Impressive how actionable that report back in 1983 was. But unfortunately the political climate is probably harder to change than the real climate, otherwise there would have been more progress in the past 40 years.
The political climate is mostly about what people want.
Dealing with this issue will require major changes in the economy (even now fossil fuel based), and national security/foreign policy (fossil fuel based now and for the foreseeable future).
Both of these no one has any plans yet which wouldn’t require major changes in the way people live and the way the US interacts with the world which would put them at a major disadvantage with everyone else, and take a hit in creature comforts, prestige, and power. At least based on the options currently available to us.
And this isn’t a problem caused just by the US. So even if the US did this, the rest of the world would keep on trucking and making the issue worse. Unless the US went to war or something? Which would definitely cause massive burning of fossil fuels (and nukes) which would definitely make everything worse, and kill a whole lot of people rather directly. And seems rather evil too.
Until the problem is causing real, unavoidable, unambiguous issues for everyone, of course it’s going to be denied. And even then….
If you’re ever tried to take the booze from an alcoholic, it’s obvious what’s going to happen. And we’re all drunk on cheap energy in the form of fossil fuels, and have been for a very, very long time.
We posted almost the same comment. I do disagree with one point. The US is the country with the most global power and is instrumental in driving global change so I really disagree that they do not hold a huge responsibility.
I mean, Germany is trying to lead by example, but their attempt is pathetic. Nobody is going to care what Germany does and they do not have the economic and political power to enforce global change. But the US does.
I am not saying the US can do it alone, but it has to show both initiative and willingness.
Not only that, but people see Germany as being fundamentally unserious about climate change when they retire nuclear and keep burning insane amounts of destructive brown coal. I don’t think the electricity mix is even significantly cleaner than the US’s
EDIT: confirmed, the US had 365grams of CO2 per kWh (805lbs per MWh) but Germany had 385g per kWh in 2022.
People see Germany as a foolish naive nation which is currently hurting itself economically and making a clown of itself. It is having the opposite of the desired effect. Other countries will be more hesitant to transition to green technologies when they see Germany suffering.
It's not like Nord Stream 2s destruction was the single largest act of industrial sabotage in human history, alongside the single largest carbon emission in human history.
Being complicit in one pipeline being bombed could undermine decades of progress in a single moment.
Good question, I just checked. The numbers I can find for 2022:
Renewables: US: 21.5% Germany: 44%
Nuclear: US: 18.2% Germany: 6%
Fossil: US: 60.2% Germany: 45.9%, 20.1% from lignite (brown coal)
So pretty clear win on the renewables for Germany. Adding Nuclear for "clean energy" it's still pretty ahead. However, Fossil in the US is mainly gas, which is cleaner than lignite. Hard to quantify.
That's just electricity generation, which is only a portion of total energy usage. Both countries use about 15% renewables overall. The exact number is hard to measure, complicated by importation and exportation of energy and other factors.
Also note the growth rate: German renewable electricity fraction went from 26% to 50% while the US went from 12% to 23% (since 2012). So they appear significantly more serious about climate change than the US.
Total CO2/capita/year is also significantly higher for the US (15 tons vs 9 tons, approx.)
Yeah, but total CO2/capita/year is like <4 for France.... That's where nuclear power really shines. Of course these calculations do not really capture all CO2 required for nuclear power.
Electricity mix is a fairly useless number on it's own. Especially for an industrial powerhouse like Germany. Renewable's share of total energy consumption in Germany is about 15%, and has been decreasing.
The number is the US is similar, and has been rising.
You need to be careful with these statistics because Germany is a (large) net importer of electricity. How are imports counted is not always obvious (nor should it be, Netherlands exports electricity to Germany, sometimes it's mostly solar powered, sometimes purely gas)
That certainly complicates the situation, as Germany imports and exports energy. But Germany is a net exporter, not importer, at least in 2022, but I believe it's so for most years.
Has to do anything - that statement is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Ethically/morally? Probably.
But that isn’t how international (or national!) politics tends to work!
Practically, why/when should the most powerful nation in the world, with the worlds most powerful military (fossil fuel based, no less), worlds reserve currency (due to the world using it for fossil fuel purchases, and because of the stable US economic system which is currently based on fossil fuels), etc. undermine itself exactly?
If it’s the breadwinner of the family doing the heaviest drinking, but literally everyone is also drinking, it’s going to be even harder to take the booze from the alcoholic - because no one is going to actually try, because they’re all alcoholics.
Realistically, the US will ‘have to do something’ when the current situation becomes actually nonfunctional in some real way, or it becomes so patently obvious that it will shortly become so that a sufficient majority starts being willing to make sacrifices to start the change.
Or someone figures out a way to make “everyone rich” if we switch.
This is a question of perceived cost and benefit. I do not actually think that the US would be undermining itself if it nudged the world's economy to transition to green technologies. I think it would protect itself and even benefit economically.
Not that I used the word "perceived" in my original comment.
The issue here is that ‘nudged’ doesn’t make the actual changes necessary.
‘Nudged’ isn’t transitioning anyone’s military off fossil fuels. Or international shipping. Or major capex outlays in things like home heating when existing (fossil fuel) options are cheaper and more effective, etc. Things that require double digit percent of GDP expenditures, which are often required.
Germany tried (guilt perhaps?) and made a dent - but far from solved the problem, and is still consuming massive amounts of fossil fuels and is now burdened with debt and very high energy bills.
They cut back from a case a day to half a case a day,
and are clearly unhappy about it and far from sober.
What do you mean US is the country with the most global power?
India and China are polluting more than the US
Annual CO₂ emissions by world
region shows that China and India are responsible for a majority of carbon emissions since the year 2000, while the US and European rates have dropped in the last 23 years.
India and China need to be hugely responsible as they are the ones building new coal plants
https://energyandcleanair.org/publication/china-permits-two-...
> Both of these no one has any plans yet which wouldn’t require major changes in the way people live
Eh... I mean, nearly every country in the EU has seen reducing greenhouse gas emissions for years (even _with_ replacement of some gas generation with higher-intensity coal generation due to the invasion of Ukraine), on the foot of building retrofitting, increased renewable generation, etc. The US and China have also been investing significantly in renewable generation (though, I believe, at least in the US's case, building retrofitting has yet to start on a large scale). US emissions are broadly declining and have been for a while, Chinese emissions have almost flatlined, though are still inching up. People are doing stuff.
> the way the US interacts with the world which would put them at a major disadvantage with everyone else
Huh? I would think that the US is actually in a rather good position here, certainly relative to Europe and probably to China. The US is very physically big, so lots of space for renewables, and is more self-sufficient on lower-carbon-intensity fossil fuel (ie gas, likely realistically essential as a transition fuel) than the others. It would also likely find lower-intensity agriculture easier to cope with, if it comes to that.
> And this isn’t a problem caused just by the US. So even if the US did this, the rest of the world would keep on trucking and making the issue worse.
China is if anything currently outpacing the US on renewable and other low-intensity (nuclear) generation capacity.
This feels like a comment written 30 years ago, back when no-one was doing anything much. Today, the big three are doing some stuff, with plans for more.
> Until the problem is causing real, unavoidable, unambiguous issues for everyone, of course it’s going to be denied.
The denial is interesting. In the developed world, it's only a significant factor in the US, Canada, and Australia, all of which have large fossil fuel industries, and in all of which it has been highly politicised. (Similar pattern in the developing world; the big denial cheerleader there being Indonesia). In most countries, it is fairly broadly accepted to be happening, and to be at least largely humanity's fault. Even in countries where denial is a significant political issue, it is generally on the decline (as you'd expect; the percentage of the electorate who'll die off anyway before we see really major impact is declining).
Ho man. To stop major, major climate impacts we long ago passed the point where reductions or caps would even make a dent.
To even have a hope of not seeing major disruptive climate change we would have had to be at the point of net-negative fossil carbon releases years ago. And we’re nowhere near that.
Those changes are something of course. and we’d be in a (marginally) worse situation without them. But they’re overall just minor impacts.
The changes required to actually address the issue have barely been contemplated, and will be massively disruptive.
I agree. Zero emissions is only the first step. It's like removing the foot from the gas pedal. But the car is still moving very fast and we need negative emissions to prevent crashing into a wall.
Unfortunately even zero emissions seems like a miracle at this point.
"Zero Emissions are just the first step".
A lot of people's critique of environmentalism is that they are anti growth. Comments like this just seem to feed that skepticism
Perhaps, in about the same way that chemotherapy on a stage 4 cancer patient is anti-growth.
And the patient is still chain-smoking.
It seems as a society we have chosen palliative care; we would like to forgo the treatment and just be made as comfortable as possible before the damage is totally overwhelming and we reach organ failure and death
Do you know how much of a settlement patients get for experiencing Chemotherapy when their cancer diagnosis was false and they went through the harrowing experience because an expert misdiagnosed the source of their problem?
High 6 figures. low 7 figures.
What I'm arguing is that we need aggressive negative emissions. In case it's not obvious this means not only stop putting carbon in the atmosphere but also removing what's already there.
I'm all for growth as long as we don't deplete the Earth and don't cook ourselves to death.
I never said no one was doing anything. I said no one is doing enough to make any significant difference in the outcome. Maybe it is enough to shift things around a couple years! That isn’t nothing.
But even if 100% of the population stopped driving cars and ordering on Amazon or whatever, that isn’t going to stop it either.
Well yeah because cars are at the most like 10% of global emissions.
And because of climate lag, we're still only experiencing the effect of emissions from a couple of decades ago. Plus there are climatic feedbacks to take into consideration which nobody really knows with certainty how these will react in the coming decades.
> The denial is interesting. In the developed world, it's only a significant factor in the US, Canada, and Australia
It depends on where the denial is hitting. E.g. plastic straw bans are made fun of, probably legitimately. Anything that is something an individual can do and feel good about is often not something that will be effective compared to the massive amount of pollution and waste being generated through the general uplift of people out of poverty.
In terms of the US: they're leading the way with Tesla on electrification of vehicles, which is a great, large-scale solution to a big source of pollution (or if not a solution, a key element in the larger solution). Canada and Australia I know less about.
Plastic straw bans are nothing much to do with global warming; they're a general hand wave-y "good for the environment" thing (and, like, they are, but not in a particularly impactful way).
> they're leading the way with Tesla on electrification of vehicles
... Eh? I'm not sure that's really particularly clear; Tesla is in global terms a fairly small part of the market, and the EU and China are both significantly outdoing the US on actual adoption of electric cars. That said, as above, the US is generally doing fairly well on emissions reduction, better than people often give it credit for (albeit partially accidentally due to cheap gas).
However, my point was that the US (and the other two) are unusual in that significant numbers of people there, with a significant political voice, believe that anthropogenic climate change is _not a thing_ (or in extreme cases that climate change period is not a thing). This is unusual.
> Plastic straw bans are nothing much to do with global warming
What I was saying was the "climate denialists", being a label applied by people who disagree with them, including on things like straws, is an extremely broad church, and not very useful for actually describing what people think.
> Tesla is in global terms a fairly small part of the market
Which is all marketing. Marketing is designed to influence and to make us want. We can't blame people because marketing to them works.
> If you’re ever tried to take the booze from an alcoholic, it’s obvious what’s going to happen
I don't think it is obvious what happens when you take booze away from an alcoholic. Are you aware that the absence of alcohol can kill them? Were you trying to kill them?
> The political climate is mostly about what people want.
Man someone should tell all the oil companies that are actively running campaigns to push propaganda on folks to change political opinions.
Yes, it is "what people want". You're missing the line of "How did we get to the point of people wanting this".
But instead of asking that question, you're jumping to blaming the victims and not the system that allowed a few people with money to completely change the thoughts and behaviors of millions of people.
The political climate is just an obfuscation. The electorate perceives the change to be too costly* and the climate risks to be too remote to justify this cost. The problem with reports such as these is that they always give you the big picture but do not directly relate it back to the individual. If people's home insurance suddenly jumped up 1000% due to recalculated natural disaster risks, that would suddenly make people rethink their positions.
* I am actually not convinced either way. Some people believe it is so expensive it will necessitate degrowth, while others think that so much economic change will almost certainly spur economic growth. Either way I think that people who push the degrowth narrative are further reinforcing the view that climate action is too costly. Nonetheless it could be that they are right.
> I am actually not convinced either way. Some people believe it is so expensive it will necessitate degrowth, while others think that so much economic change will almost certainly spur economic growth. Either way I think that people who push the degrowth narrative are further reinforcing the view that climate action is too costly. Nonetheless it could be that they are right.
Whatever your view on that is, it doesn't really matter because the costs if climate change goes unchecked are going to be catastrophically high - direct in terms of e.g. having to rebuild burned down/flooded/etc. areas, more electricity for AC, etc. or indirect such as having to accommodate mass migration from climate refugees.
That is however one of the the two unknowns in the equation:
Unknown one: how expensive is the green transition.
Unknown two: how expensive is climate change.
The issue is further complicated by the fact that both of these costs are variable, depending on the individual, not easily predictable and time dependent. It is all very complicated, when you think about it. If you search the literature there are some people attempting to calculate such costs but the task is almost insurmountable.
I do not want to give the wrong impression. For whatever its worth, I am convinced that climate change will impact us people living today, negatively.
They regularly have to pay out for what happens, and they're not happy about the direction things are going and are passing the cost along. Just ask anyone living in Florida:
> If people's home insurance suddenly jumped up 1000% due to recalculated natural disaster risks, that would suddenly make people rethink their positions.
Insurance costs what it does due to the risk of paying out. Changing risks makes the price of the insurance change as well. If insurance companies aren't changing their prices, then the risk isn't changing either.
By asking to inflate the cost of insurance artificially, you're really only pointing out that natural disasters have not yet increased enough to notice.
> The political climate is just an obfuscation. The electorate perceives the change to be too costly* and the climate risks to be too remote to justify this cost
This is true but it’s really important to remember that’s not some historical accident but the result of decades of anti-science messaging and political campaigning by the fossil fuel industry after their internal scientists confirmed the problem was significant. In the absence of that huge amount of distortion most people would have an accurate understanding of the risks. We should remember those companies in the same light as the tobacco companies, Purdue Pharmaceuticals, etc.
Unfortunately as we can see even in a relatively educated community like HN there are a lot of people willing to parrot that propaganda because the alternative is not just making lifestyle changes but now also having to admit that they have been repeating falsehoods for a long time.
And that anti-climate-change narrative changed to blaming indviduals for climate change when they couldn't deny it any longer: the slogan “carbon footprint” is a British Petroleum invention.
Of course now people use that propaganda line and say that the anti-science crowd are the only mind-programmed group in this debate.
That's nonsense. We can all believe that doing the usual consumer nonsense like recycling will make a big enough difference, but believing is not sufficient.
I don't deny the decades long anti-climate change lobbying and propaganda.
However, being honest with myself, if you asked me right now about my willingness to incur a cost to fund the green transition, I would be hesitant, because I cannot realistically make a cost/benefit analysis. Would I be willing to give up international travel? Would I be willing to eat almost no meat? Would I be willing to pay $10k extra to buy an EV? I don't know. I don't know what that will achieve. I don't know what happens if I don't and what happens if I do. I know neither my individual climate risk, nor how much my contribution would count if I chose to do my part.
I am only living one life, so it is pretty hard for me to make life changing decisions without a good cost/benefit analysis.
Luckily, I am by nature quite anti-materialistic and not infected by the consumerist bug either, so my actual carbon footprint is still way below average.
What does this even matter? Seriously. Consumers aren't the architects of consumer capitalism. They aren't the ones who decided that economic growth must continue forever, in part by the middle class “consumers” who have to spend most of their money on commodities that ideally last so short that they will eventually have to buy the same thing again. Imagine if most people could buy all their appliances and get their needs met within a few years by things that are of good quality (which means more second-hand resale). Imagine if society was built for mass transit instead of (especially in America) urban sprawl, which would mean that far fewer families would need 1–2 cars. (And the US road network was designed top-down: you don't build a car-dependent society based on consumer actions.)
But that would be bad for the economy: less money in circulation, less growth.
If consumers (as citizens) got mad because “people's home insurance suddenly jumped up 1000%“. Then they would do protests... so what? Protests can change things but it's a very low form of power.
This matters because consumers are the ones that vote.
Sure, we could tax Co2 right now, but the main problem is that people don't want to sacrifice their vacation travel or pay a premium for non-regional goods/personal travel/energy, just to "save the climate".
This applies even more strongly to older voters.
If you implemented actually effective Co2 mitigation policies (i.e. policies aiming to reduce Co2/capita/year to under 4 tons within a decade) in pretty much ANY western industrialized democracy, you would get thrown out of office even before your term was over.
PS: This is not my position-- I believe that drastic action is very urgently required, but I don't think it is some "corporate interests" or "lobbyism conspiracy" that prevents it-- simply democracy in action.
> This matters because consumers are the ones that vote.
Show me evidence that this matters in the slightest.
The policy preferences of 90% of Americans are irrelevant, i.e have no correlation with implemented policy.[1][2]
Sure. Let's say that every green-eyed person gets to vote on what everyone has to eat: a pear or an apple. To the naive onlooker it looks like the green-eyed people have the ultimate power. But they neglect to notice that the two choices are filtered down from thousands of options by the brown-eyed people.
> PS: This is not my position-- I believe that drastic action is very urgently required, but I don't think it is some "corporate interests" or "lobbyism conspiracy" that prevents it-- simply democracy in action.
Of course. It's just a coincidence that implemented policy tracks better with “corporate interests”—dismissive quotation marks or not—than with the policy preferences of citizens.
> Show me evidence that this matters in the slightest.
Say Biden actually took drastic steps-- complete ICE vehicle ban within 2030, extensive green electricity investments/grid improvements, high taxes on jet fuel, etc.
That might get you below 5 tons Co2/capita/year within 2030 or so, which is still insufficient globally...
Do you honestly believe Democrats would win the next election after doing something like that?
I asked for evidence that what consumers (I mean citizens) vote for matter in practice. Not rhetorical honestly questions.
It's telling that this is all hypotheticals. This particular duopoly is not exactly leading by example on climate change. And if the Biden platform took these supposedly drastic steps then the Democrats might lose badly to the Republicans among the donors which is what actually keeps these parties alive (a party can't pay the bills with votes).
So far I have one study about the actual policy outcomes compared to policy preferences. You have a hypothetical.
To be fair, there were other things on the agenda as well. The time was the height of the cold war, and 1983 was the year of the Stanislav Petrov incident that could potentially have started nuclear war. (Not to mention dealing with the Iran-Iraq war and working to reduce emissions CFC gasses to protect the Ozone layer).
It is great that the world is now in a position to make serious progress on the green energy transition.
There are thousands of people who's job is to actively research and find ways to create effective propaganda.
It doesn't matter how smart or stupid humanity is. There will always be flaws to abuse to create propaganda.
So, if we agree with "Propaganda generation is a given" - what should we do with the people who are creating it and what should we do to protect people as much as we can from corporate backed propaganda?
If you live anywhere in the US you're probably ok. The southwest droughts are bad but the rivers were overused even before climate change. We'll build more air conditioners and more levees. Those rich enough to move to Vermont will be fine anywhere.
The billions living in already marginal places near the equator will die or leave. That's where the real humanitarian disaster will be, and it will be far beyond precedent.
If you learn more about history, note how much suffering was caused by famine, disease, and the ensuing warfare, too. One of the hallmarks of modern civilization is that we were less callous about shrugging off deaths & lowered quality of life. Thanks to those advances we have a much larger population than in the past which means each failure will impact numbers of people which would have been hard to reach in most of human history.
Back then we could not prevent or ameliorate such disasters. This is equivalent to arguing we should not invest in sanitation because humans have been dying of cholera since ever.
This is the equivalent of arguing that we instead invented sanitation to adapt to reality instead of sitting in our own shit and dying of cholera and opining about sanitation refugees.
“Probably ok” doesn’t seem adequate to cover wildfires, large scale storm flooding in areas which weren’t previously prone to it, tropical diseases becoming endemic, etc. We probably won’t have massive famines but we’re definitely going to have cost increases and reduced availability which a lot of people are going to have a hard time with. People who aren’t rich are going to struggle with all of this at the same time, especially when homeowners insurance starts meaning you can’t get a mortgage (or sell your home to someone who’ll need one).
Yeah, I don’t think the U.S. is turning into Sarajevo during the 90s but I think there will be more disruption than we expect and probably actual refugee camps sooner than we like to think.
We have refugee camps now. FEMA trailers and whatnot for hurricanes and earthquakes and for the Mexican border.
So I expect we’ll continue to have them.
But we won’t have the kind of camps they had in Jordan that had millions of refugees from Syria or something.
So I think we’ll have “normal” refugee camps that help place thousands of people. But not “end of the world” style camps with the population of Mississippi.
People seem to be catastrophizing what’s going to be a different future into something much worse than it likely will be.
I don't like the idea of living someplace where if the air conditioning fails, I die. I don't know where the wet bulb temp is hitting/will hit 35/95, but those places are off my list of places to live.
I'm not sure how one would get enough food to live if the world's breadbaskets have collapsed due to excessive rain/drought. I guess one could get enough land to try to subsistence farm and hope none of the hundred million starving New Yorkers decide to steal your food while you sleep. I'm not particularly bullish on that strategy.
At this point I'm legitimately resigned to just dying in the food riots. There doesn't seem to be a way to clever my way out of this one. If I'm in the right place at the right time, maybe I'll die of old age. Otherwise, I'll die in middle age. My grandfathers only lived to their mid-fifties, so it wouldn't even be that unusual.
Too many unknowns, embracing prepping and farming just seems like a cope when no one even knows what exactly the situation will be. Maybe food is plentiful but it's raining so hard in VT that roads get washed out and trucks can't get to your area.
It just feels like anywhere near a major city is likely to have either a few hundred thousand starving people roving the countryside or nuclear fallout on the wind. VT is close to Boston and Montreal.
Even a military compound could easily be overrun with enough hungry people. There's only so many bullets when people are frantic and hungry. So it's not like I'm going to be successful hiring armed guards and putting up barbed wire.
One could try to live on a sailboat, but open sea piracy is real, and it'll be very hard to fish when the oceans are dead from acidification.
If the food supply is disrupted due to weather, it'll be a very small number of people even in the US who survive. Societal unrest will likely kill more than actual starvation.
I just got twenty acres of land in a place that gets over 100F in the summer now.
I spent some time there last month and it's unlivable when it's that hot. You have to have some way to mitigate the heat or you'll pretty much just die. It's literally harder to think when it's that hot.
I'm going to build big stone walls three meters thick and ten meters tall to keep out fire and regulate temps. It will be like the Forestiere Underground Gardens[1]. The "Grow Bio-intensive"[2] folks say you can grow a complete diet for an adult in five acres. So, yeah, basically I'm going to build a "climate fortress" and stockpile emergency supplies to give to people when/if uh emergencies happen.
I don't know what most people are going to do. Frankly, the situation is starting to look pretty sketchy.
I'm legitimately curious, if food supply is disrupted, how do you plan to stop starving people from stealing that food while you are asleep? Armed guards doing shifts along the walls? If you've got enough food production that's probably a legit option, as long as they are loyal. Also how about water supply for the crops?
> how do you plan to stop starving people from stealing that food while you are asleep?
In a word, robots. But I really really hope it doesn't come to that. If things get really "Mad Max" ... I don't know that I could actually kill people, even to save my own life (I have no children nor spouse.) I would basically have to give up?
> how about water supply for the crops?
Moisture-sealed greenhouses. I've got a well, but I want to make integrated water recycling systems. Then I can "top off" from atmospheric moisture as needed.
Gotcha yeah that makes sense. It's as good a plan as any I've heard, trying to make like a walled biodome. What are you thinking about doing for fertilizer? Fish systems?
The Grow Biointensive system claims to be a complete diet and require no fertilizer. The trick is that 60% of your crop is so-called "carbon farming" that produces a lot of compostable material in addition to food (e.g. corn, fava beans).
Ok, last question! How are you planning to build those walls? Where are you going to get all that stone? Have you priced out having someone build it for you?
My rough calculation says 20 acres is about 1000 feet per side, 3 meters is 10 feet, 10 meters is 32 feet. So you'll need roughly (1000*10*32*4) 1,280,000 cubic feet of stone. That's a cube just over 100 feet per side. That's a lot of stone! If you're planning on something like that garden in Fresno, are you planning to excavate it from the land itself? If you could slice 1.2 feet of stone from the entire 20 acre property you'd have enough, but you'd probably need to move a lot of topsoil to get to it.
If anything the engineering effort for the walls the by far the most impressive part! A thousand years from now they'll wonder what it's purpose was.
The whole place is classified as "gravelly loam", it's rocks upon rocks in a loam matrix at least ten meters deep. ;D I don't really have topsoil, it's literally just rocks and rocks and more rocks. (I suspect it's the alluvial remains of something like the Great Flood of 1862: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Flood_of_1862)
For moving them I'm making pick-and-place bots (probably simplified delta-bots, but the actual form isn't fixed yet) that will also scan and sort them.
The tail wags the dog here, eh? Because I have essentially nothing but rocks I concocted this plan to make use of them. I can also build things like "sand batteries" to store heat. And because the rocks come in all different colors I could make patterns in the walls and floors and roads, etc...
> A thousand years from now they'll wonder what it's purpose was.
Ha! Right? I should add some weird features just for future archeologists? "We believe the frog eating a banana had religious significance." Embed some titanium spheres in a wall in the shape of the constellation of Pleiades --but as it was millions of years ago? Make the whole thing look like the base of one end of a vast bridge? Or like the foot of a huge statue? The possibilities are endless!
Is that the global cooling that all the denier sites were predicting for 2016?
You know, because the global warming was all caused by the sun and the sunspot cycle was going to enter a new Maunder Minimum leading to a new Little Ice Age.
There were a small number of scientists who in the '70s were predicting cooling.
Those scientists agreed that greenhouse gases cause warming, but they thought that the cooling effect from particulate pollution would be more significant.
The thing about particulates is that they and some of theor bad effects are very clearly directly noticeable to the average person. You could see them in the air, and feel and taste and smell then when you would breath that air.
That makes it much more feasible politically to deal with them, and Congress and the states enacted many laws and programs to do so.
And so particulate levels dropped dramatically over the next several years, invalidating the assumption of the models that predicted cooling.
Yesterday I saw my nephew, just four years old, talk with such excitement at a train he saw last week. In eras gone by I'm sure this would have people wondering if he'll be a train driver when he grows up, but I'm under no illusions that "climate refugee" is the only possible future he is hurtling towards.
I don't know how his parents handle it, if they have accepted it at all.
How do you simply adapt to temperatures which are literally unlivable such as wet bulb temperatures hitting 33C+ in areas such as the Middle East and South Asia? Humans literally cannot survive at such temperatures. Mass migration or mass investment in redoing the building stock and electrical grid to make indoors habitable are the only options, and neither are really viable (tens of millions migrating will cause severe issues up to and including wars, meanwhile most of the countries likely to be impacted simply do not have the money nor governance needed to rebuild everything with AC).
At the (usual) risk of being down voted to oblivion. There is plenty of space in more northern areas. Most European countries are approaching negative population growth. Huge swaths of Siberia and Canada are underpopulated. Still there are people that choose to live in places where one can barely survive with no AC (Dubai in summer, certain hot parts of the US, and many others). How are people "simply adapting" to these temperatures now?
How do you simply adapt to temperatures which are literally unlivable such as wet bulb temperatures hitting 33C+ in areas such as the Middle East and South Asia?
Seek shelter during those hours, such as underground.
> How do you simply adapt to temperatures which are literally unlivable such as wet bulb temperatures hitting 33C+ in areas such as the Middle East and South Asia?
You move.
Climate change of the magnitude you are talking about does not happen overnight. That change happens over a few hundred years, not over a weekend.
Living in AZ it’s not uncommon to have runs of 43ºC for weeks on end. Oh, and there’s not much water. The Hohokam people brought water in by digging canals by hand 600 years ago. Now >5 million people live in the Phoenix area and put up with this heat every summer - lots of retirees to, not just healthy young people.
Does construction, sports, or other outdoor activity stop during the summer? No. More might move to early in the morning or later at night, but last summer I regularly ran 5K twice a week when it was between 35-38ºC.
California is taking the bulk of the water we naturally have by river, and Saudi Arabia is taking a significant amount of our groundwater (by alfalfa farming), and we’ve not started wars with either.
On the other hand we have a lot of sun and we’re able to offset >100% of our cooling cost with solar energy (amortized over the year, but also at any point in time if our installer hadn’t undersized our inverter). None of that would have been possible 40 years ago, but buildings are being retrofit every day here.
All that to say, people will adapt. Some will migrate. Some area may become more habitable, some less.
Most people couldn't even handle masking and staying indoors during a plague. At a time when hospitals were rationing oxygen they were folks acting like not being able to go to Applebee's was a human rights violation.
The most likely adaptation is some form of eco-fascism.
This is not even close to the scientific consensus on climate change. It’s just as unscientific and counterproductive as the drivel repeated by climate denialists. Climate Doomerism is just another kind of denialism, in effect.
But even if that were true, who says you can’t drive trains in a climate catastrophe? There’s a whole movie on the topic. ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowpiercer
Exactly, at this stage the panic inducing "OMG we're all going to die/out children will live in MadMax world for sure" mental state should be added to the long list of dangers caused by the climate around the climate change. Right after the danger of knee-jerk deindustrialisation of the West and collapse of democracies in favor of autocracies. These countries (like China) not only double their greenhouse emissions for each tonne we limit, they also actively promote fear and panic amongst our populations that leads to the very deindustrialisation that will form the basis of their power over us.
However, I remain optimistic, yes there is climate change, yes it will have a range of effects on people depending on where they live. From the lengthening of the growing season and all the positive outcomes, through minor inconvenience, to crop failures/lack of water and death of the others. Sadly, some of the poorest regions on the planet will be hit the worst and some of the most wealthy will reap the benefits.
Without actual physical power over countries like China there is no stopping of climate change. The best we(democracies) can do is to retain as much power as possible to help as many people as possible during this time.
Imagine scenario 1 where a climate change is slowed down by 1C over next 20 years at the cost of entire deindustrialisation of Europe, and it's subsequent subjugation to Russian-Chinese partnership.
Then scenario 2 where we have 1C of extra warming now not in 20 years, but Europe remains free, wealthy and able to continue to help poorer countries, accept refugees etc. Which world is going to be a better one?
> Without actual physical power over countries like China there is no stopping of climate change.
But China is famously the big commodity supplier of the whole West. Why and how could the West (or just the US) shut all of that down even in the hypothetical of having complete control of China?
> This is not even close to the scientific consensus on climate change. It’s just as unscientific and counterproductive as the drivel repeated by climate denialists.
Nonsense: climate scientists have been making accurate predictions since the 1970s and, more importantly those have become more precise over time because their goal is to do scientific research and see where the results lead rather than starting from the precept “we can’t reduce profits for polluters” and working backwards. You can see the difference in how many different things deniers have latched onto over the years – each time we’re told that some minor gap completely disproves the entire field, and then when that’s debunked they move on to some other random point, very similar to creationists’ “god of the gaps” where it’s left with increasingly insignificant claims between multiple lines of robust argument and evidence.
The climate SCIENTISTS have been making accurate predictions, but the climate DOOMERS have not. The Doomers claims (like that someone’s nephew can only ever hope to be a climate refugee and nothing else) are not represented by the scientific consensus.
And in fact, we’ll probably want train conductors if we’re going to improve public transportation to enable more density and electrified transport. That’s why Doomers are nearly as bad as the denialists: the unscientific vocal lack of hope means they’re not supporting the actual change we need. And sometimes they’ll shout down folks offering solutions.
Counter to the old Slashdot adage, let's actually read the fucking article.
Remember, the headline trumpets: How Accurate Were Their Predictions?
1. Estimate seems to be alright.
2. "On target if a little high"? or you could read it as off by about 50 years.
3. Glad that this has been pointed out.
4. Whatever my opinion is on geoengineering, this is not a prediction, this is a statement of theory, there is no prediction or verdict to be had here.
5. This is also not a prediction.
6. I agree with the author re the link being proven out, but I disagree with their attribution of lack of action to climate changer denialism. Or is this the standard "Let's not call out India and China" dancing around the issue? Poor form, either way.
7. Is not a prediction.
Verdict, saner than most articles regarding this, but still extremely poor. Out of seven points, three are not predictions, one has numbers that are so twisted that it can be spun any which way, two are valid points and one seems to be written specifically to deflect blame from the majority polluting nations. Not really quality journalism here, which is kinda sad. For an article that sets out to measure the accuracy of certain predictions it's sorely lacking in both predictions, as well as accuracy.
I think you're being unfairly harsh calling the article "extremely poor" just because it goes off on a few tangents-- it's an article after all, not a homework assignment.
> "Let's not call out India and China"
You do realize that the US is doing way worse in Co2/capita/year right now than both of those (~15tons compared to ~9 and ~2, respectively)? And thats not even talking cumulative emissions.
> Bring on the downvotes!
"Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. " -- guidelines
> You do realize that the US is doing way worse in Co2/capita/year
> right now than both of those (~15tons compared to ~9 and ~2, respectively)?
If you call out "per country", China is double the US.
If you call out "per capita per country", there are 14 countries worse than the US, including Canada and Australia.
Not saying the US is blameless, but you're playing games with the stats. Why aren't you criticizing individuals in Qatar? They're emitting more than double the CO2 per person than the US.
You do realize that the US is also down from its' peak of CO2/Capita production, whereas china is getting there per-captia. (13 US, ~9 China), and the trend doesn't seem to be stopping? Per capita becomes kind of a bad comparitor when the trend is towards parity, and the overall output isn't slowing.
I've been around long enough to see that the climate change stuff really only ratchets up in the US when going into an election year, and if the correct candidate makes it in, it immediately stops, regardless of their actual climate change policy. (Sure, let's ignore the drilling that's going on under the current administration. Or the oil permits being given out. Or the lessenings of tarrifs on import goods leading to an increase of fantastic microplastics in your drinking water and additional CO2 emissions overseas). There really is no room to not be harsh on articles like this. The only thing articles like this are doing is proving the denlialists right.
It's great that the US emissions are improving, but I'm very sceptical about them reaching Chinese levels even within a decade, and arguing for improvements elsewhere while doing really badly appears very hypocritical to me (expecially with the cumulative emissions in mind when talking about nations like India).
I believe the main problem with climate change policy in the west is simply that voters in general don't really want to sacrifice anything for climate change mitigations, and without significant sacrifices government is very limited in what can be achieved...
I think the original sin of climate change communication was fixating on average temperature rise. Even 5°C doesn't sound terrible when you think all you'll get is current climate plus a flat 5°C offset. 1.5 sounds barely noticeable.
I think a lot of people heard, meh it's gonna be imperceptibly warmer, I don't care about some polar bears.
Since this is Hacker News I think I should point out Moore's Law.
All the computer modeling done by Hansen and others in the early 80's could be done today on a gamer desktop. The code itself is a mix of Fortran and (bleach) IDL (Interactive Data Language a product that today exists only to extract money from tiny niches of science). But rewriting it in Numpy/Julia/C++/Rust would be a month's exercise to most of us.
Which means if there was some way to model the climate while discounting the greenhouse effect, thereby providing evidence against manmade global warming, someone would have done it by now, with a Jupyter notebook.
Since this is Hacker News, I think I should point out that the claim "if there was some way to foo someone would have done it" is not evidence of absence.
It's certainly not proof of absence. But when the need for climate models that discount AGW pertains to a trillion dollar industry with a large staff of computer modeling specialists, using the same hardware and often the same software as climate scientists, and they can't come up with something, it's evidence, and it's strong evidence.
Climate-change conversations feel like the most important topic on Hacker News. After reading all the comments I'm tempted to go back to the main page and look for something distracting, about emacs or Rust or some other vanishingly minor technology to divert my attention.
The biggest hacking challenge is shifting our collective behavior. How do we (let's just say we in the USA, because that's the culture(s) I know best, and we continue to do significant environmental harm) make changes so that we use far fewer resources per capita?
I call my political representatives now and then, and I do my small part (keeping the house temperature close to the outside temperature, as low as 59F or as high as 85F or so, anyway; I'm not the only occupant. Minimizing driving trips by maximizing appointments and errands, and living close to work. Minimizing travel- grudgingly flew to the Midwest from the PNW once for Christmas in the last three years, plus one family road trip in the same span, plus several shorter car trips- I consider these luxuries. Eating meat a few times a month. Not buying stuff for "retail therapy"- making do with what I have, and actively de-acquiring stuff & letting go of diverting hobbies so I can think more clearly and focus on what matters: the health of myself and my family, the growth and education of my child, and environmental health for all living beings. Volunteering with the local food shelf.), but I still feel like I could be doing more and I'm not sure how. So I look for answers, here on hn, in books, in the news, and in conversations.
I haven't slipped into doomerism or other denial; life is interesting, there is much out of my control, and to stay sane I try to operate within my control and not stress about the rest. I'm trying to expand my control to support the narrative I like: strong local communities thriving on the resources available to them, with some trade with cities but not dependency on trade, and plenty of land and sea that we're part of rather than in dominion over. Romantic? Sure, and I accept that life isn't easy and that I and every bleeding-edge-of-life thing will die. Why not go out with all my available senses full of a minimally-polluted world?
I grew up in a logged-off area in the Midwest. I live in a heavily logged area of the Pacific Northwest. In the forests nearby, forests only as old as me, there are massive stumps, reminders of what the forest use to be. Can we 8+ billion people have hundreds-year-old forests again?
If we are too numerous, how do we scale back our numbers without dystopia?
If some of us just use too much resources, how do we scale that back with just enough conflict, ideally without war?
One challenge is that we are a status seeking species.
We fly to a remote beach because the one nearby is just as comfortable but won't make the same waves when we post a selfie on Facebook. We buy houses and cars to show how far we've gone instead of just for the sake of staying dry and warm and getting around. For the fifty years of the Cold War, we had a corporate sector that channeled our status seeking in ways that would keep the assembly lines running, the same assembly lines that could be retooled in hours to restart the Arsenal of Democracy in case of war. The result was consumerism as we know it.
The case of Greta Thunberg throws it into relief. She has imposed a lot of restrictions on herself, but as she frequently points out, she remains very comfortable. But, we can't magically drive 8 billion people to copy a single person's disinterest in status seeking when that disinterest is caused by a brain pathology. What we have to do is rechannel that status seeking drive into directions that help the issue instead of worsening it.
I sometimes dream of a situation where we seek status through virtuous behaviour. Unfortunately there’s no religion with sufficient authority at the moment to gather a big enough community where this would take place, at least none that I could see myself joining. And at the same time consumerism is quite aggressive when you decide to opt out of it. It becomes hard to socialize when you publicly state that most of the available work contributes to worsening the environmental conditions and earns you money that you can’t spend on something else than consumerism.
Fair points. How to help people find a healthy sense of purpose without the pitfalls of many (all?) religions (this may reveal my ignorance about religion; perhaps the problem isn't religion itself but how we humans interpret and implement religious practices?) seems key.
Culture shapes behavior, individuals can affect culture, and culture transcends individuals; if I have a positive impact towards decreasing the amplitude of climate-change catastrophe (part of what matters to me while I'm alive), that may help me die with more grace, knowing that my contributions will carry on awhile. After I'm dead nothing matters to me anymore (presumably), but while I'm alive it feels right to push for what I value.
131 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 173 ms ] threadDealing with this issue will require major changes in the economy (even now fossil fuel based), and national security/foreign policy (fossil fuel based now and for the foreseeable future).
Both of these no one has any plans yet which wouldn’t require major changes in the way people live and the way the US interacts with the world which would put them at a major disadvantage with everyone else, and take a hit in creature comforts, prestige, and power. At least based on the options currently available to us.
And this isn’t a problem caused just by the US. So even if the US did this, the rest of the world would keep on trucking and making the issue worse. Unless the US went to war or something? Which would definitely cause massive burning of fossil fuels (and nukes) which would definitely make everything worse, and kill a whole lot of people rather directly. And seems rather evil too.
Until the problem is causing real, unavoidable, unambiguous issues for everyone, of course it’s going to be denied. And even then….
If you’re ever tried to take the booze from an alcoholic, it’s obvious what’s going to happen. And we’re all drunk on cheap energy in the form of fossil fuels, and have been for a very, very long time.
Don’t look up!
I mean, Germany is trying to lead by example, but their attempt is pathetic. Nobody is going to care what Germany does and they do not have the economic and political power to enforce global change. But the US does.
I am not saying the US can do it alone, but it has to show both initiative and willingness.
EDIT: confirmed, the US had 365grams of CO2 per kWh (805lbs per MWh) but Germany had 385g per kWh in 2022.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1290224/carbon-intensity...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1247991/annual-power-sec...
No one considers Germany a leader in renewables. It's just a straw man for the nuclear fanboys.
Renewables: US: 21.5% Germany: 44%
Nuclear: US: 18.2% Germany: 6%
Fossil: US: 60.2% Germany: 45.9%, 20.1% from lignite (brown coal)
So pretty clear win on the renewables for Germany. Adding Nuclear for "clean energy" it's still pretty ahead. However, Fossil in the US is mainly gas, which is cleaner than lignite. Hard to quantify.
Sources: US: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3 Germany: https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1247991/annual-power-sec...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1290224/carbon-intensity...
US renewables + nuclear ist at ~40% (https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2023/03/us-electricity-energy...).
Also note the growth rate: German renewable electricity fraction went from 26% to 50% while the US went from 12% to 23% (since 2012). So they appear significantly more serious about climate change than the US.
Total CO2/capita/year is also significantly higher for the US (15 tons vs 9 tons, approx.)
The number is the US is similar, and has been rising.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/even-crisis-germany-...
Has to do anything - that statement is doing a lot of heavy lifting.
Ethically/morally? Probably.
But that isn’t how international (or national!) politics tends to work!
Practically, why/when should the most powerful nation in the world, with the worlds most powerful military (fossil fuel based, no less), worlds reserve currency (due to the world using it for fossil fuel purchases, and because of the stable US economic system which is currently based on fossil fuels), etc. undermine itself exactly?
If it’s the breadwinner of the family doing the heaviest drinking, but literally everyone is also drinking, it’s going to be even harder to take the booze from the alcoholic - because no one is going to actually try, because they’re all alcoholics.
Realistically, the US will ‘have to do something’ when the current situation becomes actually nonfunctional in some real way, or it becomes so patently obvious that it will shortly become so that a sufficient majority starts being willing to make sacrifices to start the change.
Or someone figures out a way to make “everyone rich” if we switch.
Here’s hoping!
Not that I used the word "perceived" in my original comment.
‘Nudged’ isn’t transitioning anyone’s military off fossil fuels. Or international shipping. Or major capex outlays in things like home heating when existing (fossil fuel) options are cheaper and more effective, etc. Things that require double digit percent of GDP expenditures, which are often required.
Germany tried (guilt perhaps?) and made a dent - but far from solved the problem, and is still consuming massive amounts of fossil fuels and is now burdened with debt and very high energy bills.
They cut back from a case a day to half a case a day, and are clearly unhappy about it and far from sober.
Eh... I mean, nearly every country in the EU has seen reducing greenhouse gas emissions for years (even _with_ replacement of some gas generation with higher-intensity coal generation due to the invasion of Ukraine), on the foot of building retrofitting, increased renewable generation, etc. The US and China have also been investing significantly in renewable generation (though, I believe, at least in the US's case, building retrofitting has yet to start on a large scale). US emissions are broadly declining and have been for a while, Chinese emissions have almost flatlined, though are still inching up. People are doing stuff.
> the way the US interacts with the world which would put them at a major disadvantage with everyone else
Huh? I would think that the US is actually in a rather good position here, certainly relative to Europe and probably to China. The US is very physically big, so lots of space for renewables, and is more self-sufficient on lower-carbon-intensity fossil fuel (ie gas, likely realistically essential as a transition fuel) than the others. It would also likely find lower-intensity agriculture easier to cope with, if it comes to that.
> And this isn’t a problem caused just by the US. So even if the US did this, the rest of the world would keep on trucking and making the issue worse.
China is if anything currently outpacing the US on renewable and other low-intensity (nuclear) generation capacity.
This feels like a comment written 30 years ago, back when no-one was doing anything much. Today, the big three are doing some stuff, with plans for more.
> Until the problem is causing real, unavoidable, unambiguous issues for everyone, of course it’s going to be denied.
The denial is interesting. In the developed world, it's only a significant factor in the US, Canada, and Australia, all of which have large fossil fuel industries, and in all of which it has been highly politicised. (Similar pattern in the developing world; the big denial cheerleader there being Indonesia). In most countries, it is fairly broadly accepted to be happening, and to be at least largely humanity's fault. Even in countries where denial is a significant political issue, it is generally on the decline (as you'd expect; the percentage of the electorate who'll die off anyway before we see really major impact is declining).
To even have a hope of not seeing major disruptive climate change we would have had to be at the point of net-negative fossil carbon releases years ago. And we’re nowhere near that.
Those changes are something of course. and we’d be in a (marginally) worse situation without them. But they’re overall just minor impacts.
The changes required to actually address the issue have barely been contemplated, and will be massively disruptive.
Unfortunately even zero emissions seems like a miracle at this point.
And the patient is still chain-smoking.
It seems as a society we have chosen palliative care; we would like to forgo the treatment and just be made as comfortable as possible before the damage is totally overwhelming and we reach organ failure and death
Don't pretend climate change isn't real. It is already impacting humanity today.
I'm all for growth as long as we don't deplete the Earth and don't cook ourselves to death.
> To stop major, major climate impacts
Yeah, no, that ship has sailed.
But even if 100% of the population stopped driving cars and ordering on Amazon or whatever, that isn’t going to stop it either.
And because of climate lag, we're still only experiencing the effect of emissions from a couple of decades ago. Plus there are climatic feedbacks to take into consideration which nobody really knows with certainty how these will react in the coming decades.
It depends on where the denial is hitting. E.g. plastic straw bans are made fun of, probably legitimately. Anything that is something an individual can do and feel good about is often not something that will be effective compared to the massive amount of pollution and waste being generated through the general uplift of people out of poverty.
In terms of the US: they're leading the way with Tesla on electrification of vehicles, which is a great, large-scale solution to a big source of pollution (or if not a solution, a key element in the larger solution). Canada and Australia I know less about.
> they're leading the way with Tesla on electrification of vehicles
... Eh? I'm not sure that's really particularly clear; Tesla is in global terms a fairly small part of the market, and the EU and China are both significantly outdoing the US on actual adoption of electric cars. That said, as above, the US is generally doing fairly well on emissions reduction, better than people often give it credit for (albeit partially accidentally due to cheap gas).
However, my point was that the US (and the other two) are unusual in that significant numbers of people there, with a significant political voice, believe that anthropogenic climate change is _not a thing_ (or in extreme cases that climate change period is not a thing). This is unusual.
What I was saying was the "climate denialists", being a label applied by people who disagree with them, including on things like straws, is an extremely broad church, and not very useful for actually describing what people think.
> Tesla is in global terms a fairly small part of the market
Can you cite?
Which is all marketing. Marketing is designed to influence and to make us want. We can't blame people because marketing to them works.
> If you’re ever tried to take the booze from an alcoholic, it’s obvious what’s going to happen
I don't think it is obvious what happens when you take booze away from an alcoholic. Are you aware that the absence of alcohol can kill them? Were you trying to kill them?
Occasionally they’ll be okay with it. At least until the DT’s.
It’s usually not pretty either way.
And doing it too fast can kill them, yes.
Man someone should tell all the oil companies that are actively running campaigns to push propaganda on folks to change political opinions.
Yes, it is "what people want". You're missing the line of "How did we get to the point of people wanting this".
But instead of asking that question, you're jumping to blaming the victims and not the system that allowed a few people with money to completely change the thoughts and behaviors of millions of people.
Now you're cooking with gas!
* I am actually not convinced either way. Some people believe it is so expensive it will necessitate degrowth, while others think that so much economic change will almost certainly spur economic growth. Either way I think that people who push the degrowth narrative are further reinforcing the view that climate action is too costly. Nonetheless it could be that they are right.
Whatever your view on that is, it doesn't really matter because the costs if climate change goes unchecked are going to be catastrophically high - direct in terms of e.g. having to rebuild burned down/flooded/etc. areas, more electricity for AC, etc. or indirect such as having to accommodate mass migration from climate refugees.
> Or zero
According to insurance companies, it is already not-zero:
* https://www.munichre.com/en/risks/climate-change.html
* https://www.insuranceinstitute.ca/en/resources/insights-rese...
* https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-is...
* https://vancouver.citynews.ca/2023/08/09/climate-change-cana...
And it's probably a fairly safe assumption that it's only going to get more expensive.
I do not want to give the wrong impression. For whatever its worth, I am convinced that climate change will impact us people living today, negatively.
The insurance companies are convinced:
* https://www.munichre.com/en/risks/climate-change.html
* https://www.insuranceinstitute.ca/en/resources/insights-rese...
* https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/climate-change-is...
* https://vancouver.citynews.ca/2023/08/09/climate-change-cana...
They regularly have to pay out for what happens, and they're not happy about the direction things are going and are passing the cost along. Just ask anyone living in Florida:
* https://www.newsweek.com/florida-insurance-crisis-explained-...
* https://www.pnj.com/story/money/2023/07/12/florida-insurance...
Insurance costs what it does due to the risk of paying out. Changing risks makes the price of the insurance change as well. If insurance companies aren't changing their prices, then the risk isn't changing either.
By asking to inflate the cost of insurance artificially, you're really only pointing out that natural disasters have not yet increased enough to notice.
This is true but it’s really important to remember that’s not some historical accident but the result of decades of anti-science messaging and political campaigning by the fossil fuel industry after their internal scientists confirmed the problem was significant. In the absence of that huge amount of distortion most people would have an accurate understanding of the risks. We should remember those companies in the same light as the tobacco companies, Purdue Pharmaceuticals, etc.
Unfortunately as we can see even in a relatively educated community like HN there are a lot of people willing to parrot that propaganda because the alternative is not just making lifestyle changes but now also having to admit that they have been repeating falsehoods for a long time.
Of course now people use that propaganda line and say that the anti-science crowd are the only mind-programmed group in this debate.
I don't care who's fault it is. Let's fix it.
However, being honest with myself, if you asked me right now about my willingness to incur a cost to fund the green transition, I would be hesitant, because I cannot realistically make a cost/benefit analysis. Would I be willing to give up international travel? Would I be willing to eat almost no meat? Would I be willing to pay $10k extra to buy an EV? I don't know. I don't know what that will achieve. I don't know what happens if I don't and what happens if I do. I know neither my individual climate risk, nor how much my contribution would count if I chose to do my part. I am only living one life, so it is pretty hard for me to make life changing decisions without a good cost/benefit analysis.
Luckily, I am by nature quite anti-materialistic and not infected by the consumerist bug either, so my actual carbon footprint is still way below average.
But that would be bad for the economy: less money in circulation, less growth.
If consumers (as citizens) got mad because “people's home insurance suddenly jumped up 1000%“. Then they would do protests... so what? Protests can change things but it's a very low form of power.
Sure, we could tax Co2 right now, but the main problem is that people don't want to sacrifice their vacation travel or pay a premium for non-regional goods/personal travel/energy, just to "save the climate".
This applies even more strongly to older voters.
If you implemented actually effective Co2 mitigation policies (i.e. policies aiming to reduce Co2/capita/year to under 4 tons within a decade) in pretty much ANY western industrialized democracy, you would get thrown out of office even before your term was over.
PS: This is not my position-- I believe that drastic action is very urgently required, but I don't think it is some "corporate interests" or "lobbyism conspiracy" that prevents it-- simply democracy in action.
Show me evidence that this matters in the slightest.
The policy preferences of 90% of Americans are irrelevant, i.e have no correlation with implemented policy.[1][2]
Sure. Let's say that every green-eyed person gets to vote on what everyone has to eat: a pear or an apple. To the naive onlooker it looks like the green-eyed people have the ultimate power. But they neglect to notice that the two choices are filtered down from thousands of options by the brown-eyed people.
> PS: This is not my position-- I believe that drastic action is very urgently required, but I don't think it is some "corporate interests" or "lobbyism conspiracy" that prevents it-- simply democracy in action.
Of course. It's just a coincidence that implemented policy tracks better with “corporate interests”—dismissive quotation marks or not—than with the policy preferences of citizens.
[1] Media discussion: https://www.vox.com/2014/4/18/5624310/martin-gilens-testing-...
[2] Paper: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...
Say Biden actually took drastic steps-- complete ICE vehicle ban within 2030, extensive green electricity investments/grid improvements, high taxes on jet fuel, etc.
That might get you below 5 tons Co2/capita/year within 2030 or so, which is still insufficient globally...
Do you honestly believe Democrats would win the next election after doing something like that?
It's telling that this is all hypotheticals. This particular duopoly is not exactly leading by example on climate change. And if the Biden platform took these supposedly drastic steps then the Democrats might lose badly to the Republicans among the donors which is what actually keeps these parties alive (a party can't pay the bills with votes).
So far I have one study about the actual policy outcomes compared to policy preferences. You have a hypothetical.
It is great that the world is now in a position to make serious progress on the green energy transition.
Such a shame we wasted 40 years because the profiteers didn't want us to know the true extent of their crimes.
https://youtu.be/MondapIjAAM?si=6_471s4ENLPar9G7
It doesn't matter how smart or stupid humanity is. There will always be flaws to abuse to create propaganda.
So, if we agree with "Propaganda generation is a given" - what should we do with the people who are creating it and what should we do to protect people as much as we can from corporate backed propaganda?
The billions living in already marginal places near the equator will die or leave. That's where the real humanitarian disaster will be, and it will be far beyond precedent.
But yeah, lots of stuff will be worse.
But definitely more careers than “climate refugee.”
So I expect we’ll continue to have them.
But we won’t have the kind of camps they had in Jordan that had millions of refugees from Syria or something.
So I think we’ll have “normal” refugee camps that help place thousands of people. But not “end of the world” style camps with the population of Mississippi.
People seem to be catastrophizing what’s going to be a different future into something much worse than it likely will be.
At this point I'm legitimately resigned to just dying in the food riots. There doesn't seem to be a way to clever my way out of this one. If I'm in the right place at the right time, maybe I'll die of old age. Otherwise, I'll die in middle age. My grandfathers only lived to their mid-fifties, so it wouldn't even be that unusual.
Too many unknowns, embracing prepping and farming just seems like a cope when no one even knows what exactly the situation will be. Maybe food is plentiful but it's raining so hard in VT that roads get washed out and trucks can't get to your area.
It just feels like anywhere near a major city is likely to have either a few hundred thousand starving people roving the countryside or nuclear fallout on the wind. VT is close to Boston and Montreal.
Even a military compound could easily be overrun with enough hungry people. There's only so many bullets when people are frantic and hungry. So it's not like I'm going to be successful hiring armed guards and putting up barbed wire.
One could try to live on a sailboat, but open sea piracy is real, and it'll be very hard to fish when the oceans are dead from acidification.
If the food supply is disrupted due to weather, it'll be a very small number of people even in the US who survive. Societal unrest will likely kill more than actual starvation.
I spent some time there last month and it's unlivable when it's that hot. You have to have some way to mitigate the heat or you'll pretty much just die. It's literally harder to think when it's that hot.
I'm going to build big stone walls three meters thick and ten meters tall to keep out fire and regulate temps. It will be like the Forestiere Underground Gardens[1]. The "Grow Bio-intensive"[2] folks say you can grow a complete diet for an adult in five acres. So, yeah, basically I'm going to build a "climate fortress" and stockpile emergency supplies to give to people when/if uh emergencies happen.
I don't know what most people are going to do. Frankly, the situation is starting to look pretty sketchy.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forestiere_Underground_Gardens
[2] http://growbiointensive.org/
In a word, robots. But I really really hope it doesn't come to that. If things get really "Mad Max" ... I don't know that I could actually kill people, even to save my own life (I have no children nor spouse.) I would basically have to give up?
> how about water supply for the crops?
Moisture-sealed greenhouses. I've got a well, but I want to make integrated water recycling systems. Then I can "top off" from atmospheric moisture as needed.
The Grow Biointensive system claims to be a complete diet and require no fertilizer. The trick is that 60% of your crop is so-called "carbon farming" that produces a lot of compostable material in addition to food (e.g. corn, fava beans).
My rough calculation says 20 acres is about 1000 feet per side, 3 meters is 10 feet, 10 meters is 32 feet. So you'll need roughly (1000*10*32*4) 1,280,000 cubic feet of stone. That's a cube just over 100 feet per side. That's a lot of stone! If you're planning on something like that garden in Fresno, are you planning to excavate it from the land itself? If you could slice 1.2 feet of stone from the entire 20 acre property you'd have enough, but you'd probably need to move a lot of topsoil to get to it.
If anything the engineering effort for the walls the by far the most impressive part! A thousand years from now they'll wonder what it's purpose was.
For moving them I'm making pick-and-place bots (probably simplified delta-bots, but the actual form isn't fixed yet) that will also scan and sort them.
The tail wags the dog here, eh? Because I have essentially nothing but rocks I concocted this plan to make use of them. I can also build things like "sand batteries" to store heat. And because the rocks come in all different colors I could make patterns in the walls and floors and roads, etc...
> A thousand years from now they'll wonder what it's purpose was.
Ha! Right? I should add some weird features just for future archeologists? "We believe the frog eating a banana had religious significance." Embed some titanium spheres in a wall in the shape of the constellation of Pleiades --but as it was millions of years ago? Make the whole thing look like the base of one end of a vast bridge? Or like the foot of a huge statue? The possibilities are endless!
You know, because the global warming was all caused by the sun and the sunspot cycle was going to enter a new Maunder Minimum leading to a new Little Ice Age.
How did that work out?
Those scientists agreed that greenhouse gases cause warming, but they thought that the cooling effect from particulate pollution would be more significant.
The thing about particulates is that they and some of theor bad effects are very clearly directly noticeable to the average person. You could see them in the air, and feel and taste and smell then when you would breath that air.
That makes it much more feasible politically to deal with them, and Congress and the states enacted many laws and programs to do so.
And so particulate levels dropped dramatically over the next several years, invalidating the assumption of the models that predicted cooling.
Global cooling was never a concern for climate scientists. It was the press that promoted it.
https://gizmodo.com/reality-check-most-scientists-never-beli...
Chances of a sudden about-face in the models at this point is... remote.
I don't know how his parents handle it, if they have accepted it at all.
Do you imagine a billion people moving from India to Siberia?
(Edit to add: that would be so epic that the entire Mahābhārata could be seen as it's prelude.)
Seek shelter during those hours, such as underground.
You move.
Climate change of the magnitude you are talking about does not happen overnight. That change happens over a few hundred years, not over a weekend.
Does construction, sports, or other outdoor activity stop during the summer? No. More might move to early in the morning or later at night, but last summer I regularly ran 5K twice a week when it was between 35-38ºC.
California is taking the bulk of the water we naturally have by river, and Saudi Arabia is taking a significant amount of our groundwater (by alfalfa farming), and we’ve not started wars with either.
On the other hand we have a lot of sun and we’re able to offset >100% of our cooling cost with solar energy (amortized over the year, but also at any point in time if our installer hadn’t undersized our inverter). None of that would have been possible 40 years ago, but buildings are being retrofit every day here.
All that to say, people will adapt. Some will migrate. Some area may become more habitable, some less.
The most likely adaptation is some form of eco-fascism.
But even if that were true, who says you can’t drive trains in a climate catastrophe? There’s a whole movie on the topic. ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowpiercer
However, I remain optimistic, yes there is climate change, yes it will have a range of effects on people depending on where they live. From the lengthening of the growing season and all the positive outcomes, through minor inconvenience, to crop failures/lack of water and death of the others. Sadly, some of the poorest regions on the planet will be hit the worst and some of the most wealthy will reap the benefits.
Without actual physical power over countries like China there is no stopping of climate change. The best we(democracies) can do is to retain as much power as possible to help as many people as possible during this time.
Imagine scenario 1 where a climate change is slowed down by 1C over next 20 years at the cost of entire deindustrialisation of Europe, and it's subsequent subjugation to Russian-Chinese partnership.
Then scenario 2 where we have 1C of extra warming now not in 20 years, but Europe remains free, wealthy and able to continue to help poorer countries, accept refugees etc. Which world is going to be a better one?
I think people will choose option 2.
But China is famously the big commodity supplier of the whole West. Why and how could the West (or just the US) shut all of that down even in the hypothetical of having complete control of China?
Nonsense: climate scientists have been making accurate predictions since the 1970s and, more importantly those have become more precise over time because their goal is to do scientific research and see where the results lead rather than starting from the precept “we can’t reduce profits for polluters” and working backwards. You can see the difference in how many different things deniers have latched onto over the years – each time we’re told that some minor gap completely disproves the entire field, and then when that’s debunked they move on to some other random point, very similar to creationists’ “god of the gaps” where it’s left with increasingly insignificant claims between multiple lines of robust argument and evidence.
And in fact, we’ll probably want train conductors if we’re going to improve public transportation to enable more density and electrified transport. That’s why Doomers are nearly as bad as the denialists: the unscientific vocal lack of hope means they’re not supporting the actual change we need. And sometimes they’ll shout down folks offering solutions.
1. Estimate seems to be alright.
2. "On target if a little high"? or you could read it as off by about 50 years.
3. Glad that this has been pointed out.
4. Whatever my opinion is on geoengineering, this is not a prediction, this is a statement of theory, there is no prediction or verdict to be had here.
5. This is also not a prediction.
6. I agree with the author re the link being proven out, but I disagree with their attribution of lack of action to climate changer denialism. Or is this the standard "Let's not call out India and China" dancing around the issue? Poor form, either way.
7. Is not a prediction.
Verdict, saner than most articles regarding this, but still extremely poor. Out of seven points, three are not predictions, one has numbers that are so twisted that it can be spun any which way, two are valid points and one seems to be written specifically to deflect blame from the majority polluting nations. Not really quality journalism here, which is kinda sad. For an article that sets out to measure the accuracy of certain predictions it's sorely lacking in both predictions, as well as accuracy.
Bring on the downvotes!
> "Let's not call out India and China"
You do realize that the US is doing way worse in Co2/capita/year right now than both of those (~15tons compared to ~9 and ~2, respectively)? And thats not even talking cumulative emissions.
> Bring on the downvotes!
"Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. " -- guidelines
> You do realize that the US is doing way worse in Co2/capita/year
> right now than both of those (~15tons compared to ~9 and ~2, respectively)?
If you call out "per country", China is double the US.
If you call out "per capita per country", there are 14 countries worse than the US, including Canada and Australia.
Not saying the US is blameless, but you're playing games with the stats. Why aren't you criticizing individuals in Qatar? They're emitting more than double the CO2 per person than the US.
https://www.worldometers.info/co2-emissions/co2-emissions-by...
I've been around long enough to see that the climate change stuff really only ratchets up in the US when going into an election year, and if the correct candidate makes it in, it immediately stops, regardless of their actual climate change policy. (Sure, let's ignore the drilling that's going on under the current administration. Or the oil permits being given out. Or the lessenings of tarrifs on import goods leading to an increase of fantastic microplastics in your drinking water and additional CO2 emissions overseas). There really is no room to not be harsh on articles like this. The only thing articles like this are doing is proving the denlialists right.
(Grabbing my data from https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.PC?location... here)
I believe the main problem with climate change policy in the west is simply that voters in general don't really want to sacrifice anything for climate change mitigations, and without significant sacrifices government is very limited in what can be achieved...
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/150192/tracking-30-...
https://theconversation.com/sea-level-rise-has-claimed-five-...
https://abcnews.go.com/International/facing-dire-sea-level-r...
Etc etc
I think a lot of people heard, meh it's gonna be imperceptibly warmer, I don't care about some polar bears.
All the computer modeling done by Hansen and others in the early 80's could be done today on a gamer desktop. The code itself is a mix of Fortran and (bleach) IDL (Interactive Data Language a product that today exists only to extract money from tiny niches of science). But rewriting it in Numpy/Julia/C++/Rust would be a month's exercise to most of us.
Which means if there was some way to model the climate while discounting the greenhouse effect, thereby providing evidence against manmade global warming, someone would have done it by now, with a Jupyter notebook.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidence_of_absence
The biggest hacking challenge is shifting our collective behavior. How do we (let's just say we in the USA, because that's the culture(s) I know best, and we continue to do significant environmental harm) make changes so that we use far fewer resources per capita?
I call my political representatives now and then, and I do my small part (keeping the house temperature close to the outside temperature, as low as 59F or as high as 85F or so, anyway; I'm not the only occupant. Minimizing driving trips by maximizing appointments and errands, and living close to work. Minimizing travel- grudgingly flew to the Midwest from the PNW once for Christmas in the last three years, plus one family road trip in the same span, plus several shorter car trips- I consider these luxuries. Eating meat a few times a month. Not buying stuff for "retail therapy"- making do with what I have, and actively de-acquiring stuff & letting go of diverting hobbies so I can think more clearly and focus on what matters: the health of myself and my family, the growth and education of my child, and environmental health for all living beings. Volunteering with the local food shelf.), but I still feel like I could be doing more and I'm not sure how. So I look for answers, here on hn, in books, in the news, and in conversations.
I haven't slipped into doomerism or other denial; life is interesting, there is much out of my control, and to stay sane I try to operate within my control and not stress about the rest. I'm trying to expand my control to support the narrative I like: strong local communities thriving on the resources available to them, with some trade with cities but not dependency on trade, and plenty of land and sea that we're part of rather than in dominion over. Romantic? Sure, and I accept that life isn't easy and that I and every bleeding-edge-of-life thing will die. Why not go out with all my available senses full of a minimally-polluted world?
I grew up in a logged-off area in the Midwest. I live in a heavily logged area of the Pacific Northwest. In the forests nearby, forests only as old as me, there are massive stumps, reminders of what the forest use to be. Can we 8+ billion people have hundreds-year-old forests again?
If we are too numerous, how do we scale back our numbers without dystopia?
If some of us just use too much resources, how do we scale that back with just enough conflict, ideally without war?
How do we change our culture?
We fly to a remote beach because the one nearby is just as comfortable but won't make the same waves when we post a selfie on Facebook. We buy houses and cars to show how far we've gone instead of just for the sake of staying dry and warm and getting around. For the fifty years of the Cold War, we had a corporate sector that channeled our status seeking in ways that would keep the assembly lines running, the same assembly lines that could be retooled in hours to restart the Arsenal of Democracy in case of war. The result was consumerism as we know it.
The case of Greta Thunberg throws it into relief. She has imposed a lot of restrictions on herself, but as she frequently points out, she remains very comfortable. But, we can't magically drive 8 billion people to copy a single person's disinterest in status seeking when that disinterest is caused by a brain pathology. What we have to do is rechannel that status seeking drive into directions that help the issue instead of worsening it.
Culture shapes behavior, individuals can affect culture, and culture transcends individuals; if I have a positive impact towards decreasing the amplitude of climate-change catastrophe (part of what matters to me while I'm alive), that may help me die with more grace, knowing that my contributions will carry on awhile. After I'm dead nothing matters to me anymore (presumably), but while I'm alive it feels right to push for what I value.