastrophic

I do what I can individual-wise to live low impact, but I feel like most of this is almost a foregone conclusion since it is just plain more expensive to live this way and many people wont be able to do it. And the corporations that hurt the planet the most have no reason to stop. What can we do to stop this on a more macro scale? Don't tell me to call my senator, I live in Utah...
Carbon taxes

Plastic, petrol, coal, paper, cars, medicine - everything around us exists only because carbon was burnt to reach us.

The price of the clean up, however, is not part of the cost, which is why it all seems so cheap - and why global warming is not something you think of when you buy up a candy bar and toss the wrapper.

Climate change is a market error because the market currently is not pricing the true cost of consumption.

The moment carbon taxes come in - people will immediately see that things are not as cheap as they thought. Those plastic beer cups? Not worth it.

This is what is needed. People respond to obvious incentives - and actually paying the full life cycle price of a product will make those incentives clear.

Will it probably cause a large change in the world economy? Yes - obviously, thats the point: this is less damaging to the world economy than just falling off of the climate change cliff.

EDIT:

I think its important to point out that this will be a tax on raw materials and production processes as well. This will push firms to pollute less to pay less tax. They will be more competitive and the prices (or profit) will be clear to customers.

2) a lot of people are pointing out that carbon taxes can be misused by the government. This is true, and is part that people need to work out for themselves.

Most importantly: We are already subsidizing the cost of carbon (there's no such thing as a free lunch)

When recycling programs are executed - your taxes subsidize it.

When a fire rages through a forest - fire fighting costs, infrastructure rebuilding costs, insurance premiums, are paid for by taxes and personal expense.

When your child's life is worse because cars are emitting nox? You pay for the doctors and the taxes to subsidize health care.

You are already paying for carbon - a carbon tax is more like having all the hidden terms and conditions made clear at one go.

Whenever I get into any sort of conversation about climate change with a family member of mine, they bring up the carbon tax and how it is just another way for the government to skim in more money from the people and then waste it. I always wonder about the actual economic effects of a carbon tax versus its intended ones.

I am hugely concerned with climate change, but I also feel like the government is already taxing people too much and the average citizen is giving way too much of their money to the government while the government seems awesome at wasting money in spectacular fashion . I have always wondered how a carbon tax would work. My worry is that any tax would be deflected to consumers while the corporations and government would continue profiting as normal, having zero effect on the climate.

Can anybody help me understand? Im hoping there is good news because I feel stuck in a rift of trying to explain to people how big of a problem climate change is and then wondering myself if there is even a way to fight it that will effect those in charge

edit: thanks for all the replies, interesting stuf

The latest research shows that since the late 80s it has reduced in strength by up to 20 to 30%. I haven’t found any information on exactly what reduction % will result in its collapse but it is the primary source of oxygenating ocean water globally.

If it collapses or even reduces too a significant weakness then oxygen levels in global ocean waters will be so low that most fish life and food sources from the ocean will die.

50% of the globes human population depends on the oceans for food and protein as the majority source of their daily nutrition.

Organic Farming is Actually Worse for Climate Change: The practice cuts greenhouse-gas emissions only if you ignore the inconvenient fact that it requires a lot more land.

There are three alternatives:

Keep the weeds and sort them out from the harvest. This is not economically viable.

Tilling. The main drawbacks is that you put a lot of nitrates into the soil and 20ish years later, these nitrates show up in your ground water. So it is not possible drinking water protection areas. The soil errosion is not so much an effect of the direct tilling, but of the fact that the soil is left barren over a winter afterwards. Using some cover foilage over the winter (like glover, which you can conviniently use as cattle food in the next year) helps quite a bit with this. The other option is to add top soil in some way to make up for the errosion (terra preta or something).


Found this article a little biased. Yes, the yield of biologically diversified crop systems has been found to be less, but I’ve found that number is quite contested. HOWEVER, this is only in the short term—I.e., through a one crop rotation. WE NEED TO START THINKING LONGTERM. If we consider that biologically diversified farming is more resilient to drought, disease, and extreme environmental changes the yields are actually very similar in the long term. Further, biologically diversified farming promotes natural pollinators, which is starting to become a necessity with the sharp decline in bee populations... Also, this article didn’t consider all the emissions generated by the creation, transportation etc of fertilizers, pesticides etc... I think this meta analysis sums up everything very well...

There is, of course, no evidence for that assertion: it's just ideology.

When I saw this headline I thought that OP was going to get it in the ear for going against the zeitgeist and, indeed, the forces are gathering.

When you compare two systems, you need to specify the objective function: what are you trying to optimise? Are you maximising yield, yield stability, biodiversity, cost per unit produced or land use, labour efficiency or aesthetics? You can make the country pretty and full of yokel labourers with one set of policies, grimly productive with another. But first - as with any policy initiative, ahem Brexit - you need to say exactly what you are trying to achieve and how you are going to measure progress.

Do you have any idea what you are talking about. So you want agricultural system where we 80% of the population works on farms to produce enough food for the other 20%. You want a system that is so unnnesseraly complicated that you can't even use machinery anymore.

You want to stop using efficient technology's like the Haber Bosh process because because right now we use CH4 as a hydrogen source when H2O is just as good if you have a better source of energy and replace it with nitrogen binding crops.

What are you gonna do when you start to lose nutrients because people use medication and their "biosolids" are no longer safe for use on farmland.

How do you want to feed population centers with 5 million inhabitants.

Lastly What crops are you actually talking about growing?

Forgive me, but the way you've phrased your comment is rather confusing- it sorta suggests that we shouldn't be feeding the entire world, which I'm assuming is not what you mean?

If you want to argue that food should be sourced as locally as possible, I don't disagree, but one has to remember that it's logistically impossible for countries like Japan or the UK to not import vast amounts of food from overseas. Moreover, the lower yields from organic farming translate to increased land demands, which translates to larger transport distances and more deforestation, which means more CO2 emissions. Efficiency in agriculture is kind of important.

You mean they reduced pesticide use, reduced water use, increased yields and saved topsoil because roundup ready is one of few ways to actually practice no till farming.

Yes its true old formulations had a toxin in it. Its not in there anymore we checked, we checked to find any know toxins in there the newer formulations are safe (after 2000) Its the most studied pesticide in the world.

So yeah even that roundup ready that uses more of a less harmful pesticide. (you calculate environmental/health effect by taking the sum of product of every pesticide you used * its danger to human en environment.) Because the more dangerous pesticides are no longer necessary for no till farming.

So yeah roundup ready means allows no till farming that saves topsoil and in turn increases C in soil, increases amount of water available, slows the loss of nutrients reducing need for fertilizers and a whole lot of other advantages simply because weeds become less of a problem. The problem in the us is bad government oversight resulting in resistance developing in weeds and indicate application methods causing it to end up in waterways.


The easiest way to accomplish this is to change what we produce. Instead of intensive monocrops for animal feed, we could produce legumes and vegetables to feed the same number of people on a much smaller area, with dramatically less inputs and water.

We really need to think about the long term consequences of any practices. A GMO designed for a better nutritional profile or for drought resistance could be used in a sustainable way. A GMO designed for herbicide resistance will encourage monocropping which damages the soil and requires more inputs. So it depends.

You'll probably be interested by regenerative agriculture.

Light pollution is key 'bringer of insect apocalypse'

This is one of those things I've seen over the years, and yet not thought about the implications.

Even as a child, attending a night baseball game, I had seen swarms of insects circling around the lights. It was a normal thing, and no one had stopped to ask why this is happening, or if it was a good thing.

Of course, the general attitude back then was that insects were pests, and if they died due to lights, that was all fine.



But just the act of circling the lights means that the insects aren't doing what they would normally do. And so it disrupts the ecosystem in ways that we may not have intended.

I also remember being in awe of the amounts of insets buzzing around lights in the summer, or landing everywhere during mayfly mating season. Now as an adult, I don’t see that anymore and had thought it was childhood memories where everything is bigger and more impressive. No, they really are dying off

It also doesn't do wonders for us trying to get to a sustainable energy standpoint, lighting up every highway, every suburban intersection with street lights. Its all so wasteful and could be eliminated or replaced my motion activated lights or just using car headlights.

Also if we had those lights all pointed down instead of shining into my eyes as I’m walking around, then they would be more efficient, as well as more effective from the point of view of enabling outdoor safety rather than blinding the people they’re supposed to protect.

When I was a kid, only 15-20 years ago, I remember seeing swarms of insects in the Summer. Riding my Dad’s lawn mower, small flying bugs would constantly be hitting my face, and flies could be seen all around. Now, I rarely see any insects at all. It’s kind of scary.

I drove across the country fifteen years ago, and again five years ago. My parents did so a month ago, when it was still unseasonably warm throughout the trip.

The first time I made the drive I had to stop on the way to clean off my windshield twice. The second time, I didn't really need to clean my windshield off at all until I got to my destination, though I had a few bugs splattered on it.

They never had to clean off their windshield. There was practically nothing splattered on it.

I'm worried.

I've noticed this as well. I live in southeastern KS, I have relatives ~200 miles away in western KS I have been visiting since I was a kid in the 1980s.

Since the late 1990s or so, I drive there myself, I go out there at least a couple times a year. Bugs were always a constant battle, especially in the late summer, and I'd sometimes have to stop once or twice on the way to clean off my windshield.

These days, I never stop, make it all the way there and back with just a spot or two on my windshield.

I know some farms use artificial lights on produces and livestock’s for growth control or warmth etc. even so called organic farms do it and it’s not seen with any issues but I always thought “how is this organic? But I was never able to back this up with a valid or smart argument for a conversation. After all it just light and electricity can be produced from clean energy. But now I read this article, I feel like I found another piece of the puzzle.


I think a lot of articles like this end up selling the wrong points, like global warming did with climate change. The issues of migration are hard to tract for fish, and I can't imagine what they're like for insects, but I don't see why their would be a collapse as opposed to new distributions in different locations. Are some insects the most resilient species on earth? Are we actually talking about "insect apocalypse" or certain necessary species becoming extinct while other flourish?

Scientists may have just discovered a new class of black holes.

First of all though: I'm not quite sure where you're going with your question. What is it that surprises you about the mass of that black hole in relation to fusion fueled stars? Keep in mind that technically ANYTHING could become a black hole. The important thing about stars is just that you need a specific initial mass for the star so that it leaves behind a black hole in the end and it's only the core that collapses into a compact object; most of the shell is gone by the end of a star's evolution.

To answer your question about density: Main sequence stars, those that turn hydrogen into helium in their cores, have an anti-proportional relationship between their mass and their volume, meaning that the more massive a star is the less dense it is if you sum up their whole mass over the whole volume; that last bit is important, because the cores of more massive stars are denser than what you find the sun simply because there's a bigger shell pressing down on it, but the shell, which is what mainly contributes to both mass and volume, is way less dense in massive stars compared to, for example, the sun.

The reason the shell is less dense is that the energy being released in the core counteracts gravity, and is distributed throughout the star. So, if you have a more massive and dense core that can produce a lot of energy, that energy heats up the shell and spreads it out, the same as how most fluids and gases become expand (= become less dense) when you heat them up.

Just quickly about massive stars leaving behind black holes: When a star leaves behind a compact object, be it a white dwarf, a neutron star, or a black hole, what constitutes that object is what remains of the core(!) of the star, not the star as a whole. During a collapse, in most scenarios, it is the core that collapses into some compact object. Most of the time that is either a white dwarf or a neutron star, depending on how much mass the core has. The shell is usually thrown out, especially during a neutron star collapses, where said shell smashes onto the neutron star and gets reflected back into space (that process is pretty complicated in actuallity, but that's the basic idea). Depending on whether some of the shell sticks around, the neutron star might accrete that mass and collapse further down to a black hole. The mass a neutron star needs for that is actually fairly well understood, and it seems to be a rather sharp transitional point, which is why we expect to find neutron stars of masses ranging very close to that boundary, but still below, as well as black holes that JUST made it over the boundary. That boundary, called the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit lies at roughly 2.3 solar masses.

This is, by the way, the reason why this observation is pretty cool: The team found a black hole that BARELY got over that boundary!

Edit: Type - Wrote 3.2 solar masses for the limit instead of 2.3. It should also be noted that the exact theoretical boundary depends on how exactly a neutron star is structured, or, in more technical terms, what its equation of state is, and we simply aren't sure about that at this point. But 2.3 solar masses seems to be in line with current observations.

Aside from the fact that microscopic black holes like that aren't actually dangerous.

it is common for black holes to be described as some cosmic vacuum cleaner that sucks up everythnig in its way, and so some seem to think a microscopic black hole would simply suck up Earth. But that's not how it works.

The gravitational force is dependent on the mass of the object and distance to it. Black holes like we're usually discussing have a really large mass, hence they exert a strong force of gravity. The really exceptional stuff only happens if you get very, very close to a black hole - because it focuses that much mass on a very small area of space (aka it's very dense). That makes the difference. With lower density objects, at this point part of the object would drag you to the sides, as it contains part of its mass, which means part of its gravitational force cancelled itselfs, limiting the amount of attraction you feel toward the center of the object. The singularity however has no outer parts that could cancel out some of this force. Hence you still feel a growing attractive force the entire time you approach the black hole, and at some point the force is so strong that not even light can escape.

However, for a microscopic black hole, it's difficult to get close enough for it to matter - other forces will counteract its pull of gravity. So what is more likely to happen is that the black hole would simply fall through the ground and fly towards earth's center, probably unable to capture much new mass along the route. Not exactly sure if it would be caught in some repeating movement cycle, flying up and down through Earth or something like that.

The black hole hypothetically created by the collider (or radiation hitting the atmosphere) would derive its effective mass from the energy of the collisions that created it - which isn't very much overall (a lot for a single particle, but not a lot compared to something like Earth. Or a chair.)

And if really fails to capture any mass or energy, it could even be that the black hole evaporates from hawking radiation eventually (I think very quickly, actually).

So we could in theory find something right on the border between a black hole and a neutron star?

Where light is almost blocked from escaping but not quite.

Would this display a you unique signature where high energy photons escaped, but low energy did not?

I’m a noob, but that seems like something we could search for.

NASA discovers thermonuclear blast in Deep Space

So was just recently listening the book "Supernova Era". It describes a star nearby earth but hidden by a dust cloud going supernova in the current time; but 200 years before it goes supernova, it produces a "helium flash" as all helium in the stars core is consumed in a few short minutes. The star then proceeds to fuse carbon produced from the helium flash. Is that what this event was? Should this pular be expected to erupt into a full blown nova sometime in the next thousand years as each of the
successively heavier elements are exhausted in their fusion cycle?

I mean of preserved things that perhaps solidified and maintained a structure that would inform someone that it was at one point entirely exotic radioactive substance.

but I’m think now that when these violent events happen, most of the ejecta is (by necessity of having to leave the large gravity well) extremely hot, and the time it takes to cool down and aggregate is also the time it takes to turn into something more boring isotope/element-wise

Betelgeuse is an enormous behemoth that has a volume of a billion suns, ready to explode. And it's not that far from us! We're safe though, we're not it the direction of the gamma ray beam, from the impending supernova. A supernova that will be so bright that it will outshine the moon!! It could happen tomorrow... Unfortunately, it could take a million years as well.

I read somewhere, I can't remember where though, that we're pretty safe from annihilating stars. Those who is ready to pop is either too far from us, or with their axis in a favourable direction.

So how many kilotons we talking here?

The sun produce about one trillion megaton per second, so about 864000000000000000000 megaton, 864 quintillion megaton, 864 septillioton. Basically nothing compared to a hypernova, that can emit as much light as the whole Milky Way galaxy (100-400 million stars) when it explode.

Back of napkin math... https://www.learnastronomyhq.com/articles/how-much-energy-does-the-sun-produce.html

In 1 second the Sun generates 3.8 x 1026 Joules. That is 3.8 followed by 26 zeroes. In the UK that is 380 quadrillion Joules every second and in short scale numbers it would be 380 septillion Joules. 

10 days x 86,400 seconds / day x 3.8 x 1026 Joules / second = 3.2832 x 1032 Joules

I'm no rocket surgeon, but that's alot.

Edit... kiloton conversion

1 kiloton[explosive] is equal to 4184000000000 Joules, so

7.84703633 x 1013 gigatons

There is a network of neutrino detectors across the planet that would give a short warning of a supernova - maybe 3 hours. One big enough to impact life on earth would produce a significantly large neutrino signal across the detectors.

The neutrinos are emitted during the core collapse, but before the shockwave reaches the star surface and starts emitting light.

Neutrinos move at like 99.999% c. So whether light can catchup depends on two factors:

a) the time head start neutrinos have due to the delay between the core collapse and the emitting of visible light.

b) the distance from the supernova to earth

NASA has found sugar in meteorites that crashed to Earth

"The research provides the first direct evidence of ribose in space and the delivery of the sugar to Earth," said Yoshihiro Furukawa of Japan's Tohoku University, lead author of the study, in the press release. "The extraterrestrial sugar might have contributed to the formation of RNA on the prebiotic Earth which possibly led to the origin of life."

I don't understand this. If the chemical processes that create Ribose are found on asteroids, wouldn't they have also likely been found on early Earth? Why do we need an extraterrestrial sugar hypothesis?

wouldn't they have also likely been found on early Earth?

Sure, but we cannot be certain about it, is what this study tells us. There is a possibility of exclusive extraterrestrial sugar. Whether exclusive or not, there is evidence some sugar on earth was delivered by the asteroids.

This suggests that sugars may not be that rare in the cosmos, but it still doesn't really get to the question of how they formed. If they are not the result of biological processes, then what are they the result of? And if they are the result of biological processes, well, that raises even more questions. This is what's great about discovery; the more you learn, the more questions you open up for further exploration.

You're right that it's a question to explore further, but there's absolutely no reason to think this is the result of biological processes. Ribose is basically just five water and carbon molecules combined. We find more complex molecules that have nothing to do with life all the time. I don't know how these particular molecules come to be an it's an interesting question, but it's almost certainly a non-biological chemical reaction.

I think what they meant was that enzymatic formation of ribose seems to be the easiest way to make ribose, and it seems like it would be a rare event otherwise. Sure, it is only 5 carbons and 5 waters (essentially), but to synthesize the sugar non-enzymatically seems unlinkely.

If the chemical processes that create Ribose are found on asteroids, wouldn't they have also likely been found on early Earth?

Not necessarily. The chemical environment on an asteroid could be very different than the conditions of early earth. Ribose made in space could arise through different mechanisms compared to ribose made on earth. Different atmospheres (or a total lack of atmosphere), different types of radiation, different temperatures... these are very different environments.

Of course these aren't mutually exclusive things, since it's possible that ribose can be made in various environments, but finding the ribose on an asteroid makes one ask how it got there.

Why do we need an extraterrestrial sugar hypothesis?

I don't think we need, it's just that finding ribose on an asteroid opens the door a bit wider towards that possibility, so it leads to some new questions being explored. Just because ribose was on an asteroid doesn't mean that ribose could not have also been made on earth.

Its evidence further supporting the panspermia hypothesis.
At least it helps give us an idea on where to look for life, what kinda conditions would be mostly advantageous.

No, it does not give evidence for panspermia. Panspermia is the hypothesis that life gets transported from one planetary body to another, even across solar systems, by small rocky/icy bodies like asteroids and comets. However, this foes support the idea that life's components were formed and arrived from outer space, which is exciting by itself.

FYI, we'd have to be able to prove the meteorite was from outside our solar system for the focus to shift like your suggesting. So far nothing in this has showed any indication it was formed in space itself. Not really possible according to the physics we know. For all we know that particular meteor may have come from something like the Great Impact theory, or even an Extrasolar planet fragment.
Remember, we don't put our wants on to the evidence. That's changing the data to suit your theory, we do the opposite. Changing the theory to suit the data.