6 ms·

Reminds me of this essay I read yesterday, which painted a pretty startling picture of how insane things could get: http://www.flassbeck-economics.com/how-clim

Reminds me of this essay I read yesterday, which painted a pretty startling picture of how insane things could get: http://www.flassbeck-economics.com/how-climate-change-is-rapidly-taking-the-planet-apart/ http://www.flassbeck-economics.com/how-climate-change-is-rap... Here's a snippet showing how rapidly predictions are escalating: * Late 2007: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) announces that the planet will see a one degree Celsius temperature increase due to climate change by 2100. * Late 2008: The Hadley Centre for Meteorological Research predicts a 2C increase by 2100. * Mid-2009: The U.N. Environment Programme predicts a 3.5C increase by 2100. Such an increase would remove habitat for human beings on this planet, as nearly all the plankton in the oceans would be destroyed, and associated temperature swings would kill off many land plants. Humans have never lived on a planet at 3.5C above baseline. * October 2009: The Hadley Centre for Meteorological Research releases an updated prediction, suggesting a 4C temperature increase by 2060. * November 2009: The Global Carbon Project, which monitors the global carbon cycle, and the Copenhagen Diagnosis, a climate science report, predict 6C and 7C temperature increases, respectively, by 2100. * December 2010: The U.N. Environment Programme predicts up to a 5C increase by 2050. * 2012: The conservative International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook report for that year states that we are on track to reach a 2C increase by 2017. * November 2013: The International Energy Agency predicts a 3.5C increase by 2035.

cryoshon 10y ago
humanity in general is in deep shit and yet, we waste (and make no mistake, it is a complete waste) our best minds and the bulk of our resources on making people click ads or other similar excursions in nihilism what is needed is a multinational manhattan project for climate change... instead, we move the deck chairs around on the titanic. it's clear we can expect no leadership from governments or corporations on this issue.
- meddlepal 10y ago
  The problem is that it's very hard to get people to give a shit about macro problems like climate change. People generally own care about a narrow set of issues between the age of 20 and the 55/60 years most of us survive after that. Another problem is that democracies are poorly setup for solving this problem. Democracy responds mostly to the needs of now without concern for the future (different politicians problem, different generation etc, kick the football down the field because someone else can deal with it once I've got mine.) So yea, we're fucked. This along with the coming robot/AI revolution we are likely to see in the middle or later part of the century creates a pretty bleak future for human beings.
- sp527 10y ago
  I'm a computer scientist and software engineer with experience at some of the largest companies whose businesses are about making people click on ads. I now work as an independent contractor and part time on my own startups. Give me a living wage and tell me how I can help and I'm in. (srs) I think there are a lot of people who might feel the same way.
  - cryoshon 10y ago
    step one is gaining political power, so find a campaign team and run on the platform of fixing climate change step one will take a good while then, step two: carbon tax at a rapacious rate. this will likely cause economic meltdown, which is unavoidable if we want to survive. step three is developing active methods of scrubbing our atmosphere of the shit we've polluted it with inventing that will take a while also anyways, let's get going.
  - taliesinb 10y ago
    I feel the same way. As history has shown, when presented with an existential threat to the group, humans are often willing to drop their immediate plans and sign up to fight. Perhaps we're wired that way. Bring on UBI. And bring on a global 'war economy' to transition us to a zero carbon energy infrastructure.
    - cryoshon 10y ago
      >And bring on a global 'war economy' to transition us to a zero carbon energy infrastructure. yes, this is what is needed. unfortunately, the imaginations of our "leaders" are far too small-- too small to see beyond the horizon of their next election. if we want to continue existing, they've gotta go.
      - cel1ne 10y ago
        > if we want to continue existing, they've gotta go. what do you mean by that?
        10y ago
- analog31 10y ago
  Let's re-think whether those people are really our best minds.
- int_19h 10y ago
  Manhattan Project, and similar massive infrastructure/engineering/scientific developments, are possible because there is a single government that can drive them. To do something like that on a multinational scale, you'll need One World Government. Otherwise you'll just have a bunch of nations bickering over who is paying for what, and who is gaining what in return, without a final arbiter to break up ties and deadlocks and say "okay, you all had a say, now we're doing it this way".
AWildDHHAppears 10y ago
America can reduce its carbon footprint by 5%, save 300,000 lives/year, and save about $400 Billion dollars a year without spending a nickel. If the 66% of the American population that's obese or overweight would just stop overeating, all of the above could happen overnight.
- honkhonkpants 10y ago
  Such a great idea. There was also a recent proposal to just breed humans to be smaller: http://www.smatthewliao.com/2012/02/09/human-engineering-and-climate-change/ http://www.smatthewliao.com/2012/02/09/human-engineering-and...
  - AWildDHHAppears 10y ago
    You missed the point. The majority of Americans _eat too much_. Why can't they just eat less and save the planet?
    - FeepingCreature 10y ago
      Well, why can't they? (That's not rhetorical.)
      - IanCal 10y ago
        [reading before posting, apologies for a rambling reply] Personally, I see it as a very similar question as "why don't people just stop taking drug X" (to avoid side arguments, substitute X for a drug you see significantly altering people's lives for what you see as negatively). Weight loss is typically very simple, but that gets confused with easy. really quite minor behavioural differences can result in fairly extreme weight changes over time. Perhaps it's simply that people are prioritising short term things over long term. Short term the beer I'm drinking is nice, relaxing and great. Long term it's negative since it's at least taking me over my calorie limit for the day. The risks are vague and hard to intrinsically grasp, the benefits are simple and local. I think there are also significant effects of what people expect. With so many people overweight, what people expect has changed. I don't have statistics, but I've heard a large number of people complain about their families declaring them "anorexic" while still being quite overweight or even obese. If you're surrounded by people telling you to have more, having an expectation that people should be larger, and many external sources telling you that losing weight is complex (requiring weird and extreme approaches) Fundamentally, we've not really evolved to deal with an environment of near infinite food available through very little activity (not suggesting work isn't hard for many, but we can sit down all day and easily get several times our required calorie intake). We have evolved in environments where we needed to get as much as we could from our surroundings, and it was hard to come by.
liviu- 10y ago
So the International Energy Agency predicts that by 2035 humans may disappear? What about more recent predictions?
- taliesinb 10y ago
  The IEA may not sure the view of the author that "such an increase would remove habitat for human beings on this planet". The current https://www.iea.org/publications/scenariosandprojections/ https://www.iea.org/publications/scenariosandprojections/ claims that "business as usual" would yield almost 4C by 2100 and 5.5C long term. Not sure how that squares with claim by author or which scenario they were referring to. The big question I have with many of the scenarios (I think IPCC ones fall into this camp) is how much worse they will get when methane clathrates release is included. I'm not too familiar with the literature, maybe others know how well clathrate release is understood and what contribution it makes under various scenarios.
learc83 10y ago
Picking and choosing predictions in this manner to make it look like they have all been steadily increasing is misleading. Some of the initial predictions in the late 80s were for up to 6c by 2100. The last IPCC report I saw predicted an increase of between 0.3C and 0.7C by 2035 with around 0.4C being the most likely. There is little support for numbers anywhere near as high as 3.5C by 2035.
- taliesinb 10y ago
  > Picking and choosing predictions in this manner to make it look like they have all been steadily increasing is misleading. Those predictions are all sourced in the original article. As you say, though, pointing out a trend in the predictions from a set of scenarios doesn't on its own tell you anything. > The last IPCC report I read predicted an increase of between 0.3C and 0.7C by 2035 with around 0.4C being the most likely. Nowhere near the the 3.5C by 2035. There is very little consensus for numbers that high. Was that the fifth assessment report? And where does the consensus 'currently' cluster for 2035? What climate models would be included? Under what emissions scenarios? I'm not too familiar with the state of the current literature.
  - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
    Here is a graph with various model predictions towards 2100, under a "business as usual" scenario. As you can see, even the most pessimistic models are below 2C by 2050. I have no idea where 3.5C by 2035 came from, no models predict such a shocking rate. (We were only up ~0.7C over the last century.) Also note that none of these models reproduce the last decade's global warming hiatus; given that constraint, temperature predictions for 2100 will be slightly cooler. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Global_Warming_Predictions.png https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Global_Warming_Predicti...
    - marvin 10y ago
      This discussion just confuses me completely. I'm a scientist (of the mathematical variety) and absolutely of the thought that human-made climate change is the largest current threat to human civilization. But here we have at least seven different claims that vary wildly, from "catastrophe practically guaranteed" to "this problem can be handled in a straightforward way if we focus". Given that I'm not a climate scientist, who should I listen to?
mirimir 10y ago
I'm not optimistic. As climate becomes less favorable, the rich will focus capital, energy and resources on mitigation. For themselves, I mean. The poor will just starve and die.
- ams6110 10y ago
  Which is no different than how things have worked at any point in the past. And yet civilization advances.
  - berkeleynerd 10y ago
    Yes, except thanks to the wild card that is technology, seemingly towards its own destruction.
- cmarschner 10y ago
  No, they will move towards the rich (and cooler) countries. They already do. what we are seeing on the coastd of Europe is only the humble beginning. Wait until the Arab countries become uninhabitable, then 500 million prople will have to look for a new place.
  - eatbitseveryday 10y ago
    These lands aren't already mostly uninhabitable, being deserts? Most people in Egypt live near the river system, and in UAE they live on the coast. These countries are already much hotter than typical western countries, yet many rich live there. I think it would take more than "a little too hot" to make them move out, such as specific business reasons like no more oil.
- semi-extrinsic 10y ago
  How will the climate become less favorable for the rich? The areas most affected are disproportionally third world countries. In the west, food prices might rise some, but the rich won't care. Sea levels will rise, but it will be happening slowly (up to 1000 years for Greenland to melt completely), and governments will be mitigating that, so the rich won't be paying much there either. If you live in London, Paris, Rome, even on Manhattan, the 7 meter sea level rise won't mean anything. It won't do anything. Long Island and Jersey will need significantly mitigation though, as will areas of Palo Alto and Menlo Park, like the Googleplex, but we have hundreds of years to build those dikes, and we will easily be able to predict when and where they are needed.
my_first_acct 10y ago
There's something odd about the list of escalating predictions, this one in particular: "November 2013: The International Energy Agency predicts a 3.5C increase by 2035." If you follow the link, it points to a Christian Science Monitor article from 2010 (not 2013), which confirms that the IEA did make such a prediction, but in 2010. Also, this line: "2012: The conservative International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook report for that year states that we are on track to reach a 2C increase by 2017". Are we still on track?
- taliesinb 10y ago
  Yup, that is odd. IEA appears to be off the rails here. Making the adjective "conservative" a strange choice.

cryoshon 10y ago

humanity in general is in deep shit and yet, we waste (and make no mistake, it is a complete waste) our best minds and the bulk of our resources on making people click ads or other similar excursions in nihilism what is needed is a multinational manhattan project for climate change... instead, we move the deck chairs around on the titanic. it's clear we can expect no leadership from governments or corporations on this issue.

meddlepal 10y ago
The problem is that it's very hard to get people to give a shit about macro problems like climate change. People generally own care about a narrow set of issues between the age of 20 and the 55/60 years most of us survive after that. Another problem is that democracies are poorly setup for solving this problem. Democracy responds mostly to the needs of now without concern for the future (different politicians problem, different generation etc, kick the football down the field because someone else can deal with it once I've got mine.) So yea, we're fucked. This along with the coming robot/AI revolution we are likely to see in the middle or later part of the century creates a pretty bleak future for human beings.
sp527 10y ago
I'm a computer scientist and software engineer with experience at some of the largest companies whose businesses are about making people click on ads. I now work as an independent contractor and part time on my own startups. Give me a living wage and tell me how I can help and I'm in. (srs) I think there are a lot of people who might feel the same way.
- cryoshon 10y ago
  step one is gaining political power, so find a campaign team and run on the platform of fixing climate change step one will take a good while then, step two: carbon tax at a rapacious rate. this will likely cause economic meltdown, which is unavoidable if we want to survive. step three is developing active methods of scrubbing our atmosphere of the shit we've polluted it with inventing that will take a while also anyways, let's get going.
- taliesinb 10y ago
  I feel the same way. As history has shown, when presented with an existential threat to the group, humans are often willing to drop their immediate plans and sign up to fight. Perhaps we're wired that way. Bring on UBI. And bring on a global 'war economy' to transition us to a zero carbon energy infrastructure.
  - cryoshon 10y ago
    >And bring on a global 'war economy' to transition us to a zero carbon energy infrastructure. yes, this is what is needed. unfortunately, the imaginations of our "leaders" are far too small-- too small to see beyond the horizon of their next election. if we want to continue existing, they've gotta go.
    - cel1ne 10y ago
      > if we want to continue existing, they've gotta go. what do you mean by that?
      - 10y ago
analog31 10y ago
Let's re-think whether those people are really our best minds.
int_19h 10y ago
Manhattan Project, and similar massive infrastructure/engineering/scientific developments, are possible because there is a single government that can drive them. To do something like that on a multinational scale, you'll need One World Government. Otherwise you'll just have a bunch of nations bickering over who is paying for what, and who is gaining what in return, without a final arbiter to break up ties and deadlocks and say "okay, you all had a say, now we're doing it this way".

AWildDHHAppears 10y ago

America can reduce its carbon footprint by 5%, save 300,000 lives/year, and save about $400 Billion dollars a year without spending a nickel. If the 66% of the American population that's obese or overweight would just stop overeating, all of the above could happen overnight.

honkhonkpants 10y ago
Such a great idea. There was also a recent proposal to just breed humans to be smaller: http://www.smatthewliao.com/2012/02/09/human-engineering-and-climate-change/ http://www.smatthewliao.com/2012/02/09/human-engineering-and...
- AWildDHHAppears 10y ago
  You missed the point. The majority of Americans _eat too much_. Why can't they just eat less and save the planet?
  - FeepingCreature 10y ago
    Well, why can't they? (That's not rhetorical.)
    - IanCal 10y ago
      [reading before posting, apologies for a rambling reply] Personally, I see it as a very similar question as "why don't people just stop taking drug X" (to avoid side arguments, substitute X for a drug you see significantly altering people's lives for what you see as negatively). Weight loss is typically very simple, but that gets confused with easy. really quite minor behavioural differences can result in fairly extreme weight changes over time. Perhaps it's simply that people are prioritising short term things over long term. Short term the beer I'm drinking is nice, relaxing and great. Long term it's negative since it's at least taking me over my calorie limit for the day. The risks are vague and hard to intrinsically grasp, the benefits are simple and local. I think there are also significant effects of what people expect. With so many people overweight, what people expect has changed. I don't have statistics, but I've heard a large number of people complain about their families declaring them "anorexic" while still being quite overweight or even obese. If you're surrounded by people telling you to have more, having an expectation that people should be larger, and many external sources telling you that losing weight is complex (requiring weird and extreme approaches) Fundamentally, we've not really evolved to deal with an environment of near infinite food available through very little activity (not suggesting work isn't hard for many, but we can sit down all day and easily get several times our required calorie intake). We have evolved in environments where we needed to get as much as we could from our surroundings, and it was hard to come by.

liviu- 10y ago

So the International Energy Agency predicts that by 2035 humans may disappear? What about more recent predictions?

taliesinb 10y ago
The IEA may not sure the view of the author that "such an increase would remove habitat for human beings on this planet". The current https://www.iea.org/publications/scenariosandprojections/ https://www.iea.org/publications/scenariosandprojections/ claims that "business as usual" would yield almost 4C by 2100 and 5.5C long term. Not sure how that squares with claim by author or which scenario they were referring to. The big question I have with many of the scenarios (I think IPCC ones fall into this camp) is how much worse they will get when methane clathrates release is included. I'm not too familiar with the literature, maybe others know how well clathrate release is understood and what contribution it makes under various scenarios.

learc83 10y ago

Picking and choosing predictions in this manner to make it look like they have all been steadily increasing is misleading. Some of the initial predictions in the late 80s were for up to 6c by 2100. The last IPCC report I saw predicted an increase of between 0.3C and 0.7C by 2035 with around 0.4C being the most likely. There is little support for numbers anywhere near as high as 3.5C by 2035.

taliesinb 10y ago
> Picking and choosing predictions in this manner to make it look like they have all been steadily increasing is misleading. Those predictions are all sourced in the original article. As you say, though, pointing out a trend in the predictions from a set of scenarios doesn't on its own tell you anything. > The last IPCC report I read predicted an increase of between 0.3C and 0.7C by 2035 with around 0.4C being the most likely. Nowhere near the the 3.5C by 2035. There is very little consensus for numbers that high. Was that the fifth assessment report? And where does the consensus 'currently' cluster for 2035? What climate models would be included? Under what emissions scenarios? I'm not too familiar with the state of the current literature.
- semi-extrinsic 10y ago
  Here is a graph with various model predictions towards 2100, under a "business as usual" scenario. As you can see, even the most pessimistic models are below 2C by 2050. I have no idea where 3.5C by 2035 came from, no models predict such a shocking rate. (We were only up ~0.7C over the last century.) Also note that none of these models reproduce the last decade's global warming hiatus; given that constraint, temperature predictions for 2100 will be slightly cooler. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Global_Warming_Predictions.png https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Global_Warming_Predicti...
  - marvin 10y ago
    This discussion just confuses me completely. I'm a scientist (of the mathematical variety) and absolutely of the thought that human-made climate change is the largest current threat to human civilization. But here we have at least seven different claims that vary wildly, from "catastrophe practically guaranteed" to "this problem can be handled in a straightforward way if we focus". Given that I'm not a climate scientist, who should I listen to?

mirimir 10y ago

I'm not optimistic. As climate becomes less favorable, the rich will focus capital, energy and resources on mitigation. For themselves, I mean. The poor will just starve and die.

ams6110 10y ago
Which is no different than how things have worked at any point in the past. And yet civilization advances.
- berkeleynerd 10y ago
  Yes, except thanks to the wild card that is technology, seemingly towards its own destruction.
cmarschner 10y ago
No, they will move towards the rich (and cooler) countries. They already do. what we are seeing on the coastd of Europe is only the humble beginning. Wait until the Arab countries become uninhabitable, then 500 million prople will have to look for a new place.
- eatbitseveryday 10y ago
  These lands aren't already mostly uninhabitable, being deserts? Most people in Egypt live near the river system, and in UAE they live on the coast. These countries are already much hotter than typical western countries, yet many rich live there. I think it would take more than "a little too hot" to make them move out, such as specific business reasons like no more oil.
semi-extrinsic 10y ago
How will the climate become less favorable for the rich? The areas most affected are disproportionally third world countries. In the west, food prices might rise some, but the rich won't care. Sea levels will rise, but it will be happening slowly (up to 1000 years for Greenland to melt completely), and governments will be mitigating that, so the rich won't be paying much there either. If you live in London, Paris, Rome, even on Manhattan, the 7 meter sea level rise won't mean anything. It won't do anything. Long Island and Jersey will need significantly mitigation though, as will areas of Palo Alto and Menlo Park, like the Googleplex, but we have hundreds of years to build those dikes, and we will easily be able to predict when and where they are needed.

my_first_acct 10y ago

There's something odd about the list of escalating predictions, this one in particular: "November 2013: The International Energy Agency predicts a 3.5C increase by 2035." If you follow the link, it points to a Christian Science Monitor article from 2010 (not 2013), which confirms that the IEA did make such a prediction, but in 2010. Also, this line: "2012: The conservative International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook report for that year states that we are on track to reach a 2C increase by 2017". Are we still on track?

taliesinb 10y ago
Yup, that is odd. IEA appears to be off the rails here. Making the adjective "conservative" a strange choice.