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Climate change refugees
and the text that was with it:
Bangladesh is one of the most crowded nations, with more than 158m crammed into about 144,000 sq km. Scientists predict Bangladesh could lose up to 20% of its land by 2050 because of rising sea levels.
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If you have the choice, which would you rather do - reduce your energy consumption by around 60% (or 80% if you're American) (I don't know the figure for Australia, but that's probably bad as it's a very coal dependent country) or allow refugees from countries like Bangladesh to enter your country in large numbers (for the sake of argument, let's assign environmental refugees to industrialised countries in proportion to their CO2 emissions per head of their own population). Discuss.
In the meantime, here's one more way to reduce your carbon footprint.
Curtains -- It's amazing how many people overlook a simple and cheap method of insulation. If you have double-glazing, still use your curtains. They'll have a big impact on heat loss. Many people tend to stop using their curtains at night once they have double-glazing (or else have filmy ones with no insulation value). By doing that, you've lost a lot of the gain from installing the double-glazing.
If it's dark enough to have your lights on, then it's probably time to close your curtains.
If you have a cold hallway (and that's an awful lot of us), get a floor-length curtain from Oxfam, put a cheap rail over the door, and use it whenever the weather is cold, especially at night. I was surprised how much difference ours made.
Also, consider a curtain at the foot of your stairs. In the old days, people had a stairCASE. The stairs were encased - it kept the heat in. A curtain will help reproduce the effect of a door at the foot of your stairs and stop heat doing what it normally does - rise upstairs. (You could always open it an hour before you go to bed, if you want the last of the heat to flow up and warm your bedroom.)
We turned off radiators in all our bedrooms the year our baby got croup (which we learned was caused by hot, dry air) and haven't turned them on again in decades. A hot water bottle or electric blanket is far more cost-effective if you need to warm the bed before you get into it. And I for one actually sleep better if my head is cool.
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As for hot water bottles - four cats does the job.
We always have a back and forth in terms of heating, as I have fur and basically don't feel the cold, and
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Also, I choose option 3, which is to continue to increase energy usage without having a serious effect on the amount of livable land. There are lot of ways to do this in theory, and at least one of them is likely to work.
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eg. Clean coal technology does not cover the fact that a lot of methane is released when some coal seams are mined. It also ignores the transport costs, and the fact that you lose around a third of the power output and thus need more power stations, etc.
Find me a form of energy that will be commercially viable in large enough quantities in the next ten years (because that may be all the safety margin we have) and I'll leap on it with open arms.
Countries with high CO2 emissions per capita, like the Gulf States, also tend to be very rich. They could take a larger number of people than their land area would suggest. But yes, I agree it's a simplistic method - I was tossing ideas around to see what other methods people would suggest (assuming that letting poor people drown/starve is not a viable option)
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I've got a New Scientist article that I cut out, and annoyingly cannot find on their web site (in spite of having the exact date and title) which goes into the problems in some depth.
Issues include the energy cost of liquifying CO2, the cost of transporting the gas to a suitable storage site, the lack of research into whether the acidity of CO2 will increase the probability of leaks from underground rock formations, and the financial cost.
CCS will help, but it can only reduce coal emissions by a max of about 2/3. We have to cut our total emissions by more than that to stop major temperature increases.
There's currently no viable method of capturing CO2 direct from the atmosphere (apart from growing trees and burying them, and we don't have enough space to do that)
Land reclamation fails to consider soil types or water supply. Land coming into use is going to be less overall than land that falls out of use and by and large we'd lose better quality land than we gain.
Big sea walls are loaded with problems (as are large scale river defences). I won't bore you with the details, but I did hydrology as one of my subjects at university and the rough rule of thumb is that the longer you hold off a flood, the greater the damage will be when you eventually get one.
We can't even protect a city the size of New Orleans, let alone a country the size of Bangladesh.
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I've not seen any show-stopper critiques of ambient carbon capture by chucking iron into the deep equatorial oceans to stimulate algae and plankton growth.
We can demonstrably protect a country the size of the Netherlands, you just need a government that will take it seriously and maintain its infrastructure.
An idea I've not seen is cloud seeding in Antarctica to increase snowfall over the East Antarctic ice sheet. It only needs to get about 1% thicker to lock up enough water to mitigate any conceivable sea level rise over the next century.
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Iron seeding of oceans has had some research done (much of which has been over-hyped by the newspapers). There seems likely to be some potential benefit from it, but not on a major scale. One should also be cautious (ie. make sure you've done all the research) before doing any large geo-engineering project, simply to ensure that there aren't side effects that are worse than the problem you're trying to solve.
Iron increases plankton growth (as long as iron is the limiting nutrient, which it is in some places), but the research doesn't yet show if the resulting plankton stay suspended in the top layers or sink to the ocean floor. The viability of this technique depends on what proportion of the plankton sink down.
Cloud seeding hasn't managed to save ski resorts...
Funnily enough, the most common suggestion for cloud seeding is to try and create more clouds (but not get rain from them) on the grounds that clouds increase the Earth's albedo. So getting snowfall from Antartic clouds might be counterbalanced by the reduced albedo. (Or might not, but it shows the need to research anything very carefully before you try it for real)
We're losing Antartic ice at quite a rate at present, so you'd also have to consider the effects of flow rates of glaciers and the like and the effect of overall temperatures on glacial lubrication. (there's a lot of quite interesting research coming out now on the factors affecting the speed of glaciers)
IN essence, you might be able to lock up water that way, but you'd have to ensure that it wasn't more than counterbalanced by glaciers moving faster as the temperature rises.
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Yes, population is reducing, but not at the rate we need to see it fall. Having said that, there are real demographic problems if we cut the reproduction rate too drastically.
Less people means we could have a higher standard of living without destroying the environment.