Randomness thread, part two.

[Lukie]

nice wuf, great answer

ill have another project for you to research soon

[wufwugy]

id make the perfect search engine.

google, yahoo, bing, wufwugy...

[givememyleg]

hmmmm wufwugy.com is available...

[Jack Sawyer]

fight for every yard

8.14.09

http://www.operationsports.com/videoview.php?id=451

[boost]

thailand was great, but man its good to be back in chicago!

[flomo]

thailand was great, but man its good to be back in chicago!

trip report please?

[UG]

The wife and I recently went on a float trip. During said float trip, the girls went on a "girls beer run" one night, and they came home with a ton of girly stuff. Somehow we ended up coming home with six bottles of Boone's. I am drinking one of those bottles.

Boone's Farm -- Snow Creek Berry




What now bitches, don't be jealous Jack Sawyer

[flomo]

what is a float trip?

[UG]

lol, you go camping in the boonies of middle-Missouri, then you rent canoes or these big giant 10-person rafts.......and you float on them down the river. We went on a 9-mile float that took us 7.5 hours, it was awesome because it wasn't too hot...omg we probably set a record for the amount of beers consumed in an 8-hour period, I hurt for two days.

[givememyleg]

YES BOONES!!! For my wedding I think I'm going to stock our limo full of it!

[UG]

i like your style

[bigspenda73]

surprised more ppl don't know about floating the river, it's huge in east TX

[boost]

k, Ill throw something together in the next few days. But for now.. in thailand they have these motorcycle taxis which are just small cc bikes or scooters and the rider wears a bright colored vest (like a construction worker) and that means they are a taxi. You can find them at any busy corner hanging out and you just have to tell them where youre going and negotiate for a price. They are cheap, fast, and very dangerous. Anyways, heres a link to some of the raw footage of a motorcycle taxi ride through bangkok during heavy traffic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bS-S08pZAI

[Galapogos]

k, Ill throw something together in the next few days. But for now.. in thailand they have these motorcycle taxis which are just small cc bikes or scooters and the rider wears a bright colored vest (like a construction worker) and that means they are a taxi. You can find them at any busy corner hanging out and you just have to tell them where youre going and negotiate for a price. They are cheap, fast, and very dangerous. Anyways, heres a link to some of the raw footage of a motorcycle taxi ride through bangkok during heavy traffic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bS-S08pZAI

I find it most puzzling how all the vehicles on either side of the road are parked facing the opposite direction that the traffic on their respective sides flow.

[boost]

ya well thailand is weird like that.. everything is just kinda informal. Like cops dont bug you for anything really. In another video there is footage of the taxi taking me into oncoming traffic (this is very standard over there.) But its also strange because I saw pretty much zero road rage. One of my taxis honked a lot but honking over there is something you do before the fact to say "hey, look out, Im coming" whereas here its something you do after the fact to say "HEY, FUCK YOU, ASSHOLE!"

[Lukie]

this is the second time this summer that a girl has called me a ken doll

unless this shit comes with a flaming dragon punch, i don't like it at all

[bode]

this is the second time this summer that a girl has called me a ken doll

unless this shit comes with a flaming dragon punch or a blow job, i don't like it at all

fyp

[bigspenda73]

Hi I'm Lukie, I get hit on a lot but would rather tell people on the internon about it instead of banging chicks all day long.

[Warpe]

this is the second time this summer that a girl has called me a ken doll

don't let them see you without your pants on, obv.

[bigspenda73]

this is the second time this summer that a girl has called me a ken doll

don't let them see you without your pants on, obv.

just when I think you couldn't be any dumber, you go and do something like this, AND TOTALLY REDEEM YOURSELF.

[ChrisBCritter]

this is the second time this summer that a girl has called me a ken doll

don't let them see you without your pants on, obv.

quoted for awesomeness.

[will641]

The wife and I recently went on a float trip. During said float trip, the girls went on a "girls beer run" one night, and they came home with a ton of girly stuff. Somehow we ended up coming home with six bottles of Boone's. I am drinking one of those bottles.

Boone's Farm -- Snow Creek Berry




What now bitches, don't be jealous Jack Sawyer

this crawfish broil pretty much only had boones. i polished off a bottle of each flavor and snow creek berry is ftw

[Lukie]

Hi I'm Lukie, I get hit on a lot but would rather tell people on the internon about it instead of banging chicks all day long.

this is the second time this summer that a girl has called me a ken doll

don't let them see you without your pants on, obv.

It seems as if I'm getting contradictory advice here.

[bigspenda73]

used to get so drunk off boones freshman year in college, I never drank much in high school and guess I enjoyed the sweet taste over beer/liquor. Grew out of that pretty fast and it was 30 packs of key the rest of the way.

[BennyLaRue]

Tying everything together, I heard drinking Boone's Farm makes your penis fall off. Then you start picking out color swatches for your cozy new bedroom fabrics.

[Warpe]

Hi I'm Lukie, I get hit on a lot but would rather tell people on the internon about it instead of banging chicks all day long.

this is the second time this summer that a girl has called me a ken doll

don't let them see you without your pants on, obv.

It seems as if I'm getting contradictory advice here.

at least you're famous:

http://www.textsfromlastnight.com/view/49597

[Ash256]

this is the second time this summer that a girl has called me a ken doll

don't let them see you without your pants on, obv.

quoted for awesomeness.

http://www.textsfromlastnight.com/view/49597

?

[Chelle]

God damn it feels good to be home.

[flomo]

God damn it feels good to be home.

All right alright!

[wufwugy]

people float the river WTF?! whenever i try to float the river my cards show and i lose

and lukie changing his name to lukendoll obv

[Galapogos]

this is the second time this summer that a girl has called me a ken doll

don't let them see you without your pants on, obv.

Nice Warpe! This is the kind of shit I wake up for.

[bigspenda73]

My Name is Earl, easily a top-5 worst TV show of all-time.

[swiggidy]

I was at a bar that usually has $2 22oz PBR draft. They were out tonight, I was confused so got 1 bottle, but then promptly left because nothing else sounded good.

[wufwugy]

In lieu of the climate change topic of a couple weeks ago, here's a bit on peak oil. Little over an hour long lecture by a professor at University of Colorado entitled Arithmetic, Population and Energy. First half is more of a foundation explaining exponential growth, second half looks into the reality of fossil fuel reserves and use. Was filmed around year 2000, but more applicable today and very, very scary. We could simply be seeing an abject collapse of human society in like 10-20 years due to depletion of fossil fuels. I've not looked as much at this issue as I have climate change, but from the looks of it, the collapse will be about as overnight as possible. The evidence very strongly suggests that we have already hit peak oil, but that the collapse is being delayed due to OPEC pricing, this would last about a decade (which we are probably at the end of).

Poorer nations and peoples will be the most affected (and are currently the most affected since we're actually being affected by peak oil as we speak), but if we are unable to replace 100% of our fossil fuel usage with renewable construction (like wind and nuclear), even the richies will all suffer social and economic collapse.

Personally, I think the notion that we will have enough quantities of renewables within the next 50 years is loltastic. The logistics seem just impossible. This is seen by things like there being only 2 companies in the US that know how to build nuclear plants, yet the logistics show that to out perform fossilf fuels we would need to build like 1 new plant every week. Not the specific numbers, but close

We disregard how dependent upon fossil fuels we are. We disregard that without the super dense and cheap energy provided by oil and coal, we would all be living hunter/gatherer lifestyles. We delude ourselves into thinking that we'll discover technological salvation. Meanwhile, oil supplies approximately 1000 times the amount of energy per price than batteries, not to mention a limited supply of minerals used for batteries. We have such a long way to go before renewables are economically viable, not to mention the even more devastating reality of politically viable.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2...5EF50D&index=0

neeways, long and 'boring' classroom lecture, but still omgwtfbbq

[UG]

we are refinancing the house so we have an appraiser-guy coming over tomorrow. Kate leaves me a voice-mail from work, "hey clean the house because an appraiser guy is coming over." Thanks for the heads-up, thanks for the help. lol, the house needed a good cleaning so I'm glad I did it, but way more satisfied with the fact that I am DONE.


wufwugy -- so why aren't the governments of the world doing more to combat this? You're talking all of this doom-and-gloom, and I'm pretty sure you're spot-on with everything you say....but why isn't anything being done about these problems? or.....is this what the elite/rich want?

[boost]

because modern government is one giant bureaucracy which means anything that needs to get done takes forever to get done. Its the same as global warming.. Any leader who jumps on a "end of the world" type of bandwagon first will be painted by the opposition as loony. Also the first country to do the right thing and completely restructure its society would for a short time be at a giant disadvantage and lag behind other world powers.

The scariest part is that people dont understand how insanely dependent we are on oil. Its not just a fuel, but it is a raw material that is used to produce countless products that we cannot at this current time do without. Our entire infrastructure would need to be rebuilt from the ground up. A nuclear power plant is great, but without plastics how will we make one? So even our best solutions are indirectly (not all that indirectly..) based on oil. But lets pretend that we do manage to get the power plants up and running. What about food? Our farming practices are heavily dependent on pesticides that are derived from fossil fuels. And this goes on and on, even if you figure out a solution for one part of our oil based society you realize that there are dozens more. Its a truly daunting problem that we are staring at and none of the worlds governments are doing a thing about it.

[wufwugy]

wufwugy -- so why aren't the governments of the world doing more to combat this? You're talking all of this doom-and-gloom, and I'm pretty sure you're spot-on with everything you say....but why isn't anything being done about these problems? or.....is this what the elite/rich want?

Good question. Great question, actually. The answer is very complicated, and I don't think I can give an optimal response, but I can try, yet I'm probably just gonna be all over the place.

There are several intermingling factors. Some are the nature of human psychology, how we look only to the immediate or near future and tend to brush away the distant future, how we have very egocentric and immortal perspectives about ourselves and our progeny, and how our brains work with regards to what we believe (read: we tend to disregard logical positions in place of fanatical positions). Another way of looking at this is that there is still a huge birth rate in Africa. You and I may think 'WTF why are they making kids? Their lives suck and the kids are just gonna die from starvation and they know it!" But the reason has to do with how the human brain works. We're emotional and habitual first, logical second.

Other factors involve the contempt for science. This is the trend of all human history, and isn't that much different now. Granted, science holds a substantially higher societal position now than every before, but it's still very small compared to the masses. Consider things like evolution, global warming, inflationary universe; these are solid truths in our reality, yet the vast majority of people deny them. Some nations are not like this though. Scandanavia and the Netherlands are the regions where the collective education of the people is high enough that, for the most part, they consider science to be their friend. Here in the US, about half the country unwittingly combats science, and we're one of the more progressive countries around.

Another factor is that the majority of the world's population lives in poverty, and modernization is essentially their dream. True story: a journalist covering the deforestation of the Amazon once asked one of the loggers, "Don't you realize that due to logging, one day there will be no more rainforest?" And the logger replied, "Yes, I realize this, but I also have kids to feed." I think this is case in point with regards to the mentality of all poor people, and I don't blame them. Another way of looking at it is Tragedy of the Commons http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons . Essentially, this is the social dilemma reached by individuals doing what is best for themselves, yet in doing so they destroy a shared interest.

Not only is modernization the underdeveloped world's dream, but it's their due. US per capita consumes way more fossil fuel than our share, this means that underdeveloped nations consume way below their share, and we have no leg to stand on when preaching to them, and they have every incentive to try to consume like us. We Americans (and other first-worlders, yet US is still way ahead of all other countries) have no clue exactly how wealthy we are. On the global scope, US middle class is rich rich rich rich


Okay so why specifically is nothing being done? Well, some stuff is being done, but even governments are susceptible to the same poor judgment of the masses, but governmental inaction is compounded by having to cater to the masses as well. 'Doing something' about peak oil and global warming will be HORRIBLE on economies, and then the leaders will lose their jobs. The masses will completely disregard the future if the current means their standard of living plummets, or worse it means their children starve, which is what it will come to. There are ways around this, ways in which economies would thrive, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't be thrown topsy turvy. A lot of the powers of today cannot remain in power tomorrow in a world that beat global warming and peak oil

Another reason is democracy. I said it, democracy. Free speech, for one. I love free speech, but like all things there's a dark side, and one of the dark sides to free speech is that people are given open reign to lie. This effects in intelligent people, the ones with the most power, lying to the masses in order to further their own position, and often this lying involves those doing the lying not even realizing they're lying. Here's a fantastic article entitled Your Brain Lies To You http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/op...8e0&ei=5087%0A It goes through some pretty amazing examples of how the brain actually confuses reality. If you're interested in that type of stuff check out Dan Ariely and Jonah Lehrer. You can find some of their lectures online; very, very interesting stuff, and you'll be blown away at the sheer inefficiency and mispeceptions that our brains make ALL THE TIME. Anyways, that's a rabbit trail....

What I was getting at before the derail was that our social structure favors and propagates ignorance. If you watched the video i previously linked, you'll see the professor go into detail about oil companies, politicians, and even clueless journalists either lying about or simply not understanding the numbers. Things like they found an oil reserve and claimed that it will provide us with 500 more years of oil production. Well, as the prof points out, this is all true as long as they include the prefix - 'if oil consumption plateaus'. When in actuality, at the time oil consumption was increasing 7% yearly, and this meant that we only had like 35 years left. Well, the former is what gets in the media, while the latter does not, yet the latter is close to what's actually going to happen.

Now look at Obama and his Energy Sec Steven Chu. Guaranteed they are very well aware of problems like global warming and peak oil, my opinion is that they do not consider the situation to be nearly as dire as it really is, but they do think it's pretty dire anyways. Well, Obama is pushing for about as much energy legislation as is politically feasible, via the cap and trade bill, yet this bill is pretty much garbage. It does something, but that something is nothing even among the most conservative of scientists. Yet this is simply because the sociopolitical climate in the US would not allow for more. We don't realize how many dumbfucks have a vote, and that they vote people out of office who make life hard for them. They could be fooled into voting for the Sun to explode if it meant a few years of paradise. This looks to be the story of Jimmy Carter. I don't know a ton about him so I won't say one way or the other, but my impression is that he was actually a fan-fucking-tastic president, yet got busted up by the ignorance of the masses and the savvy of his opposition. Back in the 70s, Carter was saying the exact same things about energy independence and financial stability that we're saying today, but nobody cared because we all want high standard of living and we want it now.

Hope I helped, was quite a ramble. I'm not that good at explaining in length. Also, keep in mind that there's so much more to it, I just hit on a small number of facets.

[UG]

freaking awesome stuff wufwugy, holy shit awesome stuff

I will reread this tomorrow and check out all of your links, too

this stuff fascinates me to no end

[wufwugy]

Here's one of the several graphs in the vid. This is a variant, just ignore the nuclear line. The point is the fossil fuel line. The graph is spanning over 5k years before petroleum discovery to 5k years after petroleum discovery. This graph agrees with scientific consensus and with the predictions put up by a dead guy name Hubbert who predicted US domestic peak oil perfectly, and I don't think has been wrong once on peak oil predictions



There are several other awesome graphs, but I either can't find them or I'm too illiterate to understand them that well.

I guess I could do another. Hubbert's prediction on global peak



So far this coincides completely with reality. It has been mentioned that the peak will be a short plateau due to OPEC pricing, and the scientific consensus is that we are very likely at that point right now. The thing about peak oil is that you can never know unless observation is retroactive. Highly educated predictions can be made, however, and some already have been and have been right with regards to regional peaks.

I really recommend going back and watching the video I linked. It's a long playlist, but it's very informative, and includes one very valuable aspect that 100% of people will miss (like I did) unless educated on the topic specifically, and that's what exponential growth actually means

[wufwugy]

Here's a recent post on the topic from a different forum that I really liked. I'm skeptical of a couple of the points of the author, but they're small points, and overall it's a pretty great post. I've come across many awesome posts on this subject, but honestly, this one was the only one where i remember exactly where to find it

***************

The first big question, then, is whether we have a replacement for petroleum. The short answer is no--there are other sources of energy, but none of them are scalable currently. We still have lots of oil, but we have reached the global peak output, and though we are currently plateaued, production will begin permanent decline by no later than 2015. The decline is likely to be very steep for several reasons.

First, we've pushed our fields to the maximum, using such techniques as seawater injection and CO2 sequestration to get at every last drop of oil in our biggest fields. When you look at decline rates now available at Ghawar, Cantarell, Burgan, Ramallyah, the North Sea, Prudhoe Bay, etc. you see that the downslope of the curve is much steeper than the upslope--the decline is often in excess of 20% per annum.

Second, we went after the biggest and easiest to produce fields first. The remaining oil is in small isolated pockets in difficult terrain. It is of lower quality, and will require more energy to extract and refine. More petroleum will have to be used per barrel extracted, so the effect will be less net petroleum.

Third, economic factors come into play. At $600 a barrel, oil production will cost exactly as much as the total current worldwide GNP. When oil reached $147 a barrel briefly, it was taking one-quarter of the wealth produced daily worldwide to make oil available, and that resulted in a massive crash and the anihilation of trillions of dollars. We will continue to see this sort of undulation, where oil prices climb and the economy suffers, throwing more people off the system in order to survive.

Decline rates worldwide are projected to be somewhere in the 8-12% range. This means that in roughly 7 years from the start of the decline, we'll be producing half the oil we were at the peak. There are some technical factors that have recently come to light which may indicate the actual decline rate would be much higher, in which case, the situation will be proportionally worse.

Of the available alternatives, only nuclear power holds the same potential of scalability as fossil fuels do. Unfortunately, it's a lot more difficult to manage, and certainly more difficult to make fertilizer from nuclear fuel. The pesticides made from nuclear waste hold the potential to create mutant species. Furthermore, there are only a few companies in the world that actually know how to build nuclear reactors (there are 2 in the U.S.).

Of course, we'll use solar, wind, and other such alternatives. But the manufacture of those systems requires the use of resources which are in very short supply. Lithium, for instance, is used in the batteries in most solar or wind systems, and production worldwide is fairly low. To scale it up to the level needed to actually replace fossil fuels, production would have to increase many hundred-fold, and there just isn't that much lithium available. Ditto many other such resources. These technologies are simply not scalable.

So far, we've only touched a little on climate change. Weather is going to become much more volatile, as there is just more energy going into our weather systems. This fact may make agriculture virtually impossible. We may have to revert to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle for several generations. In that case, it's impossible to accurately guess at the maximum sustainable population, but it's probably somewhere in the neighborhood of a few scores of millions.

Recent analyses have indicated that we have destroyed roughly a third of the ecosphere. The destruction continues, and this will decrease even further our chances for survival in a post-petroculture world.

The situation begins to look even more grim when you start thinking about the fact that nuclear waste has to be managed with an energy-intensive process for many thousands of years. Ditto other toxic chemicals we've produced. All of these waste products hold the potential to be extremely deadly to large areas. When the energy is no longer available to manage these systems, the chance for a catastrophic breach of containment will begin to increase until such a breach occurs.

Climate change and declining energy availability will increase the prevalence of disease and restrict the availability of medicine to combat it. This will reduce population, but

Then you have to factor in human nature. People aren't going to willingly starve or otherwise go to their death without fighting. And that means war, further consumption of energy, and ultimately, population reduction through violence. Will we use nuclear weapons once things really start cooking? I think it likely, in which case, food production capacity will plummet drastically. History has shown that people will commit to the utmost madness in desperate times. Never in the history of the world has any nation built up a huge stockpile of armament and then failed to use it.

It's very difficult to see how human ingenuity will overcome these problems. I think it's a serious lack of grasp on both human history and natural history to think that the past is on the side of the optimists in this matter. Human societies have collapsed before, often leading to serious depopulation. Species have gone extinct.

If I were a betting man, I would bet that by the end of this century, the human race will be reduced to probably just a few thousand individuals.

[wufwugy]

The scariest part is that people dont understand how insanely dependent we are on oil. Its not just a fuel, but it is a raw material that is used to produce countless products that we cannot at this current time do without. Our entire infrastructure would need to be rebuilt from the ground up. A nuclear power plant is great, but without plastics how will we make one? So even our best solutions are indirectly (not all that indirectly..) based on oil. But lets pretend that we do manage to get the power plants up and running. What about food? Our farming practices are heavily dependent on pesticides that are derived from fossil fuels. And this goes on and on, even if you figure out a solution for one part of our oil based society you realize that there are dozens more. Its a truly daunting problem that we are staring at and none of the worlds governments are doing a thing about it.

This is a fantastic point that all of us simply just gloss over. I'm not sure exactly how issues like plastics and pesticides can be fixed with renewables. I suspect they can be fixed, but I honestly do not know since everybody's focus is on energy and cost, not derivatives. It could be, though, that if we got energy and cost out of the way all the scientists would be pointing at the problem involving derivatives, I really don't know though.

The point about dependency is top notch. We don't realize that EVERYTHING we have today is due to fossil fuels, that those fuels are going to be gone within our lifetimes, and that we'll lose EVERYTHING that we have if we do not have a replacement. This is a very fascinating and troubling thing.

Personally, I think that the richies, like multi-millionaires, will be fine. They'll be affected quite heavily by peak oil, but eventually renewables will be pushed gung ho since everybody will acknowledge impending doom. And socioeconomic troubles always trickle down. Like when global food production halves it won't mean that US starves, but that the poorer 3-4 billion starves while US steals their food.

Ironically, I think that if anything cures global warming it will be peak oil. I'm not exactly sure about this though since I honestly do not know the numbers behind unconventional reserves and things like coal to oil transformation. These reserves and processes are more expensive to extract than is currently economical, but they are either beginning to become used or will soon be due to price of oil simply being high enough (some estimates are like 80$ a barrel is when things like Canadian oil shale comes into market). The flip side of this is that these unconventional fossil fuels are WAY worse for global warming than crude oil. When we use them we'll be double timing our way to ecological collapse. However, these unconventional sources are likely to do nothing for peak oil due to the exponential nature of growth expressed in the video. Essentially, the last decade of consumption we will consume more petroleum than the entire history of petroleum consumption. So we can have all these massive reserves even now, yet still suck ourselves dry in no time at all. The real life impacts of growth are fascinating.

[flomo]

this is becoming a onestar thread

[Chelle]

ahahahha, like I'll actually read all that.

someone give some cliff notes.

[flomo]

ahahahha, like I'll actually read all that.

someone give some cliff notes.

Hi, I'm wufugy.

[bigspenda73]

the house needed a good cleaning so I'm glad I did it, but way more satisfied with the fact that I am DONE.

yea I get this too, must be some mutant-man gene I'm unaware of.

[BennyLaRue]

ahahahha, like I'll actually read all that.

someone give some cliff notes.

wufwugy thinks the world will become like Mad Max in just a few years.

[Warpe]

I'm looking forward to the first edition of the Wufwugy Bathroom Reader.

[bikes]

I'm looking forward to the first edition of the Wufwugy Bathroom Reader.

Hi, I'm Wufwugy.


Followed by 50 pages of blank paper

[givememyleg]

wugwufy does use a lot of text, but this is a pretty important topic, everyone should take 10 mins to read it.

[bigspenda73]

If I were a betting man, I would bet that by the end of this century, the human race will be reduced to probably just a few thousand individuals.

quoting this for whatthefuckness

surely you meant millennium

[Ash256]

welcome to Britain: http://www.viceland.com/wp/2009/07/babes-of-the-bnp/

[killerkebab]

If I were a betting man,

You're on a poker forum. Of course you're a betting man.

I would bet that by the end of this century, the human race will be reduced to probably just a few thousand individuals.

After writing all that stuff to say that we should not be acting selfishly and then telling us that there will only be one or two generations after us anyway, I know what I need to know.

No one has managed to convince me that I should waste as much energy as possible and live a decadent lifestyle up until today.

welcome to Britain: http://www.viceland.com/wp/2009/07/babes-of-the-bnp/

All that has done is prove that British women are at least as stupid as their counterparts in the rest of the world

[Jack Sawyer]

someone give some cliff notes.

We are fucked. With graphs.

[givememyleg]

LOL british women... prolly the most unattractive bunch on the planet

[wufwugy]

If I were a betting man, I would bet that by the end of this century, the human race will be reduced to probably just a few thousand individuals.

quoting this for whatthefuckness

surely you meant millennium

FYI, I'm not the author of that one post. It was a good one I came across recently and felt I'd share. I'm not sure how I feel about the prediction because, well, I haven't given this a ton of thought and it's nearly impossible to predict.

Also, we're not talking about millenia. If we last a millenia we'll be fine. We are currently in very serious peak oil and global warming issues that will play themselves out within our lifetimes. The scientific consensus on peak oil is that in the next few decades, if we do not replace the astronomical amounts of energy with renewables (which we are NOT on course to do currently), billions will starve to death and the vast majority of the species will return to hunter/gatherer esque lives. Given that we are a cheap energy society, this means that the vast majority of us will either die or live in poverty, and this is just a few decades away since we are currently at peak.

Global warming is also currently in full swing. If this is not the single most rapid 'natural' increase in the Earth's temperature throughout prehistory, it is certainly one of the highest, and we know it's anthropogenic (caused by humans). Global warming is something that is a huge problem slightly later than peak oil, but it's still just a few decades at most that we have to drastically reduce emission before we hit a point of no return and the positive feedback loops of continual warming destroys the ecology in which humans evolved, and could likely even create another anoxic event (read: mass organic extinction). Ironically, anoxic events are what caused fossil fuel formation in the first place, and if we do not get this problem fixed within just a couple decades we will suffer another one or come very close.

Predicting the human population being down to thousands by the end of the century is actually not that outlandish. I have no clue what probability I would put on it, but it's definitely greater than 0, and probably greater than 1.

Like GMML said, this is such a major issue. The public simply just doesn't realize that if we do not get our shit together like it's WWIII then in 30, 40, 50 years we will ALL be pushed into mass poverty. How many of us lament this current economic recession? Well, peak oil will not only give us a recession, but it will obliterate the entire notion of economies. Without enough cheap energy, which oil, gas, and coal are currently the only scalable options to date, EVERYTHING of the last century will disappear. Very few people will have jobs, very few will have electricity, there will be virtually no stores to buy stuff and literally no wealth except for the top 1%. This will all happen in our lifetimes. 100% guarantee. And the only way we can avoid the devastation is via enough renewables production before then which all signs point towards not happening.

Also, if any mod wants to move all the global warming/peak oil stuff to a different thread, that may be better. It's hard to say if something is best in it's own thread or the random thread since it's hard to predict how much interest the topic will generate.

[wufwugy]

ahahahha, like I'll actually read all that.

someone give some cliff notes.

The amount of recoverable fossil fuels on the Earth is finite. Scientific consensus is that we are currently at peak production, we cannot go any higher, we have used approximately half of all petroleum reserves, and the usage of petroleum will plummet just like it skyrocketed before peak.

Everything about our lifestyles is based in fossil fuels, and we do not have alternative fuels to scale which would allow us to replace fossil fuels. I'm sure you've noticed that at the pump gas has been getting dramatically more and more expensive over your lifetime, and stories from people older tell of days where it was even much cheaper. Well, expect prices to skyrocket at rates never before seen once we begin our descent from peak (which will be in just a few years at most). The price of everything will skyrocket, the economy and living standards will plummet due to demand for petroleum being so high while supply so low. Everything that we have and know will change because it's all based on fossil fuels. Everything from our clothing and DVDs to buildings and freeways come from fossil fuels. We are not on course to replace fossil fuels, yet we are on course to lose fossil fuels.

This is not me stating opinions too, it's reiterating facts put forward by scientists for decades, and none of their predictions have been wrong on this issue. It's simply a numbers game, and scientists are great at those.

[Ash256]

wuf

Are there any semi-advanced cultures you know of that aren't reliant on oil?

[mcatdog]

People have been predicting the imminent collapse of civilization for centuries, yet somehow we're still here. I doubt this crisis will be any different.

-Fossil fuel reserves are never going to disappear completely. They will simply be depleted causing the price to go up, discouraging consumption and encouraging the use of alternative energy. Also as the price goes up, we will find more oil that's difficult to access and not commercially viable at current price levels.

There's no inherent reason why the economy has to be so dependent on oil, but we are because it's by far the cheapest source of fuel we have. I don't blame "government bureaucracy" for a lack of investment in alternative energy when it hasn't been rational to invest a huge amount of money in it yet. Sooner or later it will be, and then we will.

As for the other derivatives of petroleum, I don't see them as a big concern since the vast majority of petroleum is used for energy.



Distillates are types of fuel oil other than gasoline, such as diesel or home heating oil. The "all other" category includes plastics, detergents, pesticides, and all the other products that are derived from crude oil. I expect that during our lifetime we'll see fossil fuels stop being the world's primary source of energy. It will take longer for find alternatives for other petroleum-based products, but that's fine because they aren't the primary use of petroleum anyway.

-Overpopulation is already becoming less and less of a concern even among the doom-and-gloom crowd. Fertility rate in the developed world is already below replacement level. In the Middle East, the number of births per woman has plummeted in the last generation; for example, in Iran it was nearly 8 per woman in the 1960s but barely 2 per woman today. Even countries like India and Bangladesh have a fertility rate of only 3 children per woman and still falling. Sub-Saharan Africa is the only world region where the fertility rate is still huge, and sadly while I'm optimistic about the rest of the world, sub-Saharan African governments are so corrupt that I don't see things improving there anytime soon. Still, current trends mean that the population won't go anywhere near the 12 billion in 2050 that Paul Ehrlich predicted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...fertility_rate

-Global climate change is not going to "make agriculture virtually impossible." Some croplands we use today will no longer be viable, yes, but there will also be dry areas that become fertile with the increased rain, and northern regions that would be suitable for farming if only the temperature were a few degrees warmer. For the world as a whole, it will be close to a wash.

The IPCC investigated what would happen in a world with a doubled CO2 level (Google Books link). They estimate that a 4-5 C temperature increase and 10-15% more worldwide rainfall would diminish worldwide grain yields by about 5 percent, but that if farmers adjusted by changing their planting dates and increasing irrigation, so the damage would most likely be even more mild than that. No doubt there will be winners and losers, and climate change will be especially tough on developing countries near the Equator, but to say we'll revert to hunting and gathering is absurd.

If you think we're all going to die, then why not get started instead of cheering the rest of us on.

[mcatdog]

wuf

Are there any semi-advanced cultures you know of that aren't reliant on oil?

No, there's no reason for any society not to rely on oil when it's still by far the cheapest way to produce energy. Anyone who did would be putting themselves at too big of a competitive disadvantage in the world economy.

[wufwugy]

wuf

Are there any semi-advanced cultures you know of that aren't reliant on oil?

Good question.

The short answer is no, but that's very misleading.

I'll start with something from history. Rome was pretty advanced, and they used little fossil fuels. Rome had things like urinals, apartment buildings, advanced surgical tools, but Rome was also a much different place than modern society. We couldn't just quit using oil and be like Rome; we would have to rework everything.

Now to current times, much of Scandanavia and the Netherlands is far along with being devoid of oil. Some countries therein, I don't remember exactly which ones, but places like Iceland and Norway, are currently at or close to 100% renewables with regards to electicity. However, they still use petroleum for transportation, construction, and military. They're pretty far along, but they are also infants compared to much of the rest of the world because they have small, steady populations and economies. They have worked for a long time to scale renewables to the degree that they have (which still isn't good enough), but in order for the US to get to their point we would basically need to attack this issue at like 50x the amount they are.

The kind of scales we're working with here are huge. For example: in order for the UK to switch to renewables without drastic living standard reductions, about half of its landmass would need to be used for a variety of different energy sources. Other examples are: China would have to build about a few nuclear reactors a week, the entire Sahara would need to be covered with solar panels not yet technologically developed yet, almost all of the midwest of US would need to be wind turbines, things like that. And we're simply not going to be able to do this in a few decades

If we somehow ward of global warming (I seriously doubt it since we are likely to use all the fossil fuels we can get our hands on), then in a few centuries everything will be back to normal. Not in our lifetimes though. Peak oil isn't about technological loss, just economic loss.

[bode]

mcatpwnd

[Chelle]

IM GOING TO TAKE A BALLET CLASS! I got all the stuff today. Black leotard, tights, and ballet slippers.

btw leotard is a funny word.

[wufwugy]

People have been predicting the imminent collapse of civilization for centuries, yet somehow we're still here. I doubt this crisis will be any different.

Uneducated people have been predicting collapses forever, not scientists. This is a much different thing since it's coming from the scientific community instead of the lay.

-Fossil fuel reserves are never going to disappear completely. They will simply be depleted causing the price to go up, discouraging consumption and encouraging the use of alternative energy. Also as the price goes up, we will find more oil that's difficult to access and not commercially viable at current price levels.

There's no inherent reason why the economy has to be so dependent on oil, but we are because it's by far the cheapest source of fuel we have. I don't blame "government bureaucracy" for a lack of investment in alternative energy when it hasn't been rational to invest a huge amount of money in it yet. Sooner or later it will be, and then we will.

This is misleading. Exponential growth determines that each doubling time sees more consumption than all previous consumption to date. Doubling time for us with regards to fossil fuels has been on the order of 12 years. We could have as much petroleum in the ground today as we've used throughout all history, yet we would still use it all in just over a decade. It is not mathematically possible to find enough reserves to satisfy current consumption, it isn't even possible to find enough to satisfy much lower consumption. Also, we know that we're not going to find that much more reserves. We've already found most of it, and our consumption is so high that new huge fields are enough for just a few weeks or months. This is all stuff the professor covered.

Prices hiking will reduce consumption, but it won't reduce demand. This would be fine if we had alternative sources that could meet demand, but we are light years away from having scalable alternatives. This is the problem. We can't just see prices for oil go up then decide to go renewable because it will take decades for those renewables to meet demand. The descent after peak oil is going to be much more dramatic than the increase in renewables. Scientific consensus is that we need to start gigantic renewable production decades before peak oil in order to not suffer greatly, and we haven't done this.

What you're suggesting is like waiting till you have a heart attack to start getting back in shape.

-Overpopulation is already becoming less and less of a concern even among the doom-and-gloom crowd. Fertility rate in the developed world is already below replacement level. In the Middle East, the number of births per woman has plummeted in the last generation; for example, in Iran it was nearly 8 per woman in the 1960s but barely 2 per woman today. Even countries like India and Bangladesh have a fertility rate of only 3 children per woman and still falling. Sub-Saharan Africa is the only world region where the fertility rate is still huge, and sadly while I'm optimistic about the rest of the world, sub-Saharan African governments are so corrupt that I don't see things improving there anytime soon. Still, current trends mean that the population won't go anywhere near the 12 billion in 2050 that Paul Ehrlich predicted.

Maybe it has for the doom and gloom crowd. I wouldn't know. The science, however, shows that overpopulation is a huge deal. The regions of the world which have seen population growth even out have done so due to modernization and lack of immigration. Like Europe, Japan, and Russia. Other places like the US have not seen this leveling off due to immigration.

But it's not even about population growth. That's misunderstanding the problem, and growth just makes it that much worse. It's about per capita consumption. The global population could quit growing overnight, yet we would still be in a world of hurt, and modernization exponentially exacerbates this. 5 billion people live on the total GDP of the US, but this number is continually reducing due to modernization. This means that per capita population is dramatically increasing. At US standard of living, global population needs to be drastically lower than it currently is. Either that's going to happen, or standard of living for modern nations is going to plummet.

-Global climate change is not going to "make agriculture virtually impossible." Some croplands we use today will no longer be viable, yes, but there will also be dry areas that become fertile with the increased rain, and northern regions that would be suitable for farming if only the temperature were a few degrees warmer. For the world as a whole, it will be close to a wash.

The IPCC investigated what would happen in a world with a doubled CO2 level (Google Books link). They estimate that a 4-5 C temperature increase and 10-15% more worldwide rainfall would diminish worldwide grain yields by about 5 percent, but that if farmers adjusted by changing their planting dates and increasing irrigation, so the damage would most likely be even more mild than that. No doubt there will be winners and losers, and climate change will be especially tough on developing countries near the Equator, but to say we'll revert to hunting and gathering is absurd.

That report was published in like 96. Climate science has come a long way since then. Current scientific consensus is that doubling carbon in the atmosphere or 4-5C temperature increase is doomsday. There will be no more polar ice, and the feedback loops of continual warming will have been exacerbated to the point that perpetual warming will take us much higher than 4-5C. Nobody actually knows what will happen since this is our first experiment, but geologic evidence suggests it would be hell.

Also, warming happens much more at the poles than the equator. We didn't realize this until recently. This puts a huge hole in ideas about arable land. Not to mention, that the main problem isn't a certain degree of warming, but in perpetual warming and positive feedback loops. We know that if we see 4-5C rise that we will be on the brink of doom due to perpetual feedback of continued warming.

[swiggidy]

Will people stop posting essays in the randomness thread. Just start a new thread "Paragraphs longer than 5 sentences where we pretend to have a debate over the internet"

IM GOING TO TAKE A BALLET CLASS! I got all the stuff today. Black leotard, tights, and ballet slippers.

btw leotard is a funny word.

pics or ban

[wufwugy]

Will people stop posting essays in the randomness thread. Just start a new thread "Paragraphs longer than 5 sentences where we pretend to have a debate over the internet

Yeah, I'm long winded on science subjects. Feel free to offer a mod a free blow job in return for moving the posts to a new thread

[swiggidy]

Meh, we're 7 posts from page 52 so the potential exists for the thread to fix itself.

[Chelle]

Today I painted a sunflower.

swiggidy - I agree with you. Also, I don't know if I'll get pics of me in a leotard, but it may be possible.

[swiggidy]

Today I painted a sunflower.

What color did you paint it?

...

or

...

Pics or ban

[flomo]

i love van goes paintings

chelle was your sunflower like his?



who am i kidding? pics in the ballet shit plese

[Chelle]

It's obv yellow and brown.

totally not taking a pic of it, it sucks, but it made me feel better.

I use to paint like a shit load.

pics of hello kitty or ban!!!!

[swiggidy]

[flomo]

this what chicks want swiggidy

Vrroooooooooommmmmmmmmmmmmm!!!






pic from this forum of hello kitty cars
http://paultan.org/archives/2005/09/...daihatsu-cars/
most comments refer to gayness

[flomo]

new page !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

we did it

[swiggidy]

Gay?



I always expect the new page one post later

[bikes]

.... I propose a ban of hello kitty.



pic so post isnt worthless.