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MIT helps launch effort to combat climate change

MIT and a group called Conservation International yesterday announced a program to look at ways to use nature to help fight climate change:

The collaboration brings together MIT’s technical, scientific, and engineering expertise with Conservation International’s expansive environmental programs, to look for ways that forests, coastal ecosystems, and urban areas can be managed to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to climate change.

The collaboration launches today with a one-day hackathon at MIT that invites participants to team up on ideation and early-state design of nature-based, technologically savvy solutions to climate challenges in developing world communities. The collaboration will involve MIT students in CI’s international fieldwork and will initially include four joint research projects in which scientists will focus directly on climate challenges already having an impact in places such as the Philippines and the Amazon Basin.

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Comments

Wonderful news! Science prevails in Massachusetts. For now at least.

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Step one : Figure out what temperature the Earth is supposed to be.

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For those with working brains, the problem is accelerating atmospheric CO2 concentrations and rapid changes in our climate systems that are clearly already underway.

Your intransient idiocy does give me an idea. Perhaps we should build walls at places like the Cape Cod Canal and the borders of states that aren't doing their part to adapt to what will happen over the next decades, so all the climate deniers who live in vulnerable areas can't run to us for help when reality soaks in?

Just a thought.

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And your response speaks volumes about the debate.

Is the solution that the Earth's temperature stay what it is today? Should we be trying to lower it? Is there an upper limit beyond which we are screwed? What should the global temperature be?

I have nothing against limiting CO emissions, but the articles of faith around the global climate bothers me.

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When we are facing accelerating climate change in a very short period of time, it is at best an irrelevant question and usually a deliberately stupid question.

We will not see the temperatures of the 20th century for about 500 years. Even if we went completely carbonless, we would not see them for another 500 years.

The exact temperature isn't the problem. THE CHANGE IS THE PROBLEM as is the RATE of change.

Do some research and smarten up. The data is out there. The research is out there. You can read it for yourself. Your response is the equivalent of sitting inside a house that is on fire and saying "all you alarmists are just being mean - you have to prove to me that sitting in a burning building is bad". Really, that simple. If you and others persist in your deliberate and willful "but gee I don't knoooooowww its all just belief vs belief" nonsense, you can kiss Waquoit Jr;'s and his children's future goodbye.

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Regardless of what we do, the Earth's temperature will still rise?

Call me a simpleton for asking simple questions (or technically for defending other people's simple questions), but you could either answer or say there is no answer. That's not what you did.

If I have a fireplace in my house, should I call 911 every time there is a fire? No, except when the fire is in the kitchen, bedroom, or any other room that doesn't have a fireplace. There are means to artificially cool things. How cool do we want it to be? Oh, I'm sorry, we're not supposed to be asking that, since like the Pope, climate science is infallible.

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Like, when your bathtub is overflowing and flooding your house, the reasonable question is "OH GOD WHERE'S THE HANDLE", not "Well exactly how full SHOULD we have the bathtub?"

20 years ago it was a reasonable question. Now we're in crisis mode.

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I shower, but the little one takes a bath. If we put too little water in the tub, parts of his body are exposed, leaving him cold. If we put too much water in the tub, when he splashes around and makes a mess of the tub. I try not to fill the tub too much, but sometimes I get distracted by other events in the house (read: the little one is screaming about not wanting to take a bath) and I end up with too much water. The question is- how much water should I take out. It would appear that the folk at MIT are looking to draw water out of the figurative tub. How much should they take out?

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The people at MIT are trying to turn the water off as it continues to pour unchecked out of the spigot. We can't even begin to discuss removing or reversing the effects of climate change while we're actively continuing to pour the agent that causes it into the atmosphere. Again, the idea of how much carbon can we/should we remove to restore climate stability would have been great 20 years ago, but we're on a timeline for an unnatural 2-3 degree increase in global temperatures and civilization is shrugging its' shoulders about carbon.

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