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Captain...

Climate change: What can we do?

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Guest MattP

Anyone surprised at how lenient the press and industry commentators were over yesterday's climate "protest"?

They blocked traffic, smashed windows, caused 500,000 people an inconvience and 114 people were arrested for various offences - had this been any other type of political protest I think we would have heard a lot of anger and condemnation.

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53 minutes ago, Captain... said:

One way to do that is to support eco friendly companies like Smol, Ecover, bulb, quorn, beaming-baby. If big companies see that they are losing customers to more eco-friendly brands they might start changing.

 

The news that Guinness are now going plastic free is a sign of how things are going but it cost them £3m to do so. We can reward those companies that are doing their bitand abandoned those market leaders that feel untouchable.

Agreed, consumer pressure will help a lot.

 

52 minutes ago, RoboFox said:

Getting rid of thick c**ts like Trump is a start. 

 

His indifference, punctuated by bursts of mocking disdain, toward climate change has been indulged for far too long by the US. He's called climate science “bullshit,” and defenestrated federal rules designed to cut planet-warming emissions. The Paris climate agreement. The cutbacks of the US EPA. 

 

His administration's energy-first agenda is at odds with the what pretty much the entire civilised world understands is happening to the planet.

 

He's ignoring the science.

 

The man at the helm of the world's largest economy went on record saying that climate change is a hoax invented by the Chinese to stifle US manufacturing.

 

A HOAX INVENTED BY THE CHINESE.

 

We cannot progress if the people of the world continue to allow morons like this to attain positions of power.

 

 

As much as I agree with your sentiment about Trump, he, along with other fine specimens of the human race like Bolsanaro are merely symptoms of the problem rather than the problem itself.

 

The problem is people unwilling to see beyond the end of their own lives and so picking leaders who guarantee instant gratification for them, no matter the cost to the future.

 

I remember one person on here (think it was Sampson) saying that this was perfectly ok because in the long run we're all dead anyway...now you have to convince the plurality of people who either think similarly or simply don't think about it enough otherwise.

 

45 minutes ago, Izzy said:

My extensive recent research on cows (:whistle:) suggests they are responsible for 18% of global emissions.

 

Add this to the 70% of these 100 companies and that doesn't seem to leave much that you, me and average Joe can do about it really...:dunno:

Buce makes some good points in his reply here.

 

15 minutes ago, MattP said:

Anyone surprised at how lenient the press and industry commentators were over yesterday's climate "protest"?

They blocked traffic, smashed windows, caused 500,000 people an inconvience and 114 people were arrested for various offences - had this been any other type of political protest I think we would have heard a lot of anger and condemnation.

Perhaps they think that it is a problem that needs drawing attention to, and while actual criminal damage is of course not okay, given attitudes and political decisions around the world people clearly aren't listening to reasoned debate from the scientific community so there needs to be other methods employed to see that they do listen.

Edited by leicsmac
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Guest MattP
19 minutes ago, leicsmac said:

Perhaps they think that it is a problem that needs drawing attention to, and while actual criminal damage is of course not okay, given attitudes and political decisions around the world people clearly aren't listening to reasoned debate from the scientific community so there needs to be other methods employed to see that they do listen. 

Well if they do that's going to be a pretty huge mistake to make.

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Just now, MattP said:

Well if they do that's going to be a pretty huge mistake to make.

I agree, provided of course that it does involve criminal activity.

 

Additional noncriminal pressure? I think what you're getting at is that will turn popular opinion against it because people are stubborn and don't like change interfering upon their own lives, yes? You could well be right, in fact, I think you probably are  - but quite frankly there's likely nothing to lose seeing as the same folks already aren't listening anyway - on this matter there's precious little difference between apathy and antipathy.

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2 hours ago, Izzy said:

In simple terms, could someone please explain why eating less meat helps climate change? :dunno:

 

I get the whole renewable energy, recycling thing, but how does eating less meat help things?

 

Thanking you...

 

Sorry just seen @David Guiza post above. Are you suggesting we stop breeding cows because they fart a lot? :dunno:

 

 

As well as the farting, isn't deforestation part of the explanation?

 

Cattle (and sheep, to a lesser extent) need a lot of grassland to thrive - and in places like Brazil, whole swathes of forest are being chopped down to create cattle ranches (though I'm sure oil exploration & population growth comes into that, too).

Forest helps reduce carbon in the atmosphere as plants consume carbon dioxide.....so chopping down forests (good) to create cattle ranches (bad) is a double whammy.

That's what I read, anyway.....I'm no expert in this field so don't bite my head off if that's a bit garbled! 

 

As I understand it, pig farming and poultry farming are much more environmentally-friendly (as regards carbon/global warming, at least) - though vegetarians and animal rights supporters would have other objections, obviously.

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2 hours ago, leicsmac said:

At an everyday level, there are a few things we can do - change lightbulbs and the like to reduce the general electricity consumption of a house, and solar panels etc to likewise reduce the net consumption from a classic grid.

 

But, to be honest, the change also has to come from the very top. There are just 100 companies responsible for over 70% of all global emissions over the last 25 years:

 

https://www.sciencealert.com/these-100-companies-are-to-blame-for-71-of-the-world-s-greenhouse-gas-emissions

 

You might say that all these companies are doing are fulfilling a demand, and of course they exist to do this (for the most part), but it does indicate that change has to be unified and across the board at a high level if it's actually going to mean anything. And those changes have to include a damn quick phased cessation of oil, gas and coal being used for power generation around the world - that's really the nub and the crux of it, it's responsible for not only more greenhouse gas emission than any other source, but more pollution of other types too. DG above makes a good point about animal agriculture above too, but I do think that breaking the hold those three sectors have on power generation in many places is the more palatable place to start.

 

So...do those things at home to do your small part, but possibly the best thing you can do is to apply pressure higher and get other people to do so too.

 

This sort of confirms my expectations - that the impact of personal behaviour is minimal and change at a higher level by major organisations and corporations is required....though the public can impact that through their pressure as voters or consumers.

 

I'm aware that I risk taking a shoulder-shrugging, fatalistic attitude here: "if it's all down to big govt & big business, I can just carry on as before".

But there's a risk on the other side: do your little bit getting low-energy light bulbs, eat less red meat and feel smug about yourself....

 

Quite by accident, not out of personal morality, I'm quite a low carbon person: never learned to drive, have flown once in a decade as I prefer boats/trains, don't like much heat at home, eat little red meat as it makes me tired/slows me down...

But I'm aware that I've paid little attention to this important political issue....and think I've been doing wrong there. Having a kid makes me feel guilty about that. I'll probably be dead within 30 years max, but she hopefully won't.... :(

 

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Everything needs to come in less packaging. I don't need a new plastic bottle every time I buy washing up liquid, shampoo, shower gel, fabric conditioner and everything else. We should be able to just refill the ones we already have.

I picked up my Leicester shirt from the KP today. It came in a clear plastic bag, inside a blue plastic bag, with an A4 sheet of paper just to confirm what I'd ordered. Complete waste. 

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4 minutes ago, Strokes said:

Surely if cows are producing emissions the answer is to eat more of them, not less. If they are anything like humans they will fart more the older they get lol

 

The US Green Party wanna kill all the cows and knock down all buildings in the country and rebuild them within 2 years.

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4 minutes ago, Beefy said:

The US Green Party wanna kill all the cows and knock down all buildings in the country and rebuild them within 2 years.

 

With a name like yours, can we rely on your neutrality?

 

Maybe you should change your user name to Bean Curdy to ensure greater trust among your fellow posters? ;)

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3 hours ago, Trav Le Bleu said:

Also, eat what you buy! Don't go buying stuff you'll never eat. So much food waste - disgusting in a world where people are starving.

This is so true. Someone at work buys the same thing for breakfast and lunch everyday, and chucks away around a third of both meals. EVERYDAY. Just ridiculous, why are you buying what you know you can't eat everyday, then just chucking it away!! Think how many bone-headed cretins like this exist all over the world, and you have a serious food waste pile, for no reason. So disrespectful.

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16 minutes ago, Beefy said:

The US Green Party wanna kill all the cows and knock down all buildings in the country and rebuild them within 2 years.

 

I'm tempted to say fake news.

 

Unless you can provide a source for it?

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This scientist thinks she has the key to curb climate change: super plants

 

Dr Joanne Chory hopes that genetic modifications to enhance plants’ natural carbon-fixing traits could play a key role – but knows that time is short, for her and the planet.

 

If this were a film about humanity’s last hope before climate change wiped us out, Hollywood would be accused of flagrant typecasting. That’s because Dr Joanne Chory is too perfect for the role to be believable.

The esteemed scientist – who has long banged the climate drum and now leads a project that could lower the Earth’s temperature – is perhaps the world’s leading botanist and is on the cusp of something so big that it could truly change our planet.

She’s also a woman in her 60s who is fighting a disease sapping her very life. In 2004, Chory was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, which makes the timetable for success all the more tenuous.

“We’re trying to do something that’s a huge, complicated thing even though it sounds so simple,” Chory says. “Plants evolved to suck up CO2 and they’re really good at it. And they concentrate it, which no machine can do, and they make it into useful materials, like sugar. They suck up all the CO2, they fix it, then it goes back up into the atmosphere.”

 

She is now working to design plants capable of storing even more carbon dioxide in their roots. Her Ideal Plant project uses gene editing – via traditional horticulture and Crispr – to do so. On a large scale, this could suck enough carbon out of the atmosphere to slow down climate change.

This concept basically splices the genes of regular crops and everyday plants like beans, corn and cotton, with a new compound that makes them absorb more carbon. Their roots then transfer it to the soil to keep it there.

This approach essentially supercharges what nature already does.

“I get worked up when I talk about the project,” Chory tells me in an office at the Salk Institute, a revered bio research campus at the edge of the Pacific Ocean in southern California. Her desk is full of posies, awards, family photos and framed magazine covers from science journals. “We have to find a way to take CO2 out of the atmosphere and I think plants are the only way to do that affordably,” Chory says.

“I feel like I have the weight of the world on my shoulders,” she says, letting out a laugh. “It is a lot of pressure.”

 

Born in Boston to Lebanese parents, the third of six children, Chory received a PhD studying photosynthetic bacteria at the University of Illinois. She spent her postdoctoral years as a Harvard Medical School researcher, then joined the institute in 1988. Along the way, she’s discovered how plants respond to everything from light and environment to how they regulate size and growth.

“It’s a philosophical issue, too,” she says, explaining why so many kick the can of global warming. “If I take pain now, maybe my great-grandchildren might see a benefit. People choose no pain now, that’s why we’ve done nothing about climate change.”

Every now and then as we speak, Chory’s symptoms pop up like an uninvited guest, another stark reminder of time. Struggling to maintain control and ever aware of the implied humor in her movements, she doesn’t shy from the elephant in the room.

“When I get excited I really get moving,” she mock-apologizes, letting out a coy chuckle. “I’m a lot better on Saturdays.” She pauses, collects her thoughts. “That’s why I want to do something that won’t cause pain to people. You never know when you’re making a global change. I don’t know if we can do it, but we have to try.”

An ‘even if’ scenario

Temperatures are already at alarming levels even if we reach the Paris agreement of curbing a rise of 2C. The world is headed for major upheaval, it’s merely a question of the scale. If we have any chance as a species, Salk contends, it’s with big ideas like this.

Right now, the institute is negotiating with seed companies and prepping tests on nine agricultural crops to introduce Ideal Plants on farms around the world. Field-testing begins later this year with wheat, soybeans, corn and cotton.

Developing these Ideal Plants is step one in the Harnessing Plants Initiative, which amplifies root systems and production of suberin – which is essentially cork, or the rind on your cantaloupe, the magic key to plants holding more of that carbon – before transferring these genetic traits to row and cover crops. Given the right resources, and funding, prototypes of each crop are expected to be ready in the next five years.

A $2m gift by Howard Newman, a Salk board member and private equity veteran who has invested in oil and gas, jump-started the project last June.

Chory says these new plants will have deeper and stronger root systems that will also stop erosion, another byproduct of warming temperatures, which will make soil more healthy and boost production. When normal plants die, they release large amounts of CO2 back into the air; when Ideal Plants die, significantly less CO2 will be re-released due to more carbon being stored in deeper roots and soil for longer periods, and suberin’s natural ability as a carbon polymer to resist short-term decomposition.

The first two meters of the Earth’s soil holds over three times the amount of carbon as the atmosphere, and can hold even more. Fossil fuel use was predicted to rise nearly 2% last year. Each year, we produce 18 more gigatons of CO2 than the Earth can currently handle; Salk believes their solution can achieve as much as a 46% annual reduction in excess CO2 emissions produced by humans.

It’s an extremely ambitious idea full of so many unknowns – how to get global buy-in from farmers, how many years will it take for plants to reach maturity and will it then be too late, how will mother nature react to such genetic modification and how will these crops taste – that none of Salk’s brains have the answers to.

The institute was founded in 1960 by Jonas Salk, a biologist who discovered the cure for polio in 1955, two years before my own father’s identical twin died of the disease in communist Romania, a place where politics kept science at bay.

Standing at the edge of the seaside campus designed by Louis Kahn, a sprawl of ominous cement towers and dramatic ocean views, it all feels straight out of the mind of Philip K Dick. Part Gattaca, part Logan’s Run, it’s easy to see why numerous films have been shot here.

But there’s also an optimism in these labs that feels so far from the stark structures and climate narrative I’m used to. Many scientists have told me their role is something akin to historian, documenting the last days of a species or system. Not so here.

“There is hope in dreams, in imagination and in the courage of those who dare to make dreams into reality,” Jonas Salk once said.

 

Inside these modernist blocks, they’re dreamers too, but rooted in reality. The biological research center, funded by government grants and private donors, has spent decades inching towards cures for everything from cancer to Alzheimer’s. In 1968, Robert W Holley, Salk Cancer Center’s founding director, won a Nobel prize; in 1975, Institute staff won another Nobel, and again in 1977 and 2002.

More recently, Chory was awarded a $3m breakthrough prize for discovering how plants optimize their growth, development and cellular structure to transform sunlight into chemical energy.

I see the optimism on a tour with Dr Joseph Noel, a biochemist focused on harnessing suberin, the project’s linchpin. He shows me seed-planting robots, which can bang out a day’s work in the time it would take a human weeks; state-of-the-art grow rooms capable of simulating almost any environmental condition; greenhouses sitting atop dramatic bluffs. All the while he breaks down the importance of cork. “It’s a spongy barrier that helps a plant regulate water coming in and out, gas exchange coming in and out. Think of it like a protective plastic around certain cells in the plant.”

The institute’s founder, Jonas, once said “our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors,” and I think about the quote’s relevance as Noel shows me rows of simulation rooms full of cattails, marsh grasses, Lotus japonicus legumes and weed-like Arabidopsis thaliana, all in various states of growth as LEDs shine and humid air blasts while I take notes.

“Instead of just growing in a greenhouse or artificial lights in a lab, we wanted to have the ability to simulate a particular climactic zone: quality of light, seasonal changes, cloud cover, temperatures,” Noel says.

Since Arabidopsis “can go from seed to seed in six weeks” and its genome is entirely sequenced and resembles so many other species, the little mustard flower has become the project’s veritable Rosetta Stone.

“It’s very easy to change the genetics of it on a massive scale,” he continues. “If we change a particular gene, we can find out if the roots get deeper, do they get more extensive, does the suberin content change. Their early ancestors have been doing photosynthesis for about 2.8bn years.”

Without plants, life as we know it wouldn’t exist. The question is whether these ones will become our saviors.

Genetically modified plants remain a tough sell

There’s a growing field of carbon dioxide removal projects which include machines pulling C02 out of the sky, known as direct air capture. There’s Bill Gates-backed Carbon Engineering and the Zurich startup Climeworks, and about 20 commercial carbon capture and storage facilities worldwide, but they’re price prohibitive.

There have been notable failures: Sir Richard Branson tried a $25m prize for carbon removal but never found a solution. Carbon removal initiatives are also criticized for preserving the status quo and big energy business models.

“Ultimately, we all know that humanity’s response to climate change will, as the Ideal Plant project states, make or break our future,” says David Stern, the president and CEO of the Boyce Thompson Institute, a leading plant research facility in New York, who calls Chory a fearless, creative and open-minded scientist. “Given the complexities and scale of the problem, many types of solutions will be needed. Sequestration is undoubtedly one of them.”

One big problem, Stern notes, is winning hearts and minds. Genetically modifying organisms saving the planet might be a tough sell in an era when GMO has become the antithesis for the green, organic movement.

“While they are not proposing traditional transgenic lines nor are they proposing to do their work in food crops, the issue will still come up,” Stern adds.

 

Chory maintains that plants have been modified for millennia – selecting the best strains to cultivate and taking a hand in their development is a form of genetic modification, after all – and the nutritional and yield values of such tweaked products still outweigh the drawbacks. Salk doesn’t introduce foreign genetic material in its plants, unlike many GMO products. The European Union outlawing modified organisms, plus crops with Crispr traits (as a result, the plants might not make it to the EU). Another issue is seed pricing and getting it to farmers around the world, so the wide-scale use is in question.

“As with any GMO crop the big question is how do the changes affect nutritional quality and whether small farmers in developing countries would be able to buy the seeds on a large enough scale to make a difference?” wonders Dan Wenny, a senior biologist who studies land-bird seed dispersal at the San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory.

Right now, the Mississippi delta in Louisiana is a test zone for a first batch of Ideal Plants in the wild, a major step to see if improved root systems can mitigate sea level rise. Still, Salk researchers are sober to the odds.

“Any restoration effort, unlike our Arabidopsis that can grow from seed to seed in six weeks, these systems you plant them and then you wait. You wait a long time,” Noel laments. “We can’t afford to have these experiments not work.”

Are we past the point of no return? “The world’s not going to be the world we live in right now,” Chory says. “I don’t know if we’re going to eliminate the whole human species, but I think if we don’t do something soon we will go that route. The misery index of humidity plus the heat will get so high mammals can’t live.”

The Union of Concerned Scientists says the tipping point is here.

“I don’t think it’s here yet,” Chory counters. Still, she concedes that “migration is already happening. Canada is going to make out well in this. The United States is not. We’re going to have a lot of changes in our agriculture.”

She adds: “The farmers are the ones we really have to convince. We can’t continue to farm the way we farm any more. It can feed 8 to 10 billion people but 50 years from now, there won’t be any good soil left so you’re just putting the disaster off.”

Chory glances at a picture of her daughter, Katie.

“Look at me, I’m 64 years old. I’m not going to be around to see this project go to fruition, I’m not going to be working at Salk, probably. That urgency is there. The climate urgency is there. Every week there’s a new climate disaster. How can we get there? We can’t really get there any faster. I don’t know if we can do it, but I want to be part of the solution. I don’t just want to sit around and complain.”

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23 minutes ago, Beefy said:

It was on Fox News while i was in nyc

 

Fox News? lol

 

The televisual equivalent of The Sun is not exactly the reliable source I was hoping for.

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4 hours ago, Trav Le Bleu said:

As you point out, living ecologically is adversely proportionate to living economically... to a degree.

 

Because in third world countries, where people are truly "poor", the general public have a very small impact on the factors attributed to climate change.

 

It's one of the great mysteries of the First World that to live this way in the First World comes at considerable cost.

Travel around & work in those developing (3rd) world countries,Their industrial waste,their plastic consumption,their dumping of dangerous household goods,and misuse of DT and agricultral chemicals,might make you think again. ....

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A few tips from my side:

 

- Eat less meat, consider eating meat a special treat - I tend to eat almost no meat during the week, so I can treat myself to a fine piece of veal or beef on Saturday, Sunday or both

- Buy more organic or biologically grown food

- Buy more local produce

- As far as food purchases are concerned, go with the seasons, buy what's currently available (no Spanish strawberries in winter, for instance)

- Buy what you eat, eat what you buy - tone down on food waste

- Recycle as much as you can (cardboard, glass, plastic/PET, electronics and whatnot)

- Switch off electronic home devices completely when you do not need to use them

- Swap old lightbulbs for newer LED ones

- Try to repair older devices rather than having to buy a new one - as a variation, don't fall for the "alway buy the newest version" trap

- Install solar panels on your rooftop (if applicable) - although I'd be wary of the high initial costs and the rather low level of energy conversion as part of the technology at present, but it surely is the future

- Install better isolation at your home (doors, windows) in order to reduce loss of power/warmth (if applicable)

- Depending on your type of house, consider switching from gas or oil heating to a heat pump

- Take less baths and try to take shorter showers

- Use public transportation rather than your car (bit of a joke of an argument in the UK, but maybe one day you'll be where we are over here)

- Use the train instead of flying if you can (depending on the distance), classic example would be visiting Paris

 

Edited by MC Prussian
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18 minutes ago, fuchsntf said:

Travel around & work in those developing (3rd) world countries,Their industrial waste,their plastic consumption,their dumping of dangerous household goods,and misuse of DT and agricultral chemicals,might make you think again. ....

I didn't say those countries, rather, the "poor" who live tribal lives far from the polluting cities.

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