Corona virus might help with climate change

[Lou]

Unfortunately, coronavirus has cancelled the next COP, the conference on global warming. This crisis, like any, pulls the government attention on to the immediate and defers action. So that is a part of the bad side of coronavirus, environmentally speaking.

Thanks, Jaime for reviving this thread. I think it is a really good one.

It just so happens I just finished an article in the NYT (it was really long).
I'm hoping some of the people here on the VF will take the time to read the article and comment on it.
I'm still processing the article but I will try to make some good comments tomorrow.
The article has some optimistic and pessimistic views.
Also, it concentrates a lot on policy changes instead of personal changes.

One of the major points in this article is what we (Earthlings) do to respond to this disaster. Do we go back to the way things were? or do we build a better future out of the ashes? I think the Democratic House would like to hitch the Green New Deal to the Recovery. Wouldn't that be great?

Opinion | What the Coronavirus Means for Climate Change (Published 2020)

Lockdowns and distancing won’t save the world from warming. But amid this crisis, we have a chance to build a better future.

www.nytimes.com

 

[Irene Adler]

Climate change is tightly linked to economic growth (- for now. This can be changed if we get rid of fossil fuels). The more economic growth, the more climate change. At the moment, I'd argue given the urgency on climate change, a recession is a good thing even after allowing for all the huge suffering and troubles and affects on some people.

An unemployed person who doesn't care about the environment has a lower footprint that a die-hard environmentalist if the latter earns a high salary and spends it all.

One of the things we should do for climate change is deliberately spend less money. Just buy the things we really want or really need only.

Hello Jamie in Chile

I can do that - I have no money....

On a less daft note, on UK news today about how much improvement there has been here in air quality because of less traffic, less pollutants from factories, etc. so I suppose there is a small silver lining to this quarantine.

Frustrating though, that actually doing something about climate change is on hold, not that they seem to implement anything without the caveat of moving the goal-posts constantly.....

 

[Forest Nymph]

Yeah this is great. Unfortunately the Trump administration is exploiting the virus to relax environmental laws and agriculture laws, including major polluters to air/water, and speeding up slaughterhouses for factory farmed chickens.

In one of my classes we are writing papers about this subject as part of our adjusted distance-learning assignments. I am writing one "light" paper on the natural decrease of destruction by people stopping their silly cruise ships, air plane rides, and long-distance drives. I am writing another on the Antichrist seeing this as a great opportunity to destroy Earth faster.

One hopes this slows down CO2e emissions long enough to seek long-term changes, and to have an infected person cough on the entire Trump administration in a small room with closed windows. Assassination has never been so easy.

 

[Sax]

Welcome back FN!

 

[Lou]

Darn it!

We can't win for losing.

COVID-19 Lockdowns Caused Cleaner Air – And Warmed the Planet

Research shows reductions in aerosol emissions had slight, temporary warming impact. The lockdowns and reduced societal activity related to the COVID-19 pandemic affected emissions of pollutants in ways that slightly warmed the planet for several months last year, according to a new study by the

scitechdaily.com

 

[Jamie in Chile]

Some people are not aware of this particular issue as it is not reported very often.

Burning fossil fuels puts soot and aerosols into the atmosphere which block the sun's power a bit and cause a cooling effect that is short term because the aerosols soon fall out of the sky. However, as we know, burning fossil fuels also causes a larger, long-term heating effect because of CO2 that is much more serious.

At the peak of COVID-19, we stopped burning as many fossil fuels. So a brief warming effect in the short term as more sunlight reached the earth but in the long term COVID-19 will cause an overall cooling effect that we burned less CO2 because CO2 stays in the atmosphere for a century or more whereas these aerosols fall out. So overall the effect of COVID-19 on the environment will be positive in the long term, and overall.

The same thing would be happen if (let's do an unrealistic hypothetical thought experiment) humanity decided to stop burning all fossil fuels by 2022. If that strategy were carried out, the world would actually get slightly hotter in 2022 (and the effects of global warming would get temporarily worse) as stuff falls out the sky because in the short term the aerosols no longer reflect the sun back into space and in a timescale of months this effect is more powerful than the (relative) cooling effect of emitting less CO2. However it does mean that the current temperature of 1.1-1.2C above pre industrial levels MUST increase a little bit whatever we do. The temperature will already reach a certain figure of perhaps between 1.3C and 1.9C even if we all agree to never again use a car or a plane or heating or electricity, or manufacture a product, starting today.

Of course, the warming effect of fossil fuels lasts for far, far longer and would probably be 10x or 100x or 1000x more powerful than the cooling effect because it goes on for centuries. Therefore, this is not a reason to stop cutting fossil fuels. If anything it means we should cut even faster because it makes the situation more serious.

Think of it this way. There is a fire in your house but there is a button to turn it off but the button is inside the fire. Now, you are going to have to reach inside the fire to press that button. It will hurt for a few seconds but it's the only way to stop the whole house setting on fire.

Also, if we stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow the lives lost from the short term heating effect would (I guess) be outweighed by the lives saves from pollution. So when we look at the overall effect on human and animal suffering and death from both climate change and pollution combined, reducing fossil fuels is probably beneficial in the short term as well as the long term.

 

[anarchist100]

Less human is good for the planet.

 

[Brian W]

Less human is good for the planet.

Write it in your diary - "Brian W agreed with me today"

 

[Sax]

It's on the way:

A lower global population is something that many folks would celebrate. The reason it is scary is that the low will keep getting lower. All around the world the fertility rate is dropping below replacement level country by country so that globally there will soon be an un-sustaining population. With negative population growth each generation produces fewer offspring, who producer fewer still, till there are none. Right now Japan’s population is way below replacement level; indeed Japan is losing total population; every year there are fewer and fewer Japanese. Most of Europe, Eastern Europe, Russia, the Former Soviet Republics, and some Asia countries are running below replacement levels. It goes further than Japan. Today Germany and Ukraine have absolute population decline; they are already experiencing the underpopulation bomb.

The shocking news is that the developing world is not far behind. This is not the stereotypical image. While developing countries are above replacement level, their birthrates are dropping fast. Much of Africa, South America, the Mid-East and Iran have fertility rates that are dropping fast. The drop in fertility in has recently stalled in some sub-Saharan African nations but that is because development there has stalled. When development resumes, fertility will drop again — because fertility rates are linked to urbanity. There is a deep feedback cycle: the more technologically developed a society becomes, the fewer offspring couples will have, the easier it is for them to raise their living standards, the more that progress lowers their desire for large families. The result is the spiral of modern technological population decline — a new but now universal pattern.

The Underpopulation Bomb

For many years overpopulation was the Ur-worry. The prospect of too many people on a finite planet stood behind common environmental…

medium.com

 

[Amy SF]

Los Angeles had a tiny sneak preview ten years ago. Here’s the original Carmageddon:

L.A. "Carmageddon" that never was ends early

A key Los Angeles freeway closed for construction work reopened some 18 hours ahead of schedule on Sunday, bringing an early end to a much-hyped "Carmageddon" traffic crisis that never materialized, officials said.

www.reuters.com

What happened was so many people stayed away from the area of construction that scientists noticed a significant drop in air pollution and an overall increase in better air quality in the area. The minute they finished the work and reopened the area to traffic, drivers returned to the area and the air got dirty again. The improvement in air quality only lasted for about 48 hours.

 

[Jamie in Chile]

The supposed population reduction is decades away and will probably come too late to help with current ecological crises at least in the case of climate change.

In the coming decade or two, we might see an average birth rate of 2.0 children per couple. And yet the population will continue to increase to 9-11 billion for the simple reason that there are more young people in the world at the moment.

This and other things are explained in this talk if you have 16 minutes to spare. I may have shared it before.

In the end you get to a point where the average births per 2 adults is <2 and the population is still growing, and then if current trends continue you go from growth to decline without hardly stopping to have a period where it stays the same.

I don't really buy the predictions for 2050 though. There is too much uncertainty that far ahead.

 

[Brian W]

The supposed population reduction is decades away and will probably come too late to help with current ecological crises at least in the case of climate change.

In the coming decade or two, we might see an average birth rate of 2.0 children per couple. And yet the population will continue to increase to 9-11 billion for the simple reason that there are more young people in the world at the moment.

This and other things are explained in this talk if you have 16 minutes to spare. I may have shared it before.

In the end you get to a point where the average births per 2 adults is <2 and the population is still growing, and then if current trends continue you go from growth to decline without hardly stopping to have a period where it stays the same.

I don't really buy the predictions for 2050 though. There is too much uncertainty that far ahead.

I'm not watching the video but what you wrote makes no sense. If the average birth rate is two per couple, the population will stay the same. If it becomes less than two per couple then it diminishes. That's just basic arithmetic, anything else is nonsense.

 

[Jamie in Chile]

Would you consider watching the first 7 minutes 45 seconds of the video. That's all you really need to do to understand why population will continue to increase even with a birth rate per 2 adults of 2.0.

 

[Vegan forever Mieke]

I hope so, but i am afraod people are to stubborn