Just a Statement ...

it is, just ask aoc

 

What would be wrong with cleaning up our air just because it is the right thing to do?

 

"glaciers prior flexing"@39. In general, isostatic rebound following glacial melt is just that - land goes up. There may be local exceptions unknown to me, and it may be just so as stated.

But I feel obliged to defend the general concept, because that's what we are supposed to learn first, before considering exceptions.

 

"What would be wrong with cleaning up our air"@42.

Well, nothing. But then complications may arise. Loudest argument against is that it can be costly. If country A cleans and B does not, B gets economic advantage. Second loudest is that the cleaning might not bring about desired benefit.

Because of atmospheric washout, nearly all forms of air pollution are local to regional. Exceptions: CO2 if one chooses to call it pollution. Airborne dust (and volcanic ash), because where it really gets going it gets so high that clouds can't rain it out. Mercury, because after it washes out, some bacteria put it back into air. Maybe like a pogo stick?

==
Among past examples of paying to reduce air pollution, I am aware of no examples where people looked back and said "No we should not have done that". US easing mercury-emission rules from coal plants may come the closest, but I'm not really sure that they have been eased. Stricter new ones have been delayed or cancelled.

 

what's wrong with our air, water, food, microwaves, magnetic fields?

 

They could cause ED?

 

Mr. ED, to you. Hung like a ... oh never mind.

 

Real science ... no likes.

Dick jokes ... likes.

Welcome to Priapism Chat.

 

dick cheney? dick hunter?

 

there's usually no money and doing the right thing. That's crazy talk.

that's a bad thing? Really, do I need more perfectly wasted wood ?
[emoji]
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Scientific companies making equipment for monitoring air and water pollution are very profitable.

Every large city in China (there are many) has multiple air-sampling stations, all made in USA.

However I take the point that avoided mortality from air pollution (etc.) remains an externality. Uncounted, basically by definition.

 

I had thought that the rebound was upward where the ice once stood, but downward a little bit beyond the maximum extent of those heavy sheets.

When the ice load pushed down the ground immediately beneath, the squishing movement caused a bit of upward push on the unloaded ground just beyond that.

River delta sediments tend to sink naturally, as the deposits slowly consolidate and compress. Normally, this is frequently backfilled by fresh new sediments from annual spring flooding.

Dikes, levies, and other flood control measures tend to halt this annual replenishment and backfill. They also tend to encourage existing sediments to dry out and sink faster. Around NOLA, before Hurricane Katrina, this meant some areas were sinking a full inch per year -- but not fully appreciated and mapped until after the Big Wet.

 

If we could watch earth history really really fast, like the whole thing compressed into an hour, it would be amazing.

A slidey, bouncy, sloshy planet. But slow.

Mostly.

 

something on the highway, i'd love to see an overhead time lapse

 

I was composing a post that touched on this when the website took its dirt-nap last night. I won't (can't) recreate it, but some points to think about:

Humans are miserable at time perception, and by extension, time management. So much of the climate change problem is that things move very slowly, and with a lot of latency.

Hollywood storytelling (at its best) usually involves a lot of time compression. Characters on screen say or do things perfectly the first time, and the effect is very powerful. Actions seem more decisive, stronger. Statements gain wisdom, questions gain an incisiveness that usually isn't there immediately in real life. That's how we build good drama. Hollywood's methods aren't original, they've just annexed and built on what worked in oral history, song and on stage for most of human culture.

And guess what? it's really, really hard to get sufficient drama out of a phenomenon that is over a century in the making, and seems to show very long latency between cause and effect. And so I think it is fairly natural for us to be facing this extra handicap in promoting an understanding of climate change.

Our media aren't well prepared to assist in the communications role here. Mediums and formats are shifting faster than the planetary changes we would seek to illustrate. We don't have 4K footage of things that happened since 1850. And while we could certainly produce a facsimile, that scores the wrong goal because it's obviously a fiction that anyone can call into question.

 

Limitations of human perception of time are surely 'plot elements' in environmental discussions.

I'd like to make a similar argument about sizes of things, but it does not seem as strong.

 

I think such an argument would be perfectly valid, though I would agree that we are improperly prepared to make relative evaluations of the two effects.

The quote attributed to Stalin comes to mind- "The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic."

Scale is hard for humans, whether it's time or count or vastness.

The 1977 short "Powers of Ten" addressed this unusually well. While it eases the abstraction load on the viewer somewhat, it relies on some visual falsehoods to tell its story. I've had a few conversations with others interested in updating it somehow. Perhaps something covering timescales.

Hey, turns out it's available on Youtube:

 

Notion of how many cells interact in a human body is basically inconceivable. That there are 10 times more commensal bacteria, well, fugetaboutit.

Microscopes and telescopes 'arrived' at about the same time. They are approximately the same things, but for which end one looks through.