Ask HN: Are You Hopeful About the Environment?

1. CFCs invented

2. CFCs are in high use

3. Thesis: It's bad for the environment; ozone layer is depleting

4. Antithesis: It's problematic for some businesses to give these up

5. Synthesis: Global effort to stop using them and find replacements

6. Ozone layer is slowly getting better

On one hand, I'm hopeful something similar could happen again.

On the other, the aforementioned events happened in a pre-post-truth world so it might not. You might argue that would be natural selection at work.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorofluorocarbon

There's a catastrophe every generation that turns out to have been a false alarm by the time the next generation's catastrophe is fabricated.

For instance, my wife was told "no homework tonight since we'll all be dead tomorrow anyway." (Cuban Missile Crisis)

Around the time of the first Earth Day, the predictions of environmental apocalypse were legion, yet societies somehow seem to find ways to fix things that societies broke. They also seem to find ways to fix things that tyrants broke.

When you see dozens of such dire predictions over a lifetime, you start to get skeptical. Skepticism is a good thing, btw. Without it, there wouldn't be any science.

A lot of this comes from extensive travel and spending time in the third and second world. Many of the poorest billion simply do not realize that it is against their interest not to, for example, dump chemicals and trash in water they drink from and bathe in. Or just simply that littering is a problem. To be clear I'm not faulting them, like everyone else they are mostly good people and if they had better access to information I have no doubt they'd act differently but there is a huge need to educate people that is not being met.

It's also just hard to imagine consumption of everyday objects at the global scale.

But it's really hard to feel like recycling one more bottle is going to save the world when you've seen dump trucks waiting in line to dump industrial waste in rivers. But this sort of thing is likely happening every day, repeatedly, in many places around the world.

I once drove through a section of highway in north western Peru that was just an open air landfill on both sides, maybe 5 feet tall on average, continously for an hour. It's just hard to imagine that stuff like this exists if you've never been exposed to it.

And that doesn't even match things I've seen only in documentaries like https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dd_ZttK3PuM

I believe that our problems are technically still fixable but that the coordination necessary is, if not totally infeasible, far beyond our current willpower to achieve.

The rich (and all but the poorest Americans are rich for this discussion) will basically be fine maybe minus inconveniences for the near future.

But I think things are going to get drastically worse for many people over the next 50 years.

You can get ahead of the eventualities and help by learning how to survive without the use of fossil fuels which is difficult but more or less achievable today. Use electric bikes, cars and motorcycles. Work remotely. Try to find an efficient home. Live in a climate that doesn't require too much heating or cooling. Eat vegetables more and so on.

I know you didn't ask for it, but there is a political factor too. Vote for politicians who take the environment seriously. There are industries that need regulation. No matter how much you're trying, if they aren't, progress on the solution will be slowed or stopped.

1. Rate of progress and market adoption of key technologies (ICE alternatives and renewables) is much higher than I would have anticipated even 10 years ago, let alone 15 years. I am hopeful that, even with only market forces, by the end of my lifetime developed economies will have more-or-less righted the ship on GHG production with a corresponding blueprint for the rest of the world.

2. I think we still have a long time before some of the worst-case feedback loops are triggered.

3. The realities of climate change are becoming difficult to ignore. This is, paradoxically, good news because it makes denial a less tenable barrier to action in the mid-term future.

All that said, I'm hedging my bets with real estate investments in regions that are most likely to benefit from mid-term impacts of warming.

My more specific take: As a human of generally European-ish descent born in the United States, the wave of extinctions that gave land-dominance to mammals, the likely genocide of closely related hominids by the homo-sapiens, the ecological changes putatively caused by the first wave of human occupants including all the extinctions of large land animals on this continent, the subsequent genocide of the first human occupants, the conflicts and wars that caused my ancestors to emigrate, ... those were all necessary conditions for the exact experiences I've had in my life.

I'm not saying I support genocide! (my ancestors are mostly all Jewish.) I'm just saying that the farther something is in the past, the more it just seems like a fact of history, no matter how miserable and wrenching it was for all the organisms that lived through it.

We have no way of knowing what we're really creating, and it may well be that we're creating a hundred thousand years of extinctions and inhospitable weather which will be more difficult to live through for our descendants than the conditions we were born into. We may be radically shrinking our own natural habitat. We may be paving the way for a different dominant organism. We may be living in an era that future humans will give as much thought to as we give to the years 1000-1100 C.E. Who knows! and in the long game, the thousands and millions of years perspective, who's to say what's good or bad?

Do I think that we’ll enjoy living in whatever this new environment ends up being? No, not at all.

For the last several years, people were saying that CA was in drought and that this was the "new normal". I didn't believe it, and I was right. This year is particularly colder than last year, even though we had 2 extremely hot days. This is how weather works, it's always changing. I think the next few years will continue to be wet in CA and then we'll hit another cycle of droughts and back and forth. It's also safe to note that the drought we experienced wasn't worse than the 1930s due to weather, it was worse because more water was being consumed by humans, which is a different sort of environmental disaster.

I do believe that the Earth is getting hotter, but I also believe we will get cooler over the next several years. But no one will talk about that because it doesn't get clicks.

We need to plant new trees and we need to incentivize countries to not cut down their forests. Places like Indonesia and Brazil, etc, need to be incentivized to keep their forests instead of cutting it down for cash crops.

I think the bigger crisis is plastic, pollution and chemicals in our water. We need to stop creating so much plastic and make extremely draconian laws controlling this. We need to stamp down on pollution from factories. Companies that spill into our lakes and rivers and oceans need to be fined with extreme prejudice. If they go out of business I simply don't care, I would rather see them out of business than have our water and environment polluted.

I think it'd be funny if we figure out immortality tech first and live long enough to see the world end in 150 years because of our own mistakes and lack of foresight... The rich want to live forever, but then they'll regret it when they destroyed everything.

It was not a nice feeling.

Now I am a bit wary of doomsday scenarios. I am not convinced we have seen any real impact of global warming yet (higher temperatures perhaps, but no land has been flooded, for example. Nothing catastrophic has occurred).

I am pessimistic about human expansion, though. I think we are in the middle of a population explosion that started with the invention of agriculture and has not ended yet. Humans will consume everything that get's in their way.

That is the same as with all other species, though (like the classical fox and rabbits scenario - fox population growing until there are only few rabbits left, foxes starving, and so on). Once we hit a natural limit, things will balance out somehow. That doesn't imply that it will be pleasant.

I'm less worried about global warming. There are too many doomsday scenarios. I think if it was that easy to break the balance, it would have happened before. So I think there may be regulating mechanisms that we haven't really taken into account. "Hottest June ever recorded" may not mean that much. There can be smaller cycles (like some news now predict a coming mini ice age because of sun activity), measuring stations can have changed (cities are warmer), all sorts of things.

I think classical damage will probably be worse - agriculture, depleting water reservoirs, destroying top soil, depleting fish populations, deforestation, destruction of animals natural habitats... That's depressing for sure. Maybe the only hope is for capitalism to come up with better means of production. After all, the environment is actually doing better in some places than a couple of decades ago.

Ultimately I think it may also be an illusion that it would be normal for things to remain the same.

However solar, grid power storage, and wind are increasing faster than anyone seemed to be think was possible just a few years ago. Coal plants and coal mines are increasingly price prohibitive to run. New plants are being cancelled and existing plants decommissioned.

UAE (the last place I'd expect solar) just turned on the largest solar farm on the planet! I walk around my city and I see huge solar arrays on parking lots, churches, universities, and even on top of commercial buildings.

Generally it seems like instead of the slow migration that green energy is causing a major disruption. Solar is now getting to the point (in many places) where it's cheaper than many consumers current power bill. 5 year cost to own is favoring electric cars over gas cars, even compared to relatively small cheap cars like the toyota corolla or honda civic.

Tesla is of course shipping more cars than ever and fighting to get the prices lower. Even at $40k to start with (not including federal, state, and power company incentives) isn't too far off the price of the average new car.

So changes are accelerating, Tony Seba on youtube has a pretty good talk on green power, electric cars, and the speed of major disruptive changes.

So terrible things will happen, but I'm growing increasingly optimistic that the worst will be avoided.

The major flows of sea water (e.g. Gulf Stream) are at risk of changing completely with the temperature changes, which means dramatic changes in climate for Europe (colder), USA (warmer) (for example) are possible. Who knows - and the answer is nobody really.

The acidification of the oceans as they absorb more and more CO2 is making it harder for phytoplankton to grow. Take away this basic building block of the ocean ecosystem and the ultimate outcome is dead sea, with no ability to generate oxygen, and toxic gases emitted. That will change our atmosphere to be deadly.

These and so many others are not just exponential trends, but have unknown knowns (e.g. methane released from Arctic) and unknown unknowns that will magnify the impact. As people involved in high growth companies and the internet we understand exponential growth - but the politicians and even scientists are reluctant to understand and embrace the consequences.

Meanwhile we are still increasing, not decreasing CO2e emissions. Emissions need to decrease sharply now, to zero, for us to have a chance, and even then it's hard.

There is no political will. We are too comfortable. And then it will be too late.

We should ask ourselves the question - what can we do that's more important than helping to reduce global emissions? And then do something. There are lots of ways to help, and none of us can do it all, but we all need to do something, and take leadership roles to make the changes.

I predict massive refugee crises with mass-migration caused by climate change within my own lifetime.

It recently hit 54C in Rajasthan.

Back when ozone depletion was being discussed, so was CO2. Thatcher was as keen on CO2 action as CFC action. Back then I was very optimistic.

James Burke, a famous old UK TV science personality known for Tomorrow's World, Connections, and The Day the Universe Changed, made a programme in 1989 called "After the Warming", a view from 2050 looking back. Find it on YT, forgive the late 80s CGI, and be surprised, and a little depressed. He gets much right, and a little of the then new science wrong, only it turns out he was pretty optimistic too.

Decades of inaction and international treaties (Rio-1992!!, Kyoto, Paris) that barely scratch the surface, or require no commitment from developing nations. Then all the disingenuous attempts at briefing against fact and science, or claiming we can't afford to, or we'll adapt, squelched all that optimism.

Now I think IPCC will turn out to be at the wildly optimistic end of the scale, as their projections presume we will eventually get off our ass and try. Seems we have to hit rock bottom, and too late, but right under our noses first.

I still have a feint hope the world will prove me wrong...

Even as we start to see major changes to weather patterns globally, most people put up little more than nominal effort to avoid CO2 emissions and other damaging activities - for example, air traffic continues to grow [1].

We're likely to hit the point of no return on CO2 emissions within two decades [2]. Those with the resources to work towards reversing the damage at that point will also be the ones who can afford to comfortably adjust to changes in climate - which do you think will take priority? Meanwhile, those who are going to be hit hardest overwhelmingly cannot afford to avoid contributing to global warming, let alone actively combat it.

I'm sure civilization will survive - it's more a question of whether we'll ever do anything significant to stop climate change, or if we'll have to adjust to whatever new equilibrium the environment enters - and how much biodiversity and population loss will we sustain on the way there?

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/564769/airline-industry-...

[2] https://www.earth-syst-dynam.net/9/1085/2018/

The only thing we have power over now is determining how severe the building catastrophes will be. If we can mobilize radical efforts in the next ~4 years we may avoid the worst case scenarios. But that doesn't mean we'll be hotly anticipating the next smart phone and enjoying next-day delivery in thirty years. There will still be mass extinctions, large swathes of the surface of Earth will be inhospitable to humans, we will live with constant wildfires and super storms... regardless of what we do now.

I'm not a gambling sort of person so I don't plan on getting lucky. It sure would be nice if some genius out there invents a technology that magically reverses everything. However that's not a likely outcome.

I think we need to look forward to surviving. It's not going to be pleasant but I do remain hopeful that it will be possible.

I don't deny the climate is changing. I just think the earth (and it's inhabitants) are tremendously resilient. Life will go on.

The World Is Too Much with Us

  The world is too much with us; late and soon,
  Getting and spending we lay waste our powers;
  Little we see in Nature that is ours;
  We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
  This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
  The winds that will be howling at all hours,
  And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
  For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
  It moves us not. --Great God! I'd rather be
  A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
  So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
  Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
  Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
  Or hear old Triton blow his wreathèd horn.