Thanks, someone already posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22270107 ... I asked for the same reason I need the text representation. I don't have time right now, but want to read it. I don't have any huge problem with site format or firefox, I just needed something more efficient.
Is it only me, but on this page I can never see the videos in Firefox which are supposed to start "immersive" as I scroll down? I always see just pictures? (independently, I can confirm that the Reader mode works).
My iPhone probably used 0.5 Watt hours in total to display it. Not sure about the assets size though, this could actually be a problem on the server/traffic side.
Personally, I like how this website is styled. It’s really well executed. I think it caters to a very broad audience - people have become used to full screen pictures and small bites of texts evenly distributed (eg in Instagram Stories).
I tend to open & read articles on a vertical (Portrait-mode) 27" monitor. The amount of scrolling required to read a single sentence is... epic-legendary :=O
Edit: At the same time, my wife, who tends to prefer her phone:
"I haven't finished it.. But such a visual treat. Interesting how they did that. Makes it feel very interactive."
So I'm clearly just not the target audience, which is fair enough :-)
I don't consider this an article so much as a series of captioned photographs and short videos. From that perspective, the experience is lovely (though perhaps overengineered).
How is this relevant? This would require action on part of the poor. What I am talking about is using technology that is already being developed. Namely, bio weapons with antidotes that is marketed to the rich. I'd do it in a heartbeat if I was a billionaire. Clearly one cannot talk about this because it is true.
The images and gifs contribute to the story so I'd still recommend that people scroll through the original article even if they read the text here instead.
I'm usually not a fan of this kind of interface but for some reason I felt like this one worked pretty well and it was a good read. Would probably not have worked well if I didn't have a decent scroll wheel though so they should definitly offer an alternative UI as well.
Well, this is HackerNews, started by a technology company accelerator focused largely on web applications, for which UX is a top line discussion point.
The point being, the takes here are pretty on-brand.
I believe the hope is the smart technically minded people on HN might have some insight or way to innovate solutions to at least mitigate climate change. Unfortunately, the best we can come up with this thread are UX critiques. I think it just illustrates how daunting of a problem climate change really is.
Stating what it is for does not change the audience who is here, what they are interested in, and ultimately how they found it and why. Not as many climatology folks here as tech folks. Let's not be obtuse.
True. That’s why powerpoints are so popular. I never stop hearing people rave about watching slideshows. They’re all like, damn, I’d love to get this information in slideshow format.
Visual photo-processing bandwidth is far higher than reading bandwidth, so in some ways it's the superior way to consume information.
It can also far more emotional and evocative, while reading can be more analytical.
Why not combine the two? After all, that is literally what advertising does -- give some message with an emotionally-charged visual to reinforce it.
I'm not saying this is advertising (though you could make that argument through a cynical lens), I'm saying it's using the same tools that have proven to work so effectively you see you billboards literally anywhere on earth where humans congregate.
The UX is discriminatory against visually impaired people.
The layout genuinely hurts my eyes to read. I have vision problems and the continuous picture changes after every sentence is very uncomfortable to view. The contrast changes rapidly from bright to dark or completely black. Then there are light pictures with white text rendered over them. After the first few "slides" I had to close the article. It was too uncomfortable to read. Perhaps you should think before you run with your ableism.
Bland high-contrast sites are discriminatory against people with depressive disorders. I'd kill myself if all information and storytelling came in man page format. So perhaps you should think before you put yourself on a pedestal.
A vast desert of #000 on #fff text is discriminatory towards people with [insert ailment here]. I have [symptoms of ailment] and [selective qualities of format] make me feel uncomfortable.
There is no lowest common denominator. Stop moralising.
This is a standard phenomenon in discussion forums. The fix is to post something on-topic, without referencing the off-topicness. If you post by complaining about what's off topic, that will then get upvoted even more, turning the thread into second-order meta off-topicness. See also https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Moderation can help, because once we see it happening in a thread, we downweight the off-topic subthreads. But ultimately the only fix for bad discussion is good discussion, and discussion about bad discussion (even about how much you dislike it) is bad discussion.
Whatever the strange presentation, there's something about it for sure. A friend of mine used to run a skilift in Norway, and he's noticed how the length of the season has changed for the worse. In the end he sold it, didn't seem as good a business as it once was.
About the business side, there is also another factor.
Somehow, during the last 2 or 3 decades, people have been nudged to believe that snow and ski times are February and Christmas/new-year holidays. Only. Easter has disappeared from the picture: now what is sold for Easter is a holiday in the sun, a stay by the sea (and nowadays, it means flying abroad, not trying your luck on your national shores). And that is stupid, because people come for Christmas when in fact there are 50% chances that there is no snow at that time of the year, and leave disappointed because the White Christmas thingie they were sold didn't exist; and they don't come any more around Easter, while there is basically always snow (soft snow, admittedly, but with a sufficient stock accumulated along the whole winter to enjoy). So basically the only time left to make money for a ski resort is February: can't open around Christmas because there is no snow, can't open around Easter because there are no customers.
I think this is one of those instances where the UX makes it better.
It forced me to slow down, parse each line one at a time, read line-by-line, image-by-image, and let the gravity sink in. I would have just skimmed it if it were a text article with a photo gallery, to no great effect.
I'm disappointed by the typical Hacker News folks complaining about the presentation format. This isn't the target demographic, and I applaud trying different approaches to convey the seriousness of these issues. The kinds of people who just want a spreadsheet and a PDF report are already bought in on the ideas.
While I find the format a bit cinematic for my taste, I can't help but respect their efforts to drive home the tangible effects of global warming in an emotional way.
I agree, this is more of a slideshow than an article, and I don't think having it as an article with pictures would make it more plausible. The pictures tie in neatly with the content in a way that doesn't annoy me as much as other similar experiences have.
Complaining about presentation formats, including the colors or fonts or use of scripts on linked articles, ought to be against the guidelines: it doesn't contribute to discussion about the content of the linked article and devolves into bickering.
This is being downvoted but, barring certain circumstances, I think I agree. There's an irony in a discussion about climate change going way off topic.
I wasn't suggesting that all topics must focus on tech, but that the majority of Hacker News users come from tech, and may therefore have an interest in the technical presentation of the submission.
My apologies if this was not clear.
I think that if users find technical aspects of an article a more interesting topic of discussion than the content, they should be free to discuss it in this forum.
I do not think that the guidelines should be updated to prohibit "off topic" criticism, as the parent comment suggested.
Well, this is hacker news. Expect us to complain as hacker news commenters would. Our complaints don't hurt the original article. We're just discussing how we feel about it. It was posted here and it's fair to debate how it relates to us even if we weren't the target audience
We're inundated with articles pointing out small unimportant changes and unquantified waffle about serious future changes. But never any actual predictions of global disaster. What's the expected cost in money or lives? Nobody has a clue beyond "catastrophe", whatever that means. I saw one estimate for the economic cost to Canada but it was so low that the citizens could actually just pay it as an additional tax and carry on with life hardly affected at all. Alarmists were actually critical of that data being published because they were afraid it might support people's belief that it's not very serious. Maybe because it's not?
So if you're going to say global warming is serious, can you also quantify what you mean? Otherwise you're only conveying your personal subjective feeling.
There are very few submissions that doesn’t have someone complain about something. HN crowd tend to be critical. Might be harsh sometimes but not necessarily a bad thing. If you want your ideas poked full of holes, submit it here.
I liked how they linked a string of observations, to effects in the environment, to effects and costs on infrastructure to maintain necessities - all driven by climate crisis.
I'm certainly on the climate change team (if that's what you call it). But are articles like this good or bad?
When confronting climate change deniers the standard response is "weather is not climate". Saying it's hot today or cold today isn't an indication of climate change. It's what occurs over hundreds of years but especially the last 150 years.
It seems we are sending mixed signals saying that one day or a decade shows climate change. Then on the other hand we try to tell people one day or a decade is too short of a time to see changes. Yes we are certainly are seeing the effects of climate change now and it is real, just look at atmospheric carbon levels.
But saying it should be colder this time in the winter or last summer it was unusually hot. Anecdotal evidence isn't very reliable. My mother in her mid 70s told me her father (my grandfather) was out plowing the field in late November when my mother was born. Now if it's warm in late November people scream climate change.
Again, I do see and accept the evidence of climate change but I know people will see my comments as denial. I'm not denying it at all I'm 100% convinced it's just the phrasing and personal anecdotes I see disrupting the message.
It also doesn't help when TV weathercasters† show graphics that list what the "normal" temperature is supposed to be for that day. There is no such animal. There is an average temperature for a particular date, but there isn't a single "normal" number.
† In America, few TV weathercasters are actual meteorologists anymore. Some stations will claim they are, but often they are not. One way to tell is to look for the AMS logo next to the person's name on-screen.
We know the historic average, but also variability, and I'm pretty sure that data just so happens to be a standard example of what is specifically called the "normal distribution".
So I don't see what the problem is with charting, say, the 98% confidence interval, calling it normal, and stating that values outside that range are 1-in-50 year events.
The problem is is that the average is presented without the range and called normal or typical. you may live your life and never experience an average day.
Most people never understand this aspect of statistics. Living in Houston, and having survived 3 out of 4 years with an above-100-year floods, I understand firsthand the clumping of events. But the "typical" guy on the street (oops, now I just violated my own rule!) has no clue what a distribution is.
Not sure how to solve this problem. Teaching statistics to everyone in not a solution (see the Monty Hall Problem [0] ).
Wow, people can be spectacularly ignorant of even simpler things like probability:
1) Scientists predicting the probability of an earthquake in a region that just had one. "If it doesn't occur, they'll say it was only a probability, and if it does, they'll claim they predicted it! Stop wasting taxpayer's money on this nonsense!"
2) "My mother chain smoked all her life and she's in her 90's. So smoking doesn't cause cancer."
Claiming it should be a "normal distribution" (aka a bell curve) is a major assumption based on there is a "correct" temperature that remains fixed over time.
To the best of my knowledge, few places have tracked temperature longer than the last 150 years and beyond that we have estimates and calculations that have variances/tolerances built in. Is 150 data points for a given location enough to KNOW both the "correct temperature" and that it does/doesn't move?
People are also generally not that easily tricked. If you play up the "bring global warming home with anecdotes" game, then you're equally vulnerable to "hey, sure is cold today, what now, Al Gore?" Nobody will be convinced of anything by this sort of nonsense.
Weather is not climate. Even when it supports climate change.
> Weather is not climate. Even when it supports climate change.
It's certainly been quite a shift to watch. 10 years ago, you'd hear "Sure is cold today, so much for global warming eh?" followed by cries that weather is not climate. Today, it seems that a hot summer day, or a cool summer day, or a warm winter day, or a particularly cold winter day, is just more proof of climate change.
I say this as someone who thinks climate change is real, by the way--but I am amused at how this all looks.
Somebody was saying last year that climate alarmists do more damage than climate deniers. I think this is true. All the prognostications sound a bit like a death cult telling us the world will end on July 15, 20xx or the Mayan calendar or the comet will signal the end and people just tune that noise out. They can smell hysteria. Part of the problem is co-opting celebrities or personalities that are louder than their understanding of the science, and make very loud and visible statements that tarnish the science and policy discussion. We'd probably all be better off if the messaging was a little more sober about what the real risk levels are and timeframes, trusting the people in time to come around. The idea of doing massive economic policy change overnight was/is a doomed proposition. It's self-defeating to try and scare people off drugs by overstating the risk, so too with scaring people into climate policy.
> Nobody will be convinced of anything by this sort of nonsense.
This is clearly false. Anecdotal appeals to emotion convince many people of many things, and the history of the climate change debate so far tends to suggest that appeals to emotion are much more effective than actual science.
On the section about the greater rainfall and the doubling of intensity, they ended with this text:
> We can't conclude that these isolated incidents are caused by climate changes.
>
> On the other hand, we can conclude that such incidents have already become more common. And that it will likely cost us several hundred billion NOK to arm ourselves against all this water.
Climate change deniers cannot be convinced by science because their objections are not based on any facts. The science on climate change is unimpeachable and has been known as such for decades.
You understand that proving causation is extremely difficult in a complex system where you can't run controlled experiments? You essentially have to have a correct model. But how do you verify your model is correct? You still can't run experiments to test it because there's only one Earth. You can use historical data but if your model was designed using that data, then you can't use it again to test it. This is one of the hardest types of task in science. Not "unimpeachable" by any means.
It ends that it isn’t a complete mistruth, just a small hyperbole. The massive bushfires we’re still experiencing are real, the hail storms that followed were real and the 40+ days in hazardous air quality since 1 Dec are also real. As is the past 20 years of drought my country has experienced.
These events were definitively contributed to by climate change, perhaps not direct cause and effect as some assume, but there is more than just correlation.
For one thing, a day and a decade are pretty different.
But more important, while a decade is really short on geological timescales, and probably isn't long enough to see natural/geo driven or many astronomically-driven changes... a decade is long enough for humans to get a real idea of trends in human-driven changes, or crossing of certain boundary conditions for long-horizon changes.
Is that a double standard, or is that a more finely articulated view?
Climate change deniers mainly deny the human influence on climate, so even if you can convince them the earth is heating up, it's still a "natural process".
True. Yet, as climate change accelerates it's absolutely reasonable to expect that we will be able to sense its effects in our daily lives.
I also have quite a number of personal observations that point to the idea that the planet is warming up. On the one hand I try to remain rational and say that this is a long-term trend, but on the other I'm thinking: holy crap, things are happening so fast that I now have memories from when the world was noticeably cooler.
I think therefore that over the next decades we should start accepting anecdotal evidence as real evidence, as global warming starts having a real impact on our lives.
No we shouldn't! You don't give up the principles of science just to expedite your political ideals. If you were going to do that, why bother with science in the first place? Just declare it so and shout it until everyone believes you!
I have memories of world 30 years ago being hotter than it is today. I don't credit it to "global cooling" because I'm not that silly. You shouldn't be either. You'll never notice a degree C of average temperature change. You regulate your body's environment's temperature with clothing, housing, heating, etc. And it varies much more dramatically hour-by-hour than over decades. If you simply changed your bedtime a little, you could experience global warming or cooling of the same magnitude as what actually happened.
No. See the enormous volume and consistency of anecdotal evidence for ineffective medicine. Most of China has believed and recreated the same false anecdotes about their TCM for thousands of years! Remember bloodletting? astrology? praying to God? If you don't apply methods for protecting yourself from human bias, then you're bound to fall victim to human bias.
I don't know, but I would reject all anecdotes. If somebody measured the temperatures around the world for many decades, I could accept that shows global temperature rise. Turns out they did and I do. That's data, not anecdotes. As for proving the cause, I don't know enough to understand how reliable that is. But climate scientists seem pretty sure of themselves so I accept their conclusions as much as any well studied science conclusions.
If you understood science you'd understand why "you'll never notice a degree C of average temperature change" is wholly, irrevocably, unarguably, objectively, and absolutely scientifically incorrect.
The scientific reality is that climate models have made decently accurate predictions so far. The whole point of the models is that 1C or 2C of change is not just about your own personal subjective experience of how warm it is.
The predictions are about everyone's personal subjective experience of having their home flooded, or destroyed in a fire, tornado or hurricane - all of which become more likely as temperatures rise.
This has literally been understood for decades now - by climate scientists, by the fossil fuel industry, and also by insurers.
Those are the obvious first order effects. The longer term second order effects - water shortages, crop failure, economic instability - are at least as important, if harder to model. And the third order consequences - homelessness, resource wars, mass migration - even more so.
Just because you have failed to educate yourself properly, while persuading yourself that your subjective opinion about "clothing and heating" is as credible scientifically as that of thousands of climate science PhDs working full-time on modelling, and don't understand that these are specific, actionable predictions doesn't mean they won't affect you personally.
You can't notice it personally without doing science. You can't just remember how hot it was when you were a kid and know that global warming is happening. That's what the GP was talking about and what I'm responding to. Obviously scientists can measure it with suitable instruments and techniques but casual observers can't. I think you're arguing with a strawman by bringing floods and fires into it. But even if you want to go there, experiencing one flood in your life doesn't tell you that the frequency is higher than it was 30 years ago. There just isn't enough data or valid statistics in one person's personal experience and feelings.
Demagoguery has a better track record than science at influencing people's actions.
For example, Dr Semmelweis who literally prooved hand washing saved lives. He was mocked and committed to an asylum by his colleagues, where he ironically died from infection after a beating.
People understand things through stories, narratives. All of which are oversimplifications. Always. Therefore, for any given popular one, you can always be the contrarian well-actually guy. You can always point out the broader inconsistencies, and you can always find a gotcha or implied hypocrisy somewhere. When all else fails you can always fall back on tone-policing like you did here.
I know you're not practicing active "denial", but consider the degree to which you chose to be a headwind or a tailwind. Tone policing is being a headwind.
They are good, as they try to paint a varied picture of how a complex phenomenon is affecting people's everyday lives. Sometimes you need more than charts to see.
Articles like this make me want to sniff glue. What should be written — and disseminated widely — is the truth that climate catastrophe is on our doorstep.
Who gives a shit if Norway is warmer and warmer, or if some other place is colder due to the chaotic nature of weather? The point is, "global warming" is rapidly destabilizing — no, destroying — ecosystems that we depend upon for our survival, and unleashing feedback loops that we are helpless to stop.
It's only going to get worse. Most articles don't go far enough in explaining the severity of the situation, because it'll frighten the neoliberals and trigger the neocons.
If Hacker News is still around in the next decade, I can't wait to read all the comments by the people here who love to bikeshed about "optics" and bullshit when actual widespread famine is beginning to rear its ugly head. I'm afraid most of you will turn inside out with all that navel-gazing.
> I'm certainly on the climate change team (if that's what you call it). But are articles like this good or bad?
> When confronting climate change deniers...
The article doesn't give me the impression that it's aimed at those wishing to support their arguments with climate-change deniers.
I don't want to make assumptions about where in the world you're from, and I do acknowledge that climate-change denial is a serious problem we need to combat, but in Norway and most other developed European countries, climate-change denial isn't really a thing* anymore. Most people in this field have moved on and are just trying to get to grips with impact and timelines (like this article).
* That's not to say climate-change deniers don't exist, just that they're not mainstream and are often either ridiculed or ignored.
I live in France next to the Alpes and climate change is really real here. Next week it's expecting to rain on the ski slopes. In the middle of February!
Lots of glaciers are gone. Many of my mountain climbing friends say they can't do the runs they used to because the terrain is getting too unpredictable.
The man in the article commenting that his father could no longer read the weather because the signs were wrong is my personal experience too - I've been tramping and hunting in a particular area of our Southern Alps since I was a child, and everything I learned about predicting the weather there when I was young doesn't work now. It used to be that autumn was the time of year with the most stable weather - lots of clear skies, no rain, so ideal for crossing rivers.
But now there's a lot more northwest winds in autumn, which causes heavy rainfall that floods rivers. And likewise, the spring "monsoon" when continual nor'westers are the defining weather pattern (when I lived in an alpine village, 29 days of continual rain in November was the usual) now extends significantly into Summer. And of course, the rainfall events are getting more extreme, damaging roads and hiking infrastructure - like this: https://www.odt.co.nz/regions/fiordland/routeburn-closed-for...
I spent a couple of years in NZ and Australia a few years ago, and since then I've been hearing about quite a few places I loved that have been severely damaged by water or fire. I have a wonderful memory of a week spent on the Routeburn track in winter, your link is a bit of a shock.
I live in Sweden. A few days ago, we got the first snow of the season here, and most of it has already melted away. Several ski slopes has decided to not open this season, since there's no chance of making any snow even if it would get cold, because the ground is too warm. It's been approximately 5-10° C warmer than usual, with the warmest January day ever.
In the centre of the Pyrenees, my local ski resort will not open for skiing holidays, for the first time ever (the resort is just a bit older than I am, and I am nearing 45 years old). Not opening for Christmas is not unusual, snow is often lacking then, but for February, that's a first... There is no snow, most of the time it doesn't even freeze at night. It is also pretty dry. Down in the valley, we didn't have a single strong frost night since the beginning of the autumn and winter, just some 0/-1/-2/-3°C.
It comes after an incredibly hot and dry summer. My place is supposed to be very green and wet: this year it rained only twice in 3 months! And those were not even summer rains, those two rainy days looked like small November rainfalls. When I was a kid we had short summer storms several times a week (in the end of afternoon / early evening), especially in August (less so in July, but still there were a few). The system has completely changed over the last 2 decades.
And then the autumn was dry too, except for 1 month. And now the winter is warm and dry.
And that comes after a similar year the year before, which was just a little bit softer.
--------
That's not just anecdotal: the long term measurements show huge changes, and acceleration. Short term measurements too: monthly records get beaten all the time those last 5 years.
Wetter and colder places have been impacted more by the warming, apparently.
While economy and consumerism are destroying our planet, we are complaining about the UX of an emergency call.. In other news stories I see participants of Extinction Rebellion being arrested by police as if they were criminals, while temperatures world wide are breaking all records and the ramifications are clearly seen almost anywhere on the planet. It just renders me speechless.
An arrest is the act of apprehending a person and taking them into custody, usually because they have been suspected of committing a crime. They are not criminals until they have been found guilty of committing a crime by a court of law. England enjoys due process and a robust judiciary.
Either the police had probable case to make an arrest or the arrestees can sue for false arrest. In general the police do not arrest people without a reason in England.
What I have found more frustrating than those in denial of climate change lately, is those who deny responsibility. That the real problem is in other countries. India. China. America. Little old X in Europe can't possible be the ones that need to sort it out. Therefore there's no point changing our habits.
I feel a little hopeless in these discussions. I have little hope for change. I cannot argue against the fact that our impact in Europe will not be enough. This requires a global, concerted effort and it's hard to argue against the logic that it won't matter what we do in Europe if everyone else doesn't follow suit. We are just delaying the inevitable.
I've also found those discussions to be extremely frustrating. Yeah, I understand feeling that as individuals we're not able to make much of a difference, but that's all the more reason we should be advocating for structural changes.
This kind of feels to me like mutual assured destruction. Nobody lay down their weapons because of the other party. If you are not changing habits because the source of the problem doesn't lie in your geographical section, you are turning your back to the fact that climate crisis is a human kind crisis. We need to change habits as a whole, so that even when we are not directly helping, we are setting precedent and example.
Edit: the talks are frustrating though, I am not arguing that! But let's not give up. Giving up we are assuring our defeat.
Any one country isn't enough to make a difference, but we're all in this together, and The West bears more than its fair share of responsibility. Pointing your finger and India and China just makes you look like a selfish hypocrite.
One way to approach this perhaps is to look at emissions per capita. Norway, as an example, is a way bigger offender (or at least has been, haven’t check recent data) than China by this metric.
And it _is_ a political problem at this point. You cant really demand change from people around you if you’re not prepared to do the same yourself.
It largely depends on how you count emissions. Norway has very low emissions per capita, as they have the right geography for hydroelectric power (with which they generate >95% of their electricity). On the other hand, they have a large industry of exporting oil to other countries.
I think a more useful metric is per unit of GDP. ...because then it becomes an efficiency metric. "How much wealth can we create with X amount of CO2".
First of all it suggests that wealth is the be-all and end-all of human progress. It also implies that wealth creation is equivalent wherever it happens - that somehow if a place is more efficient at creating wealth than it should be privileged.
Finally, of course, this means that poorer countries that produce less wealth will almost certainly be less efficient by this metric, and hence should be penalized (of course, we shouldn't mention that a lot of their production actually ends up being consumed by the rich-world which can this way claim to be highly CO2 efficient).
but then very poor countries will never be able to get to the development level of the rich countries because they’ll be energy limited. Buying a car (even if electric) could push them over the quota. Where as folks in the west can continue driving their giant SUVs.
People on denial will always find a viewpoint that suits them. I've witnessed discussions demanding emission limits per square kilometer of land. Unsurprisingly by people from sparsely populated areas.
> Unilateral changes actually have a net negative impact because other parties simply consume more (CO2 in this case).
I fail to see your logic. If many people consume less petroleum maybe the price goes down and others consume more, but I don't see how they're going to consume more than what was the state of things in the first place.
Honestly it seems like a shallow rationalization to avoid taking personal responsibility for your actions. That might sound harsh but I'm a firm believer in extreme ownership as espoused by Jocko Willink. I'm allergic to excuses and rationalizations.
It's very simple. If Country A reduces CO2 production by closing a few factories, and Country B increases CO2 production to replace that market demand, Country A will have spent economic resources in making that change, and Country B would simply be producing what A+B produced before.
I see, you're talking not about unilateral personal choices, but unilateral country choices.
It's not that simple, there are many unilateral choices a country can make that would not have a net negative effect. For example if you close a coal power plant in Virginia, China is not simply going to build one and sell the power to the US - there are physical limitations there.
You have a valid point that a country needs to think about unintentional consequences of their decisions, something politicians are notoriously bad at, but claiming that all unilateral action is net negative is such a ludicrous strawman that I don't actually beleive that's your position on the subject.
How do you know there is a negative effect? I can see some people buying more because something is on sale, but that's temporary and overall a smaller market should consume less.
The thing is, the people blaming others also tend to strongly oppose collective action solutions.
Eg a carbon tax is better than individual action. And if combined with an international effort to apply it to imports, it would be even more effective.
But the people in question tend to say “oh, it could never be done. Others would oppose. [let’s do nothing]”
Collective action is essential but the way forward is through smaller efforts as pilot projects and to prove the market.
Setting a good example doesn't inevitably result in everyone following along, but a proven solution is a whole lot easier to sell than a proposal that's never been tried at scale.
I'd go further and say there could easily be a set of outcomes where it's a big first mover advantage for anyone who develops the approach that works in any of the many niches needed to move forward. And for the first nation that systematically enables that kind of scaled climate focused development - they'll get huge payback as the effects get worse and lagging nations pony up the money to mitigate effects and go to leading nations and companies looking for solutions with any sort of track record.
It's worse than that. And this always receives a negative reaction...yet this is the truth nobody seems to want to talk about save a very few brave researchers:
We can't do a thing about it. Period.
I've written about this many times. This isn't about denying climate change or our contribution to atmospheric CO2 concentration --that would be silly, it's as real as it gets.
This is about pulling our heads out of the sand to take a look at the data in order to understand what it is screaming at us very loudly. It goes something like this:
If humanity --all of us-- left the planet tomorrow and we took all of our technology, cars, planes, buildings --everything-- with us...it would take somewhere in the range of 50K to 100K years for atmospheric CO2 to come down by 100 ppm (which is roughly what we need).
This isn't me saying it. This is the very accurate data we have. We know, with a very high degree of certainty, what the atmosphere looked like and how long it took for CO2 to increase and decrease when humanity was but a bunch of apes on trees.
This data is provided to us by the 800,000 years of ice core atmospheric data we already have. Ice core atmospheric composition sampling is a highly accurate way to learn about what the atmosphere looked like in the past. And, again, to be redundant, we have data going back 800,000 years.
This means we KNOW how the atmosphere behaved when we were not here.
This also means we KNOW how it will behave is we all left.
If it takes the planet 50,000 to 100,000 years for a 100 ppm reduction there's NOTHING we can do at a small scale (solar panels world-wide, stop using cars, stop using planes, ban all fossil fuels, etc.) that will accelerate the slope at all. If we stay on the planet the rate of change is GREATER than 50K to 100K for 100 ppm, because we are contributing more CO2 to the equation.
Please don't take my word for it. Look at the data and you should have the same revelation about this issue I had many years ago. This does not mean we should not make an effort to clean-up our act, there are many reasons for which this is a good idea and none of them anything to do with climate change. I does mean we need to not lie to ourselves and start having real conversations about this stuff rather than, on the one hand, denying it, and, on the other, thinking we can actually affect planetary scale problems with truly insignificant measures. Hint: Everything is insignificant when compared to humanity leaving the planet. Both extreme positions are unreasonable and delusional.
Finally, a problem: Scientists, researchers, don't want to talk about this reality because their careers would be over if they did. At the very least their grants would evaporate. This is a terrible side-effect of the religion climate change has become. We need to free our researchers so that they can be honest about what we know and we can put them to work on how to deal with reality.
Here's were you will find the 800,000 years of ice core data:
Here's a paper that explains why it is that atmospheric CO2 will continue to rise exponentially even if we switch the the most optimal forms of renewable energy world-wide:
I have looked into this issue in depth and I have yet to find any argument or proposed solution that can do better than all of humanity leaving the planet, w...
Well, nobody said there's rule that says reality has to align with how we would like things to be.
The problem is greater than that. I urge you to read the paper and look at the data. We are talking about planetary scale issues here, which means solving the problem in 50 or 100 years by forcing it (chemically or whatever) is far more likely to kill all life on this planet than to fix anything at all.
And, so, sadly, 100% renewable --which is impossible-- and reforestation will not do it either.
First of all, aside from the fact that 100% renewable --again, global, planetary scale-- is impossible, we already know that, if we did that, atmospheric CO2 levels would continue to rise exponentially. That's the paper I linked to in my comment.
That leaves reforestation. So, we start with atmospheric CO2 continuing to rise exponentially and want trees to fix it.
Here's the other dose of reality, which comes from a simple question:
How did the planet "fix it" on its own when we were not around?
Simple:
- Trees grew
- Storms, cyclones, hurricanes, rain
And it took 50,000 to 100,000 years for that to drop atmospheric CO2 by 100 ppm. Again, please, don't take my word for it, I'm just another delusional moron, go look at the data and challenge that. I'd be very interested in learning I am wrong and how.
The other question is:
How did the planet cause CO2 levels to rise?
Simple:
- Massive continental scale fires burning for tens of thousands of years
Look at what's going on in Australia. Even with all of our technology we can't stop it. I have no idea how much CO2 got injected into the atmosphere so far but it can't be trivial. Now imagine that at a global scale, with massive country and continent scale fires raging unimpeded. That's how the planet did it.
Which brings me back to the reforestation issue. Yes, we need to restore the Amazon and other areas. What we've done is criminal. However, we are not going to fix the problem in 100 years by doing this. We can't.
The other danger is, once again, fires. If we plant trees on every available square meter --assuming that was possible-- we would be creating massive amounts of fuel for fires much larger than what we are seeing in Australia. In other words, just planting trees isn't a solution at all, and doing it without an understanding of the dangers involved could kill more life on earth than the alternatives.
It's a very difficult problem. I don't claim to have any solution. All I know is that we are not discussing the truth. All we have are two religious camps, one saying it isn't real and the other saying we have to destroy entire economies to fix it in 50 years. Both are crazy.
There is a very harsh implicit truth that humans, when left to do what they think best, choose to live in cities. Anything larger than about knee high is systematically exterminated and anything smaller is fitfully exterminated. Most of the land is covered in concrete. The idea that people need to take responsibility for increased PPM of CO2 when their default contribution is city living has a certain flavor of missing the forest for the trees. That is just how we roll by choice.
The hope that people might choose reduced/more expensive energy availability was always slim to nonexistant. Collective action is not going to fly; the only things that will work are (1) running out of fossil fuels or (2) Renewables/nuclear being a cheaper, better choice.
I think there are so many people already recognize climate change as a mega issue and just feel depressed. I would like to see more leadership messages of what is done and can be done in the present.
> But sure, HN, go ahead, discuss if it's the right format/UX to deliver the message that we're fucked. Heaven forbid we talk about the message itself.
Please don't contribute to the problem by going off topic in this way—it just adds more of what you're complaining about. (As, alas, does this comment.)
I think Norway should lead by example and immediately cease all oil and gas production. /s After all, they're enlightened Europeans who believe in the impending climate change catastrophe, so what's the hold up?
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 298 ms ] threadAnd it would be really nice if someone could do this for, say, Bangladesh, Yemen, or Guatemala where it's becoming life and death.
Text-only browser is easiest way.
Netcat-like programs, or wget-like http clients, will also suffice Add the 1080p videos to the end of the text:Reader mode in Firefox (probably also in other browsers) gives just the text of the story, without the images.
Who do people think this is how users want to ingest information?
Its the 2020's equivalent of a flash based website.
The photography was great.
A picture says a thousand words. It also contains far more kb of information.
Edit: At the same time, my wife, who tends to prefer her phone: "I haven't finished it.. But such a visual treat. Interesting how they did that. Makes it feel very interactive."
So I'm clearly just not the target audience, which is fair enough :-)
If human-made global warming exists, then the most immediate solution is a more lethal 2019-ncov. This is not hard to understand.
Meanwhile we are radically altering the natural environment. As the TFA spells out, so superbly.
The point being, the takes here are pretty on-brand.
recommended words per slide: 20
recommended time per slide: 2 minutes
Average academic words per page: 600
nobody is sitting through a 10 hour ppt deck either.
Also: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/23/what-jeff-bezos-learned-from...
It can also far more emotional and evocative, while reading can be more analytical.
Why not combine the two? After all, that is literally what advertising does -- give some message with an emotionally-charged visual to reinforce it.
I'm not saying this is advertising (though you could make that argument through a cynical lens), I'm saying it's using the same tools that have proven to work so effectively you see you billboards literally anywhere on earth where humans congregate.
The layout genuinely hurts my eyes to read. I have vision problems and the continuous picture changes after every sentence is very uncomfortable to view. The contrast changes rapidly from bright to dark or completely black. Then there are light pictures with white text rendered over them. After the first few "slides" I had to close the article. It was too uncomfortable to read. Perhaps you should think before you run with your ableism.
There is no lowest common denominator. Stop moralising.
Moderation can help, because once we see it happening in a thread, we downweight the off-topic subthreads. But ultimately the only fix for bad discussion is good discussion, and discussion about bad discussion (even about how much you dislike it) is bad discussion.
Somehow, during the last 2 or 3 decades, people have been nudged to believe that snow and ski times are February and Christmas/new-year holidays. Only. Easter has disappeared from the picture: now what is sold for Easter is a holiday in the sun, a stay by the sea (and nowadays, it means flying abroad, not trying your luck on your national shores). And that is stupid, because people come for Christmas when in fact there are 50% chances that there is no snow at that time of the year, and leave disappointed because the White Christmas thingie they were sold didn't exist; and they don't come any more around Easter, while there is basically always snow (soft snow, admittedly, but with a sufficient stock accumulated along the whole winter to enjoy). So basically the only time left to make money for a ski resort is February: can't open around Christmas because there is no snow, can't open around Easter because there are no customers.
It forced me to slow down, parse each line one at a time, read line-by-line, image-by-image, and let the gravity sink in. I would have just skimmed it if it were a text article with a photo gallery, to no great effect.
Could we use capitalism to provide solutions?
It's my only sustainable solution to the environment problem. I have little faith in government solutions.
While I find the format a bit cinematic for my taste, I can't help but respect their efforts to drive home the tangible effects of global warming in an emotional way.
I wouldn’t be the first to point out that the medium is the message.
Kudos for those guys for trying to tell the story differently in a hope to reach a broader audience.
I think they choose the right medium for the message.
This is a tech forum, not a climate news forum.
I wasn't suggesting that all topics must focus on tech, but that the majority of Hacker News users come from tech, and may therefore have an interest in the technical presentation of the submission.
My apologies if this was not clear.
I think that if users find technical aspects of an article a more interesting topic of discussion than the content, they should be free to discuss it in this forum.
I do not think that the guidelines should be updated to prohibit "off topic" criticism, as the parent comment suggested.
We're inundated with articles pointing out small unimportant changes and unquantified waffle about serious future changes. But never any actual predictions of global disaster. What's the expected cost in money or lives? Nobody has a clue beyond "catastrophe", whatever that means. I saw one estimate for the economic cost to Canada but it was so low that the citizens could actually just pay it as an additional tax and carry on with life hardly affected at all. Alarmists were actually critical of that data being published because they were afraid it might support people's belief that it's not very serious. Maybe because it's not?
So if you're going to say global warming is serious, can you also quantify what you mean? Otherwise you're only conveying your personal subjective feeling.
Well that can’t be right; it would turn the entire topic of climate change on its head.
When confronting climate change deniers the standard response is "weather is not climate". Saying it's hot today or cold today isn't an indication of climate change. It's what occurs over hundreds of years but especially the last 150 years.
It seems we are sending mixed signals saying that one day or a decade shows climate change. Then on the other hand we try to tell people one day or a decade is too short of a time to see changes. Yes we are certainly are seeing the effects of climate change now and it is real, just look at atmospheric carbon levels.
But saying it should be colder this time in the winter or last summer it was unusually hot. Anecdotal evidence isn't very reliable. My mother in her mid 70s told me her father (my grandfather) was out plowing the field in late November when my mother was born. Now if it's warm in late November people scream climate change.
Again, I do see and accept the evidence of climate change but I know people will see my comments as denial. I'm not denying it at all I'm 100% convinced it's just the phrasing and personal anecdotes I see disrupting the message.
† In America, few TV weathercasters are actual meteorologists anymore. Some stations will claim they are, but often they are not. One way to tell is to look for the AMS logo next to the person's name on-screen.
So I don't see what the problem is with charting, say, the 98% confidence interval, calling it normal, and stating that values outside that range are 1-in-50 year events.
Most people never understand this aspect of statistics. Living in Houston, and having survived 3 out of 4 years with an above-100-year floods, I understand firsthand the clumping of events. But the "typical" guy on the street (oops, now I just violated my own rule!) has no clue what a distribution is.
Not sure how to solve this problem. Teaching statistics to everyone in not a solution (see the Monty Hall Problem [0] ).
[0] - https://statisticsbyjim.com/fun/monty-hall-problem/
1) Scientists predicting the probability of an earthquake in a region that just had one. "If it doesn't occur, they'll say it was only a probability, and if it does, they'll claim they predicted it! Stop wasting taxpayer's money on this nonsense!"
2) "My mother chain smoked all her life and she's in her 90's. So smoking doesn't cause cancer."
To the best of my knowledge, few places have tracked temperature longer than the last 150 years and beyond that we have estimates and calculations that have variances/tolerances built in. Is 150 data points for a given location enough to KNOW both the "correct temperature" and that it does/doesn't move?
People don’t change their minds if you throw a bunch of data at them. People change their minds if you make them feel.
Weather is not climate. Even when it supports climate change.
I think everyone will agree tht the tree line can’t be 100m higher just because it was warm one winter. Trees take a while.
It's certainly been quite a shift to watch. 10 years ago, you'd hear "Sure is cold today, so much for global warming eh?" followed by cries that weather is not climate. Today, it seems that a hot summer day, or a cool summer day, or a warm winter day, or a particularly cold winter day, is just more proof of climate change.
I say this as someone who thinks climate change is real, by the way--but I am amused at how this all looks.
This is clearly false. Anecdotal appeals to emotion convince many people of many things, and the history of the climate change debate so far tends to suggest that appeals to emotion are much more effective than actual science.
> We can't conclude that these isolated incidents are caused by climate changes. > > On the other hand, we can conclude that such incidents have already become more common. And that it will likely cost us several hundred billion NOK to arm ourselves against all this water.
If it takes a slight misunderstanding about weather relating to climate change to get immediate action, isn’t that a good thing?
These events were definitively contributed to by climate change, perhaps not direct cause and effect as some assume, but there is more than just correlation.
Probably not, since people will point out that this call to action is based in falsehood and the credibility of the movement will be compromised.
For one thing, a day and a decade are pretty different.
But more important, while a decade is really short on geological timescales, and probably isn't long enough to see natural/geo driven or many astronomically-driven changes... a decade is long enough for humans to get a real idea of trends in human-driven changes, or crossing of certain boundary conditions for long-horizon changes.
Is that a double standard, or is that a more finely articulated view?
> In some places, the timberline is over 100 meters higher than before.
You give the impression the article is saying “oh it is currently warm in Norway”. It seems to be much more than that.
True. Yet, as climate change accelerates it's absolutely reasonable to expect that we will be able to sense its effects in our daily lives.
I also have quite a number of personal observations that point to the idea that the planet is warming up. On the one hand I try to remain rational and say that this is a long-term trend, but on the other I'm thinking: holy crap, things are happening so fast that I now have memories from when the world was noticeably cooler.
I think therefore that over the next decades we should start accepting anecdotal evidence as real evidence, as global warming starts having a real impact on our lives.
I have memories of world 30 years ago being hotter than it is today. I don't credit it to "global cooling" because I'm not that silly. You shouldn't be either. You'll never notice a degree C of average temperature change. You regulate your body's environment's temperature with clothing, housing, heating, etc. And it varies much more dramatically hour-by-hour than over decades. If you simply changed your bedtime a little, you could experience global warming or cooling of the same magnitude as what actually happened.
The scientific reality is that climate models have made decently accurate predictions so far. The whole point of the models is that 1C or 2C of change is not just about your own personal subjective experience of how warm it is.
The predictions are about everyone's personal subjective experience of having their home flooded, or destroyed in a fire, tornado or hurricane - all of which become more likely as temperatures rise.
This has literally been understood for decades now - by climate scientists, by the fossil fuel industry, and also by insurers.
Those are the obvious first order effects. The longer term second order effects - water shortages, crop failure, economic instability - are at least as important, if harder to model. And the third order consequences - homelessness, resource wars, mass migration - even more so.
Just because you have failed to educate yourself properly, while persuading yourself that your subjective opinion about "clothing and heating" is as credible scientifically as that of thousands of climate science PhDs working full-time on modelling, and don't understand that these are specific, actionable predictions doesn't mean they won't affect you personally.
For example, Dr Semmelweis who literally prooved hand washing saved lives. He was mocked and committed to an asylum by his colleagues, where he ironically died from infection after a beating.
> It seems we are sending mixed signals saying that one day or a decade shows climate change.
The article isn't making these points at all; it definitely seemed to be looking at a much longer picture, at least that was my takeaway.
I know you're not practicing active "denial", but consider the degree to which you chose to be a headwind or a tailwind. Tone policing is being a headwind.
Articles like this make me want to sniff glue. What should be written — and disseminated widely — is the truth that climate catastrophe is on our doorstep.
Who gives a shit if Norway is warmer and warmer, or if some other place is colder due to the chaotic nature of weather? The point is, "global warming" is rapidly destabilizing — no, destroying — ecosystems that we depend upon for our survival, and unleashing feedback loops that we are helpless to stop.
It's only going to get worse. Most articles don't go far enough in explaining the severity of the situation, because it'll frighten the neoliberals and trigger the neocons.
If Hacker News is still around in the next decade, I can't wait to read all the comments by the people here who love to bikeshed about "optics" and bullshit when actual widespread famine is beginning to rear its ugly head. I'm afraid most of you will turn inside out with all that navel-gazing.
> When confronting climate change deniers...
The article doesn't give me the impression that it's aimed at those wishing to support their arguments with climate-change deniers.
I don't want to make assumptions about where in the world you're from, and I do acknowledge that climate-change denial is a serious problem we need to combat, but in Norway and most other developed European countries, climate-change denial isn't really a thing* anymore. Most people in this field have moved on and are just trying to get to grips with impact and timelines (like this article).
* That's not to say climate-change deniers don't exist, just that they're not mainstream and are often either ridiculed or ignored.
It's quite scary.
But now there's a lot more northwest winds in autumn, which causes heavy rainfall that floods rivers. And likewise, the spring "monsoon" when continual nor'westers are the defining weather pattern (when I lived in an alpine village, 29 days of continual rain in November was the usual) now extends significantly into Summer. And of course, the rainfall events are getting more extreme, damaging roads and hiking infrastructure - like this: https://www.odt.co.nz/regions/fiordland/routeburn-closed-for...
It comes after an incredibly hot and dry summer. My place is supposed to be very green and wet: this year it rained only twice in 3 months! And those were not even summer rains, those two rainy days looked like small November rainfalls. When I was a kid we had short summer storms several times a week (in the end of afternoon / early evening), especially in August (less so in July, but still there were a few). The system has completely changed over the last 2 decades.
And then the autumn was dry too, except for 1 month. And now the winter is warm and dry.
And that comes after a similar year the year before, which was just a little bit softer.
--------
That's not just anecdotal: the long term measurements show huge changes, and acceleration. Short term measurements too: monthly records get beaten all the time those last 5 years.
Wetter and colder places have been impacted more by the warming, apparently.
The best (worst for humans) stuff is buried.
Either the police had probable case to make an arrest or the arrestees can sue for false arrest. In general the police do not arrest people without a reason in England.
I feel a little hopeless in these discussions. I have little hope for change. I cannot argue against the fact that our impact in Europe will not be enough. This requires a global, concerted effort and it's hard to argue against the logic that it won't matter what we do in Europe if everyone else doesn't follow suit. We are just delaying the inevitable.
This kind of feels to me like mutual assured destruction. Nobody lay down their weapons because of the other party. If you are not changing habits because the source of the problem doesn't lie in your geographical section, you are turning your back to the fact that climate crisis is a human kind crisis. We need to change habits as a whole, so that even when we are not directly helping, we are setting precedent and example.
Edit: the talks are frustrating though, I am not arguing that! But let's not give up. Giving up we are assuring our defeat.
Has the colonists accepted the responsibility for their plundering of once wealthy countries that's called "third world" now ?
Any one country isn't enough to make a difference, but we're all in this together, and The West bears more than its fair share of responsibility. Pointing your finger and India and China just makes you look like a selfish hypocrite.
And it _is_ a political problem at this point. You cant really demand change from people around you if you’re not prepared to do the same yourself.
First of all it suggests that wealth is the be-all and end-all of human progress. It also implies that wealth creation is equivalent wherever it happens - that somehow if a place is more efficient at creating wealth than it should be privileged.
Finally, of course, this means that poorer countries that produce less wealth will almost certainly be less efficient by this metric, and hence should be penalized (of course, we shouldn't mention that a lot of their production actually ends up being consumed by the rich-world which can this way claim to be highly CO2 efficient).
You misunderstand. The point is to quantify economic power. ...because economic power is the ONLY way fix global warming.
The whole thing looks very gloomy to me.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PP.GD?end=2...
Unilateral changes actually have a net negative impact because other parties simply consume more (CO2 in this case).
I fail to see your logic. If many people consume less petroleum maybe the price goes down and others consume more, but I don't see how they're going to consume more than what was the state of things in the first place.
Honestly it seems like a shallow rationalization to avoid taking personal responsibility for your actions. That might sound harsh but I'm a firm believer in extreme ownership as espoused by Jocko Willink. I'm allergic to excuses and rationalizations.
It's a net negative for the world.
It's not that simple, there are many unilateral choices a country can make that would not have a net negative effect. For example if you close a coal power plant in Virginia, China is not simply going to build one and sell the power to the US - there are physical limitations there.
You have a valid point that a country needs to think about unintentional consequences of their decisions, something politicians are notoriously bad at, but claiming that all unilateral action is net negative is such a ludicrous strawman that I don't actually beleive that's your position on the subject.
Eg a carbon tax is better than individual action. And if combined with an international effort to apply it to imports, it would be even more effective.
But the people in question tend to say “oh, it could never be done. Others would oppose. [let’s do nothing]”
Setting a good example doesn't inevitably result in everyone following along, but a proven solution is a whole lot easier to sell than a proposal that's never been tried at scale.
It's worse than that. And this always receives a negative reaction...yet this is the truth nobody seems to want to talk about save a very few brave researchers:
We can't do a thing about it. Period.
I've written about this many times. This isn't about denying climate change or our contribution to atmospheric CO2 concentration --that would be silly, it's as real as it gets.
This is about pulling our heads out of the sand to take a look at the data in order to understand what it is screaming at us very loudly. It goes something like this:
If humanity --all of us-- left the planet tomorrow and we took all of our technology, cars, planes, buildings --everything-- with us...it would take somewhere in the range of 50K to 100K years for atmospheric CO2 to come down by 100 ppm (which is roughly what we need).
This isn't me saying it. This is the very accurate data we have. We know, with a very high degree of certainty, what the atmosphere looked like and how long it took for CO2 to increase and decrease when humanity was but a bunch of apes on trees.
This data is provided to us by the 800,000 years of ice core atmospheric data we already have. Ice core atmospheric composition sampling is a highly accurate way to learn about what the atmosphere looked like in the past. And, again, to be redundant, we have data going back 800,000 years.
This means we KNOW how the atmosphere behaved when we were not here.
This also means we KNOW how it will behave is we all left.
If it takes the planet 50,000 to 100,000 years for a 100 ppm reduction there's NOTHING we can do at a small scale (solar panels world-wide, stop using cars, stop using planes, ban all fossil fuels, etc.) that will accelerate the slope at all. If we stay on the planet the rate of change is GREATER than 50K to 100K for 100 ppm, because we are contributing more CO2 to the equation.
Please don't take my word for it. Look at the data and you should have the same revelation about this issue I had many years ago. This does not mean we should not make an effort to clean-up our act, there are many reasons for which this is a good idea and none of them anything to do with climate change. I does mean we need to not lie to ourselves and start having real conversations about this stuff rather than, on the one hand, denying it, and, on the other, thinking we can actually affect planetary scale problems with truly insignificant measures. Hint: Everything is insignificant when compared to humanity leaving the planet. Both extreme positions are unreasonable and delusional.
Finally, a problem: Scientists, researchers, don't want to talk about this reality because their careers would be over if they did. At the very least their grants would evaporate. This is a terrible side-effect of the religion climate change has become. We need to free our researchers so that they can be honest about what we know and we can put them to work on how to deal with reality.
Here's were you will find the 800,000 years of ice core data:
https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/images/air_bubbles_historical...
https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html
Here's a paper that explains why it is that atmospheric CO2 will continue to rise exponentially even if we switch the the most optimal forms of renewable energy world-wide:
https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...
I have looked into this issue in depth and I have yet to find any argument or proposed solution that can do better than all of humanity leaving the planet, w...
Going 100% renewable alone isn't enough. We also need afforestation programs and carbon capture programs on a massive scale.
The problem is greater than that. I urge you to read the paper and look at the data. We are talking about planetary scale issues here, which means solving the problem in 50 or 100 years by forcing it (chemically or whatever) is far more likely to kill all life on this planet than to fix anything at all.
And, so, sadly, 100% renewable --which is impossible-- and reforestation will not do it either.
First of all, aside from the fact that 100% renewable --again, global, planetary scale-- is impossible, we already know that, if we did that, atmospheric CO2 levels would continue to rise exponentially. That's the paper I linked to in my comment.
That leaves reforestation. So, we start with atmospheric CO2 continuing to rise exponentially and want trees to fix it.
Here's the other dose of reality, which comes from a simple question:
How did the planet "fix it" on its own when we were not around?
Simple:
- Trees grew - Storms, cyclones, hurricanes, rain
And it took 50,000 to 100,000 years for that to drop atmospheric CO2 by 100 ppm. Again, please, don't take my word for it, I'm just another delusional moron, go look at the data and challenge that. I'd be very interested in learning I am wrong and how.
The other question is:
How did the planet cause CO2 levels to rise?
Simple:
- Massive continental scale fires burning for tens of thousands of years
Look at what's going on in Australia. Even with all of our technology we can't stop it. I have no idea how much CO2 got injected into the atmosphere so far but it can't be trivial. Now imagine that at a global scale, with massive country and continent scale fires raging unimpeded. That's how the planet did it.
Which brings me back to the reforestation issue. Yes, we need to restore the Amazon and other areas. What we've done is criminal. However, we are not going to fix the problem in 100 years by doing this. We can't.
The other danger is, once again, fires. If we plant trees on every available square meter --assuming that was possible-- we would be creating massive amounts of fuel for fires much larger than what we are seeing in Australia. In other words, just planting trees isn't a solution at all, and doing it without an understanding of the dangers involved could kill more life on earth than the alternatives.
It's a very difficult problem. I don't claim to have any solution. All I know is that we are not discussing the truth. All we have are two religious camps, one saying it isn't real and the other saying we have to destroy entire economies to fix it in 50 years. Both are crazy.
The hope that people might choose reduced/more expensive energy availability was always slim to nonexistant. Collective action is not going to fly; the only things that will work are (1) running out of fossil fuels or (2) Renewables/nuclear being a cheaper, better choice.
They've been trying social efforts for quite a while now.
Are there other similar groups that try to educate and motivate the rest of the population ?
With enough of these groups, I believe most people will feel motivated, they just need a headstart to follow (we're too social).
I really thought I was somewhat informed about the effects, but what happened there is way beyond anything you get from reading papers.
But sure, HN, go ahead, discuss if it's the right format/UX to deliver the message that we're fucked. Heaven forbid we talk about the message itself.
Please don't contribute to the problem by going off topic in this way—it just adds more of what you're complaining about. (As, alas, does this comment.)