One thing this latest heat wave is worrying me about is that climate disasters seem like they will happen no matter what happens with CO2.
Like, the hottest temperatures from Death Valley are from a century ago.
Tornadoes, droughts, heat waves, monsoons, floods, hurricanes -- not to mention earthquakes and volcanic eruptions -- will all continue even if CO2 goes back to pre industrial levels.
Reducing it, ideally to pre-industrial norms. Stopping extreme weather is obviously impossible, and so obviously so that it's bizarre you're even trying to prop it up as a strawman.
The specific hottest temperature reading from Death Valley in 1913 is far from certain. The reality is we aren't sure how accurate that reading really was (turns out, measuring accurately temperature is harder than one might think). We're a lot more certain about recent temperature readings and aside from Death Valley there are far more records broken nowadays than in the past. For example just 2 years ago, Canada's hottest temperature reading was (121.3f) in Lytton BC. Before that, the record was set thousands of miles away. Lytton usually gets hot in the summer, but never that hot.
Interestingly, the list of weather records data shows that the extreme highs are really scattered throughout the last century. It seems probable, though, that these will all fall in the next couple decades.
On the one hand, it's nice and quiet here without all the west coast folks, on the other, maybe more liberal folks moving to Wisconsin would turn it blue again.
Wisconsin is already blue. Redistricting was removed from a panel of (nominally) nonpartisan former judges and given to the legislature. The subsequent maps drawn by the legislature were the most effectively gerrymandered maps in the country (at the time) and set a strategic precedent for partisan gerrymandering across the country.
Edit: for context, this redistricting happened in 2011
Edit 2: I will happily walk back my first sentence to “purple”; however, the impact of partisan redistricting has been made repeatedly clear as Republicans in the state legislature significantly over perform in capturing seats vs statewide voter count. I will also add that I believe the problem here is partisan gerrymandering, not specifically that Republicans over-perform. Partisan gerrymandering is explicitly anti-democratic whether it is taking place in Wisconsin or New York.
Not sure how you can say that. Trump won Wisconsin in 2016, and Biden just barely won Wisconsin in 2020. Democratic Governor Tony Evers squeaked out a 1% victory in 2018 over Scott Walker. His reelection margin last year was a little higher at 3%, but Republican Senator Ron Johnson also won reelection last year by 1%. These were all statewide races, where redistricting was irrelevant.
We had a fairly mild winter here in Michigan. My snowplow provider definitely came out ahead this year. Though the way climate change leads to extremes means it's unlikely we'll just have our same climate a few degrees warmer.
I think we're especially well-suited because of our water resources—the Great Lakes are an extremely valuable asset. We just emerged from the worst drought in 90 years, but we didn't even have lawn irrigation restrictions put in place. And here in West Michigan, the lake also mitigates a lot of severe weather (the number of bad storms in Chicago that are mere whimpers by the time they reach us...).
Yeah, until Wolverine or whoever fills all of Lake Michigan with PFAS 2.0. Industry in the state is still far too unregulated and wildly irresponsible.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting climate change now. The debate is over. Can anyone tell me why debate at any level is still happening, and why drastic measures are not being taken?
I get this is a relatively slow-moving problem, unlike war or abrupt famine, but crivens.
>Can anyone tell me why debate at any level is still happening
Because there are people who are in denial, it's too much for them to acknowledge mentally/emotionally. There are also people with a vested interest in the status quo, and believe they can overcome/mitigate the consequences of climate change with all of the resources they are currently gathering. Just a couple of reasons, I'm sure there are more...
No one, especially the rich, wants to compromise their current standard of living or economic situation for what would be required to turn this around. So we keep on pretending this isn't happening, hoping someone can figure out a way to reverse all of this someday while maintaining the current standard of living.
> ...hoping someone can figure out a way to reverse all of this someday while maintaining the current standard of living.
This is exactly the case of my mother and many of her peers (in their 70s, boomers). Whenever the topic comes up she'll say something to the extent of "well someone really smart will figure out a solution and fix it. I hope." It's not that any of them deny it's happening, they just think humans are smart and will figure out how to reverse the consequences of the way they lived their entire lives. I love my mom, but it's delusional to think this is a problem someone will have a single "aha" moment over.
Well, but do you blame her? What a person in their seventies can do to prevent the catastrophe? Probably at most they can become vegetarian and it would still have relatively low impact on global warming anyway.
The tough decisions are to be taken by a few very specific people, and the rest can either support them or not. The way I see it, we haven't reached the point where such decisions would be met with unanimous support yet.
Yes, of course I (partially) blame my parents, who are also in their seventies.
The science has been clear for decades. But when their generation was younger and presented with the opportunity to do something about it, they punted. It was too difficult. It will let China “win”. It’s not even happening anyway, and if it is, it’s the sun and volcanoes but not anthropogenic.
Now that we’re all living in the future brought about by their political and economic choices, they’re supposed to get a pass because they’re too old to make an impact? Their generation is still the main voting bloc that prevents real change.
That’s a false presentation. With appropriate policy level changes we can make enormous progress towards decarbonization yet this requires an effective political situation. The solution is fixing the people systems abs everything else derives from that.
> No one, especially the rich, wants to compromise their current standard of living or economic situation for what would be required to turn this around.
And the poor don’t want to give up the possibility of increasing their living standard to become like the rich.
In the developing world, millions of people dream of having air conditioning and cars. They will not be happy with politicians that do things that take away that possibility from them.
In a great example of having your cake and eating it too: AFAICT in Germany they currently have some significant incentives to replace fossil fuel powered heating with a heat pump.
A heat pump is also an air conditioner, so lots of Germans are getting air conditioning for the first time while at the same time significantly reducing their carbon output.
Yeah. The whole “scientists do the fraud” bullshit is just annoying.
Do scientists sometimes post fraudulent results and/or claims? Sure. And they also get busted by other scientists.
Is this a frequently occurring thing in the grand scheme? Absolutely not.
Is probably the single most studied phenomena (climate change) to ever be under scientific scrutiny since humans became humans actually just widespread fraud and conspiracy? Not a chance.
The only remaining coherent arguments against climate change our the fact that some reports and conclusions were exaggerated in order to drum up public concern. There are no actual arguments against it remaining, just legitimate but completely distracting arguments about how the research and communication was carried out.
Luckily the original data from that day is available, so you can see [1] that the actual temperatures recorded in Zaragoza and several other cities nearby were far from that extreme temperature.
Other Spanish newspapers reported the extreme temperature as taken in the sun [2], and also included the temperature in the shade with a more reasonable value.
Paraphrasing other comments I've seen: those "debaters" have leapt straight from "There isn't a climate problem" to "It's too late to do anything," bypassing the pesky "We should do something about it" stage.
Expect to see those debates as long as civilization continues. :/
Almost nobody debates that human accelerated climate change is real, the debate is mostly around what to do about it. Plan of action and implementation details.
"While local climate change is always with us, the reality of global change is lacking, and the projections have been pushed out year for year over the last forty years now."
"Does it really seem reasonable that our little human technology, an infinitesimal fraction of the energy at work in the Solar System is making a huge difference?"
"I immediately know the article is trash the moment they start blaming global warming for how hot or cold it is today rather than broader weather patterns. The upper and lower bounds for temperature at a given time of year are far more dependent on geography. It's trivially easy to see that all this "record breaking" is just recency bias, not global warming."
"Climate has been changing since earth got a climate."
"I think it's unwise to constantly associate normal temperature fluctuations with any threat to civilization"
Because the logic of Capital accumulation empowers the current rulers of the world, while the destructive reality of its consequences does not.
This, however, cannot be plainly acknowledged because it would incite people to revolt against those who
impose this logic on everyone else. So, the only alternatives are to lie, dissemble, compartmentalize etc.
It’s a bit like asking why did they invent all those fairy tales about the divine right of kings and why did people ever believe them? The answer is because there was no other alternative on offer until the whole order became so violently unstable as to be usurped. Most people are not anything resembling brave until their baseline survival is on the line, and the the first world is ordered in such a way to foist the worst of its consequences onto the global south.
To have dramatic change, you have to either have a technological breakthrough or get the entire planet to agree to make a consistent change. It's a tough sell for many geo-political reasons.
Right or wrong, it's hard for developed economies to destroy their economies while China (and others) are rapidly making the problem worse. [1] Progress is being made through:
"The Climate Action Tracker says that between 2015 and 2022 China's greenhouse gas emissions increased nearly 12%, while U.S. emissions declined some 5%. China's methane emissions rose about 3% from 2015 to 2021, the latest year with good data, while the U.S. cut them by 5%." [1]
The optimist in me believes that investments in fossil alternatives can actually be great investments. Just like what you see with car batteries (China) and EVs (US + China), the electrification of everything has some fundamental benefits and could thus provide great wealth for the innovators long-term.
Most of the current denial around climate change now is whether humans are causing it and have the power to reverse it. On one side, there is hope that we can change our habits and lifestyles to reverse or at least slow down the effects, the other side thinks that any change by us won't help so why change at all?
Don't worry, the WSJ is still perfectly happy to run things like https://archive.is/VYsHY, penned by someone who also claims smoking doesn't cause cancer.
One of the great lies told was that we as individuals can each individually contribute and solve this, we can't. The vast majority of CO2 production is outside of our control, we have no option about it other than to just stop doing anything at all including eating. The direct things we can control like electric vehicles and gas cooking and heating also require the alternatives to be reasonably competitive if there is still a choice.
The only way to solve this has always been governments enforcing the change via the law. If CO2 emissions reflected the true cost to humanity they would be a lot less competitive. Even then this requires legislation to move us on, such as banning new petrol and diesel cars sales by 2030. Neoliberal governments have passed on doing their jobs to solve this crisis by creating a fair environment where CO2 emissions can be replaced and the consequence is a disaster.
What strange times we live in. We have plenty of technology to counter these things and understanding of these process, but whether anything happens or not depends on the fact that it offers someone an arbitrage opportunity, otherwise the technology in question might as well not exist because it won't ever be implemented.
During the past years I found two answers to this question that seem plausible to me.
First, there are many myths about climate change that are believe by many [1].
Second, George Marshall investigated why 'we' don't take measures and wrote a book about it [2]. He found the problem is hard wired in our brains and caused by "our evolutionary origins, our perceptions of threats, our cognitive blind spots, our love of storytelling, our fear of death, and our deepest instincts to defend our family and tribe".
The way to deal with this both short term and long term is plentiful, zero carbon energy like solar, wind, nuclear.
Even without global warming, earth always had times and places which have been very inhospitable to humanity. Energy helps make earth habitable. Starting with fire, and continuing on with air conditioning, energy makes the world habitable for humanity.
It is much more effective to do more with less. There will always be a need for air conditioning in some cases, but having 10 million single window units blasting walls of heat into a crowded city very quickly becomes an arms race where nobody wins (except perhaps the AC manufacturers).
Finding efficient ways to use our energy matters just as much as finding efficient ways to produce our energy. Keep in mind as well that many of the current methods of manufacturing green technologies only end up exporting their carbon to the global south.
The bitter lesson is that, actually, quantity usually beats efficiency.
Increasing efficiency has a brutal difficulty that is constrained by thermodynamics whereas the universe is almost limitlessly full of energy, space, and mass.
I spent a few days recently in Vermont where it was hot but the wind was able to blow straight through the cabin and no A/C was necessary. No matter how many window fans I use in my apartment it doesn't come close. Buildings are not designed to do this, they're designed to pack humans together. I'd say that we need more efficient buildings but then we would also need to tear down what we have. That's more carbon!
Part of the concern with climate change is that you could start seeing literally uninhabitable hot temperatures in more and more parts of the world, which passive cooling are unable to save you from. You can get pretty far with warm gloves and weak fire in Vermont winter, but if the summer heat conditions are right, you just die no matter how tough you are and no matter how much air flow you have. That's not exactly a problem in Vermont yet, but people already die of heat stroke in the summer in the Northeast, and that's going to get worse as the climate gets warmer, with the disparity of course being along socioeconomic lines.
I mean that we wouldn't have to crank the A/C and create more carbon emissions if buildings were designed for natural airflow. Now that it's heating up you are correct that this becomes more difficult.
> having 10 million single window units blasting walls of heat into a crowded city very quickly becomes an arms race where nobody wins (except perhaps the AC manufacturers).
Is this more or less energy than would be used for heating, in an equivalent city that seldom wants A/C? Remember, with the exception of heat pumps (hardly universal and less efficient at low temperatures) A/C is usually much more efficient at changing indoor temperatures, and also that 100F -> 72F is a smaller temperature difference than 32F -> 72F.
In this particular case it's a question of putting a lot of concentrated heat into one area, compared to thinking about the overall energy budget.
Part of the problem with heat is that above a certain threshold you basically just die without recourse. Whereas with the right survival equipment, humans can tolerate a surprising amount of cold for a surprising duration, with a wide range of sophistication from "a blanket because you're shivering" to "full-body survival suit because the wind will instantly freeze your skin". That is, you can survive fairly cold temperatures without "burning" anything other than calories, if you have the right clothing. But above a certain heat and humidity threshold, there's no recourse and you automatically die without external energy input.
It would be pretty interesting to do some kind of analysis on the total energy expenditure on maintaining human homeostasis in a hot climate compared to an equivalently cold climate. But you have to take that threshold effect into account, that people can tolerate being cold for a while, but cooling becomes a strict requirement sooner than heating becomes a strict requirement, so you actually might need to pump around more total energy in the hot climate case compared to the cold climate case, even though cooling is more efficient than heating.
Due to the Jevons paradox making air conditioning more efficient will most likely increase energy consumption.
Whereas if you increase the price of energy (e.g. carbon fees) then you will reduce consumption and incentivize more efficient air conditioning as a side effect.
Unfortunately while the former is counterproductive the latter is politically unpalatable so we'll end up either doing nothing or making the problem worse.
Absolutely. More efficient technologies will make life more pleasant for many people. On balance I think this is a net win for humanity and am in favor of ongoing work in this area.
However, I should have been more specific when I said making air conditioning more efficient is counterproductive. I solely meant counterproductive towards the assumed goal of decarbonization in response to the prior comment's claim that "finding efficient ways to use our energy" is a viable strategy to address climate change.
Without pairing that efficiency with real solutions like putting a price on negative externalities, increasing efficiency is significantly more likely to increase overall energy consumption than to decrease it.
Climate change means the earth is heating up in the aggregate, not that it's a constant, linear increase everywhere. I live in the midwest US, which is normally baking in mid-July. They cancelled swimming for my child today because it was too cold. However, we'll also see an abnormal scorching heat soon enough - not to mention more examples of extreme weather events over the years.
I would like to register a contrary prediction: I think things will be basically okay even under fairly extreme climate change.
I understand that many people may disagree with this prediction and some of those people will disagree with even communicating this prediction, as they will see it as boosterism for our decadent industrial society. However, I think if we are interested in what is true, we need to allow ourselves to conceive of such things as human civilization continuing on without much fuss.
This is a bit like driving drunk and believing that things will be OK because until now the road has been mostly clear and you've only swerved a couple of times. It's totally possible that things will turn out not so bad, you'll get home without hurting yourself or anybody else, and you'll sleep it off. Or you will murder somebody in cold blood with your car. Worth the risk?
As far as well can tell, all of the previous mass extinctions were due primarily to climate change.
Your prediction has no evidence behind it. On the contrary, the evidence suggests that we are currently at the beginning of a mass extinction event. It’s not that there will be a mass extinction if we don’t stop. It’s already started my dude.
You could just as easily argue that "things will be more or less fine" is highly evidence based (things have been fine in the past) and in contrast millenarianism has an awfully bad evidentiary track record.
A mass extinction event is underway, but it's not just starting. We are not at the beginning. There is this idea that the premodern world was "basically natural", but the reality is that 70% of animals larger than 45kg that were present in North America when humans arrived are already extinct.
There is no Eden to go back to or preserve. The world hasn't been in equilibrium since hominid intelligence started taking off and our only constant is change.
This is a bad attitude to have when you consider the cost of being wrong. If you hope for the best and only plan for the best, you won't survive when it actually turns out to be bad. And for the most part, most expert agree it won't be "ok" and more likely to be "shit" to "we are completely fucked"
An adaptation of the "narcissist's prayer" for climate change deniers:
---
Climate Change isn't happening
And if it is, it isn't that bad.
And if it is, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not our fault.
And if it is, we didn't mean it.
And if we did, you should have stopped it.
---
Your comment is on line 3.
> we need to allow ourselves to conceive of such things as human civilization continuing on without much fuss.
There is a large difference between "conceiving of possibilities" and burying our heads in the sand. Climate Change is not a new phenomenon, we've known about it for 50 years (and the oil companies have known for longer). We have decades of research telling us that climate change will drive extreme weather. We have decades of research predicting the effects it will have on human civilization.
None of this is new info. The "alternate possibilities" have been considered and disproved a long time ago. We know, without ambiguity, what's happening.
My meta point is that the moral urgency of the discussion has reached such a fever pitch that if, hypothetically, you were wrong about something -
perhaps that the effects will be different than your expectations, perhaps that human ingenuity will overcome the challenges, perhaps that some other, bigger problem will rear it’s head
- you have no mechanism left to tell. If that sounds like the narcissists prayer to you then so be it.
I actually decided to quit my entire dev career some months ago and move to the country side as I didn't see a point in the grind anymore given the situation with the world. (I know this might seem extreme - I was ripe for a downshift anyways, and am financially stable.)
So now I'm literally just watching the world burn and trying to figure out long term plans. The more you look at what's going on in planet Earth, the more absurd it seems.
I'd be interested to hear how other HNers plan for the future.
Several years ago we left NYC for a small old New England town not far from where I grew up. Our neighbors have victory gardens, chickens, goats, bees, and/or fruit trees. We insulated our home, got solar panels, started a garden and a cellar, and built up a backlog of firewood. We eat more fresh local food and spend more time working outside, building relationships with neighbors, and working on community projects.
I still pay attention to global events, vote, minimize my "carbon footprint", march, and all the stuff that feels morally necessary. But when that's all I was doing I felt pessimistic because I felt like none that actually made a dent in the world's problems. Since then I've found it more useful to focus attention on local problems. For example, hosting refugees, helping at the food bank, teaching repair or technology classes, supporting locally-owned farms and businesses, motivating friends and neighbors to get around town by foot or bike, advocating for low-income housing in your neighborhood, that sort of thing.
Climate change will not end civilization. But it'll cause a lot of misery. So if you're already fulfilling whatever moral obligation you feel you need to do at the global level then maybe consider finding a resilient community, putting down roots, and figuring out what you can do to help your neighbors.
99 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 136 ms ] threadLike, the hottest temperatures from Death Valley are from a century ago.
Tornadoes, droughts, heat waves, monsoons, floods, hurricanes -- not to mention earthquakes and volcanic eruptions -- will all continue even if CO2 goes back to pre industrial levels.
Then what?
Africa: 1931
Antarctica: 1982
Asia: Tie, 2023 and 2017
Europe: 2021
North America: 1913
Oceania (incl. Australia): Tie, 1960 and 2022
Oceania (excl. Australia): 1973
South America: 1905
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_weather_records
Edit: for context, this redistricting happened in 2011
Edit 2: I will happily walk back my first sentence to “purple”; however, the impact of partisan redistricting has been made repeatedly clear as Republicans in the state legislature significantly over perform in capturing seats vs statewide voter count. I will also add that I believe the problem here is partisan gerrymandering, not specifically that Republicans over-perform. Partisan gerrymandering is explicitly anti-democratic whether it is taking place in Wisconsin or New York.
Not sure how you can say that. Trump won Wisconsin in 2016, and Biden just barely won Wisconsin in 2020. Democratic Governor Tony Evers squeaked out a 1% victory in 2018 over Scott Walker. His reelection margin last year was a little higher at 3%, but Republican Senator Ron Johnson also won reelection last year by 1%. These were all statewide races, where redistricting was irrelevant.
It's a quintessential swing state.
Chicago was 6 months of winter this last year. Hate to see how it used to be.
I think we're especially well-suited because of our water resources—the Great Lakes are an extremely valuable asset. We just emerged from the worst drought in 90 years, but we didn't even have lawn irrigation restrictions put in place. And here in West Michigan, the lake also mitigates a lot of severe weather (the number of bad storms in Chicago that are mere whimpers by the time they reach us...).
I get this is a relatively slow-moving problem, unlike war or abrupt famine, but crivens.
Because there are people who are in denial, it's too much for them to acknowledge mentally/emotionally. There are also people with a vested interest in the status quo, and believe they can overcome/mitigate the consequences of climate change with all of the resources they are currently gathering. Just a couple of reasons, I'm sure there are more...
Tragedy of the commons. Even when you know the problem, and solution, you can't get ALL parties to implement it.
This is exactly the case of my mother and many of her peers (in their 70s, boomers). Whenever the topic comes up she'll say something to the extent of "well someone really smart will figure out a solution and fix it. I hope." It's not that any of them deny it's happening, they just think humans are smart and will figure out how to reverse the consequences of the way they lived their entire lives. I love my mom, but it's delusional to think this is a problem someone will have a single "aha" moment over.
The tough decisions are to be taken by a few very specific people, and the rest can either support them or not. The way I see it, we haven't reached the point where such decisions would be met with unanimous support yet.
The science has been clear for decades. But when their generation was younger and presented with the opportunity to do something about it, they punted. It was too difficult. It will let China “win”. It’s not even happening anyway, and if it is, it’s the sun and volcanoes but not anthropogenic.
Now that we’re all living in the future brought about by their political and economic choices, they’re supposed to get a pass because they’re too old to make an impact? Their generation is still the main voting bloc that prevents real change.
And the poor don’t want to give up the possibility of increasing their living standard to become like the rich.
In the developing world, millions of people dream of having air conditioning and cars. They will not be happy with politicians that do things that take away that possibility from them.
A heat pump is also an air conditioner, so lots of Germans are getting air conditioning for the first time while at the same time significantly reducing their carbon output.
Also what's your evidence that this is fraud and not just a mistake?
Also, oddly enough, wikipedia doesn't know anything about a 1935 heat record: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_extreme_temperatures_i...
Do scientists sometimes post fraudulent results and/or claims? Sure. And they also get busted by other scientists.
Is this a frequently occurring thing in the grand scheme? Absolutely not.
Is probably the single most studied phenomena (climate change) to ever be under scientific scrutiny since humans became humans actually just widespread fraud and conspiracy? Not a chance.
Are you suggesting a massive world wide conspiracy based on that tiny single article?
Other Spanish newspapers reported the extreme temperature as taken in the sun [2], and also included the temperature in the shade with a more reasonable value.
1: https://repositorio.aemet.es/handle/20.500.11765/6290
2: http://hemeroteca.lavanguardia.com/preview/1935/06/23/pagina...
Expect to see those debates as long as civilization continues. :/
here's some from the past month (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastMonth&page=0&prefix=tr...):
"Climate change is overhyped in my view"
"While local climate change is always with us, the reality of global change is lacking, and the projections have been pushed out year for year over the last forty years now."
"Does it really seem reasonable that our little human technology, an infinitesimal fraction of the energy at work in the Solar System is making a huge difference?"
"I immediately know the article is trash the moment they start blaming global warming for how hot or cold it is today rather than broader weather patterns. The upper and lower bounds for temperature at a given time of year are far more dependent on geography. It's trivially easy to see that all this "record breaking" is just recency bias, not global warming."
"Climate has been changing since earth got a climate."
"I think it's unwise to constantly associate normal temperature fluctuations with any threat to civilization"
This, however, cannot be plainly acknowledged because it would incite people to revolt against those who impose this logic on everyone else. So, the only alternatives are to lie, dissemble, compartmentalize etc.
It’s a bit like asking why did they invent all those fairy tales about the divine right of kings and why did people ever believe them? The answer is because there was no other alternative on offer until the whole order became so violently unstable as to be usurped. Most people are not anything resembling brave until their baseline survival is on the line, and the the first world is ordered in such a way to foist the worst of its consequences onto the global south.
Right or wrong, it's hard for developed economies to destroy their economies while China (and others) are rapidly making the problem worse. [1] Progress is being made through:
"The Climate Action Tracker says that between 2015 and 2022 China's greenhouse gas emissions increased nearly 12%, while U.S. emissions declined some 5%. China's methane emissions rose about 3% from 2015 to 2021, the latest year with good data, while the U.S. cut them by 5%." [1]
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/john-kerry-china-climate-econom...
The only way to solve this has always been governments enforcing the change via the law. If CO2 emissions reflected the true cost to humanity they would be a lot less competitive. Even then this requires legislation to move us on, such as banning new petrol and diesel cars sales by 2030. Neoliberal governments have passed on doing their jobs to solve this crisis by creating a fair environment where CO2 emissions can be replaced and the consequence is a disaster.
First, there are many myths about climate change that are believe by many [1].
Second, George Marshall investigated why 'we' don't take measures and wrote a book about it [2]. He found the problem is hard wired in our brains and caused by "our evolutionary origins, our perceptions of threats, our cognitive blind spots, our love of storytelling, our fear of death, and our deepest instincts to defend our family and tribe".
[1] https://skepticalscience.com/argument.php
[2] George Marshall - Don't Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change
Even without global warming, earth always had times and places which have been very inhospitable to humanity. Energy helps make earth habitable. Starting with fire, and continuing on with air conditioning, energy makes the world habitable for humanity.
Finding efficient ways to use our energy matters just as much as finding efficient ways to produce our energy. Keep in mind as well that many of the current methods of manufacturing green technologies only end up exporting their carbon to the global south.
Increasing efficiency has a brutal difficulty that is constrained by thermodynamics whereas the universe is almost limitlessly full of energy, space, and mass.
Is this more or less energy than would be used for heating, in an equivalent city that seldom wants A/C? Remember, with the exception of heat pumps (hardly universal and less efficient at low temperatures) A/C is usually much more efficient at changing indoor temperatures, and also that 100F -> 72F is a smaller temperature difference than 32F -> 72F.
Part of the problem with heat is that above a certain threshold you basically just die without recourse. Whereas with the right survival equipment, humans can tolerate a surprising amount of cold for a surprising duration, with a wide range of sophistication from "a blanket because you're shivering" to "full-body survival suit because the wind will instantly freeze your skin". That is, you can survive fairly cold temperatures without "burning" anything other than calories, if you have the right clothing. But above a certain heat and humidity threshold, there's no recourse and you automatically die without external energy input.
It would be pretty interesting to do some kind of analysis on the total energy expenditure on maintaining human homeostasis in a hot climate compared to an equivalently cold climate. But you have to take that threshold effect into account, that people can tolerate being cold for a while, but cooling becomes a strict requirement sooner than heating becomes a strict requirement, so you actually might need to pump around more total energy in the hot climate case compared to the cold climate case, even though cooling is more efficient than heating.
Whereas if you increase the price of energy (e.g. carbon fees) then you will reduce consumption and incentivize more efficient air conditioning as a side effect.
Unfortunately while the former is counterproductive the latter is politically unpalatable so we'll end up either doing nothing or making the problem worse.
Good. That means more people now have access to it and it is a good thing.
Another example is clean water. If clean water is abundant, people will use it for more drinking and cooking and bathing. That is a good thing.
However, I should have been more specific when I said making air conditioning more efficient is counterproductive. I solely meant counterproductive towards the assumed goal of decarbonization in response to the prior comment's claim that "finding efficient ways to use our energy" is a viable strategy to address climate change.
Without pairing that efficiency with real solutions like putting a price on negative externalities, increasing efficiency is significantly more likely to increase overall energy consumption than to decrease it.
I understand that many people may disagree with this prediction and some of those people will disagree with even communicating this prediction, as they will see it as boosterism for our decadent industrial society. However, I think if we are interested in what is true, we need to allow ourselves to conceive of such things as human civilization continuing on without much fuss.
Your prediction has no evidence behind it. On the contrary, the evidence suggests that we are currently at the beginning of a mass extinction event. It’s not that there will be a mass extinction if we don’t stop. It’s already started my dude.
A mass extinction event is underway, but it's not just starting. We are not at the beginning. There is this idea that the premodern world was "basically natural", but the reality is that 70% of animals larger than 45kg that were present in North America when humans arrived are already extinct.
There is no Eden to go back to or preserve. The world hasn't been in equilibrium since hominid intelligence started taking off and our only constant is change.
---
Climate Change isn't happening
And if it is, it isn't that bad.
And if it is, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not our fault.
And if it is, we didn't mean it.
And if we did, you should have stopped it.
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Your comment is on line 3.
> we need to allow ourselves to conceive of such things as human civilization continuing on without much fuss.
There is a large difference between "conceiving of possibilities" and burying our heads in the sand. Climate Change is not a new phenomenon, we've known about it for 50 years (and the oil companies have known for longer). We have decades of research telling us that climate change will drive extreme weather. We have decades of research predicting the effects it will have on human civilization.
None of this is new info. The "alternate possibilities" have been considered and disproved a long time ago. We know, without ambiguity, what's happening.
perhaps that the effects will be different than your expectations, perhaps that human ingenuity will overcome the challenges, perhaps that some other, bigger problem will rear it’s head
- you have no mechanism left to tell. If that sounds like the narcissists prayer to you then so be it.
So now I'm literally just watching the world burn and trying to figure out long term plans. The more you look at what's going on in planet Earth, the more absurd it seems.
I'd be interested to hear how other HNers plan for the future.
I still pay attention to global events, vote, minimize my "carbon footprint", march, and all the stuff that feels morally necessary. But when that's all I was doing I felt pessimistic because I felt like none that actually made a dent in the world's problems. Since then I've found it more useful to focus attention on local problems. For example, hosting refugees, helping at the food bank, teaching repair or technology classes, supporting locally-owned farms and businesses, motivating friends and neighbors to get around town by foot or bike, advocating for low-income housing in your neighborhood, that sort of thing.
Climate change will not end civilization. But it'll cause a lot of misery. So if you're already fulfilling whatever moral obligation you feel you need to do at the global level then maybe consider finding a resilient community, putting down roots, and figuring out what you can do to help your neighbors.