It seems like there’s kind of a lot of this watching villains and deciding they must be the heroes phenomenon. I see the same thing with how people interpret things like Rick and Morty, It’s Always Sunny, Starship Troopers, or Warhammer 40K. Like, they seem to miss that the characters they’re watching aren’t supposed to be admirable, but are meant to be demonstrating their flaws as, you know, flaws. But instead they just see someone to follow.
That may well be the case, but it’s always a mistake to assume we know everything. That’s how we got into this mess in the first place. It wasn’t long ago that we didn’t know what germs were, didn’t have electricity, didn’t understand things like relativity or quantum mechanics. We don’t know what we’re going to learn tomorrow, or next year, or 50 years from now.
If there’s an option A in which we both fail to do anything to reduce carbon in the atmosphere and also fail to do anything to cool down the planet and an option B where we for now fail to do anything to reduce the carbon in the atmosphere but manage to cool it down enough to provide a stop gap, option B might get us to a point where we can actually do something. At the very least it could give us a little more time before we fully run out of options for survival. Option A doesn’t give us that breathing room and doesn’t make things better in the mean time.
Saying that neither option can fully solve our problem doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing the thing that makes the immediate issue less severe. It’s a bandaid, to be sure, but sometimes a bandaid is what you need to slow down an infection until you can get somewhere where you can actually heal.
I don’t know the long term answer. I don’t think anybody does. But I also don’t think we can say with honesty, given the history of human knowledge and technology, that we actually know whether or not an answer will exist in the future. In the mean time, we should probably be acting to create the possibility that we can make use of an answer if we find one.
Well, it has to be repeated indefinitely until we actually manage to find a way to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere significantly. Which, yeah, that might be forever, but it could also be somewhere around the corner. Personally, given the trajectory we’re on it seems like a reasonable stop gap that might actually help cool the planet somewhat, but it’s not up to me.
The closest thing I’ve heard of is sulfur dioxide injection, which could apparently reduce greenhouse effects. However, if we implemented this and ever stopped doing it before decreasing the current levels of carbon, it could result in more rapid heating, which would be more damaging to wildlife due to the greater speed with which survivors would have to migrate.
Those are all ways to reduce the flow of new carbon emissions, but they don’t address the issue if the carbon that’s already in the atmosphere, which is what they’re talking about.
This would be things like more effective carbon capture technologies or sulfur dioxide injection. The point they’re making is that just slowing down the rate that new carbon is added or even stopping new carbon from being added at all isn’t sufficient to stop the runaway effects.
Never mind that the current regime in the US is on track to actually increase carbon emissions.
What I see in these threads is the reverse. People insist that their pet solution is a panacea for every use case and when someone points out that it doesn’t work for them they get downvotes and sarcasm. Making use of the best software for your use case is not equivalent to complicity in animal torture and environmental destruction. Nobody’s being forced into constant pregnancy or having their calves taken away at birth because I feel like third party security patches for Windows will be a better option for me than fully swapping to a Linux distro.
But what is definitely happening is people stop reading pro-FOSS threads by the third rabid fanboy response and actually miss what could be a useful alternative.
The way people act while advocating for something does in fact affect the efficacy of their advocacy whether they want to admit it or not.
Threads like this are why people don’t use open source. It sounds like a reality-denying anti-intellectual one-size-fits-all cult in here. This is also like half the threads about Linux. Just armies of tech bros who couldn’t put themselves in someone else’s shoes if their life literally depended on it.
Last week there was a day when the AQI went over 50. I have asthma and noticed I was having trouble breathing. It was burning my eyes and giving me a headache and a stomach ache. I ended up spending most of the day inside, and if it had even been a little bit worse I would have just called out. A mask didn’t really help. You could see a smoky haze in the clouds, obscuring the mountains a bit, and even hanging in some of the bigger fields.
That’s at 50. The highest I’ve seen it is somewhere around like 120 to 140, which makes my breathing bad enough that I just seal up my room, crank my carbon filter and air purifier, and stay inside until it passes.
Then I look at the AQI maps and scroll over to India and China. Yikes.
I can’t imagine what 400 must be like. I don’t think I’d survive. I would never be able to go outside.
Oh no! Not our capitalism! Where will we get all our poverty?!?!
I also have a CueCat! I ordered it back in the 90s when it was still being advertised!