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Posted 2 years agoit's time! debuting my $2/mo sketch club over on patreon. each week focuses on a new subject to study. this week? guppies!!
SunDogsFunDogs | creating Illustrations | Patreon
Posted using PostyBirb
SunDogsFunDogs | creating Illustrations | Patreon
Posted using PostyBirb
long time no C
Posted 2 years agohiya, i'm in the process of getting all my art accounts back up to date! hoping to get back into a comfortable rhythm of posting regularly.
did you know the starchy water leftover from washing rice is a great abrasive for washing dishes? go on, chuck it in your hot soapy water the next time you make rice. i swear it's magic for grease/oil that even paper towels couldn't conquer.
did you know the starchy water leftover from washing rice is a great abrasive for washing dishes? go on, chuck it in your hot soapy water the next time you make rice. i swear it's magic for grease/oil that even paper towels couldn't conquer.
Consumer habits won't avert climate change
Posted 7 years agoI wrote this as a really quick talk so the format is a little funky to read, but i thought i'd pop it up on here anyway.
--
I'm going to introduce this item with a radical concept: that the Earth is an engine. An engine can be loosely defined a machine that converts one form of energy into another. Our planet gets light from the sun and converts it into heat. Light can also be harnessed for use in biological processes, but only a fractional amount is used.
As was mentioned before, the rest is turned into heat, which is a major driver of global climate and weather. Earth has an incredibly sophisticated system that moves this heat around, after which it will eventually dissipate. Things that help keep climate in check is the "greenhouse effect" (though that term is technically incorrect) of the atmosphere, the high heat capacity of water and the fact that it covers 70% of the planet, the low density of ice allowing it and frigid water to float instead of sink, and the reflectivity of ground surfaces - also known as albedo.
This system of heat transfer made life possible, but life needs more than just heat to exist. We are only here today thanks to organisms that convert sunlight into energy that is immediately accessible to us, like plants. Plants photosynthetise to fuel their own biological processes, which we can then eat - or we can eat animals that have used the plant's energy potential themselves.
When anything living dies that isn't eaten, a whole lot of energy and chemical potential is sort of wasted. But if you bury enough decomposing organisms together in one spot and let it heat up and pressurise for a few million years, that energy becomes accessible to us in another form - as fossil fuels. "Fossil fuel" is an umbrella term that is used for coal, petroleum, or natural gas that we dig up and burn.
Annually, we produce around 21.3 billion tonnes of CO2 from burning fossil fuels alone. Earth can handle absorbing about half of that through natural processes, which means we are producing an estimated 10.65 billion tonnes of an excess greenhouse gas which, generally speaking, has nowhere else to go except our atmosphere.
An analogy, to make things a little less (or a little more) abstract: have you ever had to deal with an overflowing tupperware pantry before? Did you just keep cramming tupperware in there until one day the whole thing flew open and there was an avalanche of plastic in the kitchen? There's only so much space in that cabinet, and it could be managed efficiently, but if it isn't things get catastrophic pretty fast.
There's only so much excess CO2 our planet can manage on its own. As a gas, CO2 is a critically important molecule in maintaining Earth's energy system. It both radiates heat and traps it, allowing the planet to recycle heat before it eventually dissipates into space, the ultimate heat sink. A glut of CO2 makes the insulatory layer thicker, and the planet warmer.
Earth's surface temperatures have already risen to 1oC, in comparison to pre-Industrial levels. That's a passive, scientific way of saying "It's only been 200 years, but we have really fucked up". The change is felt globally through a shift in climate - storms and droughts are unusually intense and frequent; and if farmers aren't terrified of an impending dustbowl phenomena, they're elsewhere cursing the unusually wet and humid weather flooding their fields and drowning crops.
Earlier this month, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report authored by over 90 scientists, that outlined in no uncertain terms how serious an effect human activity has on climate change. Global carbon emissions must cease completely before 2050, or we face a temperature rise of beyond 1.5oC pre-industrial. UN Environment Program executive director Erik Solheim described the report as being like a “deafening, piercing smoke alarm going off in the kitchen”. “We have to put out the fire,” he says.
A temperature rise of only 1.5oC sounds tame, but this will be a global average. Many parts of the world will easily feel double that. Coral, our "canary in the coal mine" model organism for climate change, will be facing a total loss of 70-90%. We'll see a rate of species extinction like never before, with high CO2 concentrations leading to an increase in ocean acidification, and aberrations in terrestrial climate. Entire ecosystems will be made uninhabitable for many organisms, including humans.
Of particular concern is our food security. Some fisheries are expected to collapse due to ocean acidification on top of wild fish die-off, and food crops are expected to reduce in yield and nutritional value by around 10-15%; a grim figure to those in poverty-stricken areas. The shift in climate would only be salt in the wound for the poor; as some staple crops may begin to become unreliable or fail entirely.
A popular opinion is that the way towards salvation is by reducing or eliminating animal proteins from our diet. This is a pretty insidious stance to take, as it pushes blame and the need for action onto individual people, rather then those earning a sickening profit from the fossil fuel industry. A poor single parent isn't responsible for releasing billions of tonnes of CO2 by buying discount mince for dinner. That being said, this argument does come the closest to actually pointing the finger at those responsible for environmental destruction.
Large-scale agribusiness has exploded over the last couple of decades and the extent of land clearing necessary for that growth is staggering. Among the many side effects of land clearing, especially in the tropics where business is booming, is localised climate change through altered carbon levels in topsoils and an increase in average temperature. Another worry that commercial agriculture brings is a total lack in sustainable crop rotation. Intense farming of a single crop degrades the soil over time, making yield scarce.
However, with fossil fuels kept unaccountable, global warming would only increase. If it rises above the global 1.5oC average, the effects climate change brings only becomes exponential. At the 2oC mark, the melting of ice caps would lead to a rise in the world's ocean level of about 10cm. Not only is that an incomprehensible amount of mass being taken from one of the Earth's most important heat mitigators, it's expected this increase would affect 10 million people. In total juxtaposition to a rise in sea-level, a rise of 2 degrees would double the number of people suffering from water scarcity as an entire third of the planet would experience heatwaves.
In response to the warning the IPCC's report heralds, there has been a predictable push towards individualistic actions being the key to preventing a literal climate catastrophe - such as reducing one's shower time, becoming more conscientious of using plastic and single-use items, and as mentioned earlier, limiting meat consumption. While these actions do have an impact, they are made meaningless by the fossil fuel industry.
By now we are probably all well acquainted with the statistic that only 100 companies produce an estimated 70% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions since 1988. The report this was published in came out in 2017, making the period of time studied a total of 29 years - nearly three decades and only 30% of all carbon pollution came from "household use" and whatever other companies may be complicit.
There is literally no compromise on this at all: if we want a future, then we must become carbon-neutral. We have the technology and we have the resources, but as long as coal and oil still line the pockets of the few, nothing will change. As the men's lifestyle magazine GQ eloquently puts it; "An economic environment, where a company is only considered viable if it's constantly expanding and increasing its production, can't be expected to pump its own brakes over something as trivial as pending global catastrophe. (...) To them, the rest of the world is just kindling."
--
I'm going to introduce this item with a radical concept: that the Earth is an engine. An engine can be loosely defined a machine that converts one form of energy into another. Our planet gets light from the sun and converts it into heat. Light can also be harnessed for use in biological processes, but only a fractional amount is used.
As was mentioned before, the rest is turned into heat, which is a major driver of global climate and weather. Earth has an incredibly sophisticated system that moves this heat around, after which it will eventually dissipate. Things that help keep climate in check is the "greenhouse effect" (though that term is technically incorrect) of the atmosphere, the high heat capacity of water and the fact that it covers 70% of the planet, the low density of ice allowing it and frigid water to float instead of sink, and the reflectivity of ground surfaces - also known as albedo.
This system of heat transfer made life possible, but life needs more than just heat to exist. We are only here today thanks to organisms that convert sunlight into energy that is immediately accessible to us, like plants. Plants photosynthetise to fuel their own biological processes, which we can then eat - or we can eat animals that have used the plant's energy potential themselves.
When anything living dies that isn't eaten, a whole lot of energy and chemical potential is sort of wasted. But if you bury enough decomposing organisms together in one spot and let it heat up and pressurise for a few million years, that energy becomes accessible to us in another form - as fossil fuels. "Fossil fuel" is an umbrella term that is used for coal, petroleum, or natural gas that we dig up and burn.
Annually, we produce around 21.3 billion tonnes of CO2 from burning fossil fuels alone. Earth can handle absorbing about half of that through natural processes, which means we are producing an estimated 10.65 billion tonnes of an excess greenhouse gas which, generally speaking, has nowhere else to go except our atmosphere.
An analogy, to make things a little less (or a little more) abstract: have you ever had to deal with an overflowing tupperware pantry before? Did you just keep cramming tupperware in there until one day the whole thing flew open and there was an avalanche of plastic in the kitchen? There's only so much space in that cabinet, and it could be managed efficiently, but if it isn't things get catastrophic pretty fast.
There's only so much excess CO2 our planet can manage on its own. As a gas, CO2 is a critically important molecule in maintaining Earth's energy system. It both radiates heat and traps it, allowing the planet to recycle heat before it eventually dissipates into space, the ultimate heat sink. A glut of CO2 makes the insulatory layer thicker, and the planet warmer.
Earth's surface temperatures have already risen to 1oC, in comparison to pre-Industrial levels. That's a passive, scientific way of saying "It's only been 200 years, but we have really fucked up". The change is felt globally through a shift in climate - storms and droughts are unusually intense and frequent; and if farmers aren't terrified of an impending dustbowl phenomena, they're elsewhere cursing the unusually wet and humid weather flooding their fields and drowning crops.
Earlier this month, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report authored by over 90 scientists, that outlined in no uncertain terms how serious an effect human activity has on climate change. Global carbon emissions must cease completely before 2050, or we face a temperature rise of beyond 1.5oC pre-industrial. UN Environment Program executive director Erik Solheim described the report as being like a “deafening, piercing smoke alarm going off in the kitchen”. “We have to put out the fire,” he says.
A temperature rise of only 1.5oC sounds tame, but this will be a global average. Many parts of the world will easily feel double that. Coral, our "canary in the coal mine" model organism for climate change, will be facing a total loss of 70-90%. We'll see a rate of species extinction like never before, with high CO2 concentrations leading to an increase in ocean acidification, and aberrations in terrestrial climate. Entire ecosystems will be made uninhabitable for many organisms, including humans.
Of particular concern is our food security. Some fisheries are expected to collapse due to ocean acidification on top of wild fish die-off, and food crops are expected to reduce in yield and nutritional value by around 10-15%; a grim figure to those in poverty-stricken areas. The shift in climate would only be salt in the wound for the poor; as some staple crops may begin to become unreliable or fail entirely.
A popular opinion is that the way towards salvation is by reducing or eliminating animal proteins from our diet. This is a pretty insidious stance to take, as it pushes blame and the need for action onto individual people, rather then those earning a sickening profit from the fossil fuel industry. A poor single parent isn't responsible for releasing billions of tonnes of CO2 by buying discount mince for dinner. That being said, this argument does come the closest to actually pointing the finger at those responsible for environmental destruction.
Large-scale agribusiness has exploded over the last couple of decades and the extent of land clearing necessary for that growth is staggering. Among the many side effects of land clearing, especially in the tropics where business is booming, is localised climate change through altered carbon levels in topsoils and an increase in average temperature. Another worry that commercial agriculture brings is a total lack in sustainable crop rotation. Intense farming of a single crop degrades the soil over time, making yield scarce.
However, with fossil fuels kept unaccountable, global warming would only increase. If it rises above the global 1.5oC average, the effects climate change brings only becomes exponential. At the 2oC mark, the melting of ice caps would lead to a rise in the world's ocean level of about 10cm. Not only is that an incomprehensible amount of mass being taken from one of the Earth's most important heat mitigators, it's expected this increase would affect 10 million people. In total juxtaposition to a rise in sea-level, a rise of 2 degrees would double the number of people suffering from water scarcity as an entire third of the planet would experience heatwaves.
In response to the warning the IPCC's report heralds, there has been a predictable push towards individualistic actions being the key to preventing a literal climate catastrophe - such as reducing one's shower time, becoming more conscientious of using plastic and single-use items, and as mentioned earlier, limiting meat consumption. While these actions do have an impact, they are made meaningless by the fossil fuel industry.
By now we are probably all well acquainted with the statistic that only 100 companies produce an estimated 70% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions since 1988. The report this was published in came out in 2017, making the period of time studied a total of 29 years - nearly three decades and only 30% of all carbon pollution came from "household use" and whatever other companies may be complicit.
There is literally no compromise on this at all: if we want a future, then we must become carbon-neutral. We have the technology and we have the resources, but as long as coal and oil still line the pockets of the few, nothing will change. As the men's lifestyle magazine GQ eloquently puts it; "An economic environment, where a company is only considered viable if it's constantly expanding and increasing its production, can't be expected to pump its own brakes over something as trivial as pending global catastrophe. (...) To them, the rest of the world is just kindling."
