Ask HN: What can be done to prevent a climate catastrophe?
It seems to me that governments can be counted out of taking the leadership needed to solve this within 12 years. If anything they seem to want to act against solving this issue in some cases.
So what can we do so our children don't live in some ghastly hothouse world?
The scientists have told us its our final chance.... not to start within 12 years, but solve it within 12 years.
I feel like the young people need to take charge of the world because the older generations have had their chance and not fixed it.
Maybe corporations are the ones who can be pressured to take the lead.
478 comments
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It gets even worse. If a large group of people reduced their energy consumption to help climate change it has the consequence of reducing demand and therefore energy costs will come down. That will make green energy cost uncompetitive and slow down the transition to green fuels.
This change really does need to come from government. So get politically involved.
Another way to look at it is, as more people demand green energy, the supply will increase faster to meet demand. As the supply increases, economies of scale reduce the cost, making it more competitive with fossil fuels while at the same time wind and solar efficiency will increase further reducing the cost per unit.
Eventually the supply with the lowest cost will win and the others may become obsolete.
Whether or not that can happen fast enough is another question. Taxation of fossil and subsidizing of renewables seems like a logical conclusion. The likelyhood of a massive win-win solution of that nature with no game theory cheats on a global scale seems much less probable than innovating our way out of it.
I don't think government on a coordinated global level can do it. It would be like diverting the same level of national resources as a war into a peacetime effort. Would need a way to demonize climate change so it becomes a common global enemy. But on the other side of demonizing is half or more of humanity, so it is really a new level of war over new types of resources being shoreline, water supply, and probablilty of destruction or famine by natural disasters.
I hope for no war and don't believe all that will happen. But it could. And I think investing in time, money, and peace seems like a valid approach to get behind vs trying to get government to do it.
I can't speak for Norway, but in the UK the sugar tax has had a huge impact - a _majority_ of soft drink manufacturers have significantly reduced sugar in their products, to avoid them becoming unaffordable, and it's had a very noticeable effect.
The UK tax is still pretty new so it's difficult to get hard numbers on that, but sugar taxes in general are fairly well studied and have been very effective worldwide. https://www.nature.com/articles/sj.bdj.2018.603 has a good summary, some highlights:
* "Overall 21.6% decrease in the monthly purchased volume of the higher taxed, sugary soft drinks"
* "People living in Philadelphia were 40% less likely to report consuming sugary drinks every day after the tax policy"
* "Mexico's 10% tax on sugar-sweetened beverages implemented in January 2014 is said to have led to a 5.5% drop in sugary drinks purchases by the end of that year and a further 9.7% fall in sales in 2015, yielding an average reduction of 7.6% over the study two-year period"
In Europe, gas prices are 2 to 3 times what they are in the US. As a result, cars are dramatically smaller and more fuel efficient. Transportation patterns are dramatically different, with many fewer miles driven per person.
It's Econ 101 that people adjust their spending in response to price changes. It varies exactly how they do so for different products, this is known as elasticity.
It's the "young and progressive" who know best! People with life experience are truly lost. /s
Edit: look at https://transitionnetwork.org - grassroots network in the UK that seems to be doing well at getting people to engage.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/10/09/richard-lindzen-lectu...
Maybe if solutions like geo-engineering were at least discussed instead of the chorus of the media/politicians telling people that taxes and fees are THE ONLY SOLUTION to the crisis.
Just my 2cents, but we would be so much further ahead if the conversation has some actual balance instead of these-days where people are complaining that having a 5/95 skew in favour of the armageddon scenario if we don't have a global tax on carbon, move to 100% renewables and electric cars as being too generous to the critics of this plan.
We now have hundreds of years of experience regarding politicians. Maybe we have to teach politics in schools:
On the methods the politicians have used to manipulate people and how to call them out.
On the way we should measure politicians and what makes a good decision makes vs. a poor one.
Hell for another issue, gay marriage. It was quite the sight to see the Deputy leader of the labor party who is openly gay vote against gay marriage legislation because the party had decided that wasn't the way they wanted to do it.
In any case, that doesn't account for the media which we don't vote for in any way.
Also just because we have centuries of experience with politics, it's about as developed as many of the other social sciences, which is to say very underdeveloped and at times heading backwards in it's understanding of the subject's truth.
Thats actually just wrong and shows how closed minded people are to how science works. Even if they were paid by big oil, shouldn't their evidence stand on it's own merits? Just like the claims made by scientists?
And no, I don't buy your false equivalence because the earth being round or gravity existing is empirically proved. Climate science has not and probably will not be ever proved on that level. If we could, then weather forecasts would also be perfect because we would be able to perfectly model exactly how the climate works but we don't, we strive every day to try and model the future better.
Just to give you a recent example: https://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/30277-c...
Can you show me how much hes being paid by big oil to do this? Or how all of the issues he found are just BS? Or maybe it's not exactly true that all researchers are all on the exact same page the media is typically on?
https://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus/
Wait a second, then why is it that almost every western country is currently seeing negative population forecasts without immigration?
Seems like western countries were already heading towards population decline but have been propped up in recent years with the call for more economic growth and I don't think those calls are hardwired at all.
I have read some predictions about world population continuing to increase to around 12 billion and stabilising at that number.
Let's say that happens. Then you run into the problem of people in western countries consuming many times more resources and energy per capital as developing world.
Then in order to avoid climate catastrophe it would mean you have to reduce standard of living for the minority that consumes the most fuel and energy, also standard of living of those in developing world could not catch up.
Basically the argument I'm trying to make it that it won't be sustainable to have 1 or 2 cars per family like it is normal in the West, and other similar luxuries.
Also I don't think 1-2 cars will be the issue, more along the lines of:
- Can you own a car? Or must you bike to work? - Can you access goods outside of your state? Since no trucks/planes for long distance shipping - How much Heating/Cooling in the Winter/Summer will you be allowed? If any?
That or we could look into geo-engineering maybe?
Don't get me wrong: the climate is going to change, arguably we're in a mass extinction event already and people aren't going to suddenly start acting in the collective long term welfare of humanity.
One of the things I like about futurism is the levelheaded optimism and pragmatism you tend to get. And I'll call out Isaac Arthur as a well-known example of this.
Think there's too many people? You can easily show that the world could easily produce enough to feed a population 10 times what we have now in the very near future, thanks largely to automation.
Think we're dumping too much CO2 into the atmosphere? We no doubt are but that problem basically goes away immediately if we ever get economic fusion power. Even if we don't, the plummetting cost of wind and solar may solve that anyway (by "solve" I mean that as soon as non-fossil fuel power production is cheaper than fossil fuels it becomes economic to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and turn into hydrocarbons).
Too expensive to get to space? Eventually the cost of this will go down to dollars per kilogram.
Worried about how we'll produce all that power? When getting stuff into orbit is sufficiently cheap it'll become economic to put solar collectors in orbit and beam energy back to Earth.
And all you need for this kind of optimism is the kind of technology we're widely expected to have this century.
So it's kind of sad that a lot of the larger fauna is doomed but you're not going to change people's appetites for rhino horns, fish bladders, tiger oil or pangolin dishes. Then again, maybe future genetics can restore some or all of those species.
The Earth has also been a lot warmer than it is now so I have trouble believing the doomsday scenarios of runaway climate change that'll turn the Earth into Venus just because the Earth has been here for 4-5 billion years, has been hotter than now and hasn't become Venus yet. We also seem to have a pretty poor history of predictions when it comes to climate change too.
Fundamentally this also seems like a "betting with the Mayans" type scenario too. Either the doomsayers are right and we're screwed. If so, you'll be right but who cares? We're still screwed. You're probably better off just hoping things will work out because, honestly, I think there's a pretty decent chance they will.
This is disingenuous because humans have been around say 2M years, and those hot climate years were >5M years ago. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geologic_temperature_record).
We don't need Earth to have Venus conditions for it to be a big problem for us.
Key here is rate of change, and what humans can survive. We are changing the climate many many times faster than ever before. Nature does not have the time to adapt. And the wars, famines and mass displacements coming from ecosystem collapse is like nothing we've seen in human history. Think we have a problem with a few million migrants? Try a billion or two!
P-T Extinction event "The Great Dying" took on the order of 100 000 years to elevate CO2 and still killed off 96% of marine species and 70% of land vertebrates. The largest mass extinction ever(?) We're going strong in that direction over a few hundred years.
And a very hot earth will have large areas that are not survivable by humans, by traditional crops and food animals, and so on. Storms and floods massively more powerful than we see today.
Frankly, how can you not be afraid of that future? It's very likely your descendants won't survive it.
Life on Earth will be fine, but that life will be different to the life we have today.
The only thing not fine is whether humans survive what they/we ultimately have brought about.
But in there is a kind of beautiful justice that the universe has in it's self-correcting algorithm... if you create imbalance, the imbalance will correct in time but perhaps to do so it kills you.
If we care about the human race, it means to care about the whole ecosystem and all other life on Earth. But the evidence of behaviour by people and governments is that they only care for themselves as individuals and not the wider human race, and other life on Earth.
I no longer see hope for significant change in the behaviour of humans, and I've shifted my view to believing that what is needed to provide massively long-term stability in the ecosystem for life on Earth is another mass extinction that includes humans.
Which sounds depressing, but doesn't feel it. I'm positive about life on Earth, just not about humans.
Humans will survive. They will adapt. It may not be in the same numbers and lifestyle as today, but the human race will likely be here for a very long time.
As individuals, we're not much more interesting than any other animal. It's our technological civilization that makes us interesting in the grand scheme of things, and that civilization is both hard to bootstrap and extremely fragile.
Well yes, nearly ('extreme' perhaps: 'ultimate' sounds a bit magical), but that's the problem. Darwinian evolution has created a creature than can avoid most sources of population limits that permit ecosystem stability. This same creature has the flexibility to repeat the trick in all regions on the planet, crashing one after another.
And then although our species is (for better or worse) remarkably resilient, agricultural civilisation is far too new to be able to make similar claims about it. The 21st century signs aren't good. It's hard to imagine major climate collapse convulsions not resulting in ongoing wars, probably nuclear.
So yes, literal extinction of humans doesn't seem likely. Some people may enjoy the idea of a dystopic 'The Road' style rag-tag dog-eat-dog existence (though they're probably mostly pale wormy teens who in real life panic when out of reach of a screen). But the breakdown of a planetary society of 7-12 billion (depending on how far into this process we can jury rig nations to hold together) is going to be nothing but a litany of sorrow & pain.
Humans will be fine, as a species. But the human and economic costs will be large.
Compare it to the Hurricane Katrina: most people in New Orleans weathered it fine (i.e. by evacuating the city). The city itself also survived mostly okay (it's still there). But the economic cost of cleanup was huge; and while most people survived without injury, many did not for various reasons.
The choice of "spend a bit of money now, save a Katrina later" versus "save money now, have a Katrina later" is pretty clear. Unfortunately in the case of Katrina we didn't have much of a choice, but for climate change we do. If we invest resources now we can save a lot of problems later on. Or we can spend our resources on other things now, and pay a huge price later.
Alarming "zomg we might all die" stuff isn't really all that helpful or likely to convince politicians or businesses to actually do something. It also invites the "meh, the earth has been warmer" counter-argument, which is missing the point. I think more level-headed risk analysis which lists potential costs/benefits is more useful.
For example, is it worth for some country to "invest", say, $100 billion in reducing emissions - which, at least unilaterally, won't be sufficient to prevent the effects of climate change but just mitigate them - or can they achieve better mitigation by a comparable investment in reinforcing their shoreline, updating or relocating buildings, etc?
If USA had to vote on whether to spend (or lose by restricting growth) $1 trillion of USA resources to prevent $10 trillion of future losses in SE Asia, then I'd assume that such proposals would be swiftly declined; spending our resources on other things now and having someone else pay a huge price later would be considered a quite good deal by many governments, as the countries that most need to take action are not the same countries that will bear the harshest consequences.
Economic, human, and ecological costs. I am not hugely in favour of reducing everything to economics (although it's definitely an important part).
I also don't think that it's as simple as "$1 trillion of USA resources to prevent $10 trillion of future losses in SE Asia". Globalisation means that "local" economies aren't really all that local; so problems in e.g. SE Asia will also affect other parts of the world.
TBH statements like these really grate on me. Yes, Earth will be fine in the same sense that you'd be fine if you surgically removed your arms, legs, eyeballs, ears, and tongue and then were fed intravenously and your waste disposed of for you. You might live a long life and have lots of nice dreams.
The reality is that we are in early stages of kicking off a cascade of effects that could wipe out the majority of the food web on Earth--let's say, everything larger than your finger. Yeah sure, insects and microbes will reboot it all--in a hundred millions years, if ever. Wonderful!
To make such flippant remarks about so profoundly annihilating the bioversity of this very special planet is not helpful in the dialogue.
Let's please work on this problem seriously.
So far we've really only scratched the surface, but there have been hundreds of local mass die-offs (billions of individual animals each). https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/01/150113-mass...
The Great Barrier Reef is about half dead now. In two years. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/since-20...
But look at what happened at the end of the Permian age. 96% of species were lost. It was due to CO2/methane causing climate change. https://cosmosmagazine.com/palaeontology/big-five-extinction...
(btw we still have no idea what caused the extinction at the end of the Triassic).
We're basically on the way to combining all of these causes of mass extinctions in a super-short timeframe that may mushroom into one super-massive extinction.
And as far as what-if's go, if climate change sets off a global conflict, and there's a nuclear war, forget it.
[1] https://www.nature.com/news/2010/100728/full/news.2010.379.h...
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/volcano-carbon-emissions/
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/which-emits...
https://www.skepticalscience.com/volcanoes-and-global-warmin...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/06/06/how-...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earthtalks-volcan...
> According to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), the world’s volcanoes, both on land and undersea, generate about 200 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) annually, while our automotive and industrial activities cause some 24 billion tons of CO2 emissions every year worldwide
But I guess you're more knowledgeable on the subject than the US geological survey?
> On average, human activities put out in just three to five days, the equivalent amount of carbon dioxide that volcanoes produce globally each year
https://www.usgs.gov/news/human-activities-produce-more-carb...
https://www.skepticalscience.com/volcanoes-and-global-warmin...
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/earthtalks-volcan...
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=compare+human+emissions+volcanic+e...
Have to agree with you there. Things will probably get much worse before they get better. Now there are 2 possible attitudes, either depression from obvious lack of adequate action, or acceptance of what's about to come will come, whatever it is.
By acceptance I don't mean ignorance, by all means promote moral, 'green' solutions, recycle, vote for sane people who at least pretend to care (I am looking at you, US). Or do gazillion of other things that help, and avoid those which don't. I know I do my part, however insignificant.
But change is inevitable. Even though on paper we can still avoid most dark stuff, we won't. Mankind as a whole will react properly only when it really will start to hurt, globally, and rich won't be able to comfortably escape or hide from it.
Some will die because of this. Some will profit from it. On enough long-term scale, it won't matter unless mankind will go extinct which I don't believe will happen.
Do I like it? Not at all. Can I change it? Same answer. Am I content with it and not waste my time, energy and mood on being depressed about it? Absolutely.
For a recent example look up the younger dryas on Wikipedia. It seems like the average global temp moved about 5 degrees over a few decades.
Closest I can get to supporting your client is that the local temperature of Greenland went up a lot at the end of that period. Not global. And given the article talks a lot about global thermohaline circulation, extreme local variation is not surprising.
I can’t follow the link from there to (Brauer et al. 2008) as that link is paywalled.
The Greenland graph is essentially vertical, but the Cariaco graph looks like it’s relatively spread out as well as being much smaller magnitude — though even then, the delta is double the current estimated maximum sustainable excess over pre-industrial temperatures.
http://gergs.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/All_palaeotemps_...
Areas where more than a billion people live today will become uninhabitable to humans if they warm up by 14 degrees. Actually, much sooner than that.
Another is sea level rise. For +14C that's on the order of +30 meters as currently predicted.
And of course such drastic changes don't come alone. Weather patterns will change, food production will be threatened, governments will be destabilized, wars will happen.
We can tech our way out of some of this but who's to say that we will be given enough time and resources. The universe doesn't owe us anything.
If so it's simply cheaper to entirely fix global warming. If not, what are we planning on eating?
We're already seeing species can't react quickly enough to changing conditions. Flora especially takes time to move. If it's only humanity that is adapting, isn't the point rather moot?
If the climate situation gets to the point of crashing global supply chains, say goodbye to all modern technology. Whatever's left will degrade quickly, and we'll be back to preindustrial levels, but with no easily accessible dense energy sources to bootstrap another industrial revolution.
This is why I keep saying that the most important goal right now is not to protect the planet, not to protect the human species, but to protect our technological civilization. If it collapses, we'll still be there (albeit in reduced numbers). But our civilization won't recover for millennia.
Sure there are dependencies, and some technologies will collapse and become unachievable for generations. But others are essentially free of dependencies - the germ theory of disease, the staff system, democracy, air travel, bicycles. Easy to bring back or keep, and with tremendous benefits.
I've always been sad that post-apocalyptic scenarios have no bicycles, and no biplanes. They just postulate people being the same as people were in the stone age, maybe with some recycled trash thrown in.
Consider that food production is very much dependent and looped with all the existing supply chains. As some say, modern agriculture is essentially pouring petroleum into the ground and harvesting crops that grow from it. Could we use our scientific knowledge to get better results than preindustrial people did with the same tech level? Sure. Will it be enough to feed even 20% of current population, especially given the battered climate? I doubt it. And the way I see it, a lot of our "social technologies" - as well as more "physical" ones - seem to depend on population size and density.
Speaking of science fiction tropes, I read an interesting book once - "The Windup Girl". It featured a post-climate-change world with depleted fossil fuels and collapsed technology, that still sort-of worked thanks to machines being powered by mechanical work (with spring systems for storage and special breeds of animals providing muscle power). I wish more books and movies would go into this territory.
--
[0] - not just because it's what we'll need come climatepocalypse, but also because I believe there are many unexplored "low-tech/hi-science" solutions that could let us achieve similar results in many areas of life, while using much less energy, or with much less dependence on existing infrastructure. For instance, I feel that mechanical energy storage (springs) and gliders are underexplored and underapplied, since energy today is too cheap to bother.
--
EDIT and a tangent: I am really interested in the possibility of combining gliders with computers and sensors to enable extremely energy-efficient (if not time-efficient) flight. If anyone knows of work being done in this space, I'd love to get some directions or resources about it.
Farming is more of a 'trickle petroleum into the ground and harvest crops'. Its one of the most efficient of technologies now. With good timing and no-till and ammonia fertilizer, even eroded clay hillsides produce bumper crops. It is a fragile technology tree but much simpler trees could be forged, having a good whack of the same benefits.
RE farming and other technology trees, it might be worth it to hedge our bets by trying to develop such simpler tech trees right now. In the worst case, we'd be making life much easier for the survivors. In the best case, maybe we could reapply some of those ideas to further reduce energy waste.
Maybe we’ll have a rennasaince. Maybe we won’t; but Paper Books will be critical
Many things are like that. And we don't have decades to wait for the Earth to become congenial again, we need to eat every day.
That will be a giant migration crisis, on an unprecedented scale, sure. Maybe even a world war. Nothing good, not in slightest. Something best avoided at all costs.
Yet, the point is, if this won't be avoided - humanity as a whole is still not in danger. We're not going extinct if Earth will warm up. The world will change drastically, many millions will die, ecosystems will be shattered - but H.sapiens aren't going to disappear as a species.
What about industrial civilization?
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080619142112.h...
The ice core showed the Northern Hemisphere briefly emerged from the last ice age some 14,700 years ago with a 22-degree-Fahrenheit spike in just 50 years...
But sometimes a brand of pragmatic, disciplined optimism serves to inspire without diminishing the urgency or importance of the matter at hand. This hit that mark pretty well.
You're looking at big, broad patterns and assuming they will work out on the huge scales necessary for civilisation to continue. Other people are looking at the big broad patterns and assuming that cascading failures will make problems accelerate.
It's a mindset and a positive attitude that is constructive instead of spreading fear and doom, which does not yield any positive outcome at all.
That's not true. You are keeping saying that in several of your comments. There are many examples where things have changed because of
What you and some others here are proposing is basically to wait that things crash and then directly jump to the "New technologies" part. Like a child waiting for christmas.If you read the comments again you will see that all that was said is "you won't change the outcome this way", which means that political action alone is not enough.
Look at what's happening currently. All that fear and doom may lead to political decisions, but have they changed the carbon level in our atmosphere? You try to regulate something without looking at the overall outcome. If you want to do something, it's much better to do something positive, e.g. passing subsidies for renewable energy tech.
I think it doesn't make sense anymore to discuss this here. HN is not a good place to discuss different opinions which could be interpreted as being political. The people with the downvote power decide what's valid and what's not.
It's sad as otherwise we could have a fruitful discussion here.
Okay, that makes sense and, even better, also works sometimes. In fact, renwable energy is a good example where incentives can trigger changes (see the solar market in Europe). However, there are also many examples where incentives have not worked, although running for decades, because people are too lazy or because the financial incentives are not big enough. People and (by design) the industry are waiting that the goverment pays and says "please, please, take that money and prevent that we destroy human life for next 100000 years".
At some point you have to say "fck you, stop that behavior, otherwise you will kill us all". In my opinion, we are very close to that point with the CO2 level. In contrast, OP seems to suggest that we should continue and hope that some miracle in technology will help us, because saying "Stop that, you idiot" doesn't work, right? The market will fix it and regulations and deep states are bad, right? But the fact is that regulations have worked many times. See leaded petrol, asbestos, catalyzators, pesticides, and basically all laws that we have had in Europe for the protection of the environment in the past 50 years. I am not a child waiting for christmas, but an adult who knows that the parents bought the presents.
I don't get why it's necessary to start a left vs. right, regulations vs. non-regulations war on this. This is effectively destroying the discussion about real solutions.
I got a completely different impression of op's comment. Namely, that we as humans cannot control everything, but there's ways we can get real progress when we combine our talents to come up with great technical solutions.
I doubt that we will be able to turn the clock back, and I wouldn't want to participate in trying.
That doesn't mean that we cannot do something positive via political means meanwhile. I'm just saying that evidence suggests it doesn't solve the problem on a global scale and hence is obviously not the whole solution.
Personally, I'm impressed with the overall quality of discussion in this thread. It's going a whole lot better than most other discussions I've seen online. There's a certain irony that you are against "doom and gloom" arguments, but fail to see any hope for productive discussion. Stick around, keep discussing, and make it incrementally better.
It's becoming an echo chamber.
I am happy to continue a discussion, but not here.
My point is that this is unfortunately what human nature is and I don't see any great change tool that unless we get to some kind of post-scarcity situation but I'm reasonably optimistic about that.
I wish there was a prediction market where I could bet against you on this outcome...
You speak of this as if space migration is going to be scalable.
The thing about the that is that it's not high tech. It's an engineering problem not a science problem. A massive engineering solution I'll grant you. I'll also concede that there are going to be a lot of steps on between.
The future is going to be very mundane. Conventional reusable rockets are going to be enough. The fuel cost of a launch is orders of magnitude lower than the cost of whatever satellites you're bringing into orbit.
Exactly. You can spread doom as much as you want and it won't help. You won't get a critical mass to listen to you. They won't change their behavior based on some event that will most likely happen in the far future. Sad, but true.
As a species, we don't have a history of planning and preventing. Instead we have always been adapting to change as things happen. This is essentially the same.
If technology caused a problem, technology can also solve it.
Sometimes. If it's economically viable. Sometimes many decades later.
Take PCBs as an example. Their absurd longevity means nearly all of it is still around, causing a long list of harms, and will probably continue for decades more. Long after production ceased.
In that context:
* Economic viability is a matter of time. Have commercially viable fusion reactors? You better recalculate your econ viability all over.
* PCBs: Nanotechnology, robotics, AI
What do you want people to do? Stop living their lives and give up tech? To what level? Can we keep the wheel?
That's not how things work in reality.
Just saying that because some people don't understand that there are good reasons to give up those clumsy wheel things, they ain't the bees knees.
In the post nuclear war movie 'Threads' there is a quick loss of education and language in the nuclear winter years. A girl is shown with a record player and records, this scene is about how the girl has no idea what this is for, the very culture of music is not conceivable, it has been lost.
All tech is given up in the apocalypse. As is language and civilisation. It becomes a life of harsh survival. Violence becomes the universal language that everyone understands, that's it.
This is still an outcome our politicians have not gone to rule out for us. With our taxes we pay for tens of thousands of nuclear weapons to be pointed at us.
If we just give up the cult of militarism then we will be fine.
I wrote a series of posts on this recently with more to come. Far more than I can fit in here. It's a classic tragedy of the commons but there is hope.
https://unop.uk/how-to-help-with-a-big-global-problem-as-a-t...
There are things you can do to take personal action. The ones that actually matter are usually disruptive (e.g. eliminating your daily commute is orders of magnitude better than eating local). Most of the mainstream 'sustainable living' tips are just a drop in the bucket designed around minimizing disruption and maximizing showing off.
First, if we have clean energy, are we going to shut down fossil fuel plants that have already been built? If not, then fossil fuel will just become cheaper as demand drops, making burning fossil fuels attractive again. Countries currently plan to reduce their emissions, but none are planning to reduce their fossil fuel exports. They just hope it will show up on another country's emissions balance sheet.
Even if we did develop super cheap clean energy, that would only reduce emissions in the future. Past emissions hang around for centuries and contribute to warm the planet (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/jan/16/greenhou...). We would need to pay huge amounts to sequester that CO2 and I don't see anybody volunteering to foot that bill.
This paper summarises both issues well: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Both are just aspects of the fundamental issue - although technological solutions perhaps could be developed, there is no political or economic will to do so, and no indication that will change.
That depends entirely on how cheap the alternatives are. Fossil fuel mining is not zero cost in itself, so there is a minimum price it can’t go below.
Indeed, quite a lot of coal plants are being shut down — they can’t compete as the fuel itself is too expensive. This is not universal as not all coal is the same price and transport costs are also relevant, but it is happening.
That's not how markets work, at all. Oil has an extraction cost, and once the price falls below the profitable threshold, the production will absolutely shutdown.
This highly visible with the boom/bust cycle of the more expensive extraction areas (dakotas, canada, etc).
So as demand continues to drop due to competition from cheaper energy, oil supply will start to collapse as well because none of it comes for free and taking it out of the ground will become a money losing proposition.
This is untrue. If cost to extract >> market price, then existing operations may well just be shut down. To quote Hemmingway it would likely happen "gradually then suddenly".
That's an enormous "if". Fusion research has been underfunded for decades, we don't even know if we can sustain it, and for a reason I don't get, many ecologists are anti-nuclear. Plus fusion won't solve everything. You won't put a sun core into your car nor your plane, not in the next centuries.
> Even if we don't, the plummetting cost of wind and solar may solve that anyway (by "solve" I mean that as soon as non-fossil fuel power production is cheaper than fossil fuels it becomes economic to remove CO2 from the atmosphere and turn into hydrocarbons).
Oh, you mean the unreliable power sources that sometimes provide electricity, sometimes don't?
> The Earth has also been a lot warmer than it is now
Well yes but 5°C is also the difference between an ice age and a hot age. We're currently in a hot age and the 4°C increase we're heading to are not very engaging. (Remainder, during ice age North America down to NY and Northern Europe down to Paris were covered by enormous glaciers. So what will the climate be in 4°C?). https://xkcd.com/1379/
Also in human history the Earth has never been this hot.
> Too expensive to get to space? Eventually the cost of this will go down to dollars per kilogram.
Ha. To escape Earth gravity you still need to spend 6.2*10^7 J/kg. That's gonna be a long time before we get to 1$/kg given that rocket propulsion is extremely costly (and as far as we know can't rely on atomic energy either). We're still at ~25 000 $/kg. And anyway recent studies show that the human body is unlikely to bear a trip to Mars, let alone the health issues caused by weightless environment.
Edit, source: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2018/09/26/1807522115. Basically the study suggests heavy ion irradiation is dangerous for the digestive system. The only thing is I'm not sure about the number of mice they used.
> We also seem to have a pretty poor history of predictions when it comes to climate change too.
I mean it's not as if oil companies conducted their own research and reached the very same conclusion in 1977. Oh wait. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-knew-about-...
I'm sorry but you're just burying your head in the sand, making the problem someone else's.
citations please..
My understanding is that without shielding about 5% of the voyagers will get cancer, and that many people consider this a reasonably acceptable risk. Does this make that number substantially worse?
Could you link to an article or study about this? I don't believe that humans will ever reach other stars, but if even Mars is too much, oh well.
Agreed with car - not sure I agree with plane.
Currently we have fission powered submarines and boats. Putting a fission reactor in a plane would be somewhat suicidal, but a fusion reactor would be mostly safe. A large plane is similar in scale to a submarine.
There were recently some rumours about the Russians producing a nuclear powered cruise missile.
I'm not sure a fusion powered plane would be any less crazy. At least with D-T fusion you have a MUCH higher neutron radiation requiring more shielding. OTOH if the plane crashes there's less worry about nuclear waste spreading over the landscape.
Can we have that before 2040 please
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/07/climate/ipcc-climate-repo...
Who knows what the future will bring. I have little doubt that the planet and human species will survive in the longer term, but the ecological, human, and economic costs will be huge. It's a stupid gamble: the benefits to ignoring climate change are small, and the dangers are huge.
It bothers me to no end that even in Europe many parties that acknowledge that climate change is real and a serious problem (basically everyone, only the US/GOP is a mainstream source of climate denial) kind of ignore it because "zomg the economy might shrink 0.001% the next quarter". It's spectacularly short-sighted, and it's one of several examples where our democratic system is failing massively in addressing serious problems.
I think you are fundamentally missing the point of the question. The question is what we can do to prevent climate change, not how we should align our beliefs not to worry about it.
> So it's kind of sad that a lot of the larger fauna is doomed but you're not going to change people's appetites for rhino horns, fish bladders, tiger oil or pangolin dishes. Then again, maybe future genetics can restore some or all of those species.
This perfectly exemplifies my problem with this attitude.
You call this "levelheaded optimism", but you're basically throwing your hands up hoping for someone to apply some sort of sci-fi solution to the problem at some point in the future. Calling for Jurassic Park to restore extinct species is the opposite of levelheaded. To say that there's nothing we can do about it now is really just thinly veiled defeatism and not at all optimistic.
Meanwhile, for example, the demand and supply of rhino horns is decreasing overall, not because people are content with speculating about how someone else in a future generation will solve the problem, but because deliberate action is being taken to change the attitudes towards rhino horns, campaigning to educate people about the medicinal myths surrounding them, to destroy smuggled horns and to protect the animals from poachers.
If the people engaging in these actions had just laid back, convinced that someone will be able to beam rhinos from a parallel universe by 2100AD anyway, they'd probably have been extinct by now.
I used to be a big believer in this. But, from a pure waste heat standpoint, if we ever have to worry about having enough area in Earth's surface for solar panels, we have much bigger problems.
We are nowhere near that point now, but given a small but steady exponential growth in the energy supply, we'll get there in a couple hundred years.
However, space based solar power could help with intermittently of solar/wind if battery tech doesn't outpace enonomic orbital launches.
For example, in the currently worst recent hurricane years, cars killed something like 10 times more people in USA than these hurricanes. If we got people to drive half as much (which would help but not be sufficient), then the most impact on deaths and injuries would come directly from the change in habits, not from the effect on global warming.
If we're not willing to drastically reduce driving so as we'd save some of the 40000 USA road vehicle deaths/year (and we're obviously not), then why would we be willing to drastically reduce emissions just to save some of the 2000-4000 hurricane deaths/year?
The same goes for massive flooding. OK, Bangladesh will plausibly get many deaths from the sea level rise. USA? Not so much; it can probably afford a massive infrastructure investment to do Netherland-style dams for all densely populated coastal areas.
1) We don't have enough time to wait for those solutions to be implemented.
2) Climate lag. We're now only seeing the consequences from the emissions from the 80s. Since then we've emitted a lot more CO2. Not only we need to reach zero emissions asap, as in in the next decade, but we also need to reach strong negative emissions very soon.
Don't get me wrong. I think if all humanity was focused working towards that goal it might be possible to get a shot at this, but I don't see that happening anytime soon.
https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/a38zve/watch-the-trailer...
If we believe in evidence-based science, then all evidence points to Republicans being anti-science. You don't have to be a committed lifelong Democrat to see that the current Republican party is fighting climate change efforts at every turn and needs to be displaced in order for political progress on the issue to happen.
That's my theory anyway.
And conspiracy theorists will have fodder for the next 50 years.
Tell them the magic elves demand doing your bidding? Because both things are on the same level of rationality? Civilization, as such, is in no danger.
...
To OP: The problem will solve itself if the population of the world goes down enough, whether naturally or through some actual catastrophe. Indeed most of the world's birth rate is low enough that we are well on the way of a solution. Look up which parts of the world still have massive population growth and then see how many liberals you can get on board with trying to reduce that. Good luck.
1. Guardian: "President Obama has four years to save the Earth" (2009)
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/jan/18/jim-hans...
Barack Obama has only four years to save the world. That is the stark assessment of Nasa scientist and leading climate expert Jim Hansen who last week warned only urgent action by the new president could halt the devastating climate change that now threatens Earth. Crucially, that action will have to be taken within Obama's first administration, he added.
2. The Independent: "Snowfalls are now a thing of the past" (2000)
According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”.
“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/11/12/one-of-the-longest-ru...
You can read more about the endlessly repeated warnings about "tipping points" that never come in this fairly partisan but well-researched blog article: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/10/08/the-ever-receding-cli...
Eventually we will have a Democrat President...get ready for a deafening wave of silence when that President does as little or maybe even less than our current one. Rest assured if that President is elected during a recession, putting people to work will override climate concerns.
That's why we have Republican congressional leaders saying things like people can't change the climate only God can (Inhofe), that sea level rise is caused by rocks falling into the ocean, and that increasing atmospheric CO2 levels are the result of more people exhaling.
Short of one of Murdoch's children changing the Fox line, only losing elections will change this behavior.
For a long time (1980s-2000s for sure), major fossil fuel companies and other extraction industries -- famously ExxonMobil and Koch Industries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ExxonMobil_climate_change_cont...), but quite a bit of others as well, have spent a lot of time funding and backing climate change denialism. The extraction industries tended to align to the Republican side, so these scientifically unsound opinions have tended to trickle up through conservative think tanks (eg Heartland Institute) and eventually down to the populist outlets (like Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and the like).
It does seem like that some of the oil companies are kind of weakly coming around to the fact that climate change is not something you can simply misinformation away. Maybe the lawsuits against extraction companies (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/20/can-clim...) are helping here. Regardless, it is not nearly enough to me at the moment. This is the pipeline that needs to be shut off in order for the message to be clearer on the right wing side in America.
Unfortunately, the concept of climate change denial has taken hold on the "conspiracy theory" side of American politic, so the concept is going to be floating around out there for a while (there are 18th century conspiracy theories still active after all). But what I'd hope to see if the extraction industry misinformation stops is that the more rational side of conservative American politics realize that this is a problem. Unlike most of Europe, it is difficult to think of many conservative politicians and personalities in the United States who are not denialists. (Arnold Schwarzenegger's one of the few I can think of immediately that is strongly convinced that climate change is a huge problem.)
When asked if he would stop offshore drilling, Jerry Brown responded that he refused to put that many people out of work.
This is in a state where Democrats have effectively no opposition
The idea the Democrats are even one iota different on climate is ridiculous and dangerous. If Democrats won't act when they have majorities, a sympathetic electorate and no opposition, when will they act?
Please show me ONE piece of real evidence or instance where a Democrat willingly sacrificed REAL economic gain to achieve a climate goal...and before you mention solar, wind or carbon credits, keep in mind the US only engaged these policies when it was economically feasible to do so. Show me where a Democratic put a voter out of work to save a polar bear.
By the way if you look at where US wind assets are, it's primarily "red" states
Shall we mention All Gore? Asks me to live in a tent while living in a 12k sq ft mansion and traveling on a private jet..
Lastly, all of the evidence on climate we have now was available to Obama...what did he do? People act like it has been decades since a Democrat lived in the White House. Where was the indignation three years ago?
I expect this comment to just be downvoted without reply...
http://environment.law.harvard.edu/2018/06/california-cafe-s...
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/09/10/california-renewab...
I'll punt it back to you. Can you please show me ONE piece of real evidence or instance where the Republican Congress did _anything_ positive regarding climate change?
Also, I won't claim (and didn't) that electing a Democratic majority is sufficient to address climate change. It's just necessary, because only when Republicans realize that they'll continue to lose on climate change that we'll make real bipartisan progress.
I am conservative and tend to lean-republican. I am not anti-science. Please stop generalizing.
It's difficult to attribute something as vague as pro or anti science to a large group of people. I wouldn't want to get into that flame war on HN. However, OP has a point that Democrats are more likely to be concerned about the real impact of climate change.
[0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/231530/global-warming-concern-s...
But we’ve seen in recent years how technology can influence politics. I’d quote a tweet from Tristan Harris from the other day [1]:
> In an hypothetical world, if Facebook were re-designed entirely into a global coordination tool for billions of people to take the most meaningful and significant steps to fight climate change -- what would it look like?
1: https://twitter.com/tristanharris/status/1049177712227573760
There is a tipping point in there that we could be prevented from hitting, but I really don't think that will happen.
The real political incentive behind fossil fuel subsidy comes down to technology and economics. The reality is that every nation is dependent on oil and gas and without them their economies would be destroyed. The real reason politicians fear a real push towards cleaner energy is that it will increase energy prices enough to trigger nationwide riots and protests.
Cement industry, heating are large consumers of fossil fuel that are seeing very little advances compared to electrification of the transportation sector.
So just because renewable electricity starts to dominate does not mean our carbon footprint goes to zero.
I wrote a lot more on this recently, with ideas that people on here can use to help influence better outcomes: https://unop.uk/how-to-help-with-a-big-global-problem-as-a-t...
It's a shame that the big technology companies aren't using their influence and reach to help.
https://www.ecowatch.com/this-country-isnt-just-carbon-neutr...
Here’s hoping for a technological solution or failing that gradual and non-catastrophic climate change.
Change in CO2 Emissions per capita 1990-2016 https://twitter.com/naytadata/status/1049675803007602688?s=2...
What if the whole problem is that of "growth"?
Here's one possible chain of thought. I don't fully subscribe to this, so please feel free to poke holes in it:
1. The biggest polluters tend to be commercial enterprises
2. They are aware of the environmental impact of their actions, but are reluctant to stop
3. They are staffed by (mostly) normal human beings, but they continue because they are heavily incentivized to show continued growth
4. Businesses can no longer reach a "steady state" -- they must continue growth or be considered failures
5. Growth appears to be demanded by stockholders
6. Stockholders need growth for return on their investments
7. Investments are necessary because of... inflation ?
Ergo, stop inflation, slow down growth?
First, in order to determine what people will do, the relevant word is not "need" but "want".
#6 is that stockholders want growth of return on their investments (because, hey, extra money is good for them). And they'll want that growth to be as big as possible, no matter what the inflation is; so stopping inflation won't remove the pressure for growth.
On the other hand, if you want to force people to be satisfied with what they have and not strive for more, well, that's against a lot of our psychology, it's not going to happen - compared to that, getting all the governments to do what needs to be done (while still striving for as much growth is feasible given the restrictions) is easy.
And while increasing regulations on climate change would be costly, it's a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of stopping GDP growth and would harms tons of individuals who would find it harder to find a job and provide for their family.
If you are arguing the easiest fix to climate change is to convince everyone to stop being interested in increasing their material wealth. That seems like a hell of an uphill battle. Orders of magnitude harder than passing a really high carbon tax.
P.S. getting rich is usually not the terminal goal, but a means to financial security for the middle class, and status for the upper class.
Consider lighting. When efficient lighting started to take off, it sucked. CFLs were expensive and worked poorly. People avoided them unless they were forced into them or really wanted to be green.
Now, LEDs are awesome. They’re still more expensive up-front, but the breakeven period is really short. They look great. I use them everywhere, not for environmental reasons, but because they’re the best practical choice.
Electric cars are another example. Used to be they were a sacrifice, unless your driving needs fit into a really narrow niche. Now they’re really good. They’re still not cheap, but people who can’t afford them often wish they could, and the prices will come down. Similar to lighting, I don’t drive an electric car to be green (although it’s a nice bonus), I drive it because it’s practical and convenient.
It shouldn’t have to be this way, but I think it does. Maybe it’ll work out anyway. It’s looking possible.
Right now our best technology for dealing with coordination problems are government and treaties.
25 % of emissions are from electricity [1], and 21 % from industry. Industy would quickly start using more electricity once it became cheap. Transportation (14 %) will take time to electrify, and the 24 % of emissions from agriculture and forestry is harder to remove (increase meat prices, thus lowering demand and production).
China, India, UAE and South Korea are building lots of reactors now.[2] I really hope Europe, the Americas and Africa follow.
We have a solution! Yes, it costs money, let's do it!
[1] https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss... [2] http://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-and...
Anything else is just wishful thinking that places much more faith in the ability of people to value their long term interests over their short term comfort than evidence suggests is warranted.
We worry about losing languages, cultures, artwork to the unyielding entropic horror named time. Not because we have a pragmatic need for them. But the future is scary when you can't bring the past with you. My culture is my security blanket.
Maybe my kids are going to grow up in a world not defined by technology but by the change in daily regimen of existence. Humans adapt really well to just about anything, so I bet my kids will feel right at home. They'll roll their eyes on cue when I insist that the future wasn't supposed to be like this.
I've always kind of wondered how someone as liberal as me can possibly turn into an old curmudgeon. Maybe this is how. Maybe I'll be disquieted not by being overrun by the creep of new gadgets, but by looking around and seeing a completely foreign anthroposphere.
Relevant paper. 75% recorded decline in insect biomass:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
But they also said ten years ago that ten years would be the absolutely longest time we had to prevent catastrophic climate change.
They also said the world would be overpopulated and we wouldn't be able to feed everybody by the end of the sixties so who knows.
Thanks to the green revolution, we figured out how to massively increase crop yield, otherwise we would have seen problems supplying enough food. In fact that's kind of the root of many of todays problems. The population of earth has doubled since 1980, when GHG levels were safe. If we couldn't feed another 3.5 billion people they wouldn't have been born and we wouldn't be in this mess. We'd be in a much different mess, where rationing and population control are common, but at least we wouldn't also be cooking ourselves
Y2K was supposed to be a global catastrophe. It got quietly fixed. No one (but me) wakes up today and goes "Oh. Thank. God. We aren't living in the Y2K post apocalypse!"
In fact, I have been told that most people laugh at the idea that we ever worried about it because it turned out fine, so we must not have been in real danger.
The Kuwait oil wells were supposed to burn for years and be a global catastrophe. Crack teams converged on the country and put them out in a mere 6 months. No one is saying "Hallelujah!" about that either. It is also forgotten while we are on to bellyaching about our next catastrophe.
Don't get me wrong. I'm an environmental studies major and I have lived without a car for more than a decade and I would like to do more to mitigate this problem. But I'm pretty damn sure that if I actually fixed it, A. I would likely get zero credit and B. The very next morning the entire world would be focused on some new problem rather than dancing in the streets to celebrate this triumph.
In the mean time,let me recommend that you pee on a tree. (Website possibly coming soon.)
Eat less meat.
And pee on a tree.
Do that every day. Track it if you need to. Spread the word if you like, though leading by example is more powerful than trying to lecture people.
We are all just dust in the wind anyway. But you can choose what your little speck gets up to, at least to some degree.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12656045
And then I spontaneously created a little website, which failed to go viral or save the world with potty humor. And I took it offline. I recently put it back online in hopes of repurposing it and removed all pages.
Just for you, I have restored the main landing page:
https://peeonatree.blogspot.com/2018/09/pee-on-tree.html
Our next wars could be fought over water. You can fight that while helping grow bigger, healthier trees.
It's a silly theory by someone who likely has delusions of grandeur.
Actually removing thousands of billions of tons of excess carbon from the atmosphere is still an unsolved problem. We can't do it with trees unless we find a black hole to stuff them into.
If nothing else, slowing things down and hurtling towards our doom less quickly buys us time to come up with Real Solutions (TM).
1. Drop coal and gas as energy sources immediately. Use renewable and nuclear energy as main power sources. Phase out nuclear after couple decades, when we hopefully can get all our energy needs from renewables. EDIT: forgot to add in fusion.
2. Eat less meat. I am not saying to go full radical vegan, just have less of it. Most people I know have meat for every main meal of the day (breakfast, lunch, dinner). We can definitely eat less of it. Meat production generates extreme amounts of CO2 and consumes too much of valuable land.
3. "Global one child policy". Sounds extreme - but we must lessen global population of humans. I know that western countries have negative growth already, problem is how to solve overpopulation in non-western countries and do it fast (ideally in one generation). Even with technological advances, IMO having 10-12+ billion people on Earth won't do any good for anyone.
The other two are even more infeasible.
It's a theoretical list which would greatly reduce our impact on climate in utopian world.
#3 is extremely infeasible
I would not agree that #1 is impossible (it's just a problem with stigma and politics), though I agree that it is very unlikely and needs great dedication from governments of powerful countries, to make it happen in 10 or even 20 years.
Though what's the problems with #2 to make it "more infeasible"? I am not vegan/vegetarian, but I have no problem eating 10 times less meat than I did 5 years ago.
The problem with geoengineering is that they make someone clearly responsible for climate change in the good direction. So geoengineering is going to cause trillions in damage, on purpose. So it'll never be done.
These solutions:
1) takes 10 years (minimum) to happen, and ignores that the environmental groups are much more against nuclear than against fossil fuels. So probably never going to happen.
Furthermore, requires rebuilding the electricity grid and changing, I don't know, 100 million households to electrical heating. That too will take time and can't happen before the first part is complete.
So in 12 years ? No appreciable effect
2) won't work at all. That land won't be replaced with co2 sinks. Even if we do put forests, they take half a century before becoming sinks.
Won't work in 12 years. Hell, won't work before we run out of oil. We might as well do nothing.
3) won't take effect until those kids start using significant resources, say 20 years. Won't cause decrease until the current generation starts dying off (worldwide average age is still low 20s, so let's generously say in 50 years). Also: who will take care of those people before they die ?
Won't work in 12 years
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
2. why not radical? we have "good enough" plant-based replacements, and these will improve a lot when meat/dairy/eggs/leather simply becomes out-lawed. (needs a law too) why point one "stop immediatly" and point 2 being just reduce as a personal choice?
3. this i do not get. we have seen (again and again) that educating women greatly changes the reproductive rates. we can just do that! the one-child policy was disasterous for china, and while it may work in the dev'd world, it is the undev'd world where the reduction is badly needed and where the china-disaster is likely to repeat itself.
also, with 1 and 2 in place, we have prolly no need for the one-child policy. we'll have food and land plenty!
2. Go, tell the farmers they are not allowed to eat their chickens' eggs. I will wait for you to report their answer. Or do you intend to enforce your decree by force?
3. If you are allowed to tell other people how many children to have, I am allowed to tell you how many children to have: You may have none.
> also, with 1 and 2 in place, we have prolly no need for the one-child policy. we'll have food and land plenty!
I wonder if you actually believe what you say.
I guess that they mostly finance re-forestation. Then, you have to ask yourself:
Would the new forest happened anyways and they are just taking your money as a bonus? Is the new forest going to be permanent or will it be removed and re-forested again in 30 years?
Perhaps, in decades/centuries a new forest might happen naturally. I should hope - if you're paying for it - that it not be permanent, carbon capture in trees happens fastest at the beginning of their lifecycle so by harvesting and re-foresting it functions as a renewable resource and has greatest efficacy as a carbon sink.
Of course you might make furniture from the wood, but it will replace other furniture that then gets burned in place.
A forest only holds carbon, it doesn't continuously remove it.
You could...drive it a lot less :-)
The Economist, 2009. https://www.economist.com/news/2009/11/13/wanted-green-engin...
I'm guessing the most relevant fields would be chemE and materials science.
Best case scenario is drought, heatwaves, forest fires, lose half the wildlife in the world, all the coral reefs, most of the fish, reduced crop yield, flooding, storms, sea level rise, and parts of the world are inhospitable, and the populations of those regions migrate north. BEST case. WORST case is runaway warming when all the methane in the arctic is released and the forests that soak up our carbon burn down and the ocean stops absorbing it, and the earth gets so hot that humans literally just drop dead from hyperthermia.
I refuse to believe in the worst case, because the majority of scientists are not going that far, and because it could make a person crazy just thinking about it. Besides, the best case is bad enough already.
But I honestly DO believe that we WILL see a downward trend in he next 12 years. We won't hit zero but i would hope we'd hit pre 2000 levels. And I also believe that even though we're going to suffer, technology like carbon capture and geo engineering will play a role in the future. A recent study suggested painting rooves and footpaths white in hotter countries would have the equivalent cooling effect of taking every car off the road for 50 years. Measures like this will help. Fusion power works. ITER in France will generate 500Mw when operational in 2025, and pave the way for more fusion globally.
I think we can fix global warming, but its to our eternal shame that we're going to be fixing it rather than preventing it
Don't think that way. Climate despair is real. People get seriously depressed about it and a lot of people probably consider suicide. Messages like this are irresponsible and can push people over the edge. If you feel that urge, talk to someone. Reach out. Get better. If you're this worried about climate change then THE WORLD NEEDS YOU.
>Messages like this are irresponsible and can push people over the edge.
this is a very naive view and one that i would argue, with all due respect, is falsely empathetic without truly understanding the mindset and circumstances of someone who chooses to stop living. we need to have a truly honest conversation about self determination as it applies to the right for individuals to end their own lives and safe/ethical means of achieving that end. anything less is an illusion of compassion and a very cruel one.
No in reality we will see a slow increase in extreme natural disasters, island states and all coastlines becoming uninhabitable, permanent drought in most parts of the world, drinking water crisis, famine, massive unprepared forced migration, global economic collapse, permanent wars about remaining resources. I actually don't think humanity has any realistic chance to survive beyond 2080 and that number is actually quite conservative given the research.
The best, least depressing and least defeatist way to think about it is that the world is changing in the next 12 years and we're the early adopters. And if you don't offload that gas car now it'll be unsellable in 6 years
I do take your point that transportation is not the whole picture, but we can't do anything on a personal level to close a coal plant, other than write to our local representatives in government.
It's also worth pointing out that if all the power for EVs is generated from coal it's still less carbon than petrol and diesel cars on the road, because of how power plants are run at optimal efficiency, where as cars have to speed up and slow down, idle in traffic etc
I don't know how old you are, but those of us over 20 remember that we had '12 years' 20 years ago.
Somehow the prophesied catastrophe never arrives and the date gets perpetually pushed into the future. Looks like a secular Seventh Day Adventists.
Though I imagine you will shortly be deluged with comments advising you that you simply don't understand the seriousness of the situation. Etc
The predictions might've been wrong about the rate of change (and I'm assuming this was a reputable source making the prediction, not cherry-picking the most extreme doomsayers). I hope more than anything they're still wrong today. But they weren't wrong about the actual direction of the change. People 20 years ago ignored the warnings, we must do better.
I was watching a TV show that said "If this spider were alive today, it would be hunting animals the size of house cats." and I blurted "No, it wouldn't. It would be on life support."
Those giant dragonflies with 4 foot wingspans or whatever? They couldn't exist today. The atmosphere isn't dense enough. For that reason, movies like Jurassic Park are probably completely unrealistic. Dinosaur physiology probably is wholly unsuited to the modern atmosphere.
Yes, absolutely, things are changing. But there is an unprecedented 7 billion people on the planet and life expectancy is going up, generally speaking.
Could we see a dramatic population crash? Absolutely. Population crashes of various species in various places are a known phenomenon. That could happen.
But we keep making these dire predictions about the end of the world and they keep failing to come true. We have been making them for at least a thousand years. The turn of the first millennium was predicted to be The End Times. More recently, the end of, I think, the Mayan calendar was supposed to be the end.
Post WW2, everyone expected to die in nuclear war. Today, there is all kinds of post apocalyptic dystopian fiction, often involving antibiotic resistant infections.
There are solutions for such things, though people who know of antibiotic alternatives are often dismissed as crackpots. Yet, we continue to quietly problem solve.
That gets largely ignored in favor of making new predictions of how The End Times are at hand -- this time for realzy realz, I'm serious man, this is not like all those other silly predictions in the last 1000 years.
And if you voice skepticism, you are advised you are a fool who just doesn't get it.
The best way to motivate people (especially bright people) is to convince them their work has higher meaning.
If a problem being solved isn't high-stakes, you won't have the best and brightest working on it. They are going to go work on something that is actually high-stakes, high-impact. The post-WW2 nuclear threat was real. It attracted intellectual giants such as John Forbes Nash and John von Neumann whose work probably helped avert a crisis.
> More recently, the end of, I think, the Mayan calendar was supposed to be the end.
That's nowhere near the same thing as a nuclear threat.
The point is that problems don't get solved by magical fairies or elves. They're solved by real people. And smart people are attracted to hard, important problems. All the bellyaching and agonizing serve the purpose of signaling which problems matter.
Einstein worked in a patent office for years, unable to get the university job he longed for. It took two tries of photographing a solar eclipse to finally get proof of his theory and once proof existed, he was world famous overnight.
He didn't stick with it because the masses were haranguing him about how very, very, very important this was.
Haranguing masses can decide what gets funded. Einstein's research didn't need much money, which worked out well for him. What if his genius had been in something that required more capital?
The long answer is probably a screed that I would probably regret posting.
It's 1am here. Please, excuse me, but I think I'm done here for now.
I think it's absolutely not reasonable to put climate scientists and their predictions into the same line as the mayans or nostradamus.
> Could we see a dramatic population crash? Absolutely. Population crashes of various species in various places are a known phenomenon. That could happen.
So, a population crash could happen. A lot of the comments here sound as if the people are saying "End of the world? Pffft. Total hysteria. Ultimately a few billion people will die and then human life will adapt. Everything's fine!"
I mean, take a minute and picture the suffering of billions of humans because of famine, resource wars, migration, deaths. Picture yourself and your loved ones into this.
It may not be the literal "end of the world", but don't you (and the others of the "it's-fine"-faction here) think that this is bad enough to take climate change serious and try to lessen all of that?
> And if you voice skepticism, you are advised you are a fool who just doesn't get it.
Are you sure that you do "get it" though?
My oldest son has the same condition. I have been supporting myself and my 2 special needs sons on under $20k annually while all of us get healthier.
I also appear to be the only woman to have ever spent time on the leaderboard of Hacker News. I hit it a month and 2 days after I got myself and my kids off the street. I then changed handles cuz reasons.
I'm quite confident I really get it. I'm quite confident I actually know useful information that could make a real difference if people would actually listen to me instead of screeching at me about what a nutter I am.
But it is generally pointless to assert that. It just causes people to more vehemently ramp up the dismissive personal attacks and assertions that I'm an idiot whose point is invalid while they run screaming across the stage flailing their arms like Kermit the frog.
> But it is generally pointless to assert that. It just causes people to more vehemently ramp up the dismissive personal attacks and assertions that I'm an idiot whose point is invalid while they run screaming across the stage flailing their arms like Kermit the frog.
In my post I never intended to question your intelligence. I also did not call you a nutter and I don't know why you think I did.
I questioned your line of reasoning, and wanted to know whether you really thought about the consequences of a "population crash". I believe that these two words very cleanly describe a hell on earth, and your post seemed to handwave all this suffering away. That is a line of thinking I don't agree with, and I wanted to make you think about and reply to that.
I'm deeply sorry for the hardships of your life. All the best to you.
"Barack Obama has only four years to save the world. That is the stark assessment of Nasa scientist and leading climate expert Jim Hansen who last week warned only urgent action by the new president could halt the devastating climate change that now threatens Earth. Crucially, that action will have to be taken within Obama's first administration, he added."
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/jan/18/jim-hans...
The IPCC chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, an engineer and economist from India, acknowledged the new trajectory. "If there's no action before 2012, that's too late," Pachauri said. "What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment."
from:
https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/world/europe/18iht-climat...
There are a few lists around the place of people saying similar things. Those are just I could find easily without too much bother.
Edited to put the Hansen statement in.
The second quote is more specific, but it doesn't say that inaction before 2012 will cause the world to end by 2018. If you've seen what IPCC suggests is required to stay at 1.5C, then that quote from 2007 reads as an understatement.
If anything, the date gets pushed back. With every subsequent IPCC report it turns out the previous as an underestimation.
That's what "pushed into the future" means. "Back" means "further away," "up" means "closer."
> With every subsequent IPCC report it turns out the previous as an underestimation.
So, every IPCC report has been wrong. How long are you going to keep believing them? Sounds like a religion.
Ultimately, unless there is a relatively quick mass extinction event, no government is going to be bothered into action. Climate change and the devastation it's going to cause, is going to play out slowly over the years. The most affected would be the poorest of the world. They are going to die first. The rich will have enough resources to be able to not only survive, but also thrive on these events as new business opportunities are going to be created.
Ultimately, Earth maybe a very different place 100 years from now, but the rich of today are surely going to have their descendants living quite comfortably.
The only thing an individual can do is to strive to get as rich as possible, because that is the only security that's going to save you and your family in the bleak future that lies ahead of us.
Governments and countries are not very stable under these conditions. Probably shouldn't expect your wealth to crisis proof your life in this scenario. Won't hurt but we'll all be much better off organizing to avoid this future.
I think the crisis will be contained to the poorest parts of the world. Especially the tropics. This area is going to be the first to bear the brunt of climate change related problems.
I dont foresee Global wars happening. The politicians are too smart for that. They will try to contain the damage to the extant that the richer countries ( US, Europe, Australia ) are not affected much. Ofcourse there will be shortages as global supply routes are going to be disrupted.
The most thought provoking scenario here is going to be what will happen with China. Maybe not being a democracy will prove to be a blessing in disguise for it. Having a pragmatic group of men leading the country is the best option in the face of upcoming doom. China may shed a lot of weight ( population), but it may just survive, because of its largely monoculture and more or less obedient population.
I see much of Africa, SouthEast Asia to completely gone by the next 100 years. They will be left alone by the rest of the world to fight the battle of survival, and the odds wont be great.
MiddleEast is already ravaged, but they may continue to survive because they have oil.
Most rich countries ( the leaders I mean ), may not be very displeased with the fate of the poorer nations. Because as far as they are concerned mass deaths in poorer nations is only going to reduce the carbon emission load on our planet.
Mass migration will definitely happen, and might even be supported by their governments and armies. India, Pakistan and China have nuclear weapons to wave around.
US will likely be better off than Europe thanks to the oceans and a big army / navy. But it will not be a good time for anyone if it comes to this.
But the wealthier nations are the ones producing majority of the carbon emissions.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/dec/02/worlds-r...
Seems like you're counting on poorer countries to die off so you in the the richer nations can survive when it's the richer folks causing the problem. Like the resource loss from these continents wasting away won't affect them.
Trump's border wall is a reality around europe.
So if mass migrations happen things will get really really ugly.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/oct/09/austr...
Good luck with that.
You can't do rational planning on a planetary scale when your political frameworks are explicitly tailored to maximise short-term resource accumulation without limit for a micro-minority.
We're not going to win this one without a revolution - not just the usual violent class swap that lops off one aristocracy to make room for another, but a moral and cultural revolution in how we plan for the future as a species.
I'm not optimistic, because IMO it's too big a challenge, and we literally don't have the brains or the culture for it.
But I'm open to being surprised.
I think individual actions can add up, particularly when we use the magnifying power of tech. I wrote a lot on this recently and I can't fit it all in a comment so I'll just link to it.
https://unop.uk/how-to-help-with-a-big-global-problem-as-a-t...
It boils down to a three step process:
- Understand
- Organise
- Amplify
There's a post for each and more to come.
I agree that useful action is possible and important, but I'm starting to feel that our last chance to avoid catastrophic climate change was sometime last decade or the one before.
It's easy to blame the big corporations. It's also about the governments facilitating alternatives and about eventually, literally every person buying into that.
Imagining that 'large corporations' are reaping all the benefits and could bear all the cost of weaning the global economy off fossil fuels is jaw droppingly naive. The massive costs of weaning ourselves off fossil fuels would bear down heavily on all of us, and especially the poor and the third world. Can we imagine China elevating hundreds of millions of people out of poverty over the last 30 years without fossil fuels?
I'm no climate change denier, far from it. You're quite right that the costs will be severe, even catastrophic, but there is no easy answer to this.
Imagine I'm a voter in, say, the US or the UK. There is no major party I can vote for that will, if elected, take serious action on climate change. In both nations there is a Green Party which probably would, but it has a firmly established track record of getting approximately zero votes; the only way in which voting Green has ever had any visible impact on US or UK policy is that a bunch of people voting for Ralph Nader in the 2000 US presidential election is part of why we had President Bush instead of President Gore, which is probably not an encouraging precedent to most potential Green voters.
And, of course, voting Green also means voting for all their other policies. Which doesn't matter if you regard climate change as the only important issue, but since you probably don't, you might find them unacceptable on other grounds; and since lots of other voters definitely don't, lots of them are going to be voting not-Green even if they care a lot about climate change ... which means that, once again, the Greens are not actually going to win, and the only real effect of voting for them is to give you less influence on which actually-electable candidate wins instead.
So no, in practice we don't have the option of voting for taking serious action on climate change. We have the option of voting for a big package of things, one of which happens to be serious action on climate change, in the knowledge that (even if a sizeable majority of voters wants serious action on climate change) voting for that package won't actually result in a government that will try to implement it.
It may be that those of us who care about climate change should be voting Green even though it predictably won't help in the near future, in order to "send a message" that might change the political landscape in future elections. Or that we should be putting pressure on the actually-electable parties to change their policies, or starting new parties, or something. But none of that means that we have a realistic way of getting action on climate change just by voting for it.
An excellent example is Brexit. The Brexit referendum existed solely because of UKIP and UKIP have only ever won 2 parliamentary seats. And those were both for sitting MPs that had defected.
However, UKIP did get 4-odd million votes, plenty of local councillors, MEPs etc. In other words, they clearly had a lot of support for their flagship policies and that caused the main parties, that had UKIP voters in their constituencies, to take notice. Unfortunately.
This has also, to a lesser extent, been the case with green issues. The Greens increased their vote from the 80's onwards and the main parties started to adopt green policies accordingly.
So, in the UK at least, there are well worn paths to get policies, like climate change action, to the top of the heap.
I'd argue that there are a few reasons why they're not top of the heap today:
1) Other things are deemed more important. Clearly Brexit is one. Whether you agree that it should be more important, or not, it's fairly undeniable that it's true.
2) The folk that have expressed most interest in green issues have tended to not be very engaged in formal politics. <30s predominantly. That changed somewhat in the 2017 election primarily because of Corbyn (though Greens did particularly badly). So it may be that green issues become more important as a byproduct of other changes.
3) There's a strong argument that UKIP's popularity was, in large part, due to Nigel Farage. He may well be a cock but he's a cock that was on TV a lot reinforcing his message. I mean, I like Sian Berry (no idea who the other bloke is) but she's no Nigel Farage.
>(no idea who the other bloke is) Jonathan Bartley [0].
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Bartley
For example, without becoming too political, it seems a plausible strategy for Russia to try and control migration from the east to gain influence over the EU.
Depending on the hyperbole, similar conflicts could become war scenarios where your wealth would not be enough to protect you.
Considering this, getting rich is certainly a good advice, but might not be enough. We need to work on de escalating the situation even without any altruistic reasons, if you want to maximise your personal survival chances.