Great place to start is shutting down Bitcoin and reclaiming one full country of electricity consumption currently doing literally absolutely nothing. Low-hanging fruit so to speak.
We need both, to be completely honest. Nuclear is a zero-carbon (well, low-carbon), sustainable solution to powering the world. And the safest form of energy in the world when measured in terms of deaths per TWh of generated power. Not a popular opinion, I'll grant you.
Again, the safest form of electricity. [1] Certainly if you add the deaths from rooftop solar to that solar chart, and also the deaths from the Bangqiao Dam to hydro (200,000 people in one go).
It would honestly just be nice to see some MSR[1]s or other "modern" reactors brought on to start disabusing people of their "Nuclear means big explosions" misconceptions. Nuclear is quite safe - it's downside is that it's expensive due to a large initial capital investment. But, once that's secured, it ends up being quite profitable - it's just hard to attract investors into an investment with a ten year RoI.
> And the safest form of energy in the world when measured in terms of deaths per TWh of generated power.
My mind on this is is not settled, but how does this factor in the unknown future of radioactive waste? We're not even through 0.1% of the time it will remain a threat. Every single nuclear TWh comes with a debt that must be repaid over thousands of years. Ensuring the death toll from that remains at zero is basically impossible to guarantee right now.
Radioactive waste is super dense, easy to contain (throw it in Yucca mountain and seal 'er up) and easy to detect with a Geiger counter. Further, you can dramatically reduce the physical quantity of waste using fast neutron reactors or breeder reactors.
/second that recommendation. I listened to the audiobook version recently and it's a good distillation of the problem [1] and outline of what it will take to definitively solve it. A good starting point for anyone who wants to understand it more clearly, or jumping off point for further deep dives.
[1]: We need to go from 51 billion tons of greenhouse gasses per year to 0 by 2050.
Declaring a war on bitcoin would be as futile as War on Drugs and the Prohibition. Might as well embrace it, try to tax and regulate it, and move the revenue from it to worthwhile initiatives that can buy humanity more time.
Having said that, in an ideal world, I’d agree with you and say we should shutdown bitcoin and all other activity that’s superfluous to humanity’s struggle against climate change. Industrialized meat production is out. International air travel is out. Raising all other product prices according to the climate externalities they cause. Doubly or triply replanting the forests in the Amazon and elsewhere. It’s gonna take sacrifices now to prevent suffering later, if we’re going to make it past this potential Great Filter.
Because we can prove by induction. If a Visa transaction consumed as much power as a single Bitcoin payment, Visa alone would consume 3X as much power as the entire world generates and be responsible for 100% of the world's e-waste production.
A single Bitcoin transaction now consumes 30 days of power for the average household, as much as it takes a Tesla to drive from SF to well past New York, at this point closer to SF-NY-Miami. And generates half an iPhone of e-waste (100g).
It also consumes 5X as much energy as mining gold, which is the second worst option.
Visa is not physical currency, that’s not what I asked.
Electricity can be generated from zero carbon means, nuclear, solar, wind, hydro, etc. There’s an order of magnitude more solar energy hitting the Earth every day than humans ever use.
Instead of stopping progress and living in the past, we can find a better way to make use of it.
Doesn't solve the e-waste generation, the arms race to increase hash rate creates 100g of e-waste per transaction. Devastating for the planet of course and utterly insufficient for anything bigger than a Costco.
Just how much power do you think physical currency consumes? Data, citations, estimates please. Because I know handing a $10 bill to my buddy consumes 0kWh, and doing the same with Bitcoin costs $20 and consumes 30 days of power.
If you want progress you'll have to do something that moves the world forward not warms it up.
e-waste can be recycled, useful metals can be reclaimed.
It doesn’t matter how much power it uses if it’s switched to solar, and there are lower power options like proof-of-stake coming online anyway.
The relevant metric is tons of CO2 released, not kWh used. Bitcoin could be run with zero CO2 released if we chose to, in which case shutting it down would do absolutely nothing in regard to climate change.
[1, 2] does not suggest that recycling of e-waste actually happens. Solve that first, power supply second, then re-enable Bitcoin mining and you've got my vote.
Basically, it can't really be economically recycled, and it isn't. It's just thrown in heaps where poor folks in developing nations scrabble through the toxic remains.
"Useful metals" is a few grams of gold, tin and copper. The rest is plastics (non-recyclables) and FR4 (epoxy filled fiberglass). Fiberglass is also not recyclable.
Your plan amounts to little more than greenwashing.
> Recyclers can make money from selling scavenged metal from electronic equipment, says Puckett, but the process to retrieve usable metals is typically extremely toxic. Workers who remove the metals often have no protective equipment and breathe in high levels of toxic chemicals, which are then released into the atmosphere. And most of the countries where the processing takes place -- China, India, Ghana, Pakistan -- do not have regulations in place to protect workers or prevent the primitive recycling operations.
Most of electronics is plastic (epoxy is a plastic), and by and large plastic simply isn't recyclable. That's one of "mother's little lies" the plastic industry has been telling you for years to feel better about consumption. Reducing waste is the only way.
[1, 2] does not suggest that recycling of e-waste actually happens. Solve that first, power supply second, then re-enable Bitcoin mining and you've got my vote.
Basically, it can't really be economically recycled, and it isn't. It's just thrown in heaps where poor folks in developing nations scrabble through the toxic remains.
"Useful metals" is a few grams of gold and copper. The rest is plastics (non-recyclables) and FR4 (epoxy filled fiberglass). Fiberglass is also not recyclable.
Your plan amounts to little more than greenwashing.
What is with this Bitcoin & infinite renewables fantasy? You want to compare Bitcoin to resource use of paper money, and then claim Bitcoin's electricity use is anyway irrelevant since humanity could theoretically harvest almost infinite energy from sun (someone just needs to build and maintain the infrastructure.)
Meanwhile in reality, Bitcoin's security and value is actually backed by the very scarcity of electricity (computing power) you want to deny, and almost all Bitcoin is mined with the dirtiest, cheapest and most climate unfriendly energy available: Chinese coal.
While I agree with the general sentiment that Bitcoin's energy consumption is a huge problem, I have a problem with these as arguments in isolation.
Most would not claim that a Visa transaction and a Bitcoin payment are close to equivalent (the article you linked even acknowledges this). Mining gold is a more interesting comparison, but even though I can go start mining Bitcoin right now, I can't go start mining gold.
The article provides a more thoughtful exploration that gets into some of the nuance and makes a stronger case against mining. I mention this because someone reading your comment might be tempted to discard it outright because "those comparisons make no sense".
Every time I read an argument like that, I wonder whether the author actually looked into how cryptocurrencies work.
They have burning of resources built in. Proof of work, their primary mechanism so far, is literally: Waste energy on meaningless computations, until you hit a "lucky" one, with all previous computations having no inherent value themselves.
Physical currencies don't have this inefficiency built into their core. In fact, unlike cryptocurrencies, it's in everyone's best interest to make the currency's operation as efficient as possible.
Nope, the U.S. is backed by the U.S. military, the currency is a freeloader. Whether the currency was bits of string, fiat dollars or Bitcoin, the U.S. military would be the exact same size. Because the military doesn't run around like a body guard for dollar bills, it furthers America's sovereign interests wherever those happen to be located.
What should I tell them exactly? That the size of the US Army will be exactly the same no matter what currency America uses? I think they already know that.
Wars would not be any easier to finance in a Bitcoin economy. America had no trouble going to war under the gold standard - and frankly organized and structured debt just makes it easier still. Remember the vast majority of US debt is held domestically by Americans. All that is to say [citation needed].
I think the only way to kill bitcoin is either to break SHA-256 (and that would probably be short-term) or aggressively shutdown the exchanges. As long as BTCs are worth tens of thousands of dollars people are going to mine them.
It's pretty hard for me to imagine that either of these things are going to happen. I don't think that cryptocurrencies are ever going to be really useful because they're so inefficient, but I also think that they're here to stay as a speculative/gambling tool.
Just have to cut off fiat gateways. Nobody's gonna gamble if LocalBitcoins is the only way to play. Plenty of other ways to gamble from home, like Robinhood.
Bitcoin just has to be the second easiest way to gamble from home to be utterly worthless.
You can't really shut down bitcoin. Whack a mole laws like this are too hard to enforce. The only bad thing about bitcoin is its electricity consumption. The easiest way to solve this is to add a carbon tax. That way you don't have to shut down bitcoin. Bitcoin either has to move entirely to renewables or they will have to lower their electricity usage or they will shut down themselves with raised costs.
Easy, as with any other thing that is imported: import duties collected by the banks and exchanges. And if you convert it into currency or goods overseas, there is also going to be a duty on that (if there isn't already).
Wait, when you said Chinese mining cartel, did you mean bitcoin mining? Not actual mining?
Bitcoin mining doesn't cause pollution, running a power plant does. If the power plant isn't publishing reasonable records as to pollution caused and tax recovered then you add it to the estimated total for the country and tax imports, that way the country fixes itself because they don't want to lose trade.
This will hit normie folks if it's done fairly, but that's not unjust - we are all contributing to pollution and it's inaccurate to say "Those miners cause all the pollution" - it is, however, appropriate to describe their activities as generating significantly more pollution.
In the short period Australia had a carbon tax, the profits were used to reduce the cost of other taxes so the average person came out even but you would be incentivized to constantly beat the rest by reducing your emissions so if you cause less damage than the average person, you pay less.
> Just tax pollution the amount it costs to clean up pollution
Even if Pigovian taxes were implementable[1], that's how they work. Since there is an optimal amount of pollution, the taxes are supposed to be set where the marginal cost to society of an additional unit of pollution is equal to the marginal benefit to society of that extra unit of pollution.
Note the hand-wavy terms "benefit", "cost", and "unit". The devil is in how those are measured. Since central planning authorities are horrible at figuring stuff like this out, one generally ends up in a situation worse than the one which one would like to fix.
As for the "clean up" aspect, I heartily recommend that one read and understand Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen[2]. Here is an excerpt[3].
There's no way to get every country to agree to a carbon tax. You'll always have a country that decides it's worth whatever sanctions in order to create a completive advantage for their industries. North Korea or Iran would end up controlling all the mining which I doubt is what anyone wants.
> The easiest way to solve this is to add a carbon tax
The easiest way to solve this is to ban PoW coins in favor of PoS coins. There is nothing inherently valuable about BTC that wouldn’t be just as valuable in an equivalent PoS token.
How do you ban PoW mining? Raiding every property with high electricity usage? This just becomes another war on drugs. Simply price the power higher and use those new profits to build renewable power sources.
The problem is that some uses of electricity are beneficial to society (e.g. keeping refrigerators running to prevent food spoilage). Others are detrimental to society (e.g. bitcoin's existence, allowing for the rise of ransomware). Raising the price uniformly across all uses does disincentivize the use of electricity, but some of that may be by not being able to have beneficial uses of electricity.
I agree that raiding individual mining locations is counterproductive. Instead, go after the exchanges, where bitcoin is exchanged for real money. Without an economic incentive to mine bitcoin, the mining would slow down and stop.
I just figured you could ban trading of it. What good is a token you can’t trade anywhere? And it’s not like BTC has any intrinsic value. The black market doesn’t care if it’s dealing in ETH or Dogecoin.
> The only bad thing about bitcoin is its electricity consumption.
The lack of reversible transactions is a bad thing. Without reversibility, there is no recourse against fraudulent transactions. Reversing a transaction requires the active participation of the fraudulent actor. This is why ransomware really started taking off once bitcoin and friends picked up. Before that, there was no economic incentive to hold computers for ransom, because any payment made could be reversed after the hard drive is decrypted.
This is not as much of a problem as it is made out to be. The whole Europe runs on SEPA system of non-reversible direct debit transactions. Even if formally exist ways to reverse transactions, I have never heard of anyone having used them. All transactions are considered final just like cryptos, and if you make a mistake (eg enter wrong account number) in a transaction, you need the receiving party to voluntarily send it back. There's no way to force the transaction. Fraud is kept under control by other means.
The total cost of electricity used is limited by revenue from the block reward, 6.25 Bitcoins every ten minutes. (And transaction fees.) So a government wouldn’t need to shut it down, just make the market crash.
And that might be possible by getting people and businesses that don’t cheat on their taxes to sell any holdings with something like a wealth tax.
If buying, selling or owning bitcoins were illegal in the US and for US companies, I guarantee trade in bitcoin would plummet and mining would wind-up using a small fraction of the energy it uses today.
The only bad thing about bitcoin is its electricity consumption.
There's also the way it allows those with access to energy they don't own to launder that access into money. Plus facilitating all manner of illegal activities (and I'm favor of making some things, like drugs, legal. Tax evasion or murder-for-hire, not so much).
I went from eating a pound of ground beef pretty much every day to almost 100% vegetarian, pretty much on a dime. Healthier than ever, don't miss it. If you're reading this and unsure about cutting down on meat... You can do it.
I can't find the link, but I read an interesting argument that the USD is more wasteful of natural resources than Bitcoin because its value is indirectly backed by the US military.
That argument hinges entirely on the assumption that the militaries ceased to exist if the US Dollar and other currencies were all replaced by Bitcoin, i.e. that our monetary system is the only reason for the states, or even the concept of sovereignty itself, to exist.
That's a great start, but don't stop there, because there are many more non-essential, energy wasting activities that we can also curtail: video games, leisure travel, fashion, and so on
Again, those don't have being inefficient by design built into their core. It's to everyone's best interest to make video games, leisure travel, and fashion, as efficient as possible. Cryptocurrencies' proof-of-work concept relies on being inefficient. If you get more efficient, difficulty goes up, to keep the process inefficient.
None of the unimaginable amounts computations wasted on proof-of-concept have any inherent value at all, until someone hits that final "lucky" one, that allows the transactions to take place.
I'm not sure what that has to do with my argument. Besides, banks have less and less walls, guards, and vaults, because they keep less and less cash on premise.
This is a prime example of the monetary system having been made more efficient over time.
I didn't realize we were making an exhaustive list, but it seems you meant at a systematic level. That would be the federal reserve and its charter, and the US government and its charter.
Yes, let's start with banning off-topic comment threads about someone's personal bugbear (these are obvious energy wasters), and ultimately we should put a stop to any non-productive discussions
> Which boils down to an entity in charge of deciding what is useful energy use and what is not. Do you want to live in a world like that? I don’t.
Of course I want to live in a world like that, just like I like living in a world where my neighbor is not allowed to just break into my house without consequences. Just like I like living in a world where people are not allowed to dump unbounded amounts of toxic waste into lakes and oceans.
We have regulation for what's allowed in food. Are you okay with that? Or do you prefer becoming an expert at food sciences so that you can test yourself that a food brand isn't trying to sell you something poisonous as a cost cutting measure?
> Why is the green solution to everything more prohibition and rules?
Because otherwise greedy people with no concept or care of long or even mid term effects mess things up for everyone else, and even themselves.
> What happened to believing in the future, in innovation and technology...
That has never been the case without regulation. We made cars and airplanes, we added tomes of regulation to make sure cars and airplanes work well enough to keep the people dying directly from them at a minimum.
You are okay with the state deciding you can only watch 30 mins of TV per day and 30 min of playstation?
You seem to think once we decide what is useful energy use and what is not, only the things you deem not useful will be affected.
What a weird straw-man. There is a whole spectrum for how regulation applies, it does not have to be the extreme you just made up. The same applies to everything. In a drought for example water usage has to be regulated, and by your reasoning I can go along and say: "You are okay with the state deciding you can only drink 1 gallon of water every day, and use 2 gallons for showering?"--even if the actual regulation is much more forthcoming.
If I wasted all energy available to us both on growing poisonous fruit that smells bad, would you object to that? Oh, but doing so would be deciding what is useful and what is not!
It’s an extreme example to point out that what’s useful energy use for someone isn’t for someone else. Who will decide? You might not like the result when we go down this path.
Yes. If the alternative is a climate catastrophe, I will have to accept that.
Again, the same applies to everything. You might not find a regulation about how much mercury is allowed in food items necessary or even "useful", but I, and many other people, are glad it exists.
I don't understand this argument, at all. Less energy wasted means less coal and fossil fuels wasted, until everything is 100% CO2-neutral regenerative energy sources.
Yes, climate change is happening. Do most people who are not progressive westerners care? No. Can you convince them without bribing or bullying them? No. Does calling it an emergency make you look like a crazy person? Yes.
How does that make anyone seem crazy? I can only speak for the region I live in, but due to neighboring areas now having regular fire seasons my area now has regular smokey seasons. This is new and looks like its here to stay. How is that not an emergency?
> Does calling it an emergency make you look like a crazy person? Yes.
Caring about the world, even invisible aspects of it, does not make anyone look crazy except to those that already are. Hopefully someone's crazy enough to do something to start fixing it.
Isn't China taking climate change pretty seriously, though? They are the second largest CO2 producer but seem aware of it and are investing massively in developing lots of green tech. Your claim is actually borderline chauvinist, as if other people than "progressive westerners" could not comprehend the long term effects of climate change.
> Isn't China taking climate change pretty seriously, though?
It's hard to argue that they're taking it terribly seriously when they continue building out massive amounts of coal power. They've got something north of 50% of the world's coal plants, and are stamping out more at an alarming rate.
Regardless of what they say, their actions would indicate that they're happy with other people being concerned about climate change, because then those people will buy Chinese panels, inverters, turbines, etc.
China is by far the largest emitter, dwarfing the next country (USA). China emit about as much as all of "the west" combined and will soon overtake them because they are still increasing and are likely to continue increasing for the next several decades while most of the west, even USA, emissions have been coming down for 15-20 years or more.
What's more, it's carbon intensity of production is bad, manufacturing something in China as opposed to a cleaner and more efficient country increases emissions. So it makes zero sense to give them subsidies that relatively disadvantage cleaner countries, as part of global efforts to reduce carbon.
Total emissions of a country is a totally meaningless stat. If you drew a line in the middle of the country and split them in to east and west china, we would have halved the emissions. We could then draw another line and quarter the emissions. Still means nothing. Only emissions per capita matter.
Completely wrong, emission intensity is what matters, particularly when developing policy that includes a manufacturing exporter like China, the idea of giving them any further advantage over cleaner more efficient economies is insanity.
It's the same as emissions per capita. That's actually worse than meaningless it's actively detrimental because rewarding that metric creates all sorts of perverse incentives around increasing population growth and restricting quality of life.
And I didn't bring up total emissions by country, I was replying to someone else who did. Apparently you weren't so concerned about it when it was wrongly claimed that China was the 2nd largest polluter.
Funny, seems like the rest of the world is taking it a lot more seriously than the U.S., but yeah I guess its just the "progressive westerners" that are the problem.
One important thing you should know, smart people are just as dumb as everyone else outside of their area of expertise.
> Do most people who are not progressive westerners care?
Do most people who are progressive westerners care - and by care I mean, "You can tell by their actions in life that they believe climate change is a very real problem"?
"Reposting something on social media about it, from their new 5G phone, connected to giant datacenters busy crunching their activity for improved targeting of advertising" doesn't really count.
How many have put their money where their mouth is? And, certainly, the answer is more than zero, but it's certainly not nearly as many as claim to care about it. Insert the usual excuses here about how it's systemic problems, and one person can't have an impact, and it doesn't matter how you live if you've voted for the right person, etc. It still leads to an awful lot of carbon emissions.
If you look at actual life actions, the snarky comment about how a Republican denies climate change and does nothing about it while a Democrat thinks it's the biggest problem facing the world and does nothing about it ends up looking awfully true.
They do, and if I'm going on about how horrible meat is, how awful cattle farming and hog farming is, while munching away on a bacon double cheeseburger, it's entirely reasonable for other people to ignore everything I say. I may be entirely correct in every aspect, but if I don't care about something I'm saying to at least try to live aspects of it out in my life, other people are free to determine I really don't care about it in the slightest - and they'd probably be right.
Indeed. And such sound and fury is wonderfully on display just about every time some celebrity goes on about what everyone else must do to save the planet, them, of course, being able to continue doing the good work from their private jet and mansion in the foothills.
Like Thunberg or not, at least she's very evidently trying, as well as she's able, to practice what she preaches.
Greta is great. Can only respect her actual commitment to a cause she is so passionate about. She’s real and truthful.
If the millions of narcissists that can only manage to tell others how idiotic they are could commit in the same way, they’d maybe actually see the change they want as they’d be an inspiration to others.
> Insert the usual excuses here about how it's systemic problems, and one person can't have an impact, and it doesn't matter how you live if you've voted for the right person, etc. It still leads to an awful lot of carbon emissions.
You haven't provided any actual rebuttals to any of these, just "Yeah, yeah, you still emit carbon so I don't have to listen to you". By your standards the only action that's good enough is taking one's own life.
> By your standards the only action that's good enough is taking one's own life.
I'm sorry, I must have missed where I wrote that in my response.
I've met many left leaning progressives who view climate change as a very real problem, and the indications of it in their own lives are... well, entirely missing.
If you've got a net worth of comfortably north of a million dollars, live in a large home (say, 5000 sq ft for three or four people), commute an hour or two to work every day (in your new Tesla, of course - have to buy to be green!), and take a vacation via jet once or twice a year? I'm sorry, I don't believe that you really find climate change that much of a problem. And, practically, it's not going to be for someone in that position. You can buy your way out of most problems, climate change included. At most, it seems to be an excuse for socially valid consumption (back six or so years ago, "Yeah, I've got a preorder for a Powerwall and a Tesla Roof..." seemed a well regarded phrase among the excessive consumption class).
If someone states "Yeah, my house is on fire, it's a really big emergency..." as they're sitting on their couch watching TV with the kids asleep in their bedrooms, it's reasonable to conclude that they don't actually believe their house is on fire. And I apply the same logic to other things people are prone to claim are "huge emergencies." If they're getting the family out of the house, calling the fire department, and discharging a fire extinguisher at the base of the flames, yeah, they believe their house is on fire.
You're welcome to assume I care nothing about climate change if you want, though a reasonably quick survey of the other writings I've done on the internet would prove the absurdity of that statement, given the number of battery packs I've rebuilt, transportation choices, solar array builds, and my general (deliberate) lack of regular travel in my life. shrug
Ok, I'll set out my own climate credentials. As a "left leaning progressive" of the economic standing you describe, I've lived most of my adult life in apartments less than 800 sq ft. All of the furniture in my apartment, save my bed, is off Craigslist or from consignment stores. I've commuted by bike or public transport for most of my career and when I've had a car commute, it's been under 20 minutes - by design.
Pre-Covid and parenthood, I took one or two flights a year mostly to visit family. I think I've taken one pure pleasure trip overseas in my entire life. The only animal flesh I consume is chicken, maybe 3 meals/week. I buy carbon offsets for everything else.
Given all that, I'll still take the other "left leaning progressives with 5000 sq ft homes" over the people who deny that there's a problem at all. At least the progressives vote for politicians who'll do something. The other guys will consume the same amount as the limousine liberals, but their politicians won't do shit.
If we keep hoping for everyone in the world to start living like you or me, the world is doomed. Carbon taxes and other big actions are the only way. With carbon taxes, people will automatically pay extra for their massive homes and jet setting lifestyles, or be priced out.
> Do most people who are not progressive westerners care? No.
Citation needed.
> Can you convince them without bribing or bullying them? No.
Well most new carbon emissions in the developing world are going to be from economic progress. You're going to have to do something to convince them that they should care about climate change instead of feeding, sheltering, and clothing their children.
> Do most people who are not progressive westerners care? No.
This isn't what's indicated by worldwide polls. In fact it's in the US where most of the first world denialism is taking place; everywhere else, _especially_ amongst youth, it's a massive issue.
Pew surveys actually say that people who are not progressive westerners actually care at a higher rate. It will seem weird but then you realize that more of them have agricultural-centric economies.
"Given the circumstances, Scientific American has agreed with major news outlets worldwide to start using the term “climate emergency” in its coverage of climate change."
This seems reasonable and appropriate. As much as I want to believe in humanity, I'm not optimistic that we're going to be able to actually solve this before things get really bad.
Yes and no. I wouldn't blame just Trump per se, because forest management policy implementation across jurisdictions moves glacially-slow. There is likely enough blame to go around, such as not clearing fuel around the electrical grid and not setting intentional, controlled clearance fires.
The most economically-destructive fires are at the Wildland-urban interface (WUI), especially new residential developments that build right up to and in large, dense forested areas. Without proper fire mitigation for houses, infrastructure, and communities, devastating Camp Fire scenarios are entirely possible again.
Uh no, not backdoor climate emergency denial. I survived in the 2018 Paradise fire. The main problem there was no rain for 200+ days, coupled with strong, dry winds in a particular direction, and PG&E's 100+-year-old under-maintained, bare powerlines that broke off their ancient fasteners. The reason for the 200+ days of no rain is likely related to both rising average temperatures, breaking record-after-record each year, and the lack of enough Arctic sea ice pack to stabilize the Arctic's jet-stream. Without a stable jet-stream, it breaks off into disjointed loops and also dips down into lower latitudes. This causes havoc and seemingly more random/variable/intense weather in N America. Blizzard in Austin, for example, which never anticipated such an occurrence that far south.
It wasn't a "forest." I lived there for five years. It was islands of tall trees. Nearly all of them were maintained by arborists because of the liability of widowmakers. Our 1/2 acre yard had 7 tall trees and two giant lawns, nothing close to a "forest."
The trees were only "highly-flammable" because of the extreme lack of rain drying out the brush acting as kindling and the trees acting as fuel.
Don't insult or disrespect me because I lived there and escaped the fire. Did you live there? Were you there? I have eyes, noticed the many tree species everyday, and density that was there before the disaster capitalism resource exploiters came in and cut down every tree that homeowners didn't defend ($1000+ per log). We had mostly pines in our yard that were constantly attacked by borer beetles and helped by woodpeckers. There were some places with more trees than others, but it wasn't an "oak forest." There were a dozen different species of trees.
Our house survived because there wasn't fuel right next to the building and building codes work. Many of the houses that burned were dilapidated/poorly maintained, had trees overhanging or too close to their homes, or had fuel like bushes, pine needles, or firewood next to them.
Do you know how many trash cans-full of pine needles I cleaned out of the gutters before putting gutter-guards in?
Gimme a break with your know-nothing reporter regurgitated soundbite quips.
You're reinforcing my point. YOUR house didn't burn because you took a great deal of preventative measures and were extra-vigilant. The majority of people's houses did not survive, because they simply never realized (or just discounted) the enormous danger their property, and the entire city, was in, based on its location and proximity to the surrounding forest. In other cities, homes don't have large quantities of pine needles piling up.
I really don't see how you can claim the town was NOT extraordinarily prone to fire, given what happened. PG&E has poorly-maintained powerlines all over the state and they often start small fires, but those don't result in the destruction of an entire town, except when the town and its surrounding area is a tinderbox.
> Blizzard in Austin, for example, which never anticipated such an occurrence that far south
The ERCOT report [0] on the 2011 Texas outage states, verbatim,
> "The winter weather event of February 1-5, 2011 was determined to be a one in ten year event for some regions of Texas in terms of low temperature extremes and duration."
Or, if you'd rather be kinder to Texas power generators while using the same report,
> "Taking these temperature extremes into account, and coupling them with the sustained winds of this event, it is estimated that the resultant [...] event suffered by many Texas generation facilities approached a one in 25 year severity."
With this decade-old report suggesting extreme cold may well occur roughly once per decade, I will respectfully follow up with: Never anticipated my ass.
Probably the worst possible damage a person can do to the enviroment is to have children. Everything else is basically just a drop (of pollution) in the ocean. I have my own opinions here, which i won't say, but i'm just addressing the elephant in the news.
There are some countries with an upside down population pyramid and it isn't the end of the world. Certainly less apocalyptic than most climate change scenarios.
Well, it doesn't scale for the future tax vs. elder social benefits. You can't just sweep the consequences of extreme population demographic shifts under a rug. Look at China with its disastrous One-child policy where there are millions of unhappy, dissatisfied men who can't marry. That's a recipe for social unrest and suicide attacks.
Look at Japan, there things got more stable with the aging of the population. China isn't really an example for most of the world because CCP experiments screwed up more than just their age pyramid.
Also, taxes and pensions are very small problems compared to uninhabitable coastal regions, mass migrations and food shortages that climate change predictions show us.
Taxes and pensions are pressing, immediate problems within the next 50 years. What you're talking about is a much bigger problem trend, but it will take longer to occur, say 80-120 years.
Age pyramid? That's not the biggest issue in China's demographics: it's the sex ratio. Talking vague FUD about China isn't helpful and doesn't contribute to this discussion.
Mass migrations and food shortages are happening now, but not as bad as they will be. This is due to both climate and US Monroe doctrine meddling (crime caused by the War on Drugs and installation of right-wing leaders with death squads).
agreed, but that's the inevitable conclusion of any inquiry into solving climate change. Should we therefore do nothing? Probably not. But again, i won't elaborate.
Omnicidal and suicidal thoughts are multiplying as people lose hope in the future and their future specifically.
Furthermore, is there any sensible, hopeful, safe, stable, productive, and generally happy society that has mass shootings and addictions/crimes of despair nearly everyday?
The current apocalyptic scenarios are the same as in the past. If anything, we do have more science and technology to deal with them and to predict them.
And the grim prediction is rather than climate change, the real problem is population growth.
Population growth is not a massive problem: we already know that human population will hit a max of 10 billion people and from there start aging progressively and reduce over time.
We don't know, we suspect that in the most optimistic scenarios. Without knowing the underlying mechanism. Without knowing the consequences of cultural change and industrialisation of the third world countries.
This is the finest kind of denialism, and it is really going to bite us hard in about a hundred years at most.
I agree. The problems are resource consumption and pollution per capita. There are many soft and hard effects trends that are reducing population. Oceanic food production that would also sequester carbon would allow for a greater population carrying capacity. The main issue is getting people to reproduce. xD
Mass shooting are isolated events - Statistics clearly show that most gun deaths are either self-inflicted or the result of gang wars - and "mass shooting" reporting is incredibly biased since they decided to artificially cut the definition at "more than 3" iirc and the data will look quite different depending on the thresholds you choose. But that's a very different topic.
Isolated events are like the weather, a general trend is the climate. There are 12000 gun-related homicides in the US every year. Per capita, the US is the 7th worst in the entire world.
There isn't any first-world country with the number and frequencies of mass shootings or gun-related homicides the US does. 2/3 of gun deaths are suicides, which are a bigger problem of preventable acts of despair. Murder is entirely different. 54% of mass shooting are family-related. Roughly 40000 gun deaths in the US per year.
> There are 12000 gun-related homicides in the US every year. Per capita, the US is the 7th worst in the entire world
Comparing with other countries is ridiculous at best when not nonsensical. No country enables citizens to purchase weapons like in the US and no other country has hundreds of millions of weapons in circulation. Trying to make it look like a single variable problem is a joke.
I wouldn't be such a prophet of doom; there is still plenty of happiness in humanity, and i'm not certain its declining as badly as you are making out.
Climate change not an emergency or existential threat, eh? Are you completely unaware of the opioid epidemic, retreat of people into their phones/virtual worlds/video games, people having fewer friends, decline of community interaction, decline of home-ownership, more single people, fewer people having children, increasing rates of depression and suicide,
Maybe you don't see the millions of people struggling to pay rent, afford food, and the million or so living on the street, under bridges, or in their cars, which didn't happen in the past with the frequency it does now. Also, economic inequality is worse than ever.
Dog in a house on fire This is fine. Please get out there outside of your own filter-bubble and try not to knee-jerk dismiss what you don't understand.
Edit: why was this flagged? I want to know what's wrong with it. The parent appeared to patronize the ever-harsher conditions of the lower-rungs of society.
I happen to like kids and want someone to bury me in the right plot that was already set-aside (in basically the middle of nowhere). We also need some people sensible enough to fix the damage done to the Earth by the reckless and selfish generations of FF burners, meat eaters, jet-setting frequent-fliers, long-distance/single-occupant car commuters, and concrete pourers who came before.
We do not need humans to "fix" anything on earth, the ecosystem will find a new balance on its own. Absent a few chaotic effects that might happen, without human disturbance, this balance will be reached faster than with humans meddling.
:-/ You're basically recommending giving-up. There is waay too much energy in the water cycle that is locked in for hundreds of years, and may lead to global ecological collapse: desert earth. Humans already "meddled" negatively, humans can also "meddle" positively to make the Earth habitable and stem the Holocene extinction. Just throwing your hands up in the air in the names of external locus-of-control is insane when humans can clean-up and restore the ecology of what we damaged. Coral reef preservation, for example. Cleaning up microplastics from oceans is another.
Increasing population levels in highly emitting countries whose populations have naturally leveled off or are decreasing is very bad too (not to mention all the other horrific problems with this neocolonial type of immigration).
Yes but, to be clear, we are only fixing the climate emergency _for_ our children, and their children.
Climate change will not really impact most of us alive today.
This is why it has been so hard to get people to make real changes, spend real money reducing our footprint. A lot of people just don't care because they will be dead and gone when the real trouble starts.
> Climate change will not really impact most of us alive today.
Climate change is already effecting millions of people worldwide in drastic, life-changing ways, and those effects will only increase over current lifetimes even under the most aggressive plausible decarbonization scenarios.
I feel the same. The coronavirus pandemic pandemic felt like the final nail in the coffin of my optimism. Humanity’s collective response or lack thereof was on full display and if that was the best we could do when faced with an immediate and dire threat to our way of life then I’m in need of serious convincing that something like the climate crisis which is already here and quantifiably guaranteed [1] to occur in the future as we can’t simply reverse the process on a dime like we did with a vaccine when it came to the virus.
> That price — more vicious heat waves, longer wildfire seasons, rising sea levels — is now irretrievably baked in. Nations, including the United States, have dithered so long in cutting emissions that progressively more global warming is assured for decades to come, even if efforts to shift away from fossil fuels were accelerated tomorrow.
To be fair, the response in South East Asia was considerably better and more collective-minded than what any European or North American state achieved.
Which still doesn't bode super well for a coordinated global response to the climate emergency. But it does point to which areas of the world are likely to manage the best while the rest of us descend into chaos and anarchy.
Agreed, there were bright spots, one of them was South East Asia.
Perhaps the people there will manage better but that's all they'll be able to do is manage and not prosper. Rising sea levels won't spare those that manage to muster up a better response.
Sure it will. I mean, coastal cities will flood regardless, but the nations which understand what's going on and get a head start on a compassionate, equitable approach to relocation will fare much better than those which prize rugged individualism and react to a climate refugee crisis with victim-blaming.
South East Asia had something of an advantage: it was already culturally acceptable to wear a mask; acceptable to consider someone else's health over your own appearance.
Of course, I'm not sure how we can build such a culture of acceptance around masks in the West, where masks are seen by some as an attack on personal liberties.
>Of course, I'm not sure how we can build such a culture of acceptance around masks in the West, where masks are seen by some as an attack on personal liberties.
Don't worry, natural selection will take care of them in due course.
The threat to our way of life was the government response, by a long shot, not the virus.
And it’s not over, our way of life is still very much in jeopardy from government throwing away civil liberties to “flatten the curve” which somehow turned into “flatten the economy”, this is probably the most terrifying thing I’ve seen in the past 30 years.
At this point is there anybody who reads this journal or watches the news regularly who doesn't have an opinion on the situation?
I really dislike how it feels scientists are positioning themselves into politics more and more. I have less and less confidence that journals are attempting to describe and report without bias.
Maybe it's because I hadn't read anything but tech related white papers pre-covid, but reading a ton of research during covid really lowered my expectations for the standard to which publishing scientists hold themselves to.
Scientific American is one of the most-respected science magazines for the intelligent layperson (non-professional) and has been for close to two centuries.
When 13,000+ scientists publicly get on-board with something, people had damned-well better pay attention. If you disagree, you'd better have some extremely convincing evidence.
I get where you're coming from, and I'm not sure how I feel about this myself.
As far as I understand it, the view proposed by people who think that trans women don't have an advantage only applies in cases where the trans women have been taking various drugs, which e.g. lower testosterone. This would at least somewhat mitigate how much of an advantage someone who was male at birth has over someone who was female at birth.
That also makes your counterargument (high school boys perform better than pro female athletes) less relevant - I think that everyone agrees that in most cases, males without any hormone changes will perform better than females in various female activities.
As for whether the supplementation to cause a transition from male to female is sufficient to "overcome" the default biological advantage males have over females - I think that's a valid question, but that's exactly what scientists publishing in journals are trying to do. If we dismiss that ahead of time, then how will we ever know the truth?
Well, to be fair, politics trampled all over their field and trying to be above that has got them nowhere.
If a mud fight erupts around you then you can either try to ignore it with zero chance of winning or you can join it with a chance to win. Either way you will come out covered in mud.
> I really dislike how it feels scientists are positioning themselves into politics more and more.
When you are aware of a major emergency coming our collective way, it is your duty to try and avoid it or mitigate its consequences. Any other behaviour would be unethical.
> I have less and less confidence that journals are attempting to describe and report without bias.
If you are talking about mainstream media, then fair enough. They most often suck at reporting science.
If you are talking about scientific journals, then at least I haven’t seen a major shift in “subjectivity”. Bearing in mind that any piece of writing is unavoidably subjective by nature. Science does not depend on individual scientists being perfectly objective people.
> Maybe it's because I hadn't read anything but tech related white papers pre-covid, but reading a ton of research during covid really lowered my expectations for the standard to which publishing scientists hold themselves to.
This has always been the case (ignoring the manure in predatory journal and obvious résumé padding). One article in itself is meaningless. Something can be considered probable if it has been validated separately by independent people. In case of global warming, an awful lot has been.
If you want to gauge the opinion of experts in a given field, it is more useful to read reviews or monographs than articles, which are always going to be limited in scope.
it is definitely a problem, not with all research, but there is plenty of high profile research that has never released their data.
The UA study that gets cited so much for showing the U.S. has effectively the highest mass gun killing events in the world, for example, never released their dataset. This is a study that was referenced by the president, even.
I suspect upgrading the phrasing to "emergency" is just going to have the opposite effect and make people care less. Sort of like how no one cares about the "THIS PRODUCT CONTAINS CHEMICALS KNOWN TO THE STATE OF CALIFORNIA TO CAUSE CANCER" warnings that are on literally everything.
"Emergency" in the public consciousness is a heart attack or a fire. Applying the word to something that operates over such long time scales just isn't going to work.
There just isn't a good word for "immediate and drastic action is needed to slow or hopefully reverse the catalysts of what will already be severe, society collapsing series of events over many decades."
We don't live long enough for our brains to fully appreciate a crisis which evolves so slowly, even if we trust the people who are doing research on it.
What's surprising about that? The dynamics of our planet's atmosphere is an important research topic for a lot of reasons, not just man-made climate change specifically.
There are presumably thousands of people in the world who study ancient Mesopotamia, and there's nothing wrong with that either.
I'm not sure how many climate scientists there are specifically, but scientists will see impacts even if they're not studying climate change specifically. Biologists are noticing changes, eg. trees flowering earlier than normal [1], coral bleaching [2], record low moisture content [3], etc. Even psychologists are involved [4]. It's pretty hard to escape.
I have no issue whatsoever with calling it a "Climate Emergency". However, when you open nearly any Scientific American topics page and find a bunch of partisan opinion pieces all leaning towards Progressive causes, it's going to be too easy to dismiss this for a lot of people.
the idea that people follow Science is pure fiction. Nobody does Science: you only hear about Science through other humans talking about it, and mostly misinformed ones (like journalists) or people with a political agenda (WHO obviously lying about everything COVID related during the first months of the epidemic). Also, "Science" is not a static state, it's ever-moving with new discoveries and topics that end up being revised over time as more data coming in.
From the perspective of western peers like Australia, NZ, Germany, France, or the UK, the American right is rather extreme, and the American left is rather moderate in its energy, economic, civil, and ecological and climate politics.
It seems otherwise to me. I don’t read many articles in Scientific American, but I recall they endorsed Joe Biden for president last year (it was posted on HN.) My understanding of American politics is that many Republican voters oppose publications that openly support Democratic candidates. Here we have such a publication making a pronouncement about what could be a bipartisan initiative, and it seems like the publication’s political history could influence Republican voters to dismiss the emergency wording.
Laziness is a problem, but I don’t see a problem with a comment speculating that popular behavior will occur using and using fewer words to explain the potential mechanism than I did.
Happy to accept criticism of this explanation of the user’s opinion, how it could be more clear, etc.
Scientific American didn't merely endorse Joe Biden for president last year, they justified it with a description of the biggest crisis currently facing humanity (the Covid-19 pandemic) that was both nakedly partisan and really obviously contradicted by what was actually happening in the real world but that they declared was pure indisputable Science.
It doesn’t bother me that they endorsed him, nor would it if they hadn’t. I was only interested in the idea proposed by your original respondent that a user on HN can’t in good faith surmise the behavior of a voting population.
The voting bloc that considers themselves "climate change skeptics" or whatever label they identify with is neither fictional nor small. I simply pointed out that there are going to be several people who throw this "climate emergency" piece out immediately because this magazine has a history of supporting left-leaning causes. It may or may not be a good strategy. That's it.
Those people are capable of speaking for themselves and don't need your advocacy. Rethink your approach, muddling equivocator.
There is no good strategy to convince the unscientific. Your project of seeking a good strategy is deluded nattering which adds nothing.
Your strategy, in other words, is bad.
To reiterate: Referencing the bad arguments of other people is stupid. Don't do it.
Racists aren't going to be convinced that Black Lives Matter but if I spend my time pointing that out in every topic about a cop killing a human being I'm doing something wrong.
You aren't being instructed to believe something based on faith. You're encountering evidence you disagree with and making up, which is to say hallucinating, the idea that the evidence of science is something that is like faith.
It is nothing like faith.
Don't make your problem with the available evidence a question of faith or you discredit faith.
Like I said, don't bring faith into politics.
If you believe that people who believe climate change is an emergency are taking part in a faith-based movement that is a huge logical error on your part.
Faith is a personal choice. Examining evidence and coming to a conclusion about what is real is a matter of logic and reasoning. They are completely different, and mixing them is not just poor form, it exposes your motivated reasoning.
No, mostly because you come into topics about serious issues and opine inanely about how science is a religion.
You talk past the topic. You get called out on it. You double down. You loftily say that we're talking past each other, when you're the one who tries to insist we follow you on a journey to how science is a religion.
Naturally your experience must be that people are talking past you. Because you don't know how to engage in the conversation, you just know how to divert.
If you insist on talking past the topic then pointing out that we're talking past each other is your first step to, maybe, perhaps, noticing that your approach to this conversation is the problem.
Nobody asks anybody else to “worship science”. Even the phrase does not make any sense. Believe it or not, you can know that something works without worshiping it. In fact, you can spend your whole life without worshiping anything.
I know that "progressive" is a political term with some baggage at this point but it still, essentially, is trying to connote "progressing and changing". Scientific American isn't a magazine about how amazing it is that decades old devices are still functioning adequately - it's about how the world is progressing into the future.
This is not a reasonable summary of Progressivism. It has 100+ years of history and has a thoroughly developed ideological, political, and moral framework. It's not just "we'd like things to progress", because "progress" (vs "regress") is subjective. Pick whatever controversial topic you care most about, and the people on the other side(s) also want things to be better — perhaps by enacting the policies you hate!
Let me guess, it was the party of inclusiveness, tolerance and understanding who decided that, while it must be those the evil divisive racists who are the deniers?
Who is worse by the way, the people who don't believe it is a problem, or the people who believe it's the biggest problem facing humanity and yet refuse to do much about it (until those other people who don't believe it's a problem start to do something about it first)? Unless you count fermenting genocide and regime change and wars in the middle east and north africa as "doing something about it".
> Let me guess, it was the party of inclusiveness, tolerance and understanding who decided that, while it must be those the evil divisive racists who are the deniers?
What the hell are you on about? This is not about inclusiveness or tolerance. You can be an utter arsehole and be a good scientist. You even used to find good scientists voting for conservative politicians, before said politicians embraced ignorance. Now, they shake their head in despair, stuck between intolerant wokeness and complete lunacy.
> Who is worse by the way, the people who don't believe it is a problem, or the people who believe it's the biggest problem facing humanity and yet refuse to do much about it (until those other people who don't believe it's a problem start to do something about it first)?
This is a straw man. There are lots of people trying to do something about it at every level. You would not be so incensed if you did not perceive them as doing something about which you disagree.
> Unless you count fermenting genocide and regime change and wars in the middle east and north africa as "doing something about it".
You sound like you’ve spent way too much time in an echo chamber. The people pushing for better regulations to preserve the environment and limit global warming are by and large not those who were enthusiastic about pouring oil on the fire in the Middle East. Almost the opposite, in fact.
That description describes both parties. Each denies inconvenient science and blocks progress. Literally the only reason I know which party you're talking about is because of the context of this thread.
Stupidity transcends parties. I have no dog in your fight, and I would not be voting for democrats if they were politicians where I live.
That said, despite all the new new age stupidity and antivaxx misinformation from some liberals, only one party has a platform that is obviously anti-science.
I wonder what kind of inconvenient science you have in mind that democrats are supposed to ignore.
Biology does not say anything about how we create categories for athletes either... Separating men from women is arbitrary, and we could very well use other criteria (weight, height, or whatever). Choosing to separate genders instead of sexes is a political decision; you are conflating social and scientific issues. Also, citation needed.
Makes sense. I mean, you can't call it global warming any more when the US has just had its coldest winter in 30 years. Climate emergency. Very catchy.
The average temperature on the planet is increasing, hence “global warming”. The climate does not care about how exceptional some people think their country is. Last time I checked, the US were not the world.
I've rarely been so optimistic about computer science as I have been in the last few weeks; when we make a stand about the disaster for humanity that is proof-of-work. This is bad shit. Worse than 'do no evil' Google destroying the press.
What would it look like if climate were an emergency? Evacuation orders with perhaps 48 hours notice to leave the suburbs and never return. Defense Production Act cranking out prefab multifamily housing for urban cores. Blackouts when it’s cloudy. Transcontinental travel only when you know somebody who knows somebody with a sailboat.
Nuclear plants take a little while to build. On that time scale we will have pretty good battery tech too, and skyscrapers that aren’t prefab. None can really be spun up on an emergency basis.
We won't know because it will be ever changing. The problem has always been is alarmist have exaggerated, set dead lines, and scare tactics, and never once been right. You can simply search old news papers less than ten years old or even early youtube videos to see all sorts of predictions by people we were told you cannot question and they are all wrong.
I've given up even trying to debate any portion of the climate because no opinion other than agreement is allowed. You must fully agree with all statements because even questioning minor parts gets your branded.
The damage done to serious debate is astounding.
Yet, read a paper from a hundred years ago, fifty years ago, twenty, or ten, and even five, and you will see what has been predicted before and never come to pass will be predicted again with the same vehemence if not worse.
Are there things we can change and need to change. Yes, and we have been making great progress. However doubling down each time you don't get it right will not make it better.
It's unfortunate that some inaccurate predictions are used as "justification" to discredit research which has actually been conducted and communicated rather carefully for the most part. The predictions made have often been conservative with in the level of indicated catastrophe to prevent exactly the sort of backlash of alarmist-alarmism you are now espousing.
I've debated the topic for over a decade now. You make it sound like the majority of the research is sound or that the majority of the actors are good and honest.
The layout on the ground is true to how the grandparent lays it out. Questions are rejected. Doubts are branded as essentially unfaithful. Credentials are waved as proof of correctness instead of evidence combined with ideas, all while people with differing beliefs or ideas are stripped of their credentials, or have them invalidated. It's a recipe for close minded and one sided discourse.
The problems in science, as practiced today in academia, are legion. Meta science show the accuracy of the general landscape is poor. Common errors abound, papers that are considered the gold standards for years are shown to be built on faulty premise, code, methodology, etc.
To be fair, doing it right is HARD. Throw in even some mild corruption, bias in funding, dismissal of the skeptical, peg career advancement to publishing metrics (It's like measuring productivity by lines of code checked in. Once everyone knows it's happening the metric becomes totally useless due to systemic manipulation. The meta game shifts to hiding your manipulation of the metric while you manipulate the metric.). This system tends to produce generally poor results.
I wasn't trying to debate. I'm providing you a summary of what the general debate looks like after hundreds and hundreds of debates.
But let us take this post as a spring off point. You presume there is a baby. Both your posts illustrate this as an unquestioned axiom. However, I don't see a baby, it might well be a rat. It's down in the dirty water and I can't really identify it. The crux of the issue between us is then: 'Is there a baby, or something else?'. Which violates your axiom. Most people simply will not question their axioms. Which is when debate opponents start reaching for the, 'you're not qualified to have an opinion', 'your question is invalid', etc etc.
I'm not interested in debating the baby's potential eye color without first ascertaining the quality of the underpinnings of the system that declares a baby exists. I have found them to be rotten, mostly through smell as direct inspection is actively shunned. We don't really know it's actual state because academic science doesn't have systemic audits. The raw data, transforms and/or code/models are usually kept privately under tight wraps. This behavior is systemic. The generalized form of quality control in academic science is peer review, and my experience with quality systems is this is the bottom rung, the LOWEST form of quality check you can use that is actually a quality check.
If peer review is a good enough quality standard really depends on the product, customer, and the reputation my group desires to retain going forward. I think it's fine for low cost systems where schedule and budget are the customer's primary concerns. If something is of vital importance, I would demand higher levels of quality assurance than the lowest bar.
To sum up. If someone is declaring that there is an emergency. I consider this of vital importance! Thus, I find it perfectly reasonable to question the foundation until higher quality practices are in place to vet the entirety of the structure.
One thing the whole COVID-19 thing has convinced me is that trying to change human behavior the amount required to fight climate change is politically untenable.
Look at California Governor Newsom. From what I have read, he seemed to have tried to implement the restrictions recommended to him by scientists (not withstanding his politically stupid decision to celebrate at the French Laundry). But he is now facing recall, and that is in deep blue California.
If a leader in a democratic country actually tried to implement what was really required to fight climate change, they would be finished politically, and all their agenda rolled back.
If you can't convince people that a novel pandemic filling killing millions and routinely filling TV with coverage of dead bodies in overflowing morgues is something that requires them to change their behavior, good luck trying to do that with climate change!
Just like the big bright spot in the USA's fight against Covid are the vaccines, I think ultimately, it will have to be a technological solution that still allows people to continue their consumption that will have to save us. If we don't come up with such a solution before it is too late, we are in for a world of hurt.
Newsom isn’t facing recall because of his climate policies lol
Also his recall effort was aided by COVID. Without some special stipulations put in place for COVID (relating to extended dates for signatures), it’s possible he wouldn’t even be facing the recall.
In January, I took 2 weeks PTO from work to visit this community to checkout what they do: https://wheaton-labs.com/
What I saw was incredible! They were making homes that keep cool during the summer and warm during the winter and you can grow crops on the roof because the house is covered in mud (wow!).
For 2 weeks when I was there (during the winter in Montana) I woke up earlier than everyone so I can light up their rocket mass heater. A few blocks of wood heats up this mass that dissipates heat throughout the day. The house stays between 66 degrees (coldest) to 72 (warmest) in the morning when the fireplace is on. As a Californian, I never thought there were so much efficiency to be gained from something as simple as a fireplace.
They lived a healthy lifestyle with minimal waste and energy usage and it helped inspire me to live a more sustainable lifestyle.
Could you please stop posting unsubstantive and/or flamewar comments to HN? You've been doing it a lot and we ban that sort of account, because it's not the intended use of the site.
SciAm posting such obvious click-bait really only seems to confirm that they've joined the likes of PopSci in terms of chasing sensationalism. If you're whining into the ether about how humanity is doomed, I have good news for you! People just like you have been predicting the end of days since the dawn of time - and they've all been wrong. Every time. If you believe that climate change is the most serious problem humanity has ever faced, then you should pursue a career that helps move us toward a more desirable future. I'm not talking about politics or activism (or any other form of coercion) either. Pursue a career in energy or material science or agriculture - something genuinely challenging and genuinely meaningful - and make a difference. Have kids. Teach them what you know about how to innovate. Teach them how to be better stewards of the planet than you have been. Teach them to be the change they would like to see in the world.
People weren't saying we are doomed, but were saying are doomed if we don't do anything about an issue. For example, if the birds are dying out because of ddt, we eliminate ddt. If the ozone layer is disappearing from the atmosphere, then we try to eliminate certain gases that destroy the the ozone layer. If we find out certain chemicals cause cancer then we try to clean up the chemicals and reduce the creation of those chemicals. And there are always people that say these obvious issues aren't a problem even with overwhelming evidence to the contrary. People don't want to understand science.
But we are still here because there are enough people that can recognize and fix out mistakes.
And global climate change is one of the biggest mistakes humankind has made.
As a side note, do people think Russian trolls have invaded this site to foster dissension? If any group of people could figure this out the people on this site could.
And everyone who has played Russian roulette will tell you that it's perfectly harmless. Every time.
Strange that you consider advocacy to be both "whining into the ether" and also "coercion". Do you outsource all your personal decisions to whoever happens to be waving a sign outside city hall? If you don't have the strength to make your own choices in the face of a few eco-friendly Chevron commercials or people sharing memes on Facebook, then they aren't your real problem.
Many of the people "whining into the ether" are already doing those "genuinely meaningful" things. They're calling for you to come join them.
If there were a climate emergency, it would be unnecessary to run a headline saying so. They're running this headline precisely because there isn't an emergency, but they'd like you to believe there is despite not seeing anything to indicate it with your own eyes. But if I'm wrong, I'd love to see it. Step outside and snap a picture of the havoc the climate emergency is wreaking where you live.
Why would Scientific American want to needlessly pump fear? Well, the alleged cure for our alleged ailments is... all the things that leftists have always wanted to do anyway. Little Hitlers in this thread seem to be licking their lips at the possibility of having some good reason to control the lives of others.
This thread is a good example of one of the psychoses that grips HN. Doomsday cultists thinking themselves sophisticated and elevated in morality.
CO2 have almost no greenhouse effect in low mesosphere. In high mesosphere/stratosphere, however, he is a high, net contributor to the GH effect.
CO2 surplus also takes 15 to 25 year to go up to the high mesosphere. That mean that a climate drift we experience today is not to consequence of the CO2 we put in the atmosphere last year, but the carbon we put in year 2000. You will never see the 2020 climate again, neither will your children or grandchildren.
If we did act today, drastically (we won't), maybe we will stabilise 2040 climate over a long period of time. in 2040 wet-bulb temperature is only reached a dozen day a year in a few 3rd world countries, nothing to worry about if you don't have familly in SA, West Africa, India or Indonesia. 2060s climate will be sightly harsher if you have family in Florida, but as long as their air conditioner doesn't fall apart and they don't go out for more than an hour, they should survive. Maybe by 2080 we will have stabilized the climate.
The other issues might be non-factor with enough technology (crop failing can be managed better, sea rise can be handled). If we don't follow though, this will be harsher than wet-bulb temperature in few area of the world.
This so called climate emergency isn’t a falsifiable theory. So why is an apparent science journal committing to it?
We know putting carbon in the air has an inverse square relation to temperature increases. We can prove this. So why not focus on the actual science instead of debasing yourself further? (2+2 can equal 5 was a recent position this journal took)
I thought we were already doomed and past the point where any change would matter 5 years ago? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6CXRaTnKDXA Sure it is fiction, but a real take by people and that aired 6 years ago.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 252 ms ] threadAgreed, Lets wipe out a country with nuclear.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/safest-sources-of-energy
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten_salt_reactor
My mind on this is is not settled, but how does this factor in the unknown future of radioactive waste? We're not even through 0.1% of the time it will remain a threat. Every single nuclear TWh comes with a debt that must be repaid over thousands of years. Ensuring the death toll from that remains at zero is basically impossible to guarantee right now.
[1]: We need to go from 51 billion tons of greenhouse gasses per year to 0 by 2050.
Declaring a war on bitcoin would be as futile as War on Drugs and the Prohibition. Might as well embrace it, try to tax and regulate it, and move the revenue from it to worthwhile initiatives that can buy humanity more time.
Having said that, in an ideal world, I’d agree with you and say we should shutdown bitcoin and all other activity that’s superfluous to humanity’s struggle against climate change. Industrialized meat production is out. International air travel is out. Raising all other product prices according to the climate externalities they cause. Doubly or triply replanting the forests in the Amazon and elsewhere. It’s gonna take sacrifices now to prevent suffering later, if we’re going to make it past this potential Great Filter.
A single Bitcoin transaction now consumes 30 days of power for the average household, as much as it takes a Tesla to drive from SF to well past New York, at this point closer to SF-NY-Miami. And generates half an iPhone of e-waste (100g).
It also consumes 5X as much energy as mining gold, which is the second worst option.
[1] https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-energy-consumption
Electricity can be generated from zero carbon means, nuclear, solar, wind, hydro, etc. There’s an order of magnitude more solar energy hitting the Earth every day than humans ever use.
Instead of stopping progress and living in the past, we can find a better way to make use of it.
Just how much power do you think physical currency consumes? Data, citations, estimates please. Because I know handing a $10 bill to my buddy consumes 0kWh, and doing the same with Bitcoin costs $20 and consumes 30 days of power.
If you want progress you'll have to do something that moves the world forward not warms it up.
It doesn’t matter how much power it uses if it’s switched to solar, and there are lower power options like proof-of-stake coming online anyway.
The relevant metric is tons of CO2 released, not kWh used. Bitcoin could be run with zero CO2 released if we chose to, in which case shutting it down would do absolutely nothing in regard to climate change.
Basically, it can't really be economically recycled, and it isn't. It's just thrown in heaps where poor folks in developing nations scrabble through the toxic remains.
"Useful metals" is a few grams of gold, tin and copper. The rest is plastics (non-recyclables) and FR4 (epoxy filled fiberglass). Fiberglass is also not recyclable.
Your plan amounts to little more than greenwashing.
> Recyclers can make money from selling scavenged metal from electronic equipment, says Puckett, but the process to retrieve usable metals is typically extremely toxic. Workers who remove the metals often have no protective equipment and breathe in high levels of toxic chemicals, which are then released into the atmosphere. And most of the countries where the processing takes place -- China, India, Ghana, Pakistan -- do not have regulations in place to protect workers or prevent the primitive recycling operations.
Most of electronics is plastic (epoxy is a plastic), and by and large plastic simply isn't recyclable. That's one of "mother's little lies" the plastic industry has been telling you for years to feel better about consumption. Reducing waste is the only way.
[1] https://recyclenation.com/2017/04/where-does-e-waste-end-up/
[2] https://www.npr.org/2010/12/21/132204954/after-dump-what-hap...
Basically, it can't really be economically recycled, and it isn't. It's just thrown in heaps where poor folks in developing nations scrabble through the toxic remains.
"Useful metals" is a few grams of gold and copper. The rest is plastics (non-recyclables) and FR4 (epoxy filled fiberglass). Fiberglass is also not recyclable.
Your plan amounts to little more than greenwashing.
[1] https://recyclenation.com/2017/04/where-does-e-waste-end-up/
[2] https://www.npr.org/2010/12/21/132204954/after-dump-what-hap...
Meanwhile in reality, Bitcoin's security and value is actually backed by the very scarcity of electricity (computing power) you want to deny, and almost all Bitcoin is mined with the dirtiest, cheapest and most climate unfriendly energy available: Chinese coal.
Most would not claim that a Visa transaction and a Bitcoin payment are close to equivalent (the article you linked even acknowledges this). Mining gold is a more interesting comparison, but even though I can go start mining Bitcoin right now, I can't go start mining gold.
The article provides a more thoughtful exploration that gets into some of the nuance and makes a stronger case against mining. I mention this because someone reading your comment might be tempted to discard it outright because "those comparisons make no sense".
To those people: read the article.
They have burning of resources built in. Proof of work, their primary mechanism so far, is literally: Waste energy on meaningless computations, until you hit a "lucky" one, with all previous computations having no inherent value themselves.
Physical currencies don't have this inefficiency built into their core. In fact, unlike cryptocurrencies, it's in everyone's best interest to make the currency's operation as efficient as possible.
It's pretty hard for me to imagine that either of these things are going to happen. I don't think that cryptocurrencies are ever going to be really useful because they're so inefficient, but I also think that they're here to stay as a speculative/gambling tool.
PaaS, pyramid schemes as a service.
Bitcoin just has to be the second easiest way to gamble from home to be utterly worthless.
That's a bold proposal.
Bitcoin mining doesn't cause pollution, running a power plant does. If the power plant isn't publishing reasonable records as to pollution caused and tax recovered then you add it to the estimated total for the country and tax imports, that way the country fixes itself because they don't want to lose trade.
In the short period Australia had a carbon tax, the profits were used to reduce the cost of other taxes so the average person came out even but you would be incentivized to constantly beat the rest by reducing your emissions so if you cause less damage than the average person, you pay less.
Even if Pigovian taxes were implementable[1], that's how they work. Since there is an optimal amount of pollution, the taxes are supposed to be set where the marginal cost to society of an additional unit of pollution is equal to the marginal benefit to society of that extra unit of pollution.
Note the hand-wavy terms "benefit", "cost", and "unit". The devil is in how those are measured. Since central planning authorities are horrible at figuring stuff like this out, one generally ends up in a situation worse than the one which one would like to fix.
As for the "clean up" aspect, I heartily recommend that one read and understand Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen[2]. Here is an excerpt[3].
Specifically, "clean up" is not free.
[1]: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/230475696.pdf [2]: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674281653 [3]: http://webpage.pace.edu/dnabirahni/rahnidocs/law802/The%20En...
The easiest way to solve this is to ban PoW coins in favor of PoS coins. There is nothing inherently valuable about BTC that wouldn’t be just as valuable in an equivalent PoS token.
I agree that raiding individual mining locations is counterproductive. Instead, go after the exchanges, where bitcoin is exchanged for real money. Without an economic incentive to mine bitcoin, the mining would slow down and stop.
The lack of reversible transactions is a bad thing. Without reversibility, there is no recourse against fraudulent transactions. Reversing a transaction requires the active participation of the fraudulent actor. This is why ransomware really started taking off once bitcoin and friends picked up. Before that, there was no economic incentive to hold computers for ransom, because any payment made could be reversed after the hard drive is decrypted.
And that might be possible by getting people and businesses that don’t cheat on their taxes to sell any holdings with something like a wealth tax.
The only bad thing about bitcoin is its electricity consumption.
There's also the way it allows those with access to energy they don't own to launder that access into money. Plus facilitating all manner of illegal activities (and I'm favor of making some things, like drugs, legal. Tax evasion or murder-for-hire, not so much).
None of the unimaginable amounts computations wasted on proof-of-concept have any inherent value at all, until someone hits that final "lucky" one, that allows the transactions to take place.
This is a prime example of the monetary system having been made more efficient over time.
What then guarantees the security of the financial system and of our money?
Why is the green solution to everything more prohibition and rules? What happened to believing in the future, in innovation and technology...
Of course I want to live in a world like that, just like I like living in a world where my neighbor is not allowed to just break into my house without consequences. Just like I like living in a world where people are not allowed to dump unbounded amounts of toxic waste into lakes and oceans.
We have regulation for what's allowed in food. Are you okay with that? Or do you prefer becoming an expert at food sciences so that you can test yourself that a food brand isn't trying to sell you something poisonous as a cost cutting measure?
> Why is the green solution to everything more prohibition and rules?
Because otherwise greedy people with no concept or care of long or even mid term effects mess things up for everyone else, and even themselves.
> What happened to believing in the future, in innovation and technology...
That has never been the case without regulation. We made cars and airplanes, we added tomes of regulation to make sure cars and airplanes work well enough to keep the people dying directly from them at a minimum.
If I wasted all energy available to us both on growing poisonous fruit that smells bad, would you object to that? Oh, but doing so would be deciding what is useful and what is not!
Again, the same applies to everything. You might not find a regulation about how much mercury is allowed in food items necessary or even "useful", but I, and many other people, are glad it exists.
You already do because here in reality resources are constrained.
> Why is the green solution to everything more prohibition and rules? What happened to believing in the future, in innovation and technology...
The green solution is to build technologies that become more efficient as people use them not less.
Caring about the world, even invisible aspects of it, does not make anyone look crazy except to those that already are. Hopefully someone's crazy enough to do something to start fixing it.
It's hard to argue that they're taking it terribly seriously when they continue building out massive amounts of coal power. They've got something north of 50% of the world's coal plants, and are stamping out more at an alarming rate.
Regardless of what they say, their actions would indicate that they're happy with other people being concerned about climate change, because then those people will buy Chinese panels, inverters, turbines, etc.
What's more, it's carbon intensity of production is bad, manufacturing something in China as opposed to a cleaner and more efficient country increases emissions. So it makes zero sense to give them subsidies that relatively disadvantage cleaner countries, as part of global efforts to reduce carbon.
It's the same as emissions per capita. That's actually worse than meaningless it's actively detrimental because rewarding that metric creates all sorts of perverse incentives around increasing population growth and restricting quality of life.
And I didn't bring up total emissions by country, I was replying to someone else who did. Apparently you weren't so concerned about it when it was wrongly claimed that China was the 2nd largest polluter.
One important thing you should know, smart people are just as dumb as everyone else outside of their area of expertise.
Do most people who are progressive westerners care - and by care I mean, "You can tell by their actions in life that they believe climate change is a very real problem"?
"Reposting something on social media about it, from their new 5G phone, connected to giant datacenters busy crunching their activity for improved targeting of advertising" doesn't really count.
How many have put their money where their mouth is? And, certainly, the answer is more than zero, but it's certainly not nearly as many as claim to care about it. Insert the usual excuses here about how it's systemic problems, and one person can't have an impact, and it doesn't matter how you live if you've voted for the right person, etc. It still leads to an awful lot of carbon emissions.
If you look at actual life actions, the snarky comment about how a Republican denies climate change and does nothing about it while a Democrat thinks it's the biggest problem facing the world and does nothing about it ends up looking awfully true.
No one cares for the sound and fury of the idiotic hypocrite.
Like Thunberg or not, at least she's very evidently trying, as well as she's able, to practice what she preaches.
If the millions of narcissists that can only manage to tell others how idiotic they are could commit in the same way, they’d maybe actually see the change they want as they’d be an inspiration to others.
Rules for thee but not for me.
You haven't provided any actual rebuttals to any of these, just "Yeah, yeah, you still emit carbon so I don't have to listen to you". By your standards the only action that's good enough is taking one's own life.
I'm sorry, I must have missed where I wrote that in my response.
I've met many left leaning progressives who view climate change as a very real problem, and the indications of it in their own lives are... well, entirely missing.
If you've got a net worth of comfortably north of a million dollars, live in a large home (say, 5000 sq ft for three or four people), commute an hour or two to work every day (in your new Tesla, of course - have to buy to be green!), and take a vacation via jet once or twice a year? I'm sorry, I don't believe that you really find climate change that much of a problem. And, practically, it's not going to be for someone in that position. You can buy your way out of most problems, climate change included. At most, it seems to be an excuse for socially valid consumption (back six or so years ago, "Yeah, I've got a preorder for a Powerwall and a Tesla Roof..." seemed a well regarded phrase among the excessive consumption class).
If someone states "Yeah, my house is on fire, it's a really big emergency..." as they're sitting on their couch watching TV with the kids asleep in their bedrooms, it's reasonable to conclude that they don't actually believe their house is on fire. And I apply the same logic to other things people are prone to claim are "huge emergencies." If they're getting the family out of the house, calling the fire department, and discharging a fire extinguisher at the base of the flames, yeah, they believe their house is on fire.
You're welcome to assume I care nothing about climate change if you want, though a reasonably quick survey of the other writings I've done on the internet would prove the absurdity of that statement, given the number of battery packs I've rebuilt, transportation choices, solar array builds, and my general (deliberate) lack of regular travel in my life. shrug
Pre-Covid and parenthood, I took one or two flights a year mostly to visit family. I think I've taken one pure pleasure trip overseas in my entire life. The only animal flesh I consume is chicken, maybe 3 meals/week. I buy carbon offsets for everything else.
Given all that, I'll still take the other "left leaning progressives with 5000 sq ft homes" over the people who deny that there's a problem at all. At least the progressives vote for politicians who'll do something. The other guys will consume the same amount as the limousine liberals, but their politicians won't do shit.
If we keep hoping for everyone in the world to start living like you or me, the world is doomed. Carbon taxes and other big actions are the only way. With carbon taxes, people will automatically pay extra for their massive homes and jet setting lifestyles, or be priced out.
Citation needed.
> Can you convince them without bribing or bullying them? No.
Well most new carbon emissions in the developing world are going to be from economic progress. You're going to have to do something to convince them that they should care about climate change instead of feeding, sheltering, and clothing their children.
No. The crazy, irrational behavior is to ignore and downplay the emergency.
Yes, of course they do.
When you get 95% [1] of your energy from hydro, in a region that experiences regular droughts, it's hard to miss.
[1] https://www.get-invest.eu/market-information/zambia/energy-s...
This isn't what's indicated by worldwide polls. In fact it's in the US where most of the first world denialism is taking place; everywhere else, _especially_ amongst youth, it's a massive issue.
Africans care [0]
[0] https://www.csmonitor.com/World/Africa/2021/0407/Amid-pandem...
This seems reasonable and appropriate. As much as I want to believe in humanity, I'm not optimistic that we're going to be able to actually solve this before things get really bad.
Climate change makes things more catastrophic. It's not dishonest.
Weren't most burned acres on federal land (managed by executive branch under Trump)?
https://www.redding.com/story/news/2018/11/11/trump-blames-s...
The most economically-destructive fires are at the Wildland-urban interface (WUI), especially new residential developments that build right up to and in large, dense forested areas. Without proper fire mitigation for houses, infrastructure, and communities, devastating Camp Fire scenarios are entirely possible again.
No, the main problem there was a neighborhood situated in a highly flammable area in the middle of a forest.
The trees were only "highly-flammable" because of the extreme lack of rain drying out the brush acting as kindling and the trees acting as fuel.
Says you.
“People were living in the forest,” he said.
https://amp.sacbee.com/news/california/fires/article24901782...
“Anybody in their right mind would know that the whole town was a large oak forest, and everybody was at risk,” Scherer said.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.latimes.com/local/californi...
Our house survived because there wasn't fuel right next to the building and building codes work. Many of the houses that burned were dilapidated/poorly maintained, had trees overhanging or too close to their homes, or had fuel like bushes, pine needles, or firewood next to them.
Do you know how many trash cans-full of pine needles I cleaned out of the gutters before putting gutter-guards in?
Gimme a break with your know-nothing reporter regurgitated soundbite quips.
I really don't see how you can claim the town was NOT extraordinarily prone to fire, given what happened. PG&E has poorly-maintained powerlines all over the state and they often start small fires, but those don't result in the destruction of an entire town, except when the town and its surrounding area is a tinderbox.
The ERCOT report [0] on the 2011 Texas outage states, verbatim,
> "The winter weather event of February 1-5, 2011 was determined to be a one in ten year event for some regions of Texas in terms of low temperature extremes and duration."
Or, if you'd rather be kinder to Texas power generators while using the same report,
> "Taking these temperature extremes into account, and coupling them with the sustained winds of this event, it is estimated that the resultant [...] event suffered by many Texas generation facilities approached a one in 25 year severity."
With this decade-old report suggesting extreme cold may well occur roughly once per decade, I will respectfully follow up with: Never anticipated my ass.
[0] http://www.ercot.com/content/meetings/other/keydocs/2011/201...
Also, taxes and pensions are very small problems compared to uninhabitable coastal regions, mass migrations and food shortages that climate change predictions show us.
Age pyramid? That's not the biggest issue in China's demographics: it's the sex ratio. Talking vague FUD about China isn't helpful and doesn't contribute to this discussion.
Mass migrations and food shortages are happening now, but not as bad as they will be. This is due to both climate and US Monroe doctrine meddling (crime caused by the War on Drugs and installation of right-wing leaders with death squads).
I'm pretty sure that's because of Missing women of China[1], not necessarily the one child policy.
[1] See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex-selective_abortion#China and the other linked articles.
Sure, let's nuke the whole world and get rid of the human species to save the environment! What a wonderful take.
Furthermore, is there any sensible, hopeful, safe, stable, productive, and generally happy society that has mass shootings and addictions/crimes of despair nearly everyday?
And the grim prediction is rather than climate change, the real problem is population growth.
Population growth is not a massive problem: we already know that human population will hit a max of 10 billion people and from there start aging progressively and reduce over time.
This is the finest kind of denialism, and it is really going to bite us hard in about a hundred years at most.
There isn't any first-world country with the number and frequencies of mass shootings or gun-related homicides the US does. 2/3 of gun deaths are suicides, which are a bigger problem of preventable acts of despair. Murder is entirely different. 54% of mass shooting are family-related. Roughly 40000 gun deaths in the US per year.
Comparing with other countries is ridiculous at best when not nonsensical. No country enables citizens to purchase weapons like in the US and no other country has hundreds of millions of weapons in circulation. Trying to make it look like a single variable problem is a joke.
Maybe you don't see the millions of people struggling to pay rent, afford food, and the million or so living on the street, under bridges, or in their cars, which didn't happen in the past with the frequency it does now. Also, economic inequality is worse than ever.
Dog in a house on fire This is fine. Please get out there outside of your own filter-bubble and try not to knee-jerk dismiss what you don't understand.
Edit: why was this flagged? I want to know what's wrong with it. The parent appeared to patronize the ever-harsher conditions of the lower-rungs of society.
Reducing the number of humans is not the same thing as extinction. Your argumentation is lacking.
https://e360.yale.edu/features/as-disease-ravages-coral-reef...
Climate change will not really impact most of us alive today.
This is why it has been so hard to get people to make real changes, spend real money reducing our footprint. A lot of people just don't care because they will be dead and gone when the real trouble starts.
Climate change is already effecting millions of people worldwide in drastic, life-changing ways, and those effects will only increase over current lifetimes even under the most aggressive plausible decarbonization scenarios.
1: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/22/climate/climate-change-fu...
> That price — more vicious heat waves, longer wildfire seasons, rising sea levels — is now irretrievably baked in. Nations, including the United States, have dithered so long in cutting emissions that progressively more global warming is assured for decades to come, even if efforts to shift away from fossil fuels were accelerated tomorrow.
Which still doesn't bode super well for a coordinated global response to the climate emergency. But it does point to which areas of the world are likely to manage the best while the rest of us descend into chaos and anarchy.
Perhaps the people there will manage better but that's all they'll be able to do is manage and not prosper. Rising sea levels won't spare those that manage to muster up a better response.
Of course, I'm not sure how we can build such a culture of acceptance around masks in the West, where masks are seen by some as an attack on personal liberties.
Don't worry, natural selection will take care of them in due course.
And it’s not over, our way of life is still very much in jeopardy from government throwing away civil liberties to “flatten the curve” which somehow turned into “flatten the economy”, this is probably the most terrifying thing I’ve seen in the past 30 years.
I really dislike how it feels scientists are positioning themselves into politics more and more. I have less and less confidence that journals are attempting to describe and report without bias.
Maybe it's because I hadn't read anything but tech related white papers pre-covid, but reading a ton of research during covid really lowered my expectations for the standard to which publishing scientists hold themselves to.
When 13,000+ scientists publicly get on-board with something, people had damned-well better pay attention. If you disagree, you'd better have some extremely convincing evidence.
As far as I understand it, the view proposed by people who think that trans women don't have an advantage only applies in cases where the trans women have been taking various drugs, which e.g. lower testosterone. This would at least somewhat mitigate how much of an advantage someone who was male at birth has over someone who was female at birth.
That also makes your counterargument (high school boys perform better than pro female athletes) less relevant - I think that everyone agrees that in most cases, males without any hormone changes will perform better than females in various female activities.
As for whether the supplementation to cause a transition from male to female is sufficient to "overcome" the default biological advantage males have over females - I think that's a valid question, but that's exactly what scientists publishing in journals are trying to do. If we dismiss that ahead of time, then how will we ever know the truth?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If a mud fight erupts around you then you can either try to ignore it with zero chance of winning or you can join it with a chance to win. Either way you will come out covered in mud.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Einstein%E2%80%93Szil%C3%A1r...
When you are aware of a major emergency coming our collective way, it is your duty to try and avoid it or mitigate its consequences. Any other behaviour would be unethical.
> I have less and less confidence that journals are attempting to describe and report without bias.
If you are talking about mainstream media, then fair enough. They most often suck at reporting science.
If you are talking about scientific journals, then at least I haven’t seen a major shift in “subjectivity”. Bearing in mind that any piece of writing is unavoidably subjective by nature. Science does not depend on individual scientists being perfectly objective people.
> Maybe it's because I hadn't read anything but tech related white papers pre-covid, but reading a ton of research during covid really lowered my expectations for the standard to which publishing scientists hold themselves to.
This has always been the case (ignoring the manure in predatory journal and obvious résumé padding). One article in itself is meaningless. Something can be considered probable if it has been validated separately by independent people. In case of global warming, an awful lot has been.
If you want to gauge the opinion of experts in a given field, it is more useful to read reviews or monographs than articles, which are always going to be limited in scope.
It would be ethical to make data sets public and verifiable to eliminate questionable reproducibility.
The UA study that gets cited so much for showing the U.S. has effectively the highest mass gun killing events in the world, for example, never released their dataset. This is a study that was referenced by the president, even.
We don't live long enough for our brains to fully appreciate a crisis which evolves so slowly, even if we trust the people who are doing research on it.
There are presumably thousands of people in the world who study ancient Mesopotamia, and there's nothing wrong with that either.
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-03-31/japans-cherry-blossom...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coral_bleaching#Pacific_Ocean
[3] https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/fuel-moisture-content...
[4] https://www.apa.org/science/about/publications/climate-chang...
Science is not dogma.
Laziness is a problem, but I don’t see a problem with a comment speculating that popular behavior will occur using and using fewer words to explain the potential mechanism than I did.
Happy to accept criticism of this explanation of the user’s opinion, how it could be more clear, etc.
There is no good strategy to convince the unscientific. Your project of seeking a good strategy is deluded nattering which adds nothing.
Your strategy, in other words, is bad.
To reiterate: Referencing the bad arguments of other people is stupid. Don't do it.
Racists aren't going to be convinced that Black Lives Matter but if I spend my time pointing that out in every topic about a cop killing a human being I'm doing something wrong.
The same people making these claims tell me that I should "believe science".
Not sure if I really want to worship any sort of tool, e.g. a wrench, when my community of faith is already a sustaining source of joy.
Moderation thus far is QED.
It is nothing like faith.
Don't make your problem with the available evidence a question of faith or you discredit faith.
Like I said, don't bring faith into politics.
If you believe that people who believe climate change is an emergency are taking part in a faith-based movement that is a huge logical error on your part.
Faith is a personal choice. Examining evidence and coming to a conclusion about what is real is a matter of logic and reasoning. They are completely different, and mixing them is not just poor form, it exposes your motivated reasoning.
You talk past the topic. You get called out on it. You double down. You loftily say that we're talking past each other, when you're the one who tries to insist we follow you on a journey to how science is a religion.
Naturally your experience must be that people are talking past you. Because you don't know how to engage in the conversation, you just know how to divert.
If you insist on talking past the topic then pointing out that we're talking past each other is your first step to, maybe, perhaps, noticing that your approach to this conversation is the problem.
It's unclear where I have insisted anyone do anything.
But let me do that now, and insist that you have both the last word and an excellent rest of your life.
Who is worse by the way, the people who don't believe it is a problem, or the people who believe it's the biggest problem facing humanity and yet refuse to do much about it (until those other people who don't believe it's a problem start to do something about it first)? Unless you count fermenting genocide and regime change and wars in the middle east and north africa as "doing something about it".
What the hell are you on about? This is not about inclusiveness or tolerance. You can be an utter arsehole and be a good scientist. You even used to find good scientists voting for conservative politicians, before said politicians embraced ignorance. Now, they shake their head in despair, stuck between intolerant wokeness and complete lunacy.
> Who is worse by the way, the people who don't believe it is a problem, or the people who believe it's the biggest problem facing humanity and yet refuse to do much about it (until those other people who don't believe it's a problem start to do something about it first)?
This is a straw man. There are lots of people trying to do something about it at every level. You would not be so incensed if you did not perceive them as doing something about which you disagree.
> Unless you count fermenting genocide and regime change and wars in the middle east and north africa as "doing something about it".
You sound like you’ve spent way too much time in an echo chamber. The people pushing for better regulations to preserve the environment and limit global warming are by and large not those who were enthusiastic about pouring oil on the fire in the Middle East. Almost the opposite, in fact.
And it’s “fomenting”, not “fermenting”.
That said, despite all the new new age stupidity and antivaxx misinformation from some liberals, only one party has a platform that is obviously anti-science.
I wonder what kind of inconvenient science you have in mind that democrats are supposed to ignore.
If you think about the gender thing, this is a social ideology. Biology is irrelevant to which bathroom someone can use.
Keep dreaming.
I've given up even trying to debate any portion of the climate because no opinion other than agreement is allowed. You must fully agree with all statements because even questioning minor parts gets your branded.
The damage done to serious debate is astounding.
Yet, read a paper from a hundred years ago, fifty years ago, twenty, or ten, and even five, and you will see what has been predicted before and never come to pass will be predicted again with the same vehemence if not worse.
Are there things we can change and need to change. Yes, and we have been making great progress. However doubling down each time you don't get it right will not make it better.
It was fun here while it lasted
The layout on the ground is true to how the grandparent lays it out. Questions are rejected. Doubts are branded as essentially unfaithful. Credentials are waved as proof of correctness instead of evidence combined with ideas, all while people with differing beliefs or ideas are stripped of their credentials, or have them invalidated. It's a recipe for close minded and one sided discourse.
The problems in science, as practiced today in academia, are legion. Meta science show the accuracy of the general landscape is poor. Common errors abound, papers that are considered the gold standards for years are shown to be built on faulty premise, code, methodology, etc.
To be fair, doing it right is HARD. Throw in even some mild corruption, bias in funding, dismissal of the skeptical, peg career advancement to publishing metrics (It's like measuring productivity by lines of code checked in. Once everyone knows it's happening the metric becomes totally useless due to systemic manipulation. The meta game shifts to hiding your manipulation of the metric while you manipulate the metric.). This system tends to produce generally poor results.
But let us take this post as a spring off point. You presume there is a baby. Both your posts illustrate this as an unquestioned axiom. However, I don't see a baby, it might well be a rat. It's down in the dirty water and I can't really identify it. The crux of the issue between us is then: 'Is there a baby, or something else?'. Which violates your axiom. Most people simply will not question their axioms. Which is when debate opponents start reaching for the, 'you're not qualified to have an opinion', 'your question is invalid', etc etc.
I'm not interested in debating the baby's potential eye color without first ascertaining the quality of the underpinnings of the system that declares a baby exists. I have found them to be rotten, mostly through smell as direct inspection is actively shunned. We don't really know it's actual state because academic science doesn't have systemic audits. The raw data, transforms and/or code/models are usually kept privately under tight wraps. This behavior is systemic. The generalized form of quality control in academic science is peer review, and my experience with quality systems is this is the bottom rung, the LOWEST form of quality check you can use that is actually a quality check.
If peer review is a good enough quality standard really depends on the product, customer, and the reputation my group desires to retain going forward. I think it's fine for low cost systems where schedule and budget are the customer's primary concerns. If something is of vital importance, I would demand higher levels of quality assurance than the lowest bar.
To sum up. If someone is declaring that there is an emergency. I consider this of vital importance! Thus, I find it perfectly reasonable to question the foundation until higher quality practices are in place to vet the entirety of the structure.
As tens of thousands of people get exposed to this year after year, that becomes the visibility of the emergency.
So I see your hyperbole, but it's BS.
- transoceanic superconducting cable connecting Europe to solar in the Sahara.
- tax credits for distributed battery storage (Powerwall)
- X-prize like awards for improved battery technology
- carbon tax
Look at California Governor Newsom. From what I have read, he seemed to have tried to implement the restrictions recommended to him by scientists (not withstanding his politically stupid decision to celebrate at the French Laundry). But he is now facing recall, and that is in deep blue California.
If a leader in a democratic country actually tried to implement what was really required to fight climate change, they would be finished politically, and all their agenda rolled back.
If you can't convince people that a novel pandemic filling killing millions and routinely filling TV with coverage of dead bodies in overflowing morgues is something that requires them to change their behavior, good luck trying to do that with climate change!
Just like the big bright spot in the USA's fight against Covid are the vaccines, I think ultimately, it will have to be a technological solution that still allows people to continue their consumption that will have to save us. If we don't come up with such a solution before it is too late, we are in for a world of hurt.
He is facing recall because he proceeded to go ahead and ignore his own lockdown rules.
Also his recall effort was aided by COVID. Without some special stipulations put in place for COVID (relating to extended dates for signatures), it’s possible he wouldn’t even be facing the recall.
What I saw was incredible! They were making homes that keep cool during the summer and warm during the winter and you can grow crops on the roof because the house is covered in mud (wow!).
For 2 weeks when I was there (during the winter in Montana) I woke up earlier than everyone so I can light up their rocket mass heater. A few blocks of wood heats up this mass that dissipates heat throughout the day. The house stays between 66 degrees (coldest) to 72 (warmest) in the morning when the fireplace is on. As a Californian, I never thought there were so much efficiency to be gained from something as simple as a fireplace.
They lived a healthy lifestyle with minimal waste and energy usage and it helped inspire me to live a more sustainable lifestyle.
Just a really cool experience! I'm going back again this summer for their conference: https://wheaton-labs.com/permaculture-design-course/
Permaculture is really awesome.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
But we are still here because there are enough people that can recognize and fix out mistakes.
And global climate change is one of the biggest mistakes humankind has made.
As a side note, do people think Russian trolls have invaded this site to foster dissension? If any group of people could figure this out the people on this site could.
Strange that you consider advocacy to be both "whining into the ether" and also "coercion". Do you outsource all your personal decisions to whoever happens to be waving a sign outside city hall? If you don't have the strength to make your own choices in the face of a few eco-friendly Chevron commercials or people sharing memes on Facebook, then they aren't your real problem.
Many of the people "whining into the ether" are already doing those "genuinely meaningful" things. They're calling for you to come join them.
Why would Scientific American want to needlessly pump fear? Well, the alleged cure for our alleged ailments is... all the things that leftists have always wanted to do anyway. Little Hitlers in this thread seem to be licking their lips at the possibility of having some good reason to control the lives of others.
This thread is a good example of one of the psychoses that grips HN. Doomsday cultists thinking themselves sophisticated and elevated in morality.
CO2 surplus also takes 15 to 25 year to go up to the high mesosphere. That mean that a climate drift we experience today is not to consequence of the CO2 we put in the atmosphere last year, but the carbon we put in year 2000. You will never see the 2020 climate again, neither will your children or grandchildren.
If we did act today, drastically (we won't), maybe we will stabilise 2040 climate over a long period of time. in 2040 wet-bulb temperature is only reached a dozen day a year in a few 3rd world countries, nothing to worry about if you don't have familly in SA, West Africa, India or Indonesia. 2060s climate will be sightly harsher if you have family in Florida, but as long as their air conditioner doesn't fall apart and they don't go out for more than an hour, they should survive. Maybe by 2080 we will have stabilized the climate.
The other issues might be non-factor with enough technology (crop failing can be managed better, sea rise can be handled). If we don't follow though, this will be harsher than wet-bulb temperature in few area of the world.
We know putting carbon in the air has an inverse square relation to temperature increases. We can prove this. So why not focus on the actual science instead of debasing yourself further? (2+2 can equal 5 was a recent position this journal took)
Do actual science, please.