Antarctic ice melt: 2.5m of extra sea

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plodder
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Re: Antarctic ice melt: 2.5m of extra sea

Post by plodder » Tue Sep 29, 2020 10:23 am

The derivation of Ely is Eel-isle (obvs), but less obvs is other places that end in Ey or Y were also often islands. So Oxney was an island they kept cows on etc. Blakeney is another one. Imagination fails me to come up with a massive list.

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Re: Antarctic ice melt: 2.5m of extra sea

Post by plodder » Tue Sep 29, 2020 10:25 am

AMS wrote:
Mon Sep 28, 2020 10:58 pm
dyqik wrote:
Mon Sep 28, 2020 10:37 pm
The economic system has been massively disrupted this year already. Which means it's easier to redirect it a bit right now - this is the "build back better" thing going on over here, at least.
And one of the lessons from this year is that the IT infrastructure is ready to support a big drop in commuting and business travel.
Agreed but this "direct" thing - please explain a little more?

Also agree that the economy is rapidly shifting towards sustainability, but that "rapid" is nothing like fast enough. Who's going to be doing the "directing" again? Trump? Johnson? Macron? Putin? Do we need to elect a bunch of Green Corbyns? Where are they? What are their plans? When and how will they be elected?

Don't downplay the intertia.

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Re: Antarctic ice melt: 2.5m of extra sea

Post by dyqik » Tue Sep 29, 2020 10:52 am

plodder wrote:
Tue Sep 29, 2020 10:25 am
AMS wrote:
Mon Sep 28, 2020 10:58 pm
dyqik wrote:
Mon Sep 28, 2020 10:37 pm
The economic system has been massively disrupted this year already. Which means it's easier to redirect it a bit right now - this is the "build back better" thing going on over here, at least.
And one of the lessons from this year is that the IT infrastructure is ready to support a big drop in commuting and business travel.
Agreed but this "direct" thing - please explain a little more?

Also agree that the economy is rapidly shifting towards sustainability, but that "rapid" is nothing like fast enough. Who's going to be doing the "directing" again? Trump? Johnson? Macron? Putin? Do we need to elect a bunch of Green Corbyns? Where are they? What are their plans? When and how will they be elected?

Don't downplay the intertia.
One plan is mentioned in my post.

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Re: Antarctic ice melt: 2.5m of extra sea

Post by Bird on a Fire » Wed Sep 30, 2020 12:15 am

plodder wrote:
Tue Sep 29, 2020 10:25 am
AMS wrote:
Mon Sep 28, 2020 10:58 pm
dyqik wrote:
Mon Sep 28, 2020 10:37 pm
The economic system has been massively disrupted this year already. Which means it's easier to redirect it a bit right now - this is the "build back better" thing going on over here, at least.
And one of the lessons from this year is that the IT infrastructure is ready to support a big drop in commuting and business travel.
Agreed but this "direct" thing - please explain a little more?

Also agree that the economy is rapidly shifting towards sustainability, but that "rapid" is nothing like fast enough. Who's going to be doing the "directing" again? Trump? Johnson? Macron? Putin? Do we need to elect a bunch of Green Corbyns? Where are they? What are their plans? When and how will they be elected?

Don't downplay the intertia.
I think we're actually all agreeing, but framing the issue differently.

Until very recently, conversations about the climate emergency, the crisis with biodiversity, etc, would be riddled with controversy over the facts, and statements about how the technology isn't ready yet. We can all see that we're basically past that: not merely acceptance but concern about those issues is mainstream, at least up to the point that anyone's required to do anything. The technology is so good that markets, despite their failure to cost externalities, are now preferring them over old-school fossil fuel.

We can all see that there is not, currently, a mainstream political movement with decent environmental credentials and significant global influence. And we can all see that we need one. I view that as a reason to keep talking about it, to continue to be outraged, and basically to struggle for something better. I'm not quite sure what view you're trying to promote - or was your point simply ontological? Yes, there's inertia. It's the last obstacle to unfucking the world. Let's overcome it.
We have the right to a clean, healthy, sustainable environment.

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Re: Antarctic ice melt: 2.5m of extra sea

Post by Bird on a Fire » Wed Sep 30, 2020 12:20 am

dyqik wrote:
Tue Sep 29, 2020 10:52 am
plodder wrote:
Tue Sep 29, 2020 10:25 am
AMS wrote:
Mon Sep 28, 2020 10:58 pm


And one of the lessons from this year is that the IT infrastructure is ready to support a big drop in commuting and business travel.
Agreed but this "direct" thing - please explain a little more?

Also agree that the economy is rapidly shifting towards sustainability, but that "rapid" is nothing like fast enough. Who's going to be doing the "directing" again? Trump? Johnson? Macron? Putin? Do we need to elect a bunch of Green Corbyns? Where are they? What are their plans? When and how will they be elected?

Don't downplay the intertia.
One plan is mentioned in my post.
Yes, Biden/the Dems seem(s) to be moving in promising directions at last on the environment. I'm (very cautiously) optimistic.

I also hope that, with time, the focus on developing "blue-collar" jobs might help to overcome some of the culture-wars aspect of environmental progress.

But however exciting things are in US domestic policy, the world as a whole is falling far behind what's necessary. The feasibility of the EU's Green Deal being anything meaningful depends on CAP reform, which is looking dicey. (OOooh look at me, acknowledging inertia in the economic system!) Everywhere else is currently relying on market forces to deliver sustainable development pathways, which they won't, at least until the carbon bubble bursts and all the old fossil c.nts finally lose their stranglehold on the global economy (There I go again!).
We have the right to a clean, healthy, sustainable environment.

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Re: Antarctic ice melt: 2.5m of extra sea

Post by plodder » Wed Sep 30, 2020 7:02 am

Right. So how long will this take and what are the levers and micro levers to make this happen? What are the priorities? How much time is there? What are environmentalists current priorities?

We are not heading in the right direction, and the scale of the task and its implications are not properly understood or communicated.

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Re: Antarctic ice melt: 2.5m of extra sea

Post by Bird on a Fire » Thu Oct 01, 2020 11:43 pm

plodder wrote:
Wed Sep 30, 2020 7:02 am
Right. So how long will this take and what are the levers and micro levers to make this happen? What are the priorities? How much time is there? What are environmentalists current priorities?

We are not heading in the right direction, and the scale of the task and its implications are not properly understood or communicated.
I think for a long time the issues have been represented by "environmentalists" and "conservationists", and are basically only now becoming mainstream in all sorts of sectors, from agronomy to energy and infrastructure planning, and financial markets. I think you're right that the those movements have often picked a lot of small battles without being clear about how they fit into the big picture, and have often prioritised conciliatory compromise approaches that haven't been very successful - e.g. the whole farce around agri-environment payments. I would really like to see an environmental movement presenting a bold vision on a broad front: what's the science, what do we need to do and how should we do it? what do the lawyers think? economists? What about development and social justice? We really need to infect politicians with the kinds of ambitious ideas that are already discussed by NGO and academic ecologists alike.

The levers currently being pulled are legal and financial. I did start a thread and I'd love to continue it. viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1644 One incredibly straightforward target, backed up by mountains of evidence and very simple to communicate, is reducing carbon emissions. We see markets starting to reorganise around overvalued carbon assets that can never be burned, for instance; there is a role for regulators to take a stronger stance, for example where investment funds are failing in their fiduciary duties by investing folks' pensions in stranded assets. Heathrow Airport expansion was blocked on climate grounds, based on the Paris agreement, creating legal precedent that will be observed in other jurisdictions. The EU, and likely the USA, are increasing carbon-reduction targets, and China has just entered the race. Those targets need to be more ambitious to match the science, and need enforcement mechanisms to be developed, but they are happening in all the world's biggest economies.

The biodiversity crisis is much, much harder to articulate. Payment for Ecosystem Services goes some way to quantifying the value of some kinds of species/habitats in some contexts, but a lot of the people motivated to work in such a depressing and unrewarding field mostly make unexamined value judgements asserting the inherent value of all forms of life. It's a lot easier not to give a sh.t about non-edible wildlife than it is to ignore the climate. The Convention on Biological Diversity is currently meeting to discuss why the last decade was such an acknowledged abject failure (coincidentally the decade I've been a student and/or professional ecologist, so forgive my gloomy outlook). They currently have sensible targets, but no meaty levers to pull in the financial department, and little of weight legislatively.

In terms of relatively straightforward stuff we could do in the next year, we could go for some joined-up thinking with public accounts. We should stop giving public money to landowners for damaging natural capital, for instance by overgrazing, burning moorland or causing soil erosion. Brexit means these rules are being rewritten anyway, and conservation groups have been presenting plans to DEFRA since 2016. No subsidies for fossil fuels either. We're about to have a huge fuckoff recession, so the government will be printing loads of money again: instead of giving it to bankers to siphon offshore, invest it economic activities that also tackle the climate and biodiversity crises, like green infrastructure or regenerative agriculture. Make sure there's jobs for people in obsolete industries, instead of shafting them like the miners. This is explicitly Biden's "Build Back Better" plan (dyqik mentioned this above), and the EU are discussing similar plans, but it's a bit more complicated to get a sense of how those discussions are going as there are 27 national governments involved, and some of them really like coal (waves at Poland). Stuff's going on.

I'm really interested in this question of directing policy towards ecologically ends, within the existing politico-economic framework rather than depending on a complete overhaul of global society (you may recall discussions along this line with millipede in about 2014-16). (That's not to say a complete overhaul of global society wouldn't be lovely, it just might not be quick enough so let's hedge our bets, eh?) I've rewritten my PhD around relevant protected-area legislation, building on what was IMHO already a pretty cool basic science project to address an imminent conservation threat. I'm going to court and everything. Like, I'm doing my best here. I've seen a lot of very cool smallish-scale projects, and worked for a few of them - what I want to happen is those kinds of visions getting joined up in the minds of people who make overarching long-term plans at a national level.
We have the right to a clean, healthy, sustainable environment.

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Re: Antarctic ice melt: 2.5m of extra sea

Post by Bird on a Fire » Fri Oct 02, 2020 6:24 pm

As it happens, I've just been reading a new report from Birdlife International using bird data to assess the 2010 Aichi Targets from the Convention on Biological Diversity (in particular, figuring out what went wrong).

They have these suggestions for the next set of targets:
The new framework needs a clear, communicable, overarching aim, comparable to the Paris Agreement's goal to limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C. The 2020 mission was lengthy, lacked the clarity needed to focus political attention and was insufficiently ambitious. The stakes are now far higher, and only transformational change across society will enable us to achieve the 2050 vision of living in harmony with nature. The new mission must be clear that we must not only halt the loss of biodiversity but start to recover it by 2030, in order to ensure full recovery by 2050.

2. There needs to be a clear ‘theory of change’ mapping a pathway to achieve this mission, distinguishing outcome-focused aims – which should deliver against the three over-arching goals of the Convention (conservation, sustainable use and equitable sharing of genetic benefits of biodiversity) and the three levels of biodiversity (ecosystem, species and genetic) – from action-orientated targets and a set of enabling conditions.

3. Ultimately, the plan needs to prevent extinctions, recover the abundance and diversity of life, and retain and restore ecosystem integrity with key biodiversity areas at the core, so that all people and nature can thrive.

4. New targets must not only be more ambitious in certain areas, but critically much more ‘SMART’ – specific, measurable, ambitious, realistic and time-bound – so that the action needed is clear and progress can be tracked. Here, we highlight some key elements that the new goals and targets need to contain.
We have the right to a clean, healthy, sustainable environment.

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