I was delighted they had white on black, and saddened that it disappeared quickly. Fortunately "light text on dark BG" is a helpful Firefox plugin for this.
Why isn't there a billion dollar reward to any person or company that comes up with a cost-effective way to capture carbon from the air and convert back to solid carbon? I'd love to understand the physics (or chemistry? maybe economy?) that prevents this from materialising.
We have a solution - reduce carbon/methane emissions. Why bet the bank on a technology that hasn't been invented yet? If you said to somebody with 100 billion dollars: capture as much carbon as you can. What would they do? I would just plant trees for that money. Sure, we need basic research on carbon sequestration, but we need fundamental breakthroughs to make it happen. Time, we don't have.
>We have a solution - reduce carbon/methane emissions. Why bet the bank on a technology that hasn't been invented yet?
Unfortunately we haven't invented the technology to implement your broad brush "solution" either.
In fact, I'm skeptical about the claim Climate Change could have been solved generations ago, given that we still haven't developed the means to do it yet.
Edit: okay, perhaps nuclear could provide us with the masses of power generation we need, but that's been ruled out.
> In fact, I'm skeptical about the claim Climate Change could have been solved generations ago, given that we still haven't developed the means to do it yet.
Path dependence. We have not developed the means to solve climate change from where we are now.
Why bet the bank on us humans collectively being able to reduce all our emissions? There are problems will all approaches, a quick Google search pokes some holes in why planting trees is not a good idea: https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/2639/how-ma...
So the billion dollar reward would be quite small sum in the grand scheme of things. And for example with a carbon tax, where collectors could offset emitters, it might also become a quite lucrative business.
Check out that middle graphic. If we really want to avoid 1.5 degrees, and we can’t rely on large-scale carbon sequestration, then the global community has to zero out its carbon emissions by 2026.
Ten years from now.
That article is two years old and, to state the obvious, global CO2 emissions are not on track to reach zero in the next eight years.
Unless you invent a time machine, or as postulated by OP, some magic sequestration technology to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere and put it back in the ground, it's too late.
It's like we're in a car that's driven over a cliff, and you're saying "Well, we're still here, as long as we invent a way for this car to fly in the next 15 seconds before impact, then we'll be okay"
While I don't really know much about the area, one option that I hear has possible potential is forests and then convert them to biochar. Downside is that you obviously need huge quantities of land that some would want to use for farming etc.
I'm not a physicist, but isn't the second law of thermodynamics puts a limit on what we can do with the excess energy, most of which are being absorbed by the oceans.
Besides most of the damage is already done.
EPA: It’s as if you’re sitting in your car, in your garage, with the engine running and the door closed, and you’ve slipped into unconsciousness. And that’s it.
McAvoy: What if someone comes and opens the door?
EPA: You’re already dead.
McAvoy: What if the person got there in time?
EPA: Then you’d be saved.
McAvoy: OK. So now what’s the CO2 equivalent of the getting there on time?
EPA: Shutting off the car 20 years ago.
Too late for what? Yes, there are going to be more impacts.
No, it won't mean the extinction of humanity or life on Earth.
There still better or worse. Choose better.
If the entire world went to zero carbon emissions tomorrow, the effects would still be serious. Given that's not going to happen, the effects are likely to be catastrophic.
You're right that it won't mean the extinction of life on earth or humanity, but it might turn out to be the end of advanced human civilization if the bad end of the predictions come to pass. If there's not enough arable land left to support the human population, things will get very ugly very quickly.
I doubt it will mean the extinction of humanity, but unless a couple of miracles happen it will mean the end of our current industrial civilization.
If we had started working on this 40 years ago reaching zero emissions would be a realistic goal today, but even that is not enough now. Not only we need to reach zero emissions ASAP, but we also need strong negative emissions. And after that we need to figure out how to slow down the feedbacks (Arctic ice melting, methane, etc).
Maybe if ALL humanity was working towards those goals we would have a chance, but it's not even a priority for the vast majority of humans.
It's not really a thermodynamics problem. We're not trying to get rid of excess energy in a system, we're trying to get rid of carbon. We need to do something roughly equivalent to growing massive tropical rainforests and burying them over and over again.
Of course it's a thermodynamics problem. It takes less energy to split a hydrocarbon chain into CO2 + Water than it does to capture the CO2 out of the air and turn it back into solid carbon.
In essence, what we have to do is "all the energy output since the industrial revolution--do it again (plus then some), except this time instead of building civilization, capture co2 out of the air. And you must get all that energy from clean sources."
"Growing massive tropical rainforests" just means "inefficiently use solar energy (via photosynthesis) to bind carbon out of the air". We could do the same with solar panels and a carbon-binding chemical process.
But the issue is, again, the sheer magnitude of the problem.
Physics/Chemistry: Solid carbon (e.g coal) is more energy-dense than CO2 (per molecular weight unit). This is why you can gain energy from burning coal. To go the other way round you need to add this energy back in to break the very stable double-bonds in the CO2 molecule. This energy is what makes it expensive and there is no way around (except finding a really cheap energy source, but then you probably wouldn't burn coal in the first place)
The problem is that "once we have CO2-neutral energy production" is way too late. There are several tipping points where the rising temperature sets off other processes that speed up warming even further.
For example, when the Russian permafrost melts, it will release gigantic amounts of methane, a very potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere. Once that happens, not only do you have to capture all the CO2 you emitted, you also have to capture all that methane.
Also, you'll want to recreate the kilometers-thick ice sheets in the arctic. When those are gone, the earth's albedo will drop, which means that it heats up even more quickly since less sunlight is reflected.
Let's also not forget the methan hydrate deposits on the coasts. Even minor temperature increase or pressure change at depth would cause them to explosively abandon their place.
We have found 3km wide crates in the deep sea formed by such methane deposits going nuclear, I doubt such an event would be pleasant for nearby coastal regions.
There is a cost-effective way: Planting trees, cutting them down and turning the wood to charcoal. You'd need huge areas dedicated to such forests. You'd also need to "unburn" most of the coal and oil we burned so far. That's a mind-boggling amount of matter we're talking about here.
But who would pay for that? If there were the political will we would long have passed a simple carbon tax that, after some adjustment period, would be tied to the price of unburning a ton of CO2.
The global CO2 production dwarfs what you could do with trees, I'm fairly certain even if we planted a tree on every square centimeter available, it would not be sufficient to counter our production sufficiently.
What we need is to invest in technology to reduce CO2. Nuclear fusion/fission, solar, wind, electric or alternative fuel cars, redesign CO2 industry processes, etc.
The petrol and coal industry would have to go entirely bankrupt. No exceptions.
If you understand French, there's an engineer called Jean-Marc Jancovici who is deep into the 'nuclear is the only solution so far'. He made talks on youtube on how to decarbonate economies.
his point is that by looking at numbers, solar and other renewables are orders of magnitude off from being enough. With today's energy consumption of course. If we change our ways, models can be remade.
The surface area of a roof is tiny in comparison to planting miles and miles of forest. It's also very weight sensitive, but the goal is to capture, remove, and continuously replace a huge mass of solid carbon. Finally, green roofs select succulents and other plants that grow slowly, but for this goal you want a species that grows like a weed and produces literal tons of biomass that have to be trucked away and be buried.
The "plant trees for charcoal" idea is basically the bio-engineering method of "build huge photovoltaic solar plant, use electric energy to power chemistry to convert CO2 to oil". Photosynthetic plants are pretty efficient, compared to silicon solar cells, and they're (literally) dirt cheap.
Why burn them to charcoal? Living trees continue to be efficient carbon sinks for potentially hundreds of years. If you have to cut them down you should use the material for construction, to reduce dependency on energy-intensive steel and concrete industry.
But it’s a moot point anyway, because trees simply grow too slowly to be an effective carbon buffer at the timescales that are relevant right now.
You burn them because that prevents decay from releasing CO2, stabilizing the carbon for at least a millennium. Young trees also add biomass much faster than old growth.
Using them for building material is okay as well, but the amount of wood needed to get rid of the excess CO2 is far above any reasonable demand for building material. (We're talking about a trillion tons of carbon here)
”Young” here still means ”decades old” (and large, mature trees keep growing thicker fairly consistently which leads to carbon fixation to be a superlinear function of tree age). Plus recent research indicates that old-growth forests actually continue adding biomass quite efficiently. So any planted trees should at least be allowed to grow a lot longer than your standard tree plantations.
Whatever you do with the biomass a hundred years from now doesn’t really matter; either climate change is in control by then or the humanity is screwed.
The thing that prevents this from materialising is that it requires energy. For the most part, we get energy from.. converting solid carbon to CO2. Unfortunately, due to 2nd law of thermodynamics, this conversion always incurs a loss of energy in the form of heat.
We can also get energy from other sources, such as solar radiation, but I think you get the gist - the most cost-effective way to carbon capture is not to release the carbon in the first place.
Whatever the solution we could find to turn CO2 into C back it would require to roughly spend as much energy as it has been already spent in the XIXth and XXth century combined burning coal or oil to go back to pre industrial level of CO2 in the atmosphere.
There are tons of ways of doing it, but all of them necessarily cost more energy than you extracted from the fossil fuel. So, from an energy economics point of view, first we stop extracting the so-called "unburnable" fossil fuels - end conventional and shale oil exploration and phase out their extraction. Then, with our spare renewable energy, we can start condensing fuel out of the atmosphere; there are several processes for this, including one the US Navy is pioneering for at-sea refuelling of planes on nuclear carriers.
There is the Carbon Prize which is part of the way there [0]:
> A $20 Million global competition to develop breakthrough technologies that will convert CO₂ emissions from power plants and industrial facilities into valuable products like building materials, alternative fuels and other items that we use every day. Teams will be scored on how much CO₂ they convert and the net value of their products.
Atmospheric concentrations are low so you need to harvest a lot of air. To put in context the earth has ~2E9 km^3 air, if you wanted to process every cubic meter of air in the world once in 10 years you'd have a system that could process ~6km^3/s , using air flowing at 30kph(18mph) would require ~800km^2 of collecting area.
One source of such an incentive could be a cap-and-trade emissions trading scheme with strict caps [0], in which air-capturers are granted emissions rights they can sell.
The EU's ETS [1] is currently the biggest carbon market, regulating about 40% of EU emissions.
It does not grant rights to capturers that take CO2 out of the atmosphere - only to those that reduce the emissions at some plant or factory. Apparently this choice is partly because it's not clear how to make sure that the carbon sink is stable - that the CO2 won't get out again. [2]
Lets assume you could get emissions rights for removing CO2. Would this provide the incentive we want?
The current price for emissions rights is 15€ per 1000 tons of CO2 [3], so an operation to sequester all of the EU's emissions (3.4 * 10^9 t, 2014, [4]) would get a revenue of at most 50 million euro / year. Probably much less since the market would get flooded.
Why is this price so low? The ETS' cap could be too low. Also, the ETS does not really cap emissions at all. Only certain industries, like power or aluminium manufacturing need to present certificates [1b], hence the 40%. Also, industries which would be 'at risk' to leave the EU if they were forced to pay, get free certificates [5] - arguably these would pay the most for rights.
Overall the EU does seem to be doing something right though, since the overall emissions are going down [4]. But the ETS does not seem to internalize the carbon externality.
I did a back of the envelope calculation or maybe better a guesstimate on this awhile back. At perfect conversion efficiency you could turn emitted CO2 back to carbon using 15-20 average sized nuclear power plants. If you realistically get 10% overall efficiency then maybe you need 200 of them. All that assumes you can actually build chemical cells that don't need continuous replacement. It also just compensates for current emissions, and doesn't turn the clock back. My numbers could be very wrong in either direction.
My takeaway was just like losing weight. It's more effective to eat less than to exercise. Here, it's bound to be better to burn less.
This was an electrochemical approach however. It's possible some bio guy will figure it out using photosynthesis.
Just to address the "also just compensates for current emissions" point--the way this tends to be thought of in the research is that, if you assume a completed Step 1 of "develop perfect carbon capture technology", Step 2 is "apply that solution to power plant smokestacks and fuel those power plants by burning and replanting trees / crop waste (corn stalks etc)". So you're not carbon negative on the capture process itself, but can be on the broader system by converting to a fuel source that regenerates through carbon capturing via photosynthesis.
This poses it's own problems though, one of which being the enormous amount of land you would need to dedicate to this process to have a meaningful impact.
The problem here is that uranium extraction and other elements of nuclear power production (e.g. concrete manufacturing) is itself carbon intensive process and takes a while to pay off.
Great read. It's always interesting to see how individuals (John Sununu, Rush Limbaugh) have the capacity to change the arc of history - against prevailing wisdom and agreed facts. Sure, they had massive support from the oil industry, but Europe also has an oil industry and it didn't change Europe's stance on climate change.
For a real-time update on climate change, just look at the canary in the cold-mine - Arctic Sea Ice. I have a look daily in summer to see if we will again break the record minimum and when the summer will be ice-free there - it will happen within a decade or two at the most. For Arctic sea ice voyeurs, check this out:
https://sites.google.com/site/arcticseaicegraphs/
US emissions of CO2 have fallen much faster than Europe's. Europe likes to talk a lot but not to compromise. So while they could be fracking and displacing dirty energy sources, they instead use oil and coal where the US uses natural gas.
Do you have any sources on that? "Falling much faster" by itself doesn't say much when EU might already be emitting ten times less than the US, for all I know.
Best thing we could have to reduce co2 would be a massive global recession I'd say, unless that is things got so bad that we had to revert to cutting down trees to survive.
Of all countries to pick on, Germany are the one doing the most to change to a carbon-free economy. Read up on the Energiewende -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energiewende_in_Germany
It is govt policy to reduce Co2 emissions by 80–95% by 2050. Germany is at the top in on-shore wind, off-shore wind, and solar. If they had kept nuclear power, they could be doing even better. I am sure closing the nuclear power plants will cause increases in Co2, but they are really trying to do their bit.
German policy is in the right place, but in recent years the reality has been different and it’s progress on reducing CO2 emissions has not been impressive.
Germany still burns huge amounts of coal including brown coal (lignite), the dirtiest form of coal.
> It is govt policy to reduce Co2 emissions by 80–95% by 2050.
Pfft. I'm German, and follow the politics to a reasonable extent. Our government (esp. under the conservatives lead by Angela Merkel) is notorious for failing to meet their own emissions goals. You didn't mention the 2020 goals; at this point, it's pretty clear that we're going to miss them. I don't know if there are any 2030 goals, but seeing how they always tout the 2050 goals, I don't think so.
Germany is not the top in off-shore wind. The UK is[0]. They are however second. Which is pretty impressive with their lack of coast. The UK has an awful lot more shore to be off!
Wait a sec, I quoted 'still seen as a positive role model' and yet you think I am having a pop at Germany?!
Also Germany is the largest economy in the EU, so isn't it natural to look at them first? (Which in any case was not in my search terms - this came up when I was searching EU)
When Germany decided to cut their nuclear they picked up more coal and natural gas. They have put in a lot more other clean energy options, but since batteries and smart grids aren't good enough yet this causes a pickup. It'll be fixed later (unfortunately time is of the essence), but at least for now turning off nuclear wasn't a green move (like they say it is). Consider France and Sweden, who are also the top performers.
That's Foxnews-like nonsense.
Here's some facts. A nice visualization of per-capita EU-US Co2 emissions over the last 20 years:
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?location...
The US has over double the per-capita emissions of the EU. The EU has a larger economy, by GDP. The US can do a lot more - particularly leadership.
It's lower in the EU because we tax gas/fuel at a higher rate for environmental reasons.
It's like losing weight. Going from 5000 calories/day to 4000 calories/day is a lot easier than going from 3000 to 2500 per day.
Actually, even though it started lower, Europe has been reducing its emissions at a faster rate. In 2014, Europe was at 63% of its peak of emissions, whereas the US were at 72%.
The slope in log scale gives it away too (from the same data set, comparing US and Eurozone since 1971): https://i.imgur.com/099XLIw.png
That is correct no country in the world has reduced CO2 emissions like the US did in the past decade, thanks to Shale revolution. Pennsylvania is the world's #3 producer of NG. I mean one state in US.
Even if some people grudge this fact, the Grid is not ready for variable generation that Wind and Solar does, they do buy some time for Grid to become smarter (Grid of MicroGrids) where it can digest Solar and Wind, especially now that viable storage like batteries and fuel cells are coming off age.
Hang on. The US pulled out the Paris accord. The US also had a huge financial crisis that caused emissions to drop. I don't think policy can take credit for the slight reductions in Co2 emissions, from ridiculously high levels.
Who's to say that regulations didn't play into the demise of IE? Maybe if we hadn't had the antitrust cases in the EU (and the US!), at some point MS would've been confident enough to just make it impossible to install a different browser. Similar to how Apple requires all iOS browsers to use the Apple's engine.
It may be true that the USA has achieved the largest reduction in CO2 emissions in absolute terms. But they’re coming off a very large base.
In percentage terms, there are several countries that have done significantly better, including the UK who’s CO2 emissions are now 38% below 1990 levels (and 25% below 2012 levels!) despite significant population growth.
While US emissions have, by some measurements, dropped in the past decade, they are still well above 1990 levels.
The lack of sense of proportion that pervades HN when comparing US with other countries .. US is 7x bigger economy and 4x more population. Wyoming is larger than UK in area.
Some of the optimistic models do say US is at 1985 levels.
No solution to climate change involves persuading everyone to choose to live in energy poverty. Get that out of the way and look for workable solutions. Without a workable solution there will be no solution.
This isn't actually true (although there are billions who do, understandably) - a lot of people would be fine with continuing with their level of energy usage. The problem is how to produce that much energy without releasing CO2.
Who said anything about energy usage. People don't care about their energy usage, they only care about what they get from it. Every time we make something more efficient we don't save energy, people just take more.
Maybe influence utility provider prices. Kinda like insurance. If you stay inside some range per month, you'll get bonuses. If you want more, you'll pay a single digit % premium ?
For sure without the industrial revolution, synthetic fertilizers and the green revolution we could not achieve such population, but turning back is no longer an option.
Whoever posted that, thank you. It’s sort of devastating to read the oil industry engaged in psy-ops over such an important issue. I was saddened to read about the success of Duane Levine’s misinformation strategy and the effect it had. I’m not a pessimist, I believe the future remains to be written. No-one knows the future and therefore we must look at different scenarios and then choose indicators to assess which scenario we are in. Right now the scenario we are in is “someone invent something to suck the carbon out”, because already without the carbon vacuum, we have locked in quite a high level of climate change.
What astounds me is Peter von Thiel, cynical enough to recognize the likelihood of climate chaos sufficiently to have bought his out in New Zealand, yet also to back Trump. I can only conclude he may be a sociopath.
Ouch. I read this and I am completely confused about what to do with the rest of the time I have left. Should I even bother with my current career in tech, or would it be better to quit it and do something that could have even a slight impact now?
These articles are great, but preaching to the choir. What should any of us do? I'm seriously and sincerely asking. Are there any suggestions, from a personal stand point i.e. excluding a completely new economic model and government structure? Is it to drive less and cut out meat? (done) Buy less stuff? Support the right organizations and political candidates?
What if one is doing all of those things already, now what? Just sit here and watch our homes go up in flames as the entire place becomes a desert? Some actionable things would be great to have.
Don’t give up on tech. It’s technology that offers the best hope of solving these problems.
Consider applying your skills to the renewable energy sector, companies working on transport electrification, and other “clean tech” sectors. These are exciting growth industries and you’ll be making a difference.
Even if the math ends up that we are indeed doomed, this type of behavior is not aligned with the human spirit. If we get lung cancer from smoking, we can learn from it, defy it, and /stop smoking/. Or we can become the vice incarnate, and die with the smug satisfaction that we were right because we gave no hope. I want to spend the rest of my life on a planet struggling to survive, not partying to death.
Climate change is one of the reasons we're not having kids. In part because they would have had a very bad life, but also because it's the best for the planet.
Reducing consumption of resources is not working, so we should start thinking about controlling population growth.
> We are far away from global overpopulation. Unless people insist on fossil fuel, waste of resources and animal products as food.
You are technically right, of course, but if humans were rational creatures we would have acted on climate change when the evidence was presented to the world.
As an individual, you are powerless to control population growth. If you decide not to have kids, the world will get filled with the descendants of other people. The descendants of those other people will probably care less about what happens to the environment than your descendants would.
Dealing with the issues of the future will require collective action. In order for that collective action to take place, people will need to vote for it. Having kids means more people to vote for the things you think need to be voted for (since they will share your genetics and you will heavily influence their environment).
You're still pretending like your kids or those other peoples' kids might get together and fix climate change. I'm saying it's too late for that.
Having kids is just condemning them to live in a world ravaged by famine, war and drought. Maybe you're fine with that because you believe on some philosophical level that any life is preferable to never having lived at all, but that's not self-evident.
Black Americans are living proof that a lot of people thought a life of slavery was worth living, despite it's utter terribleness. I think it’s a good bet that living in a world with global warming is better than slavery.
Sorta, but quality of life is subjective. A poor person might be happy and not mind their kids growing up poor. A rich person fearing poverty might have a different opinion.
evangelize in high birthrate countries things like contraception and encourage education especially of women. The fewer people destroying virgin forests and becoming western style consumers the lesser the better for environmental health.
An earth of 7.5 billion is more sustainable than an earth of 10 billion. 7.5 will live better lives than a world of 10, given sociopolitical realities.
I like the idea of helping with education and stuff, but why not instead help them develop clean energy?
I’m just REALLY not a fan of the “can’t let the 3rd world have so many people and then develop to 1st world standards” thing. It may technically help the problem, but it feels like soft racism and proto-eugenicism, at least from the perspective of people living in those countries. It gives me the creeps, although I’m sure that’s not your intention.
Also, I’m convinced that the main way to solve these problems is human ingenuity. And that can’t just include people in the Western world.
Third world countries are going to become first world countries, barring as disaster. When they do, they'll use a lot more resources per capita, but their population growth will drop dramatically. Switching them over sooner is a boon for the environment.
Keeping people poor or would be a soft racism/proto-eugenicism, but reduce child mortality and empower women with contraception (as an option they can choose, not pushed coercive) are pretty unambiguously good. I mostly donate to the Against Malaria Foundation both as my anti-poverty charity and my pro-environment charity. They're rated well on effectiveness.
I haven't done much research into highly-effective charities that provide contraception or related educational materials, but https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/causes/women-charities has some that seem relevant. Women's rights in general is usually a pretty good proxy for both "let women not have babies when they don't want to" and "give women options for fulfilling lives other than just having babies".
Your comment mentions its own fatal flaw: "becoming western style consumers". From what we've seen in the last hundred years, that's strongly positively correlated with (and probably causes) decreasing birthrates. The only other broadly successful way to decrease birthrates was to make it the law, and the one country that did that has abandoned it because of the negative economic effects of too-low birthrates.
"I read this and I am completely confused about what to do with the rest of the time I have left."
It is a grave life error to assign excessive likelihood to the doomsayers. I've been reading about inevitable doom for 25 years now. Some of what I read as a kid dated to the 60s and the guaranteed dates of inevitable doom had already passed by the time I read them in the early 90s.
Even assuming they are completely 100% right about the problems, which is frankly a big assumption, they rarely, if ever, even remotely account for the fact that people and the economy change in reaction to problems.
Also, consider the possibility that this feeling of hopelessness is something that perhaps somebody wants to instill in you. Why? Who benefits? Are their hands as clean as you suppose? Are you sure? I'm a big fan of "follow the money"; where most people fuck that up is that they only want to follow the money sometimes, when it suits them. Nope... always follow it. "Follow the money" is almost always used wrong; you don't need it to debunk the people you already don't trust, you need it to vet the people you do. Doomsaying has been exceedingly profitable over the past ~60 years. (It's been profitable even farther back than that, but mass market doomsaying really took off somewhere around then, which is where the real money is.) Do not forget to take that into account.
(Also, as my post implies, don't assume I'm speaking just to the particular doom de jour, about which you might still have emotional reactions. I'm talking about nuclear war, population bombs, a multitude of claims we're running out of some resource, trash management issues, a wide variety of eschatological claims, all sorts of things I've read in the last 30 years. You may say "But jerf, some of those are still problems and may be problems in the future" and I say, I agree. I often like to say "Stand up. Point in a random direction. You are pointing at a problem." There are always problems and always will be problems. But we're not talking about problems... we're talking about doom. The doom has not happened. I believe fully in environmental problems both in the present and the future. I do not anywhere near fully believe in inevitable doom.)
It's tricky when a preponderance of evidence and theory tells us that the lag time on the signal is several decades but human generations are also measured in decades. It doesn't matter how strong your negative feedback is if the system it's controlling is in thermal runaway by the time you apply a corrective signal.
Maybe we can bandaid or mitigate the worst effects for some people. Probably richer people. But just see Harvey and wildfires and droughts for strong evidence that we will not do anything whatsoever even when cities are being destroyed by inaction.
Harvey? The hurricane that was the first to make landfall after 12 years of no hurricanes? After we were repeatedly explicitly promised increased hurricanes because of global warming? The one that Wikipedia lists as merely a category 4 and looms large in your mind simply because of where it happened to hit?
Did anyone ever admit their predictions about increased hurricanes during those 12 years were wrong? I never saw it. You just remember the images, not the 12 years of no images.
And I remember wildfires in California when I was a kid, too. Except now probably about 10 million people live closer to them and like to build houses in the way of them. (Oh, and let's not forget how many of those fires turn out to be less about "global warming" and more about arson. After a certain point, dry is just dry.)
This is part of why I really can't get myself too worked up over Certain Environmental Doom... it's always people sharing emotionally vivid anecdotes instead of data. When I look at the statistical data, it isn't much to get worked up over. The IPCC warming estimates have already been revised down to the point that it's hardly worth worrying about; it's not as if "zero degrees of change in a century" was ever on the table.
It's the emotionally charged anecdotes that get you worked up and feeling doomed and hopeless. Again, who benefits? Sure isn't you.
I'm personally more interested in the ocean plastic problem than global warming at the moment. Global warming has really failed to pan out as a threat, in my opinion.
But then, bear in mind once again I'm brushing 40. If you're twenty-something and inclined to pull your hair out over what I'm saying here, think about where you would be with another 15 years of your current level of concern, but if you looked outside on the same world you do now. I see anecdotes and anecdotes and anecdotes about how horrible climate change is, but the data isn't anywhere near as scary as the news stories being written... in fact I see the news stories getting scarier even as the data gets less scary to me. In fact it's downright bizzare to compare the predictions made now nearly twenty years ago to what actually happened, and to read all these stories that are written as if the predictions made twenty years ago actually happened, or perhaps even happened worse than predicted, instead of being rather a ways off the mark.
Personally, I'd probably actually be more concerned if I read a story that basically said "Here's the predictions made 20 years ago. Here's why they didn't pan out. Here's the models that we made 10 years ago that fixed the problem and evidence that they've done a great job predicting the last ten. Here's why those models are showing problems 20 years down the road and why this time we actually know what we are talking about." But that's not what I read. What I see is just screeching panic, and most damningly, denial that any error was ever made when it is plainly obvious that errors were made, and that IPCC report estimates have in fact been trending down and not up. When no error can ever be admitted, it's clearly a political process, not a scientific one, because it's in politics you can't ever admit you were wrong, not even a little, with the only error you're allowed to admit to is that you didn't realize how right you were at the time. I don't recommend driving yourself into anxiety and insanity for a process so obviously filled with politics.
And I remember wildfires in California when I was a kid, too. Except now probably about 10 million people live closer to them and like to build houses in the way of them. (Oh, and let's not forget how many of those fires turn out to be less about "global warming" and more about arson. After a certain point, dry is just dry.)
The problem isn't what sets the fire. It's that the heat dries out the forests, making any fires larger and more devastating. For example: you can light a fire pretty much anywhere in an Eastern forest, because they're sufficiently wet that a fire won't grow very large. You could even do that a few decades ago in the West. But try that now in California, you and could start a thousands-acre conflagration so hot it kills the soil and doesn't burn out until literally all available fuel has been used up.
Did anyone ever admit their predictions about increased hurricanes during those 12 years were wrong? I never saw it. You just remember the images, not the 12 years of no images.
There have been way more hurricanes. Luckily for us, the oceans are very large, and most of those hurricanes did not make landfall.
And no, I'm the same age as you. I do not remember nearly as many devastating hurricanes in the first 20 years of my life, whereas in the second half I've seen Katrina, Harvey, Maria, Sandy, saw California in drought for what, a decade? I have personally seen the glaciers in New Zealand that have receded by miles and miles. And the temperature record is undeniable. And the ocean temperature measurements. And the ocean acidification measurements. And the ice cap melt measurements.
The linked report, by the way, suggests that while the current trends are in line with increases that actual statistically significant diversions from usual won't be detectable until the possible to see until the end of the century (for Hurricanes). Of course by then the temperature will be 3C or so hotter, and lots of other things will be impacted more directly sooner like crop yields, fish populations, and other things.
The problem with this thinking is that, as I said, the timescale that responses show up is on par with the human life span. This is a huge problem for a species with massive future-discounting built into our DNA. No, we don't see these things (strongly) yet. That's not the point, the point is that the impact on our lives to change this is shockingly small compared to the enormous and extremely likely risks of doing nothing. The timescale might be wrong, that wouldn't be surprising. But given a choice between "do something that might not be needed" and "do nothing until it's too late even if it is needed" shouldn't be hard.
Current technology can remove CO2 from the atmosphere for $90-230 per ton. That's with current technology to capture it from literally the air.
A gallon of gas emits 8.9kg of CO2. So capturing that emission with current technology costs $2.25 per gallon. If that sounds expensive, compare that to the further collapse of fish stocks, massive water and food insecurity globally forcing mass migrations, and entire cities being flooded. Suddenly that sounds a lot more reasonable.
Anyway. I don't think your attitude is a good one. Switching to a carbon neutral economy is just frankly not nearly as costly as people seem to think, and the risks of not doing it are way too big to ignore. Of course, people with this attitude that we shouldn't act until proof of specific harm that impacts them specifically is available... not going to lie, I think that's a huge moral failing.
If you want to believe in Inevitable Doom, go nuts.
Possibly literally.
But if that's how you want to play things, I probably can't stop you. But at least I tried.
It's not a healthy way to live, and I don't think it's one particularly backed by the evidence. In terms of threats I think are likely to impact me over the next twenty years, I still rate "governments instituting stupid economic policies" well over "environmental catastrophe". You look around the world and that's something that happens a lot more often than, say, a port closing or a city being abandoned because of rising seas. There's a nontrivial chance they'll both combine and we'll get stupid economic decisions made because of unjustified panic about environmental issues.
In your original post you listed out a bunch of issues that never amounted to anything.
Did it occur to you that they never amounted to anything because people did shit about them? It wasn't the economy that stopped the Ozone hole from expanding. It wasn't technological innovation that brought down the Soviet Union and ended Red Scare.
Did it occur to you that just because you live an insulated life, that these disasters are actually happening right now?
It doesn't seem like you're as bad as a denialist, but you're worse than a geopolitical isolationist. You're an individual isolationist and your mantra seems to be, "Fuck you, I've got mine".
"Did it occur to you that they never amounted to anything because people did shit about them?"
Then you've admitted the only point I care about here, which is that getting personally panicky about those things would have been a waste of time. Doom is not certain. People do in fact do things in reaction to problems.
"Did it occur to you that just because you live an insulated life, that these disasters are actually happening right now?"
Read what I wrote again with an eye towards answering those questions, because the answer is there. The Earth is positively saturated with problems... but that's not actually a new state of affairs, despite what youth may think and/or certain people may have told you.
You are establishing that problems exist. That is not the question I am answering. I am answering is doom inevitable? And the answer is simple: No. Do not live hopelessly. Do not plan for your future life as if we're all going to be dead in 10 years inevitably because of environmental disaster. There are many disasters in your future with non-zero probability, but living as if they have already occurred just moves them into the present with 100% probability. That's not a win.
In terms of reading my mind, you'd be doing better off if you first read my text, instead of what you assume my text is going to say. Or trying to figure out which bogeyman to associate me with so you can stop thinking and start emoting. That's not a healthy psychological pattern. Who taught you to do that? What benefit do they get from it? Are you benefiting from it? (Hint: No.)
There is an inevitable (if nothing is done), slowly unfolding tragedy in motion right now. You are the one that is reacting irrationally, in spite of the number of words you've thrown at the problem.
Your sentiment really embodies the worst kind of free-rider: "you shouldn't worry, because other people have solved problems for me in the past".
This is a terribly uncharitable (downright hostile) interpretation of jerfs’ actually thoughtful response.
It’s not about free-riding. The grandparent posted, “I read this and I am completely confused about what to do with the rest of the time I have left. Should I even bother with...” and there’s a lot in jerfs’ response which I hope GP reads and reflects on.
The world is saturated with imminent disaster. Perhaps the entire universe hangs on a thread.
The way we (humans) get out of it, and they way we always have, is not nihilistic defeatism. In the face of continuous doomsday prophecy, the optimal individual response is absolutely to tune it completely out and focus on becoming the best you can be at that thing that you do.
And throwaway5752 you trying to moralize that jerfs is “the worst kind of free-rider” is an asinine ad hominem attack that I’d say only amplifies the underlying truth of how important it is to tune out voices like yours.
I guess we need to define what you mean by "personally panicky". I read you saying that a person shouldn't be personally panicky as "a person should not worry." That's where my annoyance comes from.
The grandparent comment's Fight or Flight instinct should be going off at ALL mentions of AGW. They need to be thinking about the next decades of their life with AGW in mind. If they live in Florida, they should seriously consider not living in Florida. If they have a house that's near a beach they need to leave. If they don't live in the developing world, they need to figure out how to get to the developed world ASAP.
You're right that nobody should be brought into a crippling depression because of global warming, but we're far past being optimistic about it.
Also, your "who is making money off your panic" thread is stupid and you should stop. People panic for a variety of reasons and only a small minority are "because panic was induced by a second party".
Well, you're in a combative mood, judging from all the replies you're posting, but I'll risk it.
> It's not a healthy way to live
Oh, agreed. Trust me. I've been neck deep in this one. It'll warp your mind. Doesn't mean it's not true. Just like the Sun blowing up to a red giant in 5 billion years. Gonna happen. Profound, devastating climate change has already begun. Human civilization is remarkably fragile and will teeter and crash in the next 50-200 years.
> I don't think it's one particularly backed by the evidence.
Well, in the same way that the Sun shows no current signs of blowing up into a red giant the size of Earth's orbit, sure. But I get the impression you're not able (or willing) to run a few of the very obvious scenarios forward in your mind. This is reality. It's coming. Maybe you're like me and will be lucky to live out your life in relative luxury before most of the damage comes home to roost. Great. I'm hoping for 40-50 more years of merrymaking, too. But make no mistake, we are totally fucked.
But then you go on to say,
> In terms of threats I think are likely to impact me over the next twenty years, I still rate "governments instituting stupid economic policies"
And that's my thunder button right there. For fuck's sake, you gotta give up this idea that this mythical "economy" and "economical policies" is all there is. Like your entire life is driven by the stock market or your ability to get bananas in January. Look at the Earth. Fuck your bananas in January and your backyard pool. Fuck your manicured lawn. Seriously. 7 billion humans thinking and acting exactly like this is how we get here, and then you have the gall to moan about "stupid economic decisions made because of unjustified panic about environmental issues."
Fuuuuck. This is what so frustrating, because it is just impossible to get through your economic interest to make you see that hey, we are deep shit right now.
> Are there any suggestions, from a personal stand point i.e. excluding a completely new economic model and government structure?
You've gone wrong at the very start. This isn't a problem that can be solved on an individual level, and the sad truth is that we do, in fact, need a new economic model. The sooner we own up to that the sooner we can move on with building it.
Improvise, adapt, overcome. Death is a natural part of life. Civilizations die too. It all happened before, and if we are as inventive as I think it will happen again in the distant future.
You can read through https://www.drawdown.org/solutions check what you can do yourself and talk to your peers and your political representatives to bring about collective action.
You don't throw your foe to the ground with brute force alone. You take him off-balance, and move in with good timing and technique.
If your goal is solving climate change, well, the leverage isn't really in the technical solution, but in the political economy. We need a redesign. That's problem one.
But if it's the power structure that needs changing, what affects it? Knowledge. Signalling. Valuation. And then you get into things that you can potentially change as a tech worker, by pushing for information systems that change our valuation metrics to match a philosophy of sustainability. And that positions actors who wish to take sustainable actions to have the leverage to realize it.
That, I think, is the trick to feeling OK about it. At the end of the day, it's a war fought in an abstract, everyday sense: Build up your sense of morality and build your career around those principles. You might not be the hero, but you won't be the villain.
I don't believe the CO2 levels we currently have (and are projected to have) in the atmosphere is a real threat. I don't believe the doomsday scenarios, apparently caused through cow farts and burning natural gas or from combustion engines. Energy must be expended to release CO2, and the energy is almost 0 in comparison to the energy needed to raise sea levels by say, 10 feet. We are talking millions of nuclear bombs worth of energy needed to accomplish that. There is something off with this. I don't believe the tiny amount of CO2 in our atmosphere will enable the sun to heat the planet to the doomsday levels. Predictions were made since the 80s, 90s, 00's that said our coastal cities should be literally destroyed by now... except that they aren't.
There are a lot of people who stand to profit from the climate change lobby: professors, alternate energy producers, politicians, government, media. They all want money invested in THEIR pet projects. And conveniently, it serves as a great distraction from issues on the horizon that WILL have a guaranteed negative affect on your children's quality of life, but I wont get into that, since what I'm writing is divisive enough as it is.
When it comes to the climate, you will be fine, we will be fine, our kids will be fine, the sky will not fall, the seas will not swallow up our cities (excluding regular weather), America will not become a desert (unless that super-volcano blows). It is sensationalism.
You seem to have this all figured out then, so let me ask, approximately what point beyond your retirement will all of this happen? And I say "beyond your retirement" because that is the time you will probably give me, a time you won't have to worry about anyone taking you to task on your faulty science.
There is no proof humans are causing doomsday levels of climate change through CO2 emissions (literal plant fertilizer, the shit I brew and inject into my fish tank to grow plants). What is demonstrable in a lab is going to be much harder to prove for a whole planet. People should not just accept what these people say as gospel, we have had 30-40 years of doomsday warnings from these people and nothing, absolutely nothing has happened. In addition, we as humans will not be stuck burning CO2 forever, eventually Nuclear and/or Fusion will be perfected to a point that there will be no going back to burning dinosaur oil for fuel.
> There is no proof humans are causing doomsday levels of climate change through CO2 emissions
Not true at all. We have plenty of evidence that humans are causing the rise of C02 emissions. Just simply look at the C14 (Carbon 14) and C12/13 (Carbon 12 and Carbon 13) ratios in the atmosphere. These give a clear signal what is causing the rise of carbon and where the carbon is coming from.
> People should not just accept what these people say as gospel, we have had 30-40 years of doomsday warnings from these people
Yes, and right now, the predictions from the credible scientists are showing to be true. Their predictions were not end of the world in 30-40 years, but we would start to see the effects of climate change, and we are starting to see the effects of climate change.
We've actually had more than 100 years of doomsday warnings, that doesn't mean "nothing happened" if each warning is for a specific set of dates. If I say, "There will be a fire in your house in one year" and then in six months I say, "There will be a fire in your house in half-a-year" that doesn't mean my prediction should be devalued.
Re: Alternative energy: It doesn't matter if fusion/nuclear/any renewable is "perfected" if Carbon Dioxide is at such high levels that every air conditioning unit needs a CO2 scrubber attached because outdoor the concentration reaches 1000ppm and people's brains literally start to get dumber.
> What is demonstrable in a lab is going to be much harder to prove for a whole planet
So what you're saying is that the proof that we have in labs isn't good enough for you?
> we have had 30-40 years of doomsday warnings from these people and nothing, absolutely nothing has happened.
What do you classify as nothing? We've shown that the ice caps are melting [0], that temperatures are increasing rapidly across the globe [1], sea walls are being built to stop cities from flooding [2] [3].
We have reason to believe it's happening now! Besides the AGW signal in the temperature spread, there's now a AGW signal in hurricane behavior and precipitation patterns. It's happening now!
That's the point of the article! Did you even read it?
There are two claims here (ice caps melt + NYC underwater).
I don't think either is even something claimed by the movie, which is a movie. And it's certainly not peer-reviewed science. (Reference for ice caps claim: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ice-caps-melt-gore-2014/, and note, "caps" as you wrote it would imply the entire Antarctic was melting by 2012, which is of course crazy.)
The problem with stating and imagining things in terms of binary outcomes is you can't have a reasonable argument about anything.
Most of what is written about Global warming are events that will unfold over long periods of time, but nevertheless should the situation continue, they will eventually come to pass.
There still are solutions. They, however, require that the environmental movement accept large scale engineering efforts aimed at adjusting our environment. Which runs counter to their instincts.
"accept large scale engineering efforts aimed at adjusting our environment."
While these are interesting technologies, it's very difficult to see how they make sense economically. The cost/benefit ratio is invariably much worse than simply investing in emissions reductions.
If we have $X to invest in climate mitigation, it's always going to be better to spend it on technologies that reduce carbon emissions: replacing fossil-fuel power plants, electrification of transport, etc. To my knowledge there is no technology that removes a ton of carbon from the atmosphere that comes anywhere close to being competitive with what it costs to not emit that ton of carbon in the first place.
Of course, the day may come when all the easy carbon reductions have been made. If the climate is still not stabilising at that point, then we can start looking at all the climate engineering mega-projects.
First of all, emission reductions are not sufficient. The CO2 already emitted is enough to create a mass extinction from ocean acidification.
Secondly the two techniques that I pointed to are, today, cheaper than emissions reductions.
Third, the cost of other mitigations is improving over time as the price of renewable power (particularly solar) drops. So even approaches that are not currently cost-effective may be in the near future.
Perhaps the memoirs of terminal cancer patients would be instructive. However, they benefit from frequentist statistics. We've only got Bayes for our experiment.
I go through cycles of being horribly depressed about the climate, and about mine and my family's future. In fact, I'm not even going to read this article because I know it'll set me off. I've learned that the only way to cope is to do everything I can personally (eat less meat, drive less, work from home, buy second hand
, save energy, vote green, encourage my children and family and those around me to do the same) and then basically just get on with life and enjoy it as much as possible. If the worst happens, there's nothing we can do to prepare, not really. If some moonshot magical tech saves the day there's not much we can do to help or hinder that either. Focus on being the best person you can be, be a force for good, live life and appreciate what you have right now. Soak up fresh air and culture. If the world is consumed by fire in the next 50 years you'll be glad you did. And if it isn't, you'll still be glad.
As far as I can tell, we are reasonably certain that the effects of climate change will be very bad. It’s hard to say exactly what will happen, though.
The truly apocalyptic predictions are just not very likely. We are not going to be boiled alive or turn into Venus or whatever. It’s not going to get so hot that all plant matter catches on fire.
No scientist is predicting that "all plant matter will catch on fire". In fact I've never heard anyone predict that.
If we do nothing, within the next 80 years large parts of the currently inhabited planet will be uninhabitable by humans, however. That's a sort of apocalypse. It's also the consensus view of scientists who study the global pollution epidemic.
I would bet you and I evaluate the problem similarly, I think there are remote but plausible scenarios that are almost intolerably bad (and these become likely if we keep polluting).
But there are left-leaning but not scientifically literate people who honestly believe most life on Earth is already doomed.
This obviously leads to despair in their political thinking and personal lives. I’ve even heard of people contemplating suicide.
I don’t think this is warranted given what we know and the uncertainties involved. Humanity still has a future worth living for even in the most frightening scenarios.
If you are in the United States, participate in Republican primaries in support of Republican politicians who acknowledge that climate change is a problem that we cannot ignore and need to start seriously acting on.
There are in fact Republican politicians who support effective measures to address climate change that are compatible with traditional Republican market-based, conservative principles, such as a revenue neutral carbon tax, but they are greatly outnumbered by the ones who think climate change is fake or is just natural cycles that will swing the other way on their own and that we cannot influence anyway.
I am on the watch and in last 5 minutes this submission got 6 new votes but have fallen 8 places!
Before we attempt to solve climate crisis, first we should solve BIGOTRY CRISIS.
I have seen this happening before too. Why does HN allows anonymous flagging? I bet anything if it were unanimous we would able to frame bigots who only flag because of their stupid personal world view.
Has there been any efforts to make flagging more transparent-perhaps where I can contribute or should we raise a new issue on that?
Yeah, that is exactly what the problem is. If someone finds something against HN rules here, should voice it in the comments. Having not more than few negative comments (I counted 2) and sinking that fast could only mean it is opinion based flagging .
This subthread may very well be contributing to the submission sinking: one of the factors involved is the "overheated discussion detector", which, as I understand it, takes into account rate of comments.
From the FAQ:
> How are stories ranked?
> The basic algorithm divides points by a power of the time since a story was submitted. Comments in comment threads are ranked the same way.
> Other factors affecting rank include user flags, anti-abuse software, software which downweights overheated discussions, and moderator intervention.
In general, comment threads like the one you've started generate more heat than light (19/116 comments as of this writing). If you think something odd is going on, contact the mods via the Contact link in the footer, as they're the ones who can actually view what's happening and do something about it.
Otherwise, the best thing you can do is make insightful, substantive comments to the thread yourself.
Some good points, but : 0 comment on this thread when I started it (obviously), and yet the situation seemed real enough for 2 persons to take notice of it.
This story tripped the overheated discussion detector, which we've just turned off. There actually aren't many flags, and one of the main reasons why it isn't ranked higher is that most of the upvotes were dropped by the anti-abuse software.
When users start speculative meta subthreads like this, it foments a kind of disconnected conspiracy thinking that we can't seem to help ourselves from. You can email us and get the answer to exactly what's going on in a few minutes! But that's not what most choose—we'd rather wring our hands and imagine demons. If we could do this a bit less, Hacker News would be more intellectually interesting.
There is a vocal minority of people don't believe the overwhelming scientific consensus about global warming, and they downvote, flag, and argue in these posts aggressively. Consequently, the topic gets the reputation of being "divisive". It's playbook how to make an important topic taboo, and an extraordinary success for the people that don't believe the overwhelming scientific consensus about the impact of modern human activity on the climate (or believe it, but profit from the status quo).
This is just a silly idea and doesn't fix all the problems, except heat.
Could we position a sheet, or a carpet of asteroids in a Lagrange point around the Earth, or as a sort of reverse Dyson sphere?
I heard that such a thing could be used to cool down Venus.
That doesn't address the ocean acidification, or mass extinctions, etc. Certain high-light plants would also likely perish without intervention. Also, solar energy on Earth would be stifled.
Problem I see is not climate change really. Real problem is not that we have problems, but the fact that we create problems. Unless human society transform into a more reactive structure, we will generate new problems or stand short in reacting naturally generated ones.
And one of those problems will see the end of us if not climate change. It is much like playing Russian roulette in the risk of extinction. We just may avert the climate change but some next problem will be our bullet.
How can a dev get into clean-tech today? What are the current problems a software engineer could solve? Please, someone with the knowledge give us a path. I wish there was an HN on clean-tech with emphasis on IT
I am trying to build exactly this. Check out http://kindandgreennews.com Its been live for about 2 months and I am looking to build up the community. Currently you have to notify me by email to give you a login, but I am planning to add the "sign up" feature within a month.
Animal welfare/rights is most important to me, but I realize that its all connected and can be brought about mostly by investing in clean tech, clean meat, and fighting climate change.
I went through this search recently - companies at the nexus of software and cleantech in the bay area, here was my shortlist so you can see what kinds of things these companies are working on: AutoGrid, Bidgely, Ohm Connect, Tesla, Utility API, Omnidian, Stem, Advanced Microgrid Solutions
If you're thinking of starting something yourself, energy seems to be an especially idiosyncratic industry that I think doesn't lend itself easily to outside in solutions, it really pays to work in it for a couple years to soak up the knowledge. You'll find tons of opportunities once you're on the inside.
A few of the better opportunities that come to mind from my point of view:
1. Software & analytics based EE and DR (Bidgely, Autogrid, Ohmconnect, First Fuel)
2. Grid analytics, especially around citing and incorporating renewables, controlling batteries to maximize value to the grid and owner (AMS, Stem, Tesla)
3. Customer acquisition for cleantech products - small scale (helping sell devices to homes) and large scale (helping developing projects)
All of these things have significant software and analytics bent and will be key parts of the solution
I feel like this article underestimates the difficulty of stopping climate change. Would China have remained poor, if in the 1980's a better anti-climate-change treaty had been signed? Would the world have discovered better clean technology? There is a tendency to assume that treaties just solve the problem. I suspect that a different treaty would have failed, just like current negotiations are failing, because of the immense cost of slowing climate change.
I think the concerns about climate change are wildly overstated for the developed world. There are some more concerns when subsistence farming is the primary way of living, but humans (and humanity) adapt, and we adapt with great alacrity.
The simple answer is because modern day society has a lot of money, and decades in the future we are going to have even MORE money. Compound interest is a hell of a drug, and GDP growth. is showing no signs of slowing.
What I mean by this is that we as a society arent fully exploiting our land even CLOSE to as much as it could be.
Our food production system operates in the normal economic model of marginal costs. We could produce way more food if we wanted, it would just cost more.
And in the future, if global warming has reduced our food production capacity, we wouldn't run out of food. The only thing that would do is force us to use these more expensive methods of food production.
And we have more than enough money now, and definitely in the future, to pay for it. Food is a small percentage of everyone's paychecks. Costs going up by 20% doesn't mean much.
What are those methods of production that will feed 8B people in a world that is 5 deg C warmer? I think you are just hand-waving around hard, unsolved, and possibly intractable problems.
Firstly, 5 degrees C is a much larger degree of warming than anyone is predicting for any of their worst case scenarios in the next 200 years. So 200 years from now, the problem will likely sound laughable.
But to answer your question anyway, yes I think that we could solve that problem today with current technology.
There are a couple reasons why. For 1, increasing temperatures also opens up unused land in cold places, that werent bring used before. Potentially, it might produce MORE arable land than it removes, once we get all the infrastructure up, of course.
And 2, it's not about "technology". There are tons of land that we "could" be using for food right now. We aren't using that land, because it is mountainous or has a bad climate, and would therefore produce lower yields.
But just because a mountainous area or a bad climate produces low yeilds doesn't mean that it would produce literally 0 food. It would produce SOME food, and the only reason we aren't using it now is because it is more expensive.
So the answer is the tons and tons of land that we aren't using for farming right now, but we could be using.
Well, AC does help. But fast forward 100, 200, 500 years. After the food riots, the protests, political meltdown, the scarcity of clean water, the wars, the starvation and pandemics, the loss of coastal cities, the collapse of ocean ecosystems, loss of the ice caps, forests, deserts spreading, we'll be lucky if 10 million people survive living...underground.
I agree with your assessment on the difficulty of the problem. Where I differ is my (somewhat optimistic, admittedly) view that an existential climate crisis is the kind of exogenous shock needed to force humanity to cooperate against a "common enemy" so to speak.
We've had models before with the CFC / Montreal Treaty, and on a national scale with WW2, and the Sputnik / Apollo missions.
There are very few problems humanity cannot solve by coordinated effort. The trick is to force that coordination, and I don't see that happening in the near future.
I do agree - climate change is a massive problem with thousands of facets, trillions of dollars at stake, and stakeholders including everyone from all global citizens, all global creatures/environments, and all businesses/governments. It's truly the biggest crisis we've ever faced as a species.
In my view, on rich vs poor nations, if China handled its emissions much earlier and more aggressively, we'd still have massive historical emissions and massive per capita emissions in North America and Europe. Rich people tend to decry those not using renewables and not transitioning quickly, however it's easier to transition/decarbonize with EVs and solar PV and energy efficiency when your economy is already developed. Long commutes, western diets, leisure travel, copious heating and air conditioning, and many other factors are not present in other countries which still have "dirty" economies with longer ways to go to both energize their entire populace AND to clean up said energy sources. So, westerners should look in the mirror before they criticize those people just getting electricity or their first car in the last decade.
The rays of hope I see for climate change come from the potential for energizing nations to skip over total fossil fuel dependence in their industrialization and modernization schemes. Furthermore, there are bright spots in electric buses (huge wave of these will come in next decade), in renewable deployments (~2/3 of capacity additions in recent years in USA), and in overall business movement towards low carbon solutions. While national and state policy-makers could move more quickly, surely, there is a lot of innovation occurring in the private and local levels.
Long term, even if we decarbonize very quickly due to technological innovations and S-curves, I foresee needing to use environmental engineering techniques to cool the planet. While risky, I think the level of economic and societal harm from the heating/expansions of the oceans and further ice melt will necessitate some sort of artificial cooling of the planet.
While some may deem this as unethical or playing God with our planet, IMO we've already irrevocably changed our planet's heat content. We need to not only pull our foots of the accelerator, reducing emissions of GH gases, but we also need to put our foots on the brake, somehow cooling the planet and/or sequestering previous emissions. If we don't take these latter steps, no amount of decarbonization will prevent catastrophes of hurricanes, fires, flooding, desertification, and sea-level-rise in the next countless generations.
A group of scientist and environmental lobbyists worked hard so that by the late 70's everyone knew about the problem of rising CO2 emissions and the impending doom of a changing global climate. The issue required action and limitations on the use and burning of natural resources. That messed with the status quo too much so the people with the power at the time said fuck it. The 'it' being young people, their kids, and their kid's kids.
I find it really interesting that this has been published along with all the news/media about how hot it is in Europe/Asia and in the end of the hottest month of the year for the United States.
It's weird, reading that article reminds me about all of that talk in the 80s. It was a real, undebated (for the most part as far as my bubble went) thing, the question was, "what are we going to do about it?" Ideas were put forth, etc.
And then it's like we talked ourselves out of it. Then someone found an old copy of Time magazine at a yard sale, and said, "aha! See, they can't make up their minds!" No, "their minds" were kind of made up, don't let a crap article from a weekly news magazine sway you.
I haven't finished the article; I'll do that tonight, because I'm kind of curious in NYT's take on why we changed our minds.
Okay, the article claims there was a lost opportunity to do something about the problem in the eighties, but reading the actual text, the presented historical facts (which are very interesting and very well presented!), I'm not seeing it. What I'm seeing is that the world was not ready to face the problem back then.
And it seems to me the reason why not is economic. At the end of the day, people care more about the roof over their heads than they do about global problems. In the eighties, we didn't have much by way of good substitutes for fossil fuel. So the message people heard was that they would have to accept economic hardship for the sake of the environment. That was not what people wanted to hear.
The lesson to learn from this is that we need to address the economic issues alongside the environmental ones. The message needs to not be that you must accept unemployment and poverty. The message needs to be that the task of transitioning the world to renewable energy is doable but enormous - and has the potential to create millions upon millions of jobs, as well as breaking the resource curse that decoupled the interests of the rulers from those of the people. That successfully turning our hands to the new energy industries will bring more prosperity than holding onto the old ones.
Maybe. But hundreds of millions of people have already been hurt by disappearing jobs and falling real wages. To say nothing about that is to let the narrative of sacrifice stand. I think it would be worth focusing on the potential to create jobs.
Six weeks after Hansen’s testimony, Exxon’s manager of science and strategy development, Duane LeVine, prepared an internal strategy paper urging the company to “emphasize the uncertainty in scientific conclusions.” This shortly became the default position of the entire sector. LeVine, it so happened, served as chairman of the global petroleum industry’s Working Group on Global Climate Change, created the same year, which adopted Exxon’s position as its own.
This is lying, spreading lies, with malicious intent. There was no scientific uncertainty.
A proper public policy would be to wipe out the Exxon, and all petrol companies, shareholders. Claw back all profits from all shareholders proportionally going back 40 years, all profits on those profits, and unwind the companies over the next 20 years strictly to public benefit. And if that is still not enough to pay for fixing what has been damaged, the corporate veil should be pierced and make every shareholder of these companies personally liable. And I'm one of those shareholders - I've owned BP directly and indirectly through funds.
And it is also quite damning for an unlimited 1st amendment concept that proposes telling lies is a right. Unlimited opinions however unpopular should be protected, but spreading proven falsehoods should not be protected. It should be used as evidence the speaker is culpable, in part, of the ensuing damage. Criminal? Perhaps. Civil? Absolutely.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 264 ms ] threadUnfortunately we haven't invented the technology to implement your broad brush "solution" either.
In fact, I'm skeptical about the claim Climate Change could have been solved generations ago, given that we still haven't developed the means to do it yet.
Edit: okay, perhaps nuclear could provide us with the masses of power generation we need, but that's been ruled out.
Path dependence. We have not developed the means to solve climate change from where we are now.
So the billion dollar reward would be quite small sum in the grand scheme of things. And for example with a carbon tax, where collectors could offset emitters, it might also become a quite lucrative business.
Because it's too late. Unless magic non-existent carbon capture technology materializes soon, we're basically fucked.
https://www.vox.com/2016/10/4/13118594/2-degrees-no-more-fos...
Check out that middle graphic. If we really want to avoid 1.5 degrees, and we can’t rely on large-scale carbon sequestration, then the global community has to zero out its carbon emissions by 2026.
Ten years from now.
That article is two years old and, to state the obvious, global CO2 emissions are not on track to reach zero in the next eight years.
No we can't, because most of the CO2 has already been emitted: https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-four-years-left-one-poi...
Unless you invent a time machine, or as postulated by OP, some magic sequestration technology to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere and put it back in the ground, it's too late.
It's like we're in a car that's driven over a cliff, and you're saying "Well, we're still here, as long as we invent a way for this car to fly in the next 15 seconds before impact, then we'll be okay"
Besides most of the damage is already done.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CXRaTnKDXAEmissions affect the climate decades later, some 40 years later. So we're now only seeing the consequences of the emissions from the 70s-80s.
We've emitted more CO2 since the 80s to today, than the previous 150 years.
You're right that it won't mean the extinction of life on earth or humanity, but it might turn out to be the end of advanced human civilization if the bad end of the predictions come to pass. If there's not enough arable land left to support the human population, things will get very ugly very quickly.
If we had started working on this 40 years ago reaching zero emissions would be a realistic goal today, but even that is not enough now. Not only we need to reach zero emissions ASAP, but we also need strong negative emissions. And after that we need to figure out how to slow down the feedbacks (Arctic ice melting, methane, etc).
Maybe if ALL humanity was working towards those goals we would have a chance, but it's not even a priority for the vast majority of humans.
In essence, what we have to do is "all the energy output since the industrial revolution--do it again (plus then some), except this time instead of building civilization, capture co2 out of the air. And you must get all that energy from clean sources."
"Growing massive tropical rainforests" just means "inefficiently use solar energy (via photosynthesis) to bind carbon out of the air". We could do the same with solar panels and a carbon-binding chemical process.
But the issue is, again, the sheer magnitude of the problem.
For example, when the Russian permafrost melts, it will release gigantic amounts of methane, a very potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere. Once that happens, not only do you have to capture all the CO2 you emitted, you also have to capture all that methane.
Also, you'll want to recreate the kilometers-thick ice sheets in the arctic. When those are gone, the earth's albedo will drop, which means that it heats up even more quickly since less sunlight is reflected.
We have found 3km wide crates in the deep sea formed by such methane deposits going nuclear, I doubt such an event would be pleasant for nearby coastal regions.
But who would pay for that? If there were the political will we would long have passed a simple carbon tax that, after some adjustment period, would be tied to the price of unburning a ton of CO2.
What we need is to invest in technology to reduce CO2. Nuclear fusion/fission, solar, wind, electric or alternative fuel cars, redesign CO2 industry processes, etc.
The petrol and coal industry would have to go entirely bankrupt. No exceptions.
The "plant trees for charcoal" idea is basically the bio-engineering method of "build huge photovoltaic solar plant, use electric energy to power chemistry to convert CO2 to oil". Photosynthetic plants are pretty efficient, compared to silicon solar cells, and they're (literally) dirt cheap.
But it’s a moot point anyway, because trees simply grow too slowly to be an effective carbon buffer at the timescales that are relevant right now.
Using them for building material is okay as well, but the amount of wood needed to get rid of the excess CO2 is far above any reasonable demand for building material. (We're talking about a trillion tons of carbon here)
Whatever you do with the biomass a hundred years from now doesn’t really matter; either climate change is in control by then or the humanity is screwed.
We can also get energy from other sources, such as solar radiation, but I think you get the gist - the most cost-effective way to carbon capture is not to release the carbon in the first place.
> A $20 Million global competition to develop breakthrough technologies that will convert CO₂ emissions from power plants and industrial facilities into valuable products like building materials, alternative fuels and other items that we use every day. Teams will be scored on how much CO₂ they convert and the net value of their products.
[0]: https://carbon.xprize.org/
The EU's ETS [1] is currently the biggest carbon market, regulating about 40% of EU emissions.
It does not grant rights to capturers that take CO2 out of the atmosphere - only to those that reduce the emissions at some plant or factory. Apparently this choice is partly because it's not clear how to make sure that the carbon sink is stable - that the CO2 won't get out again. [2]
Lets assume you could get emissions rights for removing CO2. Would this provide the incentive we want?
The current price for emissions rights is 15€ per 1000 tons of CO2 [3], so an operation to sequester all of the EU's emissions (3.4 * 10^9 t, 2014, [4]) would get a revenue of at most 50 million euro / year. Probably much less since the market would get flooded.
Why is this price so low? The ETS' cap could be too low. Also, the ETS does not really cap emissions at all. Only certain industries, like power or aluminium manufacturing need to present certificates [1b], hence the 40%. Also, industries which would be 'at risk' to leave the EU if they were forced to pay, get free certificates [5] - arguably these would pay the most for rights.
Overall the EU does seem to be doing something right though, since the overall emissions are going down [4]. But the ETS does not seem to internalize the carbon externality.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emissions_trading
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/ets_en
[1b] https://ec.europa.eu/clima/sites/clima/files/factsheet_ets_e...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Emission_Tradin...
[3] https://www.theice.com/products/197/EUA-Futures/data?marketI...
[4] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?location...
[5] https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/ets/allowances/leakage_e...
My takeaway was just like losing weight. It's more effective to eat less than to exercise. Here, it's bound to be better to burn less.
This was an electrochemical approach however. It's possible some bio guy will figure it out using photosynthesis.
This poses it's own problems though, one of which being the enormous amount of land you would need to dedicate to this process to have a meaningful impact.
For a real-time update on climate change, just look at the canary in the cold-mine - Arctic Sea Ice. I have a look daily in summer to see if we will again break the record minimum and when the summer will be ice-free there - it will happen within a decade or two at the most. For Arctic sea ice voyeurs, check this out: https://sites.google.com/site/arcticseaicegraphs/
'Germany emitted more greenhouse gasses in 2016 than in the previous year, but is still seen as a positive model for the rest of the world.'
https://euobserver.com/environment/137298
Best thing we could have to reduce co2 would be a massive global recession I'd say, unless that is things got so bad that we had to revert to cutting down trees to survive.
Germany still burns huge amounts of coal including brown coal (lignite), the dirtiest form of coal.
Pfft. I'm German, and follow the politics to a reasonable extent. Our government (esp. under the conservatives lead by Angela Merkel) is notorious for failing to meet their own emissions goals. You didn't mention the 2020 goals; at this point, it's pretty clear that we're going to miss them. I don't know if there are any 2030 goals, but seeing how they always tout the 2050 goals, I don't think so.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offshore_wind_power
Also Germany is the largest economy in the EU, so isn't it natural to look at them first? (Which in any case was not in my search terms - this came up when I was searching EU)
The slope in log scale gives it away too (from the same data set, comparing US and Eurozone since 1971): https://i.imgur.com/099XLIw.png
Even if some people grudge this fact, the Grid is not ready for variable generation that Wind and Solar does, they do buy some time for Grid to become smarter (Grid of MicroGrids) where it can digest Solar and Wind, especially now that viable storage like batteries and fuel cells are coming off age.
What actually dethroned IE was Chrome and better Firefox.
Policy wonking can push you in certain direction, but they do not solve. Sometimes the bridge technologies are the ones that save from imminent doom.
People demonstrating urgency with climate change, can certainly set an example by cutting their quality of life by half for starters!
In percentage terms, there are several countries that have done significantly better, including the UK who’s CO2 emissions are now 38% below 1990 levels (and 25% below 2012 levels!) despite significant population growth.
While US emissions have, by some measurements, dropped in the past decade, they are still well above 1990 levels.
Some of the optimistic models do say US is at 1985 levels.
How much would you be happy to lose in today's practices ? (I'm curious about what people need/want)
energy poverty ? there's a middle point between energy waste+opulence and poverty.
What astounds me is Peter von Thiel, cynical enough to recognize the likelihood of climate chaos sufficiently to have bought his out in New Zealand, yet also to back Trump. I can only conclude he may be a sociopath.
These articles are great, but preaching to the choir. What should any of us do? I'm seriously and sincerely asking. Are there any suggestions, from a personal stand point i.e. excluding a completely new economic model and government structure? Is it to drive less and cut out meat? (done) Buy less stuff? Support the right organizations and political candidates?
What if one is doing all of those things already, now what? Just sit here and watch our homes go up in flames as the entire place becomes a desert? Some actionable things would be great to have.
Consider applying your skills to the renewable energy sector, companies working on transport electrification, and other “clean tech” sectors. These are exciting growth industries and you’ll be making a difference.
On the plus side, the worst consequences from climate change will occur after we're dead.
Just enjoy the rest of your life and try not to think about it too much. After all, that's what everyone else has been doing.
Climate change is one of the reasons we're not having kids. In part because they would have had a very bad life, but also because it's the best for the planet.
Reducing consumption of resources is not working, so we should start thinking about controlling population growth.
We are far away from global overpopulation. Unless people insist on fossil fuel, waste of resources and animal products as food.
More people are needed for more work for a better world.
Have a good life because it is important for work for improvement. Improvement means better technology.
I know about the dangerous situation but I am still optimistic for humans.
http://landartgenerator.org/blagi/archives/127
https://thinkprogress.org/solar-wind-keep-getting-cheaper-33...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdLRiaCjRkw
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climatechange-carbon/scie...
https://phys.org/news/2017-09-solar-to-fuel-recycles-co2-eth...
https://www.or.is/carbfix
The forest is still composed by trees.
> We are far away from global overpopulation. Unless people insist on fossil fuel, waste of resources and animal products as food.
You are technically right, of course, but if humans were rational creatures we would have acted on climate change when the evidence was presented to the world.
Yes, but most people do not improve their behavior until nature or some culture or some law enforces the change.
The efforts of many are wasted by the ignorance or carelessness or selfishness or insanity or lack of choice of many others.
Dealing with the issues of the future will require collective action. In order for that collective action to take place, people will need to vote for it. Having kids means more people to vote for the things you think need to be voted for (since they will share your genetics and you will heavily influence their environment).
So you should have kids.
Having kids is just condemning them to live in a world ravaged by famine, war and drought. Maybe you're fine with that because you believe on some philosophical level that any life is preferable to never having lived at all, but that's not self-evident.
Depends on the level of warming.
An earth of 7.5 billion is more sustainable than an earth of 10 billion. 7.5 will live better lives than a world of 10, given sociopolitical realities.
I’m just REALLY not a fan of the “can’t let the 3rd world have so many people and then develop to 1st world standards” thing. It may technically help the problem, but it feels like soft racism and proto-eugenicism, at least from the perspective of people living in those countries. It gives me the creeps, although I’m sure that’s not your intention.
Also, I’m convinced that the main way to solve these problems is human ingenuity. And that can’t just include people in the Western world.
Keeping people poor or would be a soft racism/proto-eugenicism, but reduce child mortality and empower women with contraception (as an option they can choose, not pushed coercive) are pretty unambiguously good. I mostly donate to the Against Malaria Foundation both as my anti-poverty charity and my pro-environment charity. They're rated well on effectiveness.
I haven't done much research into highly-effective charities that provide contraception or related educational materials, but https://www.thelifeyoucansave.org/causes/women-charities has some that seem relevant. Women's rights in general is usually a pretty good proxy for both "let women not have babies when they don't want to" and "give women options for fulfilling lives other than just having babies".
What you can do:
- Do not panic. A good life is important for work for improvement.
- Yes to all of your suggestions. You are vegan ? Good for you and the rest of the world.
- Tell other people how important and urgent change is.
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGJq0eQZoFSwgcqgxIE9MHw/vid...
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJRjK20fHylJyf-HiBtqI2w/vid...
https://lustysociety.org/
https://jancovici.com/en/climate-change/acting-individually/...
It is relatively practical and takes into account the ratio cost or difficulty vs impact
It boils down to using less energy for transportation or consumption (food or otherwise)
It is a grave life error to assign excessive likelihood to the doomsayers. I've been reading about inevitable doom for 25 years now. Some of what I read as a kid dated to the 60s and the guaranteed dates of inevitable doom had already passed by the time I read them in the early 90s.
Even assuming they are completely 100% right about the problems, which is frankly a big assumption, they rarely, if ever, even remotely account for the fact that people and the economy change in reaction to problems.
Also, consider the possibility that this feeling of hopelessness is something that perhaps somebody wants to instill in you. Why? Who benefits? Are their hands as clean as you suppose? Are you sure? I'm a big fan of "follow the money"; where most people fuck that up is that they only want to follow the money sometimes, when it suits them. Nope... always follow it. "Follow the money" is almost always used wrong; you don't need it to debunk the people you already don't trust, you need it to vet the people you do. Doomsaying has been exceedingly profitable over the past ~60 years. (It's been profitable even farther back than that, but mass market doomsaying really took off somewhere around then, which is where the real money is.) Do not forget to take that into account.
(Also, as my post implies, don't assume I'm speaking just to the particular doom de jour, about which you might still have emotional reactions. I'm talking about nuclear war, population bombs, a multitude of claims we're running out of some resource, trash management issues, a wide variety of eschatological claims, all sorts of things I've read in the last 30 years. You may say "But jerf, some of those are still problems and may be problems in the future" and I say, I agree. I often like to say "Stand up. Point in a random direction. You are pointing at a problem." There are always problems and always will be problems. But we're not talking about problems... we're talking about doom. The doom has not happened. I believe fully in environmental problems both in the present and the future. I do not anywhere near fully believe in inevitable doom.)
Maybe we can bandaid or mitigate the worst effects for some people. Probably richer people. But just see Harvey and wildfires and droughts for strong evidence that we will not do anything whatsoever even when cities are being destroyed by inaction.
Did anyone ever admit their predictions about increased hurricanes during those 12 years were wrong? I never saw it. You just remember the images, not the 12 years of no images.
And I remember wildfires in California when I was a kid, too. Except now probably about 10 million people live closer to them and like to build houses in the way of them. (Oh, and let's not forget how many of those fires turn out to be less about "global warming" and more about arson. After a certain point, dry is just dry.)
This is part of why I really can't get myself too worked up over Certain Environmental Doom... it's always people sharing emotionally vivid anecdotes instead of data. When I look at the statistical data, it isn't much to get worked up over. The IPCC warming estimates have already been revised down to the point that it's hardly worth worrying about; it's not as if "zero degrees of change in a century" was ever on the table.
It's the emotionally charged anecdotes that get you worked up and feeling doomed and hopeless. Again, who benefits? Sure isn't you.
I'm personally more interested in the ocean plastic problem than global warming at the moment. Global warming has really failed to pan out as a threat, in my opinion.
But then, bear in mind once again I'm brushing 40. If you're twenty-something and inclined to pull your hair out over what I'm saying here, think about where you would be with another 15 years of your current level of concern, but if you looked outside on the same world you do now. I see anecdotes and anecdotes and anecdotes about how horrible climate change is, but the data isn't anywhere near as scary as the news stories being written... in fact I see the news stories getting scarier even as the data gets less scary to me. In fact it's downright bizzare to compare the predictions made now nearly twenty years ago to what actually happened, and to read all these stories that are written as if the predictions made twenty years ago actually happened, or perhaps even happened worse than predicted, instead of being rather a ways off the mark.
Personally, I'd probably actually be more concerned if I read a story that basically said "Here's the predictions made 20 years ago. Here's why they didn't pan out. Here's the models that we made 10 years ago that fixed the problem and evidence that they've done a great job predicting the last ten. Here's why those models are showing problems 20 years down the road and why this time we actually know what we are talking about." But that's not what I read. What I see is just screeching panic, and most damningly, denial that any error was ever made when it is plainly obvious that errors were made, and that IPCC report estimates have in fact been trending down and not up. When no error can ever be admitted, it's clearly a political process, not a scientific one, because it's in politics you can't ever admit you were wrong, not even a little, with the only error you're allowed to admit to is that you didn't realize how right you were at the time. I don't recommend driving yourself into anxiety and insanity for a process so obviously filled with politics.
heres the list of hurricanes that have made landfall: http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/E23.html
here's a list of atlantic hurricanes: http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/E11.html
axios made this nice chart showing intensity by year: https://www.axios.com/thirty-years-of-atlantic-hurricanes-15...
here's the noaa page about global warming and hurricanes: https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes/
The problem isn't what sets the fire. It's that the heat dries out the forests, making any fires larger and more devastating. For example: you can light a fire pretty much anywhere in an Eastern forest, because they're sufficiently wet that a fire won't grow very large. You could even do that a few decades ago in the West. But try that now in California, you and could start a thousands-acre conflagration so hot it kills the soil and doesn't burn out until literally all available fuel has been used up.
Did anyone ever admit their predictions about increased hurricanes during those 12 years were wrong? I never saw it. You just remember the images, not the 12 years of no images.
There have been way more hurricanes. Luckily for us, the oceans are very large, and most of those hurricanes did not make landfall.
https://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/global-warming-and-hurricanes/
And no, I'm the same age as you. I do not remember nearly as many devastating hurricanes in the first 20 years of my life, whereas in the second half I've seen Katrina, Harvey, Maria, Sandy, saw California in drought for what, a decade? I have personally seen the glaciers in New Zealand that have receded by miles and miles. And the temperature record is undeniable. And the ocean temperature measurements. And the ocean acidification measurements. And the ice cap melt measurements.
The linked report, by the way, suggests that while the current trends are in line with increases that actual statistically significant diversions from usual won't be detectable until the possible to see until the end of the century (for Hurricanes). Of course by then the temperature will be 3C or so hotter, and lots of other things will be impacted more directly sooner like crop yields, fish populations, and other things.
The problem with this thinking is that, as I said, the timescale that responses show up is on par with the human life span. This is a huge problem for a species with massive future-discounting built into our DNA. No, we don't see these things (strongly) yet. That's not the point, the point is that the impact on our lives to change this is shockingly small compared to the enormous and extremely likely risks of doing nothing. The timescale might be wrong, that wouldn't be surprising. But given a choice between "do something that might not be needed" and "do nothing until it's too late even if it is needed" shouldn't be hard.
Current technology can remove CO2 from the atmosphere for $90-230 per ton. That's with current technology to capture it from literally the air.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/611369/maybe-we-can-affor...
A gallon of gas emits 8.9kg of CO2. So capturing that emission with current technology costs $2.25 per gallon. If that sounds expensive, compare that to the further collapse of fish stocks, massive water and food insecurity globally forcing mass migrations, and entire cities being flooded. Suddenly that sounds a lot more reasonable.
Anyway. I don't think your attitude is a good one. Switching to a carbon neutral economy is just frankly not nearly as costly as people seem to think, and the risks of not doing it are way too big to ignore. Of course, people with this attitude that we shouldn't act until proof of specific harm that impacts them specifically is available... not going to lie, I think that's a huge moral failing.
He's also one of the villains.
Possibly literally.
But if that's how you want to play things, I probably can't stop you. But at least I tried.
It's not a healthy way to live, and I don't think it's one particularly backed by the evidence. In terms of threats I think are likely to impact me over the next twenty years, I still rate "governments instituting stupid economic policies" well over "environmental catastrophe". You look around the world and that's something that happens a lot more often than, say, a port closing or a city being abandoned because of rising seas. There's a nontrivial chance they'll both combine and we'll get stupid economic decisions made because of unjustified panic about environmental issues.
Did it occur to you that they never amounted to anything because people did shit about them? It wasn't the economy that stopped the Ozone hole from expanding. It wasn't technological innovation that brought down the Soviet Union and ended Red Scare.
Did it occur to you that just because you live an insulated life, that these disasters are actually happening right now?
It doesn't seem like you're as bad as a denialist, but you're worse than a geopolitical isolationist. You're an individual isolationist and your mantra seems to be, "Fuck you, I've got mine".
Then you've admitted the only point I care about here, which is that getting personally panicky about those things would have been a waste of time. Doom is not certain. People do in fact do things in reaction to problems.
"Did it occur to you that just because you live an insulated life, that these disasters are actually happening right now?"
Read what I wrote again with an eye towards answering those questions, because the answer is there. The Earth is positively saturated with problems... but that's not actually a new state of affairs, despite what youth may think and/or certain people may have told you.
You are establishing that problems exist. That is not the question I am answering. I am answering is doom inevitable? And the answer is simple: No. Do not live hopelessly. Do not plan for your future life as if we're all going to be dead in 10 years inevitably because of environmental disaster. There are many disasters in your future with non-zero probability, but living as if they have already occurred just moves them into the present with 100% probability. That's not a win.
In terms of reading my mind, you'd be doing better off if you first read my text, instead of what you assume my text is going to say. Or trying to figure out which bogeyman to associate me with so you can stop thinking and start emoting. That's not a healthy psychological pattern. Who taught you to do that? What benefit do they get from it? Are you benefiting from it? (Hint: No.)
Your sentiment really embodies the worst kind of free-rider: "you shouldn't worry, because other people have solved problems for me in the past".
It’s not about free-riding. The grandparent posted, “I read this and I am completely confused about what to do with the rest of the time I have left. Should I even bother with...” and there’s a lot in jerfs’ response which I hope GP reads and reflects on.
The world is saturated with imminent disaster. Perhaps the entire universe hangs on a thread.
The way we (humans) get out of it, and they way we always have, is not nihilistic defeatism. In the face of continuous doomsday prophecy, the optimal individual response is absolutely to tune it completely out and focus on becoming the best you can be at that thing that you do.
And throwaway5752 you trying to moralize that jerfs is “the worst kind of free-rider” is an asinine ad hominem attack that I’d say only amplifies the underlying truth of how important it is to tune out voices like yours.
The grandparent comment's Fight or Flight instinct should be going off at ALL mentions of AGW. They need to be thinking about the next decades of their life with AGW in mind. If they live in Florida, they should seriously consider not living in Florida. If they have a house that's near a beach they need to leave. If they don't live in the developing world, they need to figure out how to get to the developed world ASAP.
You're right that nobody should be brought into a crippling depression because of global warming, but we're far past being optimistic about it.
Also, your "who is making money off your panic" thread is stupid and you should stop. People panic for a variety of reasons and only a small minority are "because panic was induced by a second party".
> It's not a healthy way to live
Oh, agreed. Trust me. I've been neck deep in this one. It'll warp your mind. Doesn't mean it's not true. Just like the Sun blowing up to a red giant in 5 billion years. Gonna happen. Profound, devastating climate change has already begun. Human civilization is remarkably fragile and will teeter and crash in the next 50-200 years.
> I don't think it's one particularly backed by the evidence.
Well, in the same way that the Sun shows no current signs of blowing up into a red giant the size of Earth's orbit, sure. But I get the impression you're not able (or willing) to run a few of the very obvious scenarios forward in your mind. This is reality. It's coming. Maybe you're like me and will be lucky to live out your life in relative luxury before most of the damage comes home to roost. Great. I'm hoping for 40-50 more years of merrymaking, too. But make no mistake, we are totally fucked.
But then you go on to say,
> In terms of threats I think are likely to impact me over the next twenty years, I still rate "governments instituting stupid economic policies"
And that's my thunder button right there. For fuck's sake, you gotta give up this idea that this mythical "economy" and "economical policies" is all there is. Like your entire life is driven by the stock market or your ability to get bananas in January. Look at the Earth. Fuck your bananas in January and your backyard pool. Fuck your manicured lawn. Seriously. 7 billion humans thinking and acting exactly like this is how we get here, and then you have the gall to moan about "stupid economic decisions made because of unjustified panic about environmental issues."
Fuuuuck. This is what so frustrating, because it is just impossible to get through your economic interest to make you see that hey, we are deep shit right now.
“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.”
Unfortunately every single aspect of modern life is based on the assumption of exponential growth. This just isn't gonna work.
Effective greenhouse gas taxation is a single thing that could solve the issue with the current system and be efficient.
* It would have to be significantly higher than today.
* It would tax exported emissions.
* It would be well designed to avoid loopholes. It would include CO2 produced by food production (especially meat) and CO2 emissions from concrete.
You've gone wrong at the very start. This isn't a problem that can be solved on an individual level, and the sad truth is that we do, in fact, need a new economic model. The sooner we own up to that the sooner we can move on with building it.
So be inventive.
You don't throw your foe to the ground with brute force alone. You take him off-balance, and move in with good timing and technique.
If your goal is solving climate change, well, the leverage isn't really in the technical solution, but in the political economy. We need a redesign. That's problem one.
But if it's the power structure that needs changing, what affects it? Knowledge. Signalling. Valuation. And then you get into things that you can potentially change as a tech worker, by pushing for information systems that change our valuation metrics to match a philosophy of sustainability. And that positions actors who wish to take sustainable actions to have the leverage to realize it.
That, I think, is the trick to feeling OK about it. At the end of the day, it's a war fought in an abstract, everyday sense: Build up your sense of morality and build your career around those principles. You might not be the hero, but you won't be the villain.
There are a lot of people who stand to profit from the climate change lobby: professors, alternate energy producers, politicians, government, media. They all want money invested in THEIR pet projects. And conveniently, it serves as a great distraction from issues on the horizon that WILL have a guaranteed negative affect on your children's quality of life, but I wont get into that, since what I'm writing is divisive enough as it is.
When it comes to the climate, you will be fine, we will be fine, our kids will be fine, the sky will not fall, the seas will not swallow up our cities (excluding regular weather), America will not become a desert (unless that super-volcano blows). It is sensationalism.
2. The sun provides lots of energy
3. Therefore, carbon dioxide is able to store lots of solar energy
4. We are releasing lots of Carbon Dioxide into the atmosphere
5. Therefore, the atmosphere's ability to store solar energy is increasing
What part of this logic don't you understand or disagree with?
Not true at all. We have plenty of evidence that humans are causing the rise of C02 emissions. Just simply look at the C14 (Carbon 14) and C12/13 (Carbon 12 and Carbon 13) ratios in the atmosphere. These give a clear signal what is causing the rise of carbon and where the carbon is coming from.
> People should not just accept what these people say as gospel, we have had 30-40 years of doomsday warnings from these people
Yes, and right now, the predictions from the credible scientists are showing to be true. Their predictions were not end of the world in 30-40 years, but we would start to see the effects of climate change, and we are starting to see the effects of climate change.
Re: Alternative energy: It doesn't matter if fusion/nuclear/any renewable is "perfected" if Carbon Dioxide is at such high levels that every air conditioning unit needs a CO2 scrubber attached because outdoor the concentration reaches 1000ppm and people's brains literally start to get dumber.
So what you're saying is that the proof that we have in labs isn't good enough for you?
> we have had 30-40 years of doomsday warnings from these people and nothing, absolutely nothing has happened.
What do you classify as nothing? We've shown that the ice caps are melting [0], that temperatures are increasing rapidly across the globe [1], sea walls are being built to stop cities from flooding [2] [3].
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8auMIfF50Ng&feature=youtu.be [1] https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/ [2] https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/photography... [3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vj8m0Nqr7s
That's the point of the article! Did you even read it?
I don't think either is even something claimed by the movie, which is a movie. And it's certainly not peer-reviewed science. (Reference for ice caps claim: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/ice-caps-melt-gore-2014/, and note, "caps" as you wrote it would imply the entire Antarctic was melting by 2012, which is of course crazy.)
The problem with stating and imagining things in terms of binary outcomes is you can't have a reasonable argument about anything.
Most of what is written about Global warming are events that will unfold over long periods of time, but nevertheless should the situation continue, they will eventually come to pass.
See https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312505967_Olivine_W... for one approach. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization for another. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_engineering lists several more.
While these are interesting technologies, it's very difficult to see how they make sense economically. The cost/benefit ratio is invariably much worse than simply investing in emissions reductions.
If we have $X to invest in climate mitigation, it's always going to be better to spend it on technologies that reduce carbon emissions: replacing fossil-fuel power plants, electrification of transport, etc. To my knowledge there is no technology that removes a ton of carbon from the atmosphere that comes anywhere close to being competitive with what it costs to not emit that ton of carbon in the first place.
Of course, the day may come when all the easy carbon reductions have been made. If the climate is still not stabilising at that point, then we can start looking at all the climate engineering mega-projects.
Secondly the two techniques that I pointed to are, today, cheaper than emissions reductions.
Third, the cost of other mitigations is improving over time as the price of renewable power (particularly solar) drops. So even approaches that are not currently cost-effective may be in the near future.
Perhaps the memoirs of terminal cancer patients would be instructive. However, they benefit from frequentist statistics. We've only got Bayes for our experiment.
The truly apocalyptic predictions are just not very likely. We are not going to be boiled alive or turn into Venus or whatever. It’s not going to get so hot that all plant matter catches on fire.
If we do nothing, within the next 80 years large parts of the currently inhabited planet will be uninhabitable by humans, however. That's a sort of apocalypse. It's also the consensus view of scientists who study the global pollution epidemic.
But there are left-leaning but not scientifically literate people who honestly believe most life on Earth is already doomed.
This obviously leads to despair in their political thinking and personal lives. I’ve even heard of people contemplating suicide.
I don’t think this is warranted given what we know and the uncertainties involved. Humanity still has a future worth living for even in the most frightening scenarios.
There are in fact Republican politicians who support effective measures to address climate change that are compatible with traditional Republican market-based, conservative principles, such as a revenue neutral carbon tax, but they are greatly outnumbered by the ones who think climate change is fake or is just natural cycles that will swing the other way on their own and that we cannot influence anyway.
Seems a bit fast given the popularity and the fact that it was posted 2 hours ago (also, compared to those that are present on p1)
-- edit: we're now on page 3 just 30 minutes after my comment.
Before we attempt to solve climate crisis, first we should solve BIGOTRY CRISIS.
I have seen this happening before too. Why does HN allows anonymous flagging? I bet anything if it were unanimous we would able to frame bigots who only flag because of their stupid personal world view.
Has there been any efforts to make flagging more transparent-perhaps where I can contribute or should we raise a new issue on that?
Maybe they disagree with the article, but the tone of the comments does not frankly reflects this rejection.
or something worse is going on
It makes me sad.
On the other hand, "Trout tickling" [1] has been on the HP for 10 hours now, with 45 points and 21 comments.
Maybe we're being trout-tickled ourselves.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17652460
My first chunk of free time goes into making an automated bigotry-watcher for HN.
This is the purest bullshit I have seen in a while. Had I checked HN half an hour late, I would have never caught this.
Please select "Hacker News" from "Concerning" drop down and submit your message.
From the FAQ:
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> The basic algorithm divides points by a power of the time since a story was submitted. Comments in comment threads are ranked the same way.
> Other factors affecting rank include user flags, anti-abuse software, software which downweights overheated discussions, and moderator intervention.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
In general, comment threads like the one you've started generate more heat than light (19/116 comments as of this writing). If you think something odd is going on, contact the mods via the Contact link in the footer, as they're the ones who can actually view what's happening and do something about it.
Otherwise, the best thing you can do is make insightful, substantive comments to the thread yourself.
This story tripped the overheated discussion detector, which we've just turned off. There actually aren't many flags, and one of the main reasons why it isn't ranked higher is that most of the upvotes were dropped by the anti-abuse software.
When users start speculative meta subthreads like this, it foments a kind of disconnected conspiracy thinking that we can't seem to help ourselves from. You can email us and get the answer to exactly what's going on in a few minutes! But that's not what most choose—we'd rather wring our hands and imagine demons. If we could do this a bit less, Hacker News would be more intellectually interesting.
Could we position a sheet, or a carpet of asteroids in a Lagrange point around the Earth, or as a sort of reverse Dyson sphere?
I heard that such a thing could be used to cool down Venus.
That doesn't address the ocean acidification, or mass extinctions, etc. Certain high-light plants would also likely perish without intervention. Also, solar energy on Earth would be stifled.
And one of those problems will see the end of us if not climate change. It is much like playing Russian roulette in the risk of extinction. We just may avert the climate change but some next problem will be our bullet.
Animal welfare/rights is most important to me, but I realize that its all connected and can be brought about mostly by investing in clean tech, clean meat, and fighting climate change.
[0]: http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/
I went through this search recently - companies at the nexus of software and cleantech in the bay area, here was my shortlist so you can see what kinds of things these companies are working on: AutoGrid, Bidgely, Ohm Connect, Tesla, Utility API, Omnidian, Stem, Advanced Microgrid Solutions
If you're thinking of starting something yourself, energy seems to be an especially idiosyncratic industry that I think doesn't lend itself easily to outside in solutions, it really pays to work in it for a couple years to soak up the knowledge. You'll find tons of opportunities once you're on the inside.
A few of the better opportunities that come to mind from my point of view: 1. Software & analytics based EE and DR (Bidgely, Autogrid, Ohmconnect, First Fuel) 2. Grid analytics, especially around citing and incorporating renewables, controlling batteries to maximize value to the grid and owner (AMS, Stem, Tesla) 3. Customer acquisition for cleantech products - small scale (helping sell devices to homes) and large scale (helping developing projects)
All of these things have significant software and analytics bent and will be key parts of the solution
Here a paper to start your research: "Energy Efficiency across Programming Languages How Does Energy, Time, and Memory Relate?" http://greenlab.di.uminho.pt/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/pape...
I think the concerns about climate change are wildly overstated for the developed world. There are some more concerns when subsistence farming is the primary way of living, but humans (and humanity) adapt, and we adapt with great alacrity.
Can I ask you why you think that is the case? Why would industrialized farming and the food supply chain that feeds the developed world do better?
What I mean by this is that we as a society arent fully exploiting our land even CLOSE to as much as it could be.
Our food production system operates in the normal economic model of marginal costs. We could produce way more food if we wanted, it would just cost more.
And in the future, if global warming has reduced our food production capacity, we wouldn't run out of food. The only thing that would do is force us to use these more expensive methods of food production.
And we have more than enough money now, and definitely in the future, to pay for it. Food is a small percentage of everyone's paychecks. Costs going up by 20% doesn't mean much.
But to answer your question anyway, yes I think that we could solve that problem today with current technology.
There are a couple reasons why. For 1, increasing temperatures also opens up unused land in cold places, that werent bring used before. Potentially, it might produce MORE arable land than it removes, once we get all the infrastructure up, of course.
And 2, it's not about "technology". There are tons of land that we "could" be using for food right now. We aren't using that land, because it is mountainous or has a bad climate, and would therefore produce lower yields.
But just because a mountainous area or a bad climate produces low yeilds doesn't mean that it would produce literally 0 food. It would produce SOME food, and the only reason we aren't using it now is because it is more expensive.
So the answer is the tons and tons of land that we aren't using for farming right now, but we could be using.
We've had models before with the CFC / Montreal Treaty, and on a national scale with WW2, and the Sputnik / Apollo missions.
There are very few problems humanity cannot solve by coordinated effort. The trick is to force that coordination, and I don't see that happening in the near future.
In my view, on rich vs poor nations, if China handled its emissions much earlier and more aggressively, we'd still have massive historical emissions and massive per capita emissions in North America and Europe. Rich people tend to decry those not using renewables and not transitioning quickly, however it's easier to transition/decarbonize with EVs and solar PV and energy efficiency when your economy is already developed. Long commutes, western diets, leisure travel, copious heating and air conditioning, and many other factors are not present in other countries which still have "dirty" economies with longer ways to go to both energize their entire populace AND to clean up said energy sources. So, westerners should look in the mirror before they criticize those people just getting electricity or their first car in the last decade.
The rays of hope I see for climate change come from the potential for energizing nations to skip over total fossil fuel dependence in their industrialization and modernization schemes. Furthermore, there are bright spots in electric buses (huge wave of these will come in next decade), in renewable deployments (~2/3 of capacity additions in recent years in USA), and in overall business movement towards low carbon solutions. While national and state policy-makers could move more quickly, surely, there is a lot of innovation occurring in the private and local levels.
Long term, even if we decarbonize very quickly due to technological innovations and S-curves, I foresee needing to use environmental engineering techniques to cool the planet. While risky, I think the level of economic and societal harm from the heating/expansions of the oceans and further ice melt will necessitate some sort of artificial cooling of the planet.
While some may deem this as unethical or playing God with our planet, IMO we've already irrevocably changed our planet's heat content. We need to not only pull our foots of the accelerator, reducing emissions of GH gases, but we also need to put our foots on the brake, somehow cooling the planet and/or sequestering previous emissions. If we don't take these latter steps, no amount of decarbonization will prevent catastrophes of hurricanes, fires, flooding, desertification, and sea-level-rise in the next countless generations.
And then it's like we talked ourselves out of it. Then someone found an old copy of Time magazine at a yard sale, and said, "aha! See, they can't make up their minds!" No, "their minds" were kind of made up, don't let a crap article from a weekly news magazine sway you.
I haven't finished the article; I'll do that tonight, because I'm kind of curious in NYT's take on why we changed our minds.
And it seems to me the reason why not is economic. At the end of the day, people care more about the roof over their heads than they do about global problems. In the eighties, we didn't have much by way of good substitutes for fossil fuel. So the message people heard was that they would have to accept economic hardship for the sake of the environment. That was not what people wanted to hear.
The lesson to learn from this is that we need to address the economic issues alongside the environmental ones. The message needs to not be that you must accept unemployment and poverty. The message needs to be that the task of transitioning the world to renewable energy is doable but enormous - and has the potential to create millions upon millions of jobs, as well as breaking the resource curse that decoupled the interests of the rulers from those of the people. That successfully turning our hands to the new energy industries will bring more prosperity than holding onto the old ones.
This is lying, spreading lies, with malicious intent. There was no scientific uncertainty.
A proper public policy would be to wipe out the Exxon, and all petrol companies, shareholders. Claw back all profits from all shareholders proportionally going back 40 years, all profits on those profits, and unwind the companies over the next 20 years strictly to public benefit. And if that is still not enough to pay for fixing what has been damaged, the corporate veil should be pierced and make every shareholder of these companies personally liable. And I'm one of those shareholders - I've owned BP directly and indirectly through funds.
And it is also quite damning for an unlimited 1st amendment concept that proposes telling lies is a right. Unlimited opinions however unpopular should be protected, but spreading proven falsehoods should not be protected. It should be used as evidence the speaker is culpable, in part, of the ensuing damage. Criminal? Perhaps. Civil? Absolutely.