If an ice cube melts in your glass does it overflow?

Perhaps we could also include some evolutionary ideas like learning to breathe underwater?
Or if that is too severe what about the technology for undersea cities?
Or making pets of dolphins and whales for transportation to reduce the carbon footprint?
Or with the space race (is it still there) founding colonies on the moon and mars and making earth the mining resource planet?

 

Spoiler :

 

I am on my phone and cant type much. I would just like to add some clarity to slightly incorrect statements made in this thread.
The hundreds of scientific stuies and pappers written about the greehouse effect and climate history have not been made by politicians. They were made by independent academics and have been peer reviewed. They are many and fact based.

I can understand if you choose not to believe a politician. But i would suggest its less sensible to disregard the overwhelming concensus of the specialists in this area. The royal academy have stated that they believe it is the greatest threat to mankind right now.

As i wrote i am on my phone and cant fill this thread with facts because i think i am already in trouble with the mods. However for you guys who are interested to hear unbiased scientists not politicians talking about ice ages and our planets climate history and what these facts about oure past can tell us about our immdeiate future i would reccomend this podcast:

www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01qjj99

It doesnt look good

 

I meant royal society not royal academy. Am on my phone and it wont letme edit the post

 

My take on the whole issue of global warming is as follows and each statement is believed by less people on the planet and has less scientific evidence to support it.

1. The earth is conclusively proven to be warming outside the bound of the range of temperatures it has experienced in the last 10,000 years or so.
https://kottke.org/13/03/new-graph-shows-unprecedented-global-warming-over-past-11000-years

2. Most climate change scientists believe that the vast majority of that climate change is man made, because the temperature has never before risen at the rate it has risen over the last 200 years.

3. The split is about 50/50 on whether anything we do will make an appreciable difference, or if it is worth attempting, given that in the past after reaching a certain point the temperature naturally dropped rapidly and over the last 400,000 years the Earth has maintained it's temperature within a very narrow band, of 10 or 12 degrees.
https://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/last_400k_yrs.html

4. There is considerable scientific doubt whether any of the weak economic climate agreements made or posited around the world are going to help. The money spent negotiating and maintaining the agreements themselves probably would be better spent directly or indirectly on new power technology, rather than mostly going to bankers and politicians.

 

I saw a great program on fusion power... it went along the lines of if the fusion technology got as much as the cat clothing industry for a year they probably would have fusion batteries by now.... is fusion a next age tech?

 

What will happen in GS if a Global Warming is triggered and ocean level rises by 5 - 10 m until 2300 in worst case?
Will height above sea level for land tiles be measured in single meters or will it be in intervals of 100 m or more?
(On earth height ranges from around - 11,000 m to + 9,000 m, so it spans 20,000 m. Average height of land is ca. 700 m while average depth of sea is ca. - 3,500 m. A raise of sea level by 1 m on earth is expected to flood around a thousandth part of the available landmass, so on most civ maps a total of maybe 1-10 tiles since civ maps do not contain so many land tiles. E.g. a map with 180 x 90 tiles with 50% land would suffer a loss of around 8 land tiles for 1 m raise.)

 

Only if you can overcome the technical difficulties. If people would see a way to build easy to use fusion reactors, we would have them.
Some fusion reactors use plasma with physical conditions similar to those in the solar core, e.g. plasma temperature around 100 million K.
Another problem is the energy extraction from and the contamination of the reactor with high energy neutrons which are produced in fusion processes like D + T = He + n.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fusion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusion_power
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castle_Bravo

 

Uh... Sea walls for property in Florida are not that cheap, I imagine the cost of a barrier protecting the entire coast of Florida is going to be pretty damn costly, not to mention the constant upkeep needed to maintain such a barrier.

 

Is there a policy card the white house could use to reduce the maintenance?

 

Sea walls aren't going to stop huge sinkholes opening up. It's far too late for that.

 

Whenever I see discussions on Florida and Global Warming, I always have this sort of Lex Luthor thought of buying a house that is 20 ft above sea level in Florida, so that I can retire to my own personal key in 50 years.

 

It's worth pointing out that this only happened across several generations, e.g. studies of industrialisation in Britain showed that health and standard of living declined massively for workers, especially in cities, between the 1780s and the 1870s/80s. It was only in this later period that health, standard of living, real wages, etc started to go up again for workers to match and go beyond those of their great-grandparents. On top of that people worked substantially longer hours, with little to no control over their work, and less free time than they had 100 years before. So that seems a significant enough amount of time to be represented in the game by a health mechanic, especially as industrialisation is becoming a big part of the game now.

 

I've seen some sources saying certain cities were particulary bad (for example Liverpool), especially the first decades of the industrial revolution. But on the whole, people agree that the turning point came early-mid 1800 (some sources say about 1810-1820, others 1840-1850). Especially real wages rose a lot faster by then, infant mortality declined rapidly and life expectency slowly started to increase. 1780-1850 is less than 30 turns on standard speed, and the positive effects of industrialization after that dwarfs these effects anyway. If plagues and all the health hazards of a pre-indutrialized (not to talk about pre-antibiotics) world aren't included, why should this? And since health is not even a part of the game, it would be extremely difficult to represent it without severly changing fundamental game mechanics. Of course they could have used to population growth, but the fact is that the population of England doubled between 1800-1850

 

Unfortunately your 3rd statement is not correct.
Right now we are living an ice age there is ice on both poles...this is considered an ice age by the academics. The earth has had ice on both poles for only about 10 percent of its existence. The rest of the time it has been very very hot.
We know how hot it has been in the past and we also know how much carbon was in the atmosphere at these times. When there has been ice on the poles there has been low carbon. When there were tropicsl oceans at the poles there was x million parts of carbon...cant remember the numbers..alot basically. When it was tropical at the poles it was hellish near the equator.

So, currently we know how much carbon is in the atmosphere. We know how much we are adding each year and you extraploate that to how long before we hit the numbers that made it tropical poles. I will be dead. But its going to happen unless we stop it.

We cant be precise about how long because theres a lot of carbon trapped in the tundra and oceans. When they warm this will get released and we cant predict when ecactly this woill happen. So, my graph might say it will take 100 years to reach tropical pole levels of carbon at current rates. Unfortunately we cant be so sure because if the inpredictability of this trapped carbon.

When we get that hot then we will probably experience completr and total civilization breakdown. The insects we need to pollinate our crops have already been decimated by pesticides in the last 40 years. A sudden fast shift in eco system and temperature will finish them off completely.

This is all very gloomy. But there is hope and time to stop it. We really have the technology available now to turn it around. Just look at what the billion euro german subsidies to solar power have resulted in over 10 years. Its now more cost effective to run solar power in southern mediterranean countries than buy electricity from their nationsl grid. It unfortunately requires the political will and willingness of people to force politicians into doing something. Unfortunatelt the politicians are the last people i would trust with this and most people just dont understand the sheer scale of the storm on the horizon

 

The problem with both sides of the argument is that they use very emotive terms to describe their case, and they use statistics very persuasively. Yes, for the 4.5 billion years the Earth has existed it has been very hot, but the reality is, that we are only interested in the time where man has existed, and only that time where conditions have been perfect for man. All I am talking about is global warming, not every environmental issue. And I also made no judgement on which of the 50% was right.

The only other thing is that the German example, it was the fact that the Germans do net billing, meaning that the electricity you supply to the grid, is paid to you at the same rate as you buy it from the electricity company. That had far more effect on encouraging solar panel use than anything the government did. You also should know that only 30% or so of Germany's power comes from renewable sources. Canada gets over 60% of its power from renewable sources, with another 15% coming from nuclear, which despite other concerns is environmentally friendly. It is also a bit strange the way they have implemented dams in Civ6. You don't build dams on flood plains, you build them up in the hills and mountains. Sometimes I think the game has got so non-intellectual it is embarrassing to tell people you play it.

I don't think the problem is the politicians as much as the bankers and the rich, that want to keep making money from fuel. You can't sell sunlight, or water as it tumbles over a dam.