The author apparently expect the Singularity to happen Real Soon Now. I guess our children will be living to 2500.
"To fully grasp and plan for climate impacts under any scenario, researchers and policymakers must look well beyond the 2100 benchmark. Unless CO2 emissions drop significantly, global warming by 2500 will make the Amazon barren, the American Midwest tropical, and India too hot to live in, according to a team of international scientists.
'We need to envision the Earth our children and grandchildren may face, and what we can do now to make it just and liveable for them,' says Christopher Lyon, a Postdoctoral Researcher under the supervision of Professor Elena Bennett at McGill University."
In Mexico, as in the Confederate States constitution for some reason, there are six year presidential terms, without reelection prospects. Does it greatly alter governance?
Xi in China recently abolished presidential term limits.
> In Mexico, as in the Confederate States constitution for some reason, there are six year presidential terms, without reelection prospects. Does it greatly alter governance?
It's kind of hard to tell; Mexico has only had a few Presidential terms as something other than a fig-leaf democracy over a one-party corporatist state which freely used the power of the State to assure the dominance of the Party.
Does the supreme court, currently the closest we have to monarchs, generate better outcomes? Arguably not.
I believe it's the institutions of selection that matter more. Who and what are they constituents of and where have we manufactured their incentives to be.
For instance let's say you have unborn generations rights such as say the right to a tamer climate, just as a theoretical example. Then you could take people into courts for violating those rights.
You could have some kind of trust that can fund candidates based on long term ROIs so if they say, support early childhood education, a great ROI, they can access funds as an instrument of debt (really an issued bond) which will be covered by the yield of their investments into our children's futures.
So for instance, there's some agreed upon metric that ever dollar invested in preschool will generate an extra say $100 in lifetime earnings, taxed at ~30%, that dollar will yield a 30x return. So a debt instrument of say $1 funding per dollar invested up to some cap is issued by a trust to future generations to finance candidates who will allocate funds accordingly. The bond will be paid in the future through the increased tax revenue. It can be a convertible note so if the politician fails to act, it can become debt on the books. This makes the pool of money more secure the more candidates dip into it, creating a virtuous cycle and thus institutionalizing it.
Candidates who successfully diligently invest in far future payoffs, perhaps well after they're dead, will have access to a large pool of money to win election today.
If corporations and other legal fictions have rights, there's really no reason they can't be granted to other concepts as well.
Complete absurdity. By the end of this century we'll have the technology to make carbon capture (and atmospheric carbon targeting more generally) a trivial exercise.
Predictions about what conditions look like in the year 2100 (let alone 2500!) are meaningless because they assume little to no improvement in technology or energy availability.
This is like those articles about how "in 30,000 years humans will evolve to look like goblins because smartphone". It's status quo bias with James Burnham/Ray Kurzweil levels of unprincipled extrapolation.
> Our projections and associated approaches to adaptation governance represent an initial attempt and have considerable uncertainty given their extended time horizon. These efforts are meant to highlight the need for more sophisticated climate and Earth system modelling beyond 2100, including a focus on aspects of ecosystem goods and services not considered here. Our work thus provides a framework and baseline for the assessment of longer-term anthropogenic effects on climate and Earth systems, and highlights the critical need for further work in this area.
In 1895 Lord Kelvin stated that “heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible”
1900's gave us first flight on a plane made of wood, by 1960's we had spaceflight and nuclear power.
'Intuition and knowledge' would suggest that today, as another 60 years passed, we should have fusion power and cities on Mars, but the world is still powered by coal and instead we got the iPhone.
Kelvin also said other things that turned out to be unbreakable rules. You can't do anything you can imagine just because Kelvin was wrong once. That's magical thinking.
The point is about not about him, it's about increadible progreas that was made in 60 years past has definately slowed down, nothing 'impossible' was accomplished since. Skyscrapers, farming, construction, they are all the same as 60 years ago. 'exponential progress' is a myth
"Liquid metal proven to be cheap and efficient CO2 converter"
In their paper, the research team show a 92 percent efficiency in converting a ton of CO2 as described, using just 230kWh of energy. They estimate this equates to a cost of around $100 per ton of CO2.
And that only counts as fossil carbon from oil (gas and coal should be added), that has been going for decades (at a slower rate, in 1998 it was 73 million of barrels/day, still a big number). And positive feedback loops are adding new carbon to the party as coming from permafrost thawing and other sources in increasing volumes, as the planet warms up.
So for making the trick carbon capture should not only offset what is being produced in that moment, but capture everything ever emitted till reaching an amount below the one we had in preindustrial times. And keep it that way for enough time to undo the warming and try to shutdown the bad feedback loops.
Creating synthetic fuel from captured carbon doesn't lower the amount of carbon in the system (once it is burned as fuel, at least), but if it is used instead of pumping out fossil fuels, at least will accelerate less the amount of carbon we still add to the atmosphere.
Having a small scale demo doesn't mean that it will be ever feasible a production of the size and the speed that will be needed.
Unflinching confidence in the smashing success of an unproven speculative technology to be a silver bullet savior in some currently unspecified Hail Mary pass at the global scale is equally problematic.
For instance, this pathogen is currently whipping us pretty good for such a master of the universe civilization. It would have been far worse before modern science but we aren't exactly living in a Gene Roddenberry fever dream.
Our grasp and control of things is tenuous, fragile, narrow, and sometimes, completely imagined. These times, like all others, call for both a pessimism of the intellect And an optimism of the will.
Not to mention, carbon capture these days is mostly about capturing emissions at source, not about distilling CO2 out of the atmosphere at large. It doesn't work very well, either.
Extracting CO2 from the atmosphere will be energy-intensive and inefficient. Where are we going to get all this spare energy to scrape back the disastrous consequences of releasing a well-mixing destructive greenhouse gas? Uh, solar panels? Nuclear? A trillion trees? Spending energy on such CO2 extraction will literally have no economic value. And we're going to fund that how?
We don't do anything now because it is easier to put it off till later. In the future, the humans should be wealthier on average, and have access to better technology.
But even then, it will always be easier to put it off till later. What generation is going to take a significant, and eventually massive, charge in order to help their grandchildren? It seems not unlikely that no generation does, the problem gets worse and worse, wealth stagnates and then starts to decline, and eventually the problem is unsolvable. This could happen even without any climate tipping points.
The Moderna vaccine was designed on January ~12 2020. All problems since have been social rather than technical. And if Balaji Srinivasan was head of the FDA we'd all have been vaccinated by December last year.
That was a rhetorical device to emphasize our buildings still crumble from earthquakes, our villages still get consumed by fire and our cities are still evacuated by flood.
The damoclean sword of nuclear apocalypse still hangs by a thread despite our best efforts and 25 years of international meetings on climate has produced only platitudes and promises.
Coal plants are still being constructed and oil pipelines are still being built, intended to last decades past the dates we promise to dismantle them all, and the world goes on.
Now is not the time to be lulled into confidence by a perceived competence and strength lest we cheerlead ourselves into an abyss. Civilization persistence and failure are both fair bets to make.
We can not rely on the greatness of people yet born to save humanity from the burdens caused by our current lack of will. There will be no future of superheros. We must address the problem at a scale that matches the insanity of the circumstances because they will only become increasingly insane without our immediate and swift remediations. Intentions are fatal where actions are required.
> That was intended as a rhetorical device to emphasize our buildings still crumble from earthquakes
When did a building in Tokio crumble from an earthquake last time? Long-long-long time ago for a place where earthquakes are almost daily experience.
The fact that US infrastracture is poorly designed and mantained does not say anything about our technology and capabilities, it only tells us that our social and political systems suck. In some places of that planet.
Technology isn't gifted to us by the God Prometheus descending from Mount Olympus. It is always a product of social and political systems; long chains of teams trying to dance together. Every shiny marvel you interact with has countless human institutions, passions and pains hidden behind it. Ultimately it's people all the way down.
Fetishizing an imagined perfection is ultimately of benefit to no one.
And to answer your question, Fukushima Daiichi did not respond with perfect grace and aplomb as an uninterrupted unflappable marvel of technological perfection effortlessly absorbing the tectonic sways
Can I move the goal post to that other place in Japan, the one with a nuclear plant, or are we cherry picking facts to ignore reality and the larger picture, pretending everything's okay ?
> Predictions about what conditions look like in the year 2100 (let alone 2500!) are meaningless because they assume little to no improvement in technology or energy availability.
As meaningless as assuming there will be improvement in technology or energy availability
It's not profitable, therefore it is not the priority, at all
We have the tech to build super cheap housing for everyone, yet poverty and homelessness skyrocket
So to think we'll solve the issue we have with Earth's climate cycling through its natural cycles is mind blogging
I am Uruguayan and have never even visited the Bay Area. But just cry "tech bro" and move on.
>We have the tech to build super cheap housing for everyone, yet poverty and homelessness skyrocket
This is a great example of a regulatory (rather than technical) issue. Global cities should simply be built up into the stratosphere by decriminalizing construction, anything else is a policy failure.
Similarly, climate is solved by decriminalizing nuclear power.
I think you are attributing too much power to policy alone.
I think human behaviour are much better explained via incentives.
We are putting ridiculous amount of CO2 in the air because roughly every human is incentivized to do so. Basically the things that scale only scale because everyone has an incentives for it.
I don't see any personal level incentives for carbon capture so I doubt it will scale.
> By the end of this century we'll have the technology to make carbon capture (and atmospheric carbon targeting more generally) a trivial exercise.
The fact people are delusional enough to think this might not happen shows there are still a lot of suckers out there that need to be parted with their money [1]
That's the entire industrial environmental complex.
But it will also work at a more abstract level. What else can be made up to extract money from them?
[1] With the obvious irony because they suck resources from pandemic preparedness and environmental measures they might cause a global collapse of some sort.
The politics of carbon capture are all but guaranteed to be a much bigger headache than the politics of cutting emissions. There's a 5 trillion ton surplus of CO2 in the atmosphere and it keeps getting bigger. We might be able to turn some CO2 into useful materials, but five trillion tons? For scale, that's 50000 times the weight of all the buildings in Manhattan:
"By the end of this century we'll have the technology to make carbon capture"
We have this technology already. It's called "trees". Whether we choose to use it is a different matter.
Environmental sustainability - like most hard problems in the world today - is not so much a technological challenge as a political one. I do believe technological progress in the future is a certainty, and will bring many good things with it, but it will not do the hard work of encouraging humans to do the right thing. That is something we have to do for ourselves.
That's the bad news. The good news is that this work is something we can do immediately, right now, without waiting for the hope of our utopian Star Trek future to become reality.
I think I agree. In the early 1900s New Yorkers were freaking out at the calculations that showed that their streets would be buried in 10 feet of horse shit within a hundred years. Obviously that didn't happen. Technological progress has a way of completely invalidating your old problems and replacing them with something totally different.
As a thought experiment, look back on humanity for the last 500 years and imagine what would happen if you asked them to solve the problems of the next century. It would be ludicrous. Steam powered air travel, pneumatic computers, advances in blood-letting, etc.
If we can crack fusion in the next 100 years, carbon capture becomes essentially free. And that's just ONE of the solutions we know about now. Imagine how many solutions we can't even conceive of...
I hope it's radically different in 2500, but not the way this author does. We should be able to have 50-100B people, with billions in space, post scarcity, fusion based economy by then.
Population is almost certainly going to shrink, largely because most people don’t really want to have a ton of kids once they’re given the option to. The more resources people have, the fewer children they tend to have in fact.
"The more resources people have, the fewer children they tend to have in fact."
I dispute this, most people want to own a home and be able to provide for their children, and average age of first-time homebuyer in UK has risen to 33
That … doesn’t actually refute my point. People have kids in apartments all the time, always have and always will.
Anyways, in country after country we see the exact same pattern; the wealthier the country gets and the lower their infant mortality gets, the fewer children they have. The majority of the world is now below replacement rate; even India is down below 2.2 children per woman, and Mexico is now on the cusp of the replacement rate. Overall the only continent still growing is Africa, as it has the vast majority of the countries with high fertility rates. I expect that to change as Africa develops and gets richer.
You might say “aha, but people can’t afford as many kids as they want to in the west, because it’s so expensive”. There is some truth to this; there’s a gap between desired fertility and actual fertility in some countries. But in a lot of countries the number of children women reportedly want has fallen. In America it’s gone from 3.5 to 2.5 in the past century. Yes, women are having fewer children than they reportedly want, but not by a lot. Frankly I think that it's much easier to say you want 3 kids than it is to actually decide to have a third.
And that’s before we consider that fertility has fallen off a cliff in countries where having a child is cheaper, and where the state generously subsidizes childbirth and child care. Norway is down to 1.6, Denmark is at 1.7, and so is Sweden. If the issue was cost, surely generous state subsidies would drive up fertility, no?
I think the simple reality is that as child mortality falls, parents increasingly begin to view children as something to be invested in, rather than an economic source for the household (in poorer countries) or as a default consequence of marriage and sex. This tips the balance over from parents wanting (or getting by default) big families, to instead smaller families that are easier to manage and that allow greater emotional investment per child.
There will never be post-scarcity because people always want more and better, and the haves will always want to feel better than and differentiated from the have-nots.
Can we have 100 billion mega-yachts sailing around? 100 billion private jets, billions of sprawling opulent mansions in each of the most desirable and expensive cities? 100 billion private rocket ships and 100 billion vacation houses on Mars?
The impact to other life on earth would just be horrific too. It's already way beyond the point of sustainability. Even if you just magic away the footprint of all primary production and all manufacturing, just having that many people living, producing waste, impacting habitat is my idea of a nightmare.
I hope population naturally gradually subsides to some actually sustainable fraction of the current that does not rely on heroics like fusion, asteroid mining, and scrubbing industrial chemicals from the environment. Tens of millions of people, perhaps.
A thousands times less people? It would be excruciatingly boring.
Even now at the peak of cultural and technological production it feels really slow (How many really great movies or song per year? Maybe 1 or 2? Mathematical proof? Simply finding an acceptable lover?)
> A thousands times less people? It would be excruciatingly boring.
I don't think it would be.
> Even now at the peak of cultural and technological production it feels really slow (How many really great movies or song per year? Maybe 1 or 2? Mathematical proof?
To each their own I guess. To me this seems like shallow, vapid passive consumption that is never going to be not-boring no matter how many other people achieve great things while I watch on.
Not to denigrate passive entertainment too much and it has its place, but I couldn't think of anything better than if people got sick of it en masse and started getting most of their entertainment from doing things themselves. Write their own proofs, learn an instrument, play in a local sport team, join a theater group and do their own performances, join a pottery group, start wood working or hacking computers, volunteer.
> Simply finding an acceptable lover?
I'll refrain from taking the cheap shot -- I'm certainly no one-in-one-hundred-billion either :)
Having more people around you doesn't make you meet more people, quite the opposite in fact. I have lived in a 10-million metropolitan city for 5 years and literally made 0 true friends. All mega-cities are packed with people with no deep social life.
On the other hand, if you live in a 1000-person village with only 10 people in your age range, you are much more likely to try bonding with them.
I think quality of life would be higher on average with a lower population, but that's an interesting point that certain products are more sustainable with a large population. Things like software, music, and movies have very low marginal cost and most of the production cost is just in making the first version. If you're JK Rowling and write Harry Potter, you make twice as much money and readers derive twice as much enjoyment from the books in a world with twice as many people, if all else is equal.
Currently we don't allocate resources very efficiently when it comes to the creation of so-called intellectual property. With a much smaller population, we'd presumably have to be smarter about it if we want large volumes of high-quality content.
Unless we invent Nuclear Energy and do what France did in the 1970's and build a handful of reactors which provided for almost all of their energy needs, which uses a small amount of fuel plentifully found in Australia and Canada and which will last for 1000's of years, and, for which we actually do have feasible ways to store waste.
The problem with climate change is it doesn't kill people quick enough for us to take action. Covid on the other hand, we rushed out vaccines and people have generally accepted massive disruption to their lives to tame it. Even with Covid not all governments wanted to react quickly. If we treated climate change like covid, we'd be finding a way to create lots of nuclear reactors around the world really quickly. We might even create a few hundred of them in the middle of Australia and use it to make hydrogen or some other fuel and ship it around.
Yep. The thought experiment does a good job I think of highlighting just how much being linked to nuclear weapons and thus became a target for peace and environmental action has screwed us. Take that history away, drop this gift from the universe in our lap yesterday, and every environmentalist would be on board today.
That's the hard part, though. I think the debate about whether or not to use nuclear is less about whether we can design a safe reactor, and more about whether we can design a human organizational structure to maintain the reactors over their whole lifetime in such a way that people who don't have specialized knowledge can be highly confident that the reactors are being managed in a safe way.
The model of having a for-profit company run the plant with a government regulator looking over their shoulder works most of the time, but it breaks down when the regulators become too friendly with the industry they oversee (regulatory capture). Maybe there are other, better models.
We don't have the same risk with wind and solar because the damage that can be done with a broken windmill or malfunctioning solar array is much less. The public doesn't have to trust the operators to the same degree.
Just as a reminder, 2100 is closer to us than 1940. The future is rushing at us fast.
As for the Amazon becoming a barren wasteland, an epiphany moment for me was to realize that the rainforest isn't a rainforest because it just happens to be where it rains a lot, it rains a lot because of the dense biomass of trees that repeatedly pump the rainwater out of the ground, fueling a huge biosphere from which it escapes as vapor, where it condenses again as rain, not far away. The Amazon continually recycles its water. Without that rainforest that rain will just end going underground, into the watertable or into the Amazon river, likely taking the topsoil with it.
The evidence that this can happen isn't all that far away. Many regions of Africa have geologic evidence of shifting multiple times from being desert, to being forest, grassland, savannah, rainforest, and back. The cycles might be over hundreds of thousands or millions of years. Mankind's release of massive CO2, plus our deforestation habit, might indeed cause a catastrophic cascade of this region in mere centuries.
That's an incorrect understanding of rainforests, and has me scratching my head at the article.
It rains because of Hadley cells. Hadley cells don't disappear with global warming, so it will still rain a lot in the tropics. Why on Earth would it be "barren?" A few degrees of temperature doesn't matter to plants: as long as there is sunlight and tons of water, they should be fine.
Now if Hadley cells widen or shift northward, that could be a problem for the US. But no matter what happens, Hadley cells still have to rise near the equator.
No, you're putting too much emphasis on Hadley cells. The air patterns are only one part of a very much more complex cycle. As the poster above you noted, for any given amount of water, the amount going into the air in a particular place is influenced by the density of plants. Plants pull water from underground and help evaporate it in one particular place. The evaporated air can then condense and become rain again. Therefore, very dense masses of plants can increase the rate with which water is pulled from the ground and then evaporate and then condenses into rain and then returns to the ground, starting the cycle over again. Remove the trees and you still have Hadley cells, but you won't have a rainforest anymore, if the density of the plants falls below some threshold -- you won't have as much rain, even though the Hadley cell is still there -- you might have the same amount of water, but the speed at which it evaporates, and therefore becomes rain, will be lessened.
> as long as there is sunlight and tons of water, they should be fine.
That's completely ridiculous. Plants don't fit your magical conception of them. Talk to any farmer or someone with a degree in forestry. Every species has its preferred temperate zones, moisture, and sunlight requirements. Heck, a gardner will tell you that. Plants need to be pollinated. The pollinators die, the plants die. Plants don't break down dead plants. Fungus, insects, and herbivores do. Those parts of the ecosystem die, plants die too. Throw in invasive species, pests like bark beetles that won't die in winter, and you can absolutely expect forests to collapse. Everything is connected. It's a system with millions of parts. It's already showing signs of abuse. Collapse is starting. Forests are weakening, tree lines are changing, some whole regions are showing signs they may die off. I've seen it with my own eyes in SW Utah. Biologists see climate change happening everywhere. We're looking at vast loss of biodiversity and collapse of ecosystems as things speed up.
It's ridiculous to think that whole ecosystems will just collapse instead of adapt with the species that are good generalists and can manage a warmer climate and the ongoing impact of humans. Plenty of wildlife manages to live inside cities, including various plants, fungi, insects, birds and mammals. Will it be pristine and as diverse before? No, but it will be what survives, as has always been the case on Earth since life evolved. Some parts of forests and ecosystems will die and other parts will take their place, and some will do even better because it's warmer with more CO2. Not always what we'd like, but nature will be there in one form or another.
The current diversity of the world evolved form times of less diversity which came from times of greater diversity and so on for several major and minor extinctions over the past couple billion years, and plenty of upheaval on more local and regional scales. Nature is always changing and adapting. There are always species migrating around and adapting or going extinct.
All of the trees I’ve seen where I live have been damaged either by the current drought or by various bark beetle attacks. All of them. We had to cut down a birch tree that was girdled by bark beetles, and I’m very worried about the mature red cedars on our property surviving the next ten years. You can drive around the city here and count dead or dying trees. Tell me how are they supposed to adapt?
Maybe they won't? Maybe you will have to plant trees that can live there. The article mentions that while the Amazon could become barren by 2500, the American midwest may be tropical. Guess what kinds of plants would grow there? And crops would grow closer to the poles. So Canada and Russia would grow much of the world's food.
That's not ideal, but I'm guessing that 480 years is enough time for humans to adapt. Anyway, there have been several articles on here saying that global plant growth and the number of trees have increased over the past century based on NASA's satellite imagery and counts from 50,000 locations. So while your area may be losing trees, other areas are gaining them. Nature adapts and changes.
Exactly! I’m totally confident that life will find a way and Earth will be fine (no matter how badly we hurt the environment)… Not so confident however that the life that finds a way will include humans.
I don't see many people arguing that climate change will end life on Earth or something. But a mass extinction could mean, for example, that everything in the ocean larger than your hand dies. It could mean, for example, that lush forests full of a myriad of insects, birds, mammals, turn into wastelands. It could mean the extinction of huge swaths of animals, like goodbye raccoons, bears, squirrels, bison, wolves, deer. Or goodbye lizards, turtles, snails, snakes. Maybe it hits a link lower in the chain first, like bees, ants, and whole towers of the ecosystem collapse down from there.
When the dinosaurs were obliterated by the Chicxulub impactor 65 million years ago, 90% of land species also disappeared, never to reappear again. It took millions of years for mammals to emerge as the "victors" of that huge extinction event.
The viewpoint you espouse is just so hollow and frankly, repugnant. The thought that we can just stupidly smash incredibly intricate towers of evolution's genius, flub our precious time on this Earth to move from ignorantly and unintentionally knocking them over to actively raising a sledge hammer to them, justifying it to ourselves that "it will all be fine". Such a destructive attitude ruins everything for everyone. It's flippant and stupid, But it's ultimately, tragically, self-destructive.
It doesn't matter what we think. It's our actions.
I think we agree — I quit eating meat entirely a couple of years ago because I feel so strongly about the environmental concerns.
Sorry if it didn’t come through in my comment: I was just being a little sarcastic and building off the GP comment, trying to reiterate that “life finds a way” is pointless to try and argue, since human life is much more fragile than life in general (and I tend to value human life).
I'll just add to my own comment that 3% economic growth for 480 years would mean the economy in 2500 would be 1,500,000 times its current size today and in the year 3000 almost 3.8 trillion times its current size. So obviously, exponential growth is going to come to an end, probably slowing down this century and we will absolutely have to reach sustainability on Earth.
We're literally just hitting the part of economic development where the highest impacts to output are not resource intensive but rather intellectual property intensive, and also difficult to measure by a traditional measure like GDP. How do you measure the economic impact of say, wikipedia, in terms of GDP? Its free, it raises funds only through donations, and it has immense value. We're just getting started with exponential growth, and we're just getting started because we're finally decoupling growth from physical resources
>We're literally just hitting the part of economic development where the highest impacts to output are not resource intensive but rather intellectual property intensive
I hope they issue patents on good edible paper then, because if the climate changes as much as this study proposes, all this intellectual property won’t matter much.
I don't understand the point of these wild extrapolations. You can just review the actual global GDP growth rate trend and notice that the YoY % increase has been trending generally downward for more than half a century:
Obviously annual real GDP growth cannot be 3% forever, but the data show that we're slowing down gradually rather than rushing toward some kind of wall. The question is what to do about the real present slowdown, not some hypothetical future catastrophe[1].
Not really. I heard a quote that the weight of everything you buy now is less than 50 years ago. Most of what I spend money on is housing and services - esp vacations, education and healthcare.
Time to plant a forest the size of England in the centre of Australia then. We can pump and desalinated the water for 100 years on solar and eventually it'll just do it itself
That's only half of it. It rains in the Amazon so much also because of the Andes pushing air from the oceans up where it condenses. You can see this happening in Hawaii in real time everyday where one side is a lush jungle and the other side is Mediterranean style desert similar to southern California and there's no way it's purely from the jungle. It's mostly coming off the ocean
Trees make their own rain, it’s a known thing, and if the moisture was only from the ocean then you’d expect it to rain to the west of the mountains not to the east.
> it rains a lot because of the dense biomass of trees that repeatedly pump the rainwater out of the ground
Even on very small scales like local botanical gardens with rainforest sections they are typically cooler and more humid than other sections of the gardens. The rainforest section of Fairchild Tropical Gardens in Miami often develops its own fog/mist not present in the other sections which is pretty nice on a hot Miami day.
> Many regions of Africa have geologic evidence of shifting multiple times from being desert, to being forest, grassland, savannah, rainforest, and back.
About six thousand years ago, the Sahara itself was largely rainy grasslands.
> Just as a reminder, 2100 is closer to us than 1940. The future is rushing at us fast.
Most people reading this here and now (today, the day it was posted) aren't going to see 2100.
I'm not making this comment in order to dissuade anyone from doing everything they can to halt or reverse climate change.
I'm simply being realistic. 2100 is 79 years from now. Barring significant medical advances - the likes of which have never been seen before - almost none of the adults here will be alive in 2100.
The resource that is most valuable for us on Earth is not oil or water or gold or rare earth metals.
It is the human brain and human potential. I would argue that we have developed this more than we ever have before in human history. We have access to more knowledge than we ever have had before. We can communicate more than we have ever had before. More children get good nutrition and so can develop normally than we ever have before. Women, especially, with the advent of safe, reliable birth control, as well as low infant and maternal mortality are encouraged by society to develop intellectually more than they ever have before.
If you look at the past, it was said that humans would exponentially grow in population. Turns out birth control and female education and empowerment radically altered that trajectory and we will actually have a stable population soon. People were predicting wide spread famine, but the green agricultural revolution enabled us to produce more food than we have ever been able to.
The most important thing is not to be consumed by doom and gloom but rather embrace that human potential is our most powerful resource and seek that every human on earth will be given the resources and opportunity to fully develop into all that they can be.
No. Just no. The most valuable thing is the ecosystem, of which we are just one small, temporary, and insignificant part.
It’s exactly this kind of hubris and overconfidence that is leading us to the next extinction event and to our own doom.
Humans may be good at solving short term problems, but one of the biggest limits on our potential is to collectively act to avert long term threats.
Every civilization from the Egyptians to the Romans thought they had it all figured out in their prime.
The Egyptians literally moved mountains, and they are gone. If we wanted to today, we probably couldn’t rebuild the great pyramid, even with modern machinery. It would be too expensive!
Our technologies have always created more problems than they have alleviated even if you restrict the cost benefit only to the human sphere. The record only becomes worse when you factor in the rest of the world.
This guy says we are just beginning runaway warming. There will be many interconnected feedbacks and our carbin levels are increasing hundreds of times faster than ever in the geologic record. The 5 bigger climate shifts all happened over about a dozen years once the runaway happens. https://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2021/07/a-temperature-rise-...
“Everything will be radically different in 500 years to an extent that might strain our imaginations” seems about right.
I’d go so far as to wager that if you time traveled back to 1521 and brought somebody to the present, they’d find it to be alien as well. Of course to verify my thesis I’d have to teach my 1521 passenger the current meaning of “alien” and the rules about my intended interpretation of my blog post to make my point clear to them.
Take someone from 1521 and have them watch Pixar movies as they fly into Tokyo and then have them order delivery pizza via a smartphone as they wait in a taxi at a traffic light at Shibuya Crossing on their way to a high-rise hotel. I think that would be an alien experience.
What evidence exists that we (humans) can make accurate predictions for the states of complex systems decades or centuries in the future? It seems like "things will be different" and "there will be catastrophes" are always solid bets, but modeling complex systems -- especially systems with many unknown variables -- always involves probability distributions. Unwarranted confidence always leaves me skeptical, suspecting ulterior motives.
I would much prefer to hear about progress toward adaptability. Bad things will happen, no matter what. Let's plan to deal with the bad things so we can minimize future suffering.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 190 ms ] thread"To fully grasp and plan for climate impacts under any scenario, researchers and policymakers must look well beyond the 2100 benchmark. Unless CO2 emissions drop significantly, global warming by 2500 will make the Amazon barren, the American Midwest tropical, and India too hot to live in, according to a team of international scientists.
'We need to envision the Earth our children and grandchildren may face, and what we can do now to make it just and liveable for them,' says Christopher Lyon, a Postdoctoral Researcher under the supervision of Professor Elena Bennett at McGill University."
- CEO Nwabudike Morgan, Morganlink 3D-Vision Interview
Xi in China recently abolished presidential term limits.
It's kind of hard to tell; Mexico has only had a few Presidential terms as something other than a fig-leaf democracy over a one-party corporatist state which freely used the power of the State to assure the dominance of the Party.
I believe it's the institutions of selection that matter more. Who and what are they constituents of and where have we manufactured their incentives to be.
For instance let's say you have unborn generations rights such as say the right to a tamer climate, just as a theoretical example. Then you could take people into courts for violating those rights.
You could have some kind of trust that can fund candidates based on long term ROIs so if they say, support early childhood education, a great ROI, they can access funds as an instrument of debt (really an issued bond) which will be covered by the yield of their investments into our children's futures.
So for instance, there's some agreed upon metric that ever dollar invested in preschool will generate an extra say $100 in lifetime earnings, taxed at ~30%, that dollar will yield a 30x return. So a debt instrument of say $1 funding per dollar invested up to some cap is issued by a trust to future generations to finance candidates who will allocate funds accordingly. The bond will be paid in the future through the increased tax revenue. It can be a convertible note so if the politician fails to act, it can become debt on the books. This makes the pool of money more secure the more candidates dip into it, creating a virtuous cycle and thus institutionalizing it.
Candidates who successfully diligently invest in far future payoffs, perhaps well after they're dead, will have access to a large pool of money to win election today.
If corporations and other legal fictions have rights, there's really no reason they can't be granted to other concepts as well.
Predictions about what conditions look like in the year 2100 (let alone 2500!) are meaningless because they assume little to no improvement in technology or energy availability.
This is like those articles about how "in 30,000 years humans will evolve to look like goblins because smartphone". It's status quo bias with James Burnham/Ray Kurzweil levels of unprincipled extrapolation.
> Our projections and associated approaches to adaptation governance represent an initial attempt and have considerable uncertainty given their extended time horizon. These efforts are meant to highlight the need for more sophisticated climate and Earth system modelling beyond 2100, including a focus on aspects of ecosystem goods and services not considered here. Our work thus provides a framework and baseline for the assessment of longer-term anthropogenic effects on climate and Earth systems, and highlights the critical need for further work in this area.
[0]: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.15871
Source?
1900's gave us first flight on a plane made of wood, by 1960's we had spaceflight and nuclear power.
'Intuition and knowledge' would suggest that today, as another 60 years passed, we should have fusion power and cities on Mars, but the world is still powered by coal and instead we got the iPhone.
In their paper, the research team show a 92 percent efficiency in converting a ton of CO2 as described, using just 230kWh of energy. They estimate this equates to a cost of around $100 per ton of CO2.
Source: https://phys.org/news/2021-10-liquid-metal-proven-cheap-effi...
(To put this price into perspective, according to the EPA, a single passenger vehicle emits 4.6 metric tons of CO2 per year. Source: https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...)
And if that's not your jam, check out Prometheus Fuels, which produces synthetic fuels from captured carbon: https://www.prometheusfuels.com
To give an idea of the current trend, every single day, near 100 million barrels of oil are produced. Each of those barrels make between 500 and 750kg of CO2 equivalent (source https://carnegieendowment.org/2016/02/09/breaking-down-barre...)
And that only counts as fossil carbon from oil (gas and coal should be added), that has been going for decades (at a slower rate, in 1998 it was 73 million of barrels/day, still a big number). And positive feedback loops are adding new carbon to the party as coming from permafrost thawing and other sources in increasing volumes, as the planet warms up.
So for making the trick carbon capture should not only offset what is being produced in that moment, but capture everything ever emitted till reaching an amount below the one we had in preindustrial times. And keep it that way for enough time to undo the warming and try to shutdown the bad feedback loops.
Creating synthetic fuel from captured carbon doesn't lower the amount of carbon in the system (once it is burned as fuel, at least), but if it is used instead of pumping out fossil fuels, at least will accelerate less the amount of carbon we still add to the atmosphere.
Having a small scale demo doesn't mean that it will be ever feasible a production of the size and the speed that will be needed.
This would give us a lot of bang for the buck but for some reason it’s been years and it’s not taking off — why?
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/10/12/seaweed-could-help-cow-f...
For instance, this pathogen is currently whipping us pretty good for such a master of the universe civilization. It would have been far worse before modern science but we aren't exactly living in a Gene Roddenberry fever dream.
Our grasp and control of things is tenuous, fragile, narrow, and sometimes, completely imagined. These times, like all others, call for both a pessimism of the intellect And an optimism of the will.
Extracting CO2 from the atmosphere will be energy-intensive and inefficient. Where are we going to get all this spare energy to scrape back the disastrous consequences of releasing a well-mixing destructive greenhouse gas? Uh, solar panels? Nuclear? A trillion trees? Spending energy on such CO2 extraction will literally have no economic value. And we're going to fund that how?
But even then, it will always be easier to put it off till later. What generation is going to take a significant, and eventually massive, charge in order to help their grandchildren? It seems not unlikely that no generation does, the problem gets worse and worse, wealth stagnates and then starts to decline, and eventually the problem is unsolvable. This could happen even without any climate tipping points.
The damoclean sword of nuclear apocalypse still hangs by a thread despite our best efforts and 25 years of international meetings on climate has produced only platitudes and promises.
Coal plants are still being constructed and oil pipelines are still being built, intended to last decades past the dates we promise to dismantle them all, and the world goes on.
Now is not the time to be lulled into confidence by a perceived competence and strength lest we cheerlead ourselves into an abyss. Civilization persistence and failure are both fair bets to make.
We can not rely on the greatness of people yet born to save humanity from the burdens caused by our current lack of will. There will be no future of superheros. We must address the problem at a scale that matches the insanity of the circumstances because they will only become increasingly insane without our immediate and swift remediations. Intentions are fatal where actions are required.
When did a building in Tokio crumble from an earthquake last time? Long-long-long time ago for a place where earthquakes are almost daily experience.
The fact that US infrastracture is poorly designed and mantained does not say anything about our technology and capabilities, it only tells us that our social and political systems suck. In some places of that planet.
Fetishizing an imagined perfection is ultimately of benefit to no one.
And to answer your question, Fukushima Daiichi did not respond with perfect grace and aplomb as an uninterrupted unflappable marvel of technological perfection effortlessly absorbing the tectonic sways
Not exactly Tokyo, but nearby Touhoku region suffered devastatingly with entire cities being levelled a mere ten years or so ago.
> Predictions about what conditions look like in the year 2100 (let alone 2500!) are meaningless because they assume little to no improvement in technology or energy availability.
As meaningless as assuming there will be improvement in technology or energy availability
It's not profitable, therefore it is not the priority, at all
We have the tech to build super cheap housing for everyone, yet poverty and homelessness skyrocket
So to think we'll solve the issue we have with Earth's climate cycling through its natural cycles is mind blogging
I am Uruguayan and have never even visited the Bay Area. But just cry "tech bro" and move on.
>We have the tech to build super cheap housing for everyone, yet poverty and homelessness skyrocket
This is a great example of a regulatory (rather than technical) issue. Global cities should simply be built up into the stratosphere by decriminalizing construction, anything else is a policy failure.
Similarly, climate is solved by decriminalizing nuclear power.
I think human behaviour are much better explained via incentives.
We are putting ridiculous amount of CO2 in the air because roughly every human is incentivized to do so. Basically the things that scale only scale because everyone has an incentives for it.
I don't see any personal level incentives for carbon capture so I doubt it will scale.
Physics, anyone?
I'm really hoping we evolve into something with more than 1d4 hit points.
The fact people are delusional enough to think this might not happen shows there are still a lot of suckers out there that need to be parted with their money [1]
That's the entire industrial environmental complex.
But it will also work at a more abstract level. What else can be made up to extract money from them?
[1] With the obvious irony because they suck resources from pandemic preparedness and environmental measures they might cause a global collapse of some sort.
https://www.thrillist.com/culture/how-much-does-manhattan-we...
We have this technology already. It's called "trees". Whether we choose to use it is a different matter.
Environmental sustainability - like most hard problems in the world today - is not so much a technological challenge as a political one. I do believe technological progress in the future is a certainty, and will bring many good things with it, but it will not do the hard work of encouraging humans to do the right thing. That is something we have to do for ourselves.
That's the bad news. The good news is that this work is something we can do immediately, right now, without waiting for the hope of our utopian Star Trek future to become reality.
As a thought experiment, look back on humanity for the last 500 years and imagine what would happen if you asked them to solve the problems of the next century. It would be ludicrous. Steam powered air travel, pneumatic computers, advances in blood-letting, etc.
If we can crack fusion in the next 100 years, carbon capture becomes essentially free. And that's just ONE of the solutions we know about now. Imagine how many solutions we can't even conceive of...
I dispute this, most people want to own a home and be able to provide for their children, and average age of first-time homebuyer in UK has risen to 33
Anyways, in country after country we see the exact same pattern; the wealthier the country gets and the lower their infant mortality gets, the fewer children they have. The majority of the world is now below replacement rate; even India is down below 2.2 children per woman, and Mexico is now on the cusp of the replacement rate. Overall the only continent still growing is Africa, as it has the vast majority of the countries with high fertility rates. I expect that to change as Africa develops and gets richer.
You might say “aha, but people can’t afford as many kids as they want to in the west, because it’s so expensive”. There is some truth to this; there’s a gap between desired fertility and actual fertility in some countries. But in a lot of countries the number of children women reportedly want has fallen. In America it’s gone from 3.5 to 2.5 in the past century. Yes, women are having fewer children than they reportedly want, but not by a lot. Frankly I think that it's much easier to say you want 3 kids than it is to actually decide to have a third.
And that’s before we consider that fertility has fallen off a cliff in countries where having a child is cheaper, and where the state generously subsidizes childbirth and child care. Norway is down to 1.6, Denmark is at 1.7, and so is Sweden. If the issue was cost, surely generous state subsidies would drive up fertility, no?
I think the simple reality is that as child mortality falls, parents increasingly begin to view children as something to be invested in, rather than an economic source for the household (in poorer countries) or as a default consequence of marriage and sex. This tips the balance over from parents wanting (or getting by default) big families, to instead smaller families that are easier to manage and that allow greater emotional investment per child.
Not yet fully complete but many women have options to do/be something other than a mother/homemaker. That will naturally lead to less children.
Equally these days, with both parents having to work to make ends meet many couples feel they don't have the resources to support many children.
Lastly, modern death rates don't implicitly demand the "have a couple to spare" approach either.
Can we have 100 billion mega-yachts sailing around? 100 billion private jets, billions of sprawling opulent mansions in each of the most desirable and expensive cities? 100 billion private rocket ships and 100 billion vacation houses on Mars?
The impact to other life on earth would just be horrific too. It's already way beyond the point of sustainability. Even if you just magic away the footprint of all primary production and all manufacturing, just having that many people living, producing waste, impacting habitat is my idea of a nightmare.
I hope population naturally gradually subsides to some actually sustainable fraction of the current that does not rely on heroics like fusion, asteroid mining, and scrubbing industrial chemicals from the environment. Tens of millions of people, perhaps.
Even now at the peak of cultural and technological production it feels really slow (How many really great movies or song per year? Maybe 1 or 2? Mathematical proof? Simply finding an acceptable lover?)
I don't think it would be.
> Even now at the peak of cultural and technological production it feels really slow (How many really great movies or song per year? Maybe 1 or 2? Mathematical proof?
To each their own I guess. To me this seems like shallow, vapid passive consumption that is never going to be not-boring no matter how many other people achieve great things while I watch on.
Not to denigrate passive entertainment too much and it has its place, but I couldn't think of anything better than if people got sick of it en masse and started getting most of their entertainment from doing things themselves. Write their own proofs, learn an instrument, play in a local sport team, join a theater group and do their own performances, join a pottery group, start wood working or hacking computers, volunteer.
> Simply finding an acceptable lover?
I'll refrain from taking the cheap shot -- I'm certainly no one-in-one-hundred-billion either :)
On the other hand, if you live in a 1000-person village with only 10 people in your age range, you are much more likely to try bonding with them.
Currently we don't allocate resources very efficiently when it comes to the creation of so-called intellectual property. With a much smaller population, we'd presumably have to be smarter about it if we want large volumes of high-quality content.
If nuclear power were just discovered yesterday, we’d all be hailing it as the miracle to solve climate change.
The model of having a for-profit company run the plant with a government regulator looking over their shoulder works most of the time, but it breaks down when the regulators become too friendly with the industry they oversee (regulatory capture). Maybe there are other, better models.
We don't have the same risk with wind and solar because the damage that can be done with a broken windmill or malfunctioning solar array is much less. The public doesn't have to trust the operators to the same degree.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5138252/
I’d prefer a mainframe.
As for the Amazon becoming a barren wasteland, an epiphany moment for me was to realize that the rainforest isn't a rainforest because it just happens to be where it rains a lot, it rains a lot because of the dense biomass of trees that repeatedly pump the rainwater out of the ground, fueling a huge biosphere from which it escapes as vapor, where it condenses again as rain, not far away. The Amazon continually recycles its water. Without that rainforest that rain will just end going underground, into the watertable or into the Amazon river, likely taking the topsoil with it.
The evidence that this can happen isn't all that far away. Many regions of Africa have geologic evidence of shifting multiple times from being desert, to being forest, grassland, savannah, rainforest, and back. The cycles might be over hundreds of thousands or millions of years. Mankind's release of massive CO2, plus our deforestation habit, might indeed cause a catastrophic cascade of this region in mere centuries.
It rains because of Hadley cells. Hadley cells don't disappear with global warming, so it will still rain a lot in the tropics. Why on Earth would it be "barren?" A few degrees of temperature doesn't matter to plants: as long as there is sunlight and tons of water, they should be fine.
Now if Hadley cells widen or shift northward, that could be a problem for the US. But no matter what happens, Hadley cells still have to rise near the equator.
That's completely ridiculous. Plants don't fit your magical conception of them. Talk to any farmer or someone with a degree in forestry. Every species has its preferred temperate zones, moisture, and sunlight requirements. Heck, a gardner will tell you that. Plants need to be pollinated. The pollinators die, the plants die. Plants don't break down dead plants. Fungus, insects, and herbivores do. Those parts of the ecosystem die, plants die too. Throw in invasive species, pests like bark beetles that won't die in winter, and you can absolutely expect forests to collapse. Everything is connected. It's a system with millions of parts. It's already showing signs of abuse. Collapse is starting. Forests are weakening, tree lines are changing, some whole regions are showing signs they may die off. I've seen it with my own eyes in SW Utah. Biologists see climate change happening everywhere. We're looking at vast loss of biodiversity and collapse of ecosystems as things speed up.
The current diversity of the world evolved form times of less diversity which came from times of greater diversity and so on for several major and minor extinctions over the past couple billion years, and plenty of upheaval on more local and regional scales. Nature is always changing and adapting. There are always species migrating around and adapting or going extinct.
That's not ideal, but I'm guessing that 480 years is enough time for humans to adapt. Anyway, there have been several articles on here saying that global plant growth and the number of trees have increased over the past century based on NASA's satellite imagery and counts from 50,000 locations. So while your area may be losing trees, other areas are gaining them. Nature adapts and changes.
When the dinosaurs were obliterated by the Chicxulub impactor 65 million years ago, 90% of land species also disappeared, never to reappear again. It took millions of years for mammals to emerge as the "victors" of that huge extinction event.
The viewpoint you espouse is just so hollow and frankly, repugnant. The thought that we can just stupidly smash incredibly intricate towers of evolution's genius, flub our precious time on this Earth to move from ignorantly and unintentionally knocking them over to actively raising a sledge hammer to them, justifying it to ourselves that "it will all be fine". Such a destructive attitude ruins everything for everyone. It's flippant and stupid, But it's ultimately, tragically, self-destructive.
It doesn't matter what we think. It's our actions.
Sorry if it didn’t come through in my comment: I was just being a little sarcastic and building off the GP comment, trying to reiterate that “life finds a way” is pointless to try and argue, since human life is much more fragile than life in general (and I tend to value human life).
I'll just add to my own comment that 3% economic growth for 480 years would mean the economy in 2500 would be 1,500,000 times its current size today and in the year 3000 almost 3.8 trillion times its current size. So obviously, exponential growth is going to come to an end, probably slowing down this century and we will absolutely have to reach sustainability on Earth.
We're literally just hitting the part of economic development where the highest impacts to output are not resource intensive but rather intellectual property intensive, and also difficult to measure by a traditional measure like GDP. How do you measure the economic impact of say, wikipedia, in terms of GDP? Its free, it raises funds only through donations, and it has immense value. We're just getting started with exponential growth, and we're just getting started because we're finally decoupling growth from physical resources
I hope they issue patents on good edible paper then, because if the climate changes as much as this study proposes, all this intellectual property won’t matter much.
Just in time for folks to invent mechanisms to convert IP intensity to physical resource intensity via e.g. blockchains.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/WLD/world/gdp-growth-r...
Obviously annual real GDP growth cannot be 3% forever, but the data show that we're slowing down gradually rather than rushing toward some kind of wall. The question is what to do about the real present slowdown, not some hypothetical future catastrophe[1].
1: (climate change is not hypothetical)
Even on very small scales like local botanical gardens with rainforest sections they are typically cooler and more humid than other sections of the gardens. The rainforest section of Fairchild Tropical Gardens in Miami often develops its own fog/mist not present in the other sections which is pretty nice on a hot Miami day.
About six thousand years ago, the Sahara itself was largely rainy grasslands.
Most people reading this here and now (today, the day it was posted) aren't going to see 2100.
I'm not making this comment in order to dissuade anyone from doing everything they can to halt or reverse climate change.
I'm simply being realistic. 2100 is 79 years from now. Barring significant medical advances - the likes of which have never been seen before - almost none of the adults here will be alive in 2100.
It is the human brain and human potential. I would argue that we have developed this more than we ever have before in human history. We have access to more knowledge than we ever have had before. We can communicate more than we have ever had before. More children get good nutrition and so can develop normally than we ever have before. Women, especially, with the advent of safe, reliable birth control, as well as low infant and maternal mortality are encouraged by society to develop intellectually more than they ever have before.
If you look at the past, it was said that humans would exponentially grow in population. Turns out birth control and female education and empowerment radically altered that trajectory and we will actually have a stable population soon. People were predicting wide spread famine, but the green agricultural revolution enabled us to produce more food than we have ever been able to.
The most important thing is not to be consumed by doom and gloom but rather embrace that human potential is our most powerful resource and seek that every human on earth will be given the resources and opportunity to fully develop into all that they can be.
No. Just no. The most valuable thing is the ecosystem, of which we are just one small, temporary, and insignificant part.
It’s exactly this kind of hubris and overconfidence that is leading us to the next extinction event and to our own doom.
Humans may be good at solving short term problems, but one of the biggest limits on our potential is to collectively act to avert long term threats.
Every civilization from the Egyptians to the Romans thought they had it all figured out in their prime.
The Egyptians literally moved mountains, and they are gone. If we wanted to today, we probably couldn’t rebuild the great pyramid, even with modern machinery. It would be too expensive!
Our technologies have always created more problems than they have alleviated even if you restrict the cost benefit only to the human sphere. The record only becomes worse when you factor in the rest of the world.
I’d go so far as to wager that if you time traveled back to 1521 and brought somebody to the present, they’d find it to be alien as well. Of course to verify my thesis I’d have to teach my 1521 passenger the current meaning of “alien” and the rules about my intended interpretation of my blog post to make my point clear to them.
I would much prefer to hear about progress toward adaptability. Bad things will happen, no matter what. Let's plan to deal with the bad things so we can minimize future suffering.