7 ms·

After half a lifetime of hearing this and not caring, humanity might have failed when they do start to see visible effects and can no longer do anything about i

After half a lifetime of hearing this and not caring, humanity might have failed when they do start to see visible effects and can no longer do anything about it. As I understand, the main point of the article is that if the huge sheet of ice dislodges from main land, it is essentially going to melt entirely and no longer slow more land ice from getting to the ocean faster. The timeframe in which the ice will melt is uncertain, but it will surely melt. So by the time you noticed water rising, it will be too late. By taking this wait and see approach, you are basically negligencing the problem to the next one or two, maybe three generations to helplessly endure. The main test for humanity here is if it can coordinate and take one for the team economically so as to prevent itself from actual catastrophe in the future generations. So far it's not looking good.

rainbowmverse 9y ago
Imagine if we do all the work to prevent climate change, end up being wrong, and are left with a clean and sustainable economy.
- twoodfin 9y ago
  In which the real incomes of billions of the poorest people are significantly lower thanks to decades of compounded lower economic growth? TANSTAAFL.
  - melling 9y ago
    As the economist Bjorn Lomborg has been quite vocal about, we have lots of global problems and fixing climate change isn't the biggest problem. https://youtu.be/pQSGuC9GF70 https://youtu.be/pQSGuC9GF70 He does argue that we should be spending a lot more on research to find cheaper solutions, however. [Update] While you're downvoting me, you should understand that I'm simply passing along one of main arguments made by the Republican party. You live in your echo chamber and they live in their's. Can anyone guess why we are moving backwards in addressing the problem?
    - thomasahle 9y ago
      Bjørn Lomborg is well known for a bait and switch strategy to climate change. He recognises the problem and often gives reasonable recommendations, but then throws in a lot of other problems together with misleading/discredited statistics to explain why we shouldn't actually do anything near term about climate change. For example, he argues that fixing poverty with cheap energy has bigger economic impact than fixing climate change. He then puts up a statistic connecting expansion of coal energy in China with a fall in extreme poverty. However he doesn't mention that the fall in poverty can mostly be attributed to improved agriculture and happened a decade before the coal expansion. Further, if you really wanted to get energy to rural areas far away from the power grid, distributed energy production from subsidised solar would be much cheaper as well as environmentally reasonable. Bjørn is not the worst denier, but he is also not intellectually honest and you get a strong feeling that he intentionally tries to make preventing climate change seem at odds with fighting poverty, when it is really to sides of the same problem.
      - melling 9y ago
        Hey, I'm just reporting back one of the common responses that I get when discussing climate change with people. If you've got something of substance (e.g. a few links) that address why he's wrong, that would help. Btw, I got downvoted because people don't like my comment? I really wish HN readers would get out of their echo chamber and understand the other side. The controlling Republican party really does believe that it's not worth investing the money into fixing climate change because of arguments like Bjorn's. Pick ANY article on the WSJ that discusses solar, climate change, or even Tesla, and it degenerates into bashing subsidizing solar, climate change bashing, etc Here's today's article: https://www.wsj.com/articles/solar-company-sunrun-was-manipulating-sales-data-say-former-managers-1495445402 https://www.wsj.com/articles/solar-company-sunrun-was-manipu... By the way, can you provide references for your claims?
      - Udik 9y ago
        > distributed energy production from subsidised solar would be much cheaper as well as environmentally reasonable How can you claim that energy production subsidised with public money is cheaper than the same energy produced with no subsidies? The Chinese government could spend the money saved from solar subsidies in unemployment salaries or hospitals and free health care.
  - bottled_poe 9y ago
    This wreaks of fear-mongering. How can you claim that only the poorest would be affected? Income as a number of dollars is irrelevant, only purchasing power matters. i.e. the gap between rich and poor in real purchasing terms.
    - twoodfin 9y ago
      I didn't say "only", but generally the poor in the developing world spend a much larger fraction of their income on energy. They are also the most dependent on significant economic growth to see qualitative improvements in their lives and well-being.
      - CuriousSkeptic 9y ago
        So we put taxes on the things we need to stop doing and distribute the revenue to the poor (or everyone for simplicity) who would then spend the money on the now cheaper things we need to start doing.
      - rainbowmverse 9y ago
        Seems like jobs installing and maintaining solar and wind farms could solve both problems. There are probably already local projects going on all over the developing world that don't get much press. Something Facebook discovered when they tried to parachute in with their perfect, locked down internet solution and discovered people were already working on the access problem.
  - enugu 9y ago
    We are not even at a place where we have seriously tried the low hanging options, like a major serious worldwide effort at building better energy technologies(there has been a lot of great work, but not great relative to what we can do), reducing tariffs on solar, giving cheap access to green technologies to poorer countries, or researching and publicizing mitigating steps which can reduce damage when natural disasters occur. Also, there are plenty of costs for the default option which should be included in the analysis. These are severe especially for low lying countries with a big coastline. But even for other countries, public health suffers due to burning fossil fuels, and political instability in oil rich countries has a big effect on the world.
  - joyofdata 9y ago
    thanks to global economic growth those people no longer have to live in huts but are allowed to sew bags - they can buy Nikes and Coke!
- alex_duf 9y ago
  The thing is if we're successfully at avoiding a cataclysm, we won't know we were right. In this specific situation, I'd rather not know we were wrong that know for a fact we were right.
  - rainbowmverse 9y ago
    It's like the Y2K bug. People still act like it was made-up. We can't prove the bug would have caused all the predicted problems because we fixed the bug. All we know is we got a lot of updated, modern systems and huge R&D budgets from all the money that flooded into fixing it. How much of the tech we take for granted today is because of all that investment? We're in the same position with climate change. All we've gotten out of it so far is affordable renewable energy, better tech for power monitoring and distribution, and a lot of new jobs. So far, solving a maybe is proving to be a good investment, and may save us all if the worst case scenarios are realistic.
    - SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago
      We can try again on January 19th 2038 if we're inclined when the unix 32-bit timestamp runs out.
  - rgacote 9y ago
    Same issue occurred with Y2K. Dire threats, nothing occurred on actual date. Fact is there was an immense effort to update millions of lines of code throughout our infrastructure -- apparently successfully. Do recall several cases of old systems being kept running "to see what would happen" and they did demonstrate the failure. Just because we averted disaster doesn't mean it wasn't going to happen.
    - caseysoftware 9y ago
      Let me tell you about the five major car accidents I narrowly avoided on the way to work this morning. They didn't happen but they would have! Just because it didn't happen doesn't mean we "averted disaster." It's entirely possible that much (or even all) of the build up was normal media fear mongering and loosely based on reality.
- TheRealDunkirk 9y ago
  This sounds just like a religious argument. "What if we do the good things that some religious book says we should do, avoid the bad, be decent human beings, and help others, and there's no afterlife to be rewarded by?" I suspect it elicits exactly the same visceral responses by the target audience.
  - biesnecker 9y ago
    Sadly I think you're underestimating the appeal of religion. If this idea were as popular as religious ideas we'd have gone green a generation ago.
    - thriftwy 9y ago
      Religious ideas are only popular when you don't have to put much effort and only pay a token sum of money. Once religion demands dedication most people will find paradigm where they skip working while still consider themself pious.
  - enugu 9y ago
    That analogy is too generic - it will apply to any action which has two distinct kinds of benefits. Pascal's wager has many issues which wont apply here. A:'This approach to programming improves memory safety', B:'Not interested', A:'It also makes code more modular/reusable', B:'Pascal's Wager!' Also, if one is doing a cost benefit analysis - one has to include things like political instability caused by oil dependence(see Middle East politics), funding of extremist groups, and health benefits due to reduction of air pollution.
  - nonbel 9y ago
    It sounds like Pascal's wager: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager It is not a good sign if your worldview rests on reasoning like this...
    - Stanish 9y ago
      It's not as simple as that. Our economic model is objectively destroying life-giving and stability-maintaining ecosystems in many different ways. We really do need to rethink everything at a fundamental level to stop destroying the web of life. You think climate change is scary, talk to a soil scientist about what agriculture is doing to topsoil in the US, which developed over hundreds of thousands of years to be in some cases several hundred feet deep, and is now measured in inches... I don't accept every single catastrophic outcome predicted by many scientists, and I cede that there is great political gain to be made from catastrophic prediction in the name of grant funding, but the issue of whether we need to drastically change how we conceptualize the natural world and our place in it (starting with the often false distinctions drawn between natural and artificial, conservation and agriculture, urban and rural, etc.) is easy to see in my eyes. Many of the ways the current population of 7-10 billion humans live are objectively imperiling the life support systems of the planet, and that is a huge problem for us all. Each broken link makes the network more fragile and less capable of buffering shock events, producing clean water, air, food, medicine, fuel, etc. Additionally, as apex species, we have an enormously outsize effect on how these systems work (or don't). Thus our changing habits will have huge ramifications through that network, good or bad. It's like we are hanging from a tangle of threads above a ravine, and each thread that is broken brings us closer to falling, though no single one will certainly do it. Taken from a sufficiently atomistic perspective, and assuming the regeneration of those threads, breaking almost any single thread is acceptable. Taken as whole, the idea of breaking any of those threads is absurd and completely outweighed by the increased risk of falling. This is a mistake made by our current economic models which too often assume complete fungibility, regeneration, and replicability of natural systems (or don't even consider them at all). Tragedy of the commons. I guess my point is that it really doesn't boil down to Pascal's Wager except in the sense that everything does!
- ekianjo 9y ago
  > end up being wrong, and are left with a clean and sustainable economy Transformation has costs, it's not a free ride. The investment that you do there is not being done somewhere else.
  - rainbowmverse 9y ago
    We're still reaping benefits of the Apollo project almost half a century later, and it cost less than what governments have spent pushing advances in clean energy that are already paying off in real economic terms. There is quite a bit of money flowing around the world, and it tends to produce more when spent. There's no shortage of money.
    - ekianjo 9y ago
      > We're still reaping benefits of the Apollo project almost half a century later, Care to elaborate about the benefits of the Apollo project?
      - rainbowmverse 9y ago
        NASA has helpfully provided pages on this exact subject under spinoff.nasa.gov. For Apollo in particular: https://spinoff.nasa.gov/flyers/apollo.htm https://spinoff.nasa.gov/flyers/apollo.htm Good search query for finding more detailed analyses (not in a snarky LMGTFY way, there's just so much to list either as a direct benefit or as something made possible by those early innovations): apollo spin off technologies
- moduspol 9y ago
  This talking point really only works as long as "we do all this work" is vague. If it's replaced by what alarmists actually claim is necessary, it becomes very clear why it's not that simple.
- oh_sigh 9y ago
  This is essentially Pascal's wager and comes with all the problems associated with it. Another way to put your statement would be 'Imagine if we pay tens of trillions of dollars for something which only costs 500 billion dollars'
  - xexers 9y ago
    This statement is getting closer... but the numbers are still off... At this point green solutions are probably only about 30% more expensive than non-green(and getting cheaper every year).
    - caseysoftware 9y ago
      And that's the thing.. if they're getting cheaper every day, eventually they'll become the rational alternative. I look forward to home solar and the supporting technology. The prices aren't quite there for me but I think they will be in the next five years. In the meantime, I grew up being told "turn off the lights to save electricity!" and now with more efficient bulbs, power consumption is down about 80-90% to where energy for lighting is rounding error.
- joyofdata 9y ago
  very good point! just think about it - all the panic and then nothing - but then we are stuck with solar power, more vegetarians, less pollution in the ocean and on and on ... terrible! waiting until the very last moment is the only feasible strategy
- IsaacL 9y ago
  The pros and cons are rarely made clear: imagine if removing cheap sources of energy makes our standard of living much worse. This should be of interest: http://industrialprogress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/MCFF-two_sheet_20170315.pdf http://industrialprogress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/MCF... The unmet need for cheap, plentiful, reliable energy: There are 7 billion people in the world who need cheap, plentiful, reliable energy to flourish. Some 3 billion have virtually no energy by our standards, which means we need vastly more energy. It is extremely difficult to produce cheap, plentiful, reliable energy. In the entire history of humanity, only three industries have achieved this on any scale: the hydrocarbon (fossil fuel) industry, the nuclear industry, and the hydroelectric power industry.
  - rainbowmverse 9y ago
    The root page is not making me optimistic about this organization's bias-checking capacity: >> For the last 40 years, so-called environmentalists have held back industrial progress around the world. That's why we're helping industry fight for its freedom, with new ideas, arguments, and policies that will improve our economy and our environment.
    - IsaacL 9y ago
      Look at his actual arguments and data. He cites sources thoroughly IIRC.
      - rainbowmverse 9y ago
        I have to use heuristics to sort through the enormous volume of information trying to make its way into my head these days. Such blatant bias is enough to send anything from this organization to the mental blocklist.
      - soundwave106 9y ago
        Alex Epstein unfortunately is well known for being heavily biased in the climate-change denial direction. I don't think anyone would argue against the idea that fossil fuels have helped technological progress over the last century and a half, which seems like the core of his thrust. The problem is the almost dismissive attitude about the future prediction consensus. Generally, the scientific consensus is against his statement: "The [future] warming impact of CO2 is mild and quite possibly positive". From there, it seems like he is selectively framing his arguments. For instance, higher CO2 concentrations does increase crop yields (as stated), but scientists believe this will be offset by higher temperatures and drier conditions. (https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/nasa-study-rising-carbon-dioxide-levels-will-help-and-hurt-crops https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/nasa-study-rising-...). Statements like "Warming is almost universally desired among civilizations" seem to ignore that there is such a thing as too hot for the human body, let alone for other things such as food or having a reliable water supply (http://www.fao.org/3/a-i5188e.pdf http://www.fao.org/3/a-i5188e.pdf). It seems like a strange bias to think that there is zero room to improve our energy pattern and sources compared to what we have now. Or that only three industries (hydro, fossil fuel, nuclear) will possibly ever exist to provide cheap, plentiful energy. (For a start, I'll ding him an additional point for forgetting about the original cheap, plentiful energy source humans used: "traditional biomass". EG: wood, crop waste, dung, etc.)
- kcorbitt 9y ago
  There's also the bonus that if we switch to renewables before sucking every drop of chemical energy out of the earth's crust, the leftovers will be a nice gift to our great great grandchildren if we accidentally destroy civilization and they have to bootstrap it from scratch.
averagewall 9y ago
You have the assumption that is will be bad as long as it happens. It won't be bad if it happens slowly. 100 years or a few generations is more than enough to get out of the way. Just look at the population growth in the past 100 years. All those extra people somehow found a place to live and fitted in. We can find them a new place to live just as slowly and just as easily.
- InitialLastName 9y ago
  > We can find them a new place to live just as slowly and just as easily. See, for example, the current state of migration from Syria, Iraq, and Northern Africa. Slow and easy, right?
johan_larson 9y ago
I'm betting we are not going to be able to prevent substantial climate change. The effects are too slow and diffuse, and the changes required too costly. We could do it, but we'd only do it if we were scared, and we're not scared yet. Some time during the 21st century there will be a critical event that prods us into dramatic action, some real disaster that even the critics won't be able to deny. After that, things will be different. It may be the first time we have to abandon a major city. Perhaps Miami. Unfortunately, at that point, it will be too late to stop many large-scale effects.

rainbowmverse 9y ago

Imagine if we do all the work to prevent climate change, end up being wrong, and are left with a clean and sustainable economy.

twoodfin 9y ago
In which the real incomes of billions of the poorest people are significantly lower thanks to decades of compounded lower economic growth? TANSTAAFL.
- melling 9y ago
  As the economist Bjorn Lomborg has been quite vocal about, we have lots of global problems and fixing climate change isn't the biggest problem. https://youtu.be/pQSGuC9GF70 https://youtu.be/pQSGuC9GF70 He does argue that we should be spending a lot more on research to find cheaper solutions, however. [Update] While you're downvoting me, you should understand that I'm simply passing along one of main arguments made by the Republican party. You live in your echo chamber and they live in their's. Can anyone guess why we are moving backwards in addressing the problem?
  - thomasahle 9y ago
    Bjørn Lomborg is well known for a bait and switch strategy to climate change. He recognises the problem and often gives reasonable recommendations, but then throws in a lot of other problems together with misleading/discredited statistics to explain why we shouldn't actually do anything near term about climate change. For example, he argues that fixing poverty with cheap energy has bigger economic impact than fixing climate change. He then puts up a statistic connecting expansion of coal energy in China with a fall in extreme poverty. However he doesn't mention that the fall in poverty can mostly be attributed to improved agriculture and happened a decade before the coal expansion. Further, if you really wanted to get energy to rural areas far away from the power grid, distributed energy production from subsidised solar would be much cheaper as well as environmentally reasonable. Bjørn is not the worst denier, but he is also not intellectually honest and you get a strong feeling that he intentionally tries to make preventing climate change seem at odds with fighting poverty, when it is really to sides of the same problem.
    - melling 9y ago
      Hey, I'm just reporting back one of the common responses that I get when discussing climate change with people. If you've got something of substance (e.g. a few links) that address why he's wrong, that would help. Btw, I got downvoted because people don't like my comment? I really wish HN readers would get out of their echo chamber and understand the other side. The controlling Republican party really does believe that it's not worth investing the money into fixing climate change because of arguments like Bjorn's. Pick ANY article on the WSJ that discusses solar, climate change, or even Tesla, and it degenerates into bashing subsidizing solar, climate change bashing, etc Here's today's article: https://www.wsj.com/articles/solar-company-sunrun-was-manipulating-sales-data-say-former-managers-1495445402 https://www.wsj.com/articles/solar-company-sunrun-was-manipu... By the way, can you provide references for your claims?
    - Udik 9y ago
      > distributed energy production from subsidised solar would be much cheaper as well as environmentally reasonable How can you claim that energy production subsidised with public money is cheaper than the same energy produced with no subsidies? The Chinese government could spend the money saved from solar subsidies in unemployment salaries or hospitals and free health care.
- bottled_poe 9y ago
  This wreaks of fear-mongering. How can you claim that only the poorest would be affected? Income as a number of dollars is irrelevant, only purchasing power matters. i.e. the gap between rich and poor in real purchasing terms.
  - twoodfin 9y ago
    I didn't say "only", but generally the poor in the developing world spend a much larger fraction of their income on energy. They are also the most dependent on significant economic growth to see qualitative improvements in their lives and well-being.
    - CuriousSkeptic 9y ago
      So we put taxes on the things we need to stop doing and distribute the revenue to the poor (or everyone for simplicity) who would then spend the money on the now cheaper things we need to start doing.
    - rainbowmverse 9y ago
      Seems like jobs installing and maintaining solar and wind farms could solve both problems. There are probably already local projects going on all over the developing world that don't get much press. Something Facebook discovered when they tried to parachute in with their perfect, locked down internet solution and discovered people were already working on the access problem.
- enugu 9y ago
  We are not even at a place where we have seriously tried the low hanging options, like a major serious worldwide effort at building better energy technologies(there has been a lot of great work, but not great relative to what we can do), reducing tariffs on solar, giving cheap access to green technologies to poorer countries, or researching and publicizing mitigating steps which can reduce damage when natural disasters occur. Also, there are plenty of costs for the default option which should be included in the analysis. These are severe especially for low lying countries with a big coastline. But even for other countries, public health suffers due to burning fossil fuels, and political instability in oil rich countries has a big effect on the world.
- joyofdata 9y ago
  thanks to global economic growth those people no longer have to live in huts but are allowed to sew bags - they can buy Nikes and Coke!
alex_duf 9y ago
The thing is if we're successfully at avoiding a cataclysm, we won't know we were right. In this specific situation, I'd rather not know we were wrong that know for a fact we were right.
- rainbowmverse 9y ago
  It's like the Y2K bug. People still act like it was made-up. We can't prove the bug would have caused all the predicted problems because we fixed the bug. All we know is we got a lot of updated, modern systems and huge R&D budgets from all the money that flooded into fixing it. How much of the tech we take for granted today is because of all that investment? We're in the same position with climate change. All we've gotten out of it so far is affordable renewable energy, better tech for power monitoring and distribution, and a lot of new jobs. So far, solving a maybe is proving to be a good investment, and may save us all if the worst case scenarios are realistic.
  - SimbaOnSteroids 9y ago
    We can try again on January 19th 2038 if we're inclined when the unix 32-bit timestamp runs out.
- rgacote 9y ago
  Same issue occurred with Y2K. Dire threats, nothing occurred on actual date. Fact is there was an immense effort to update millions of lines of code throughout our infrastructure -- apparently successfully. Do recall several cases of old systems being kept running "to see what would happen" and they did demonstrate the failure. Just because we averted disaster doesn't mean it wasn't going to happen.
  - caseysoftware 9y ago
    Let me tell you about the five major car accidents I narrowly avoided on the way to work this morning. They didn't happen but they would have! Just because it didn't happen doesn't mean we "averted disaster." It's entirely possible that much (or even all) of the build up was normal media fear mongering and loosely based on reality.
TheRealDunkirk 9y ago
This sounds just like a religious argument. "What if we do the good things that some religious book says we should do, avoid the bad, be decent human beings, and help others, and there's no afterlife to be rewarded by?" I suspect it elicits exactly the same visceral responses by the target audience.
- biesnecker 9y ago
  Sadly I think you're underestimating the appeal of religion. If this idea were as popular as religious ideas we'd have gone green a generation ago.
  - thriftwy 9y ago
    Religious ideas are only popular when you don't have to put much effort and only pay a token sum of money. Once religion demands dedication most people will find paradigm where they skip working while still consider themself pious.
- enugu 9y ago
  That analogy is too generic - it will apply to any action which has two distinct kinds of benefits. Pascal's wager has many issues which wont apply here. A:'This approach to programming improves memory safety', B:'Not interested', A:'It also makes code more modular/reusable', B:'Pascal's Wager!' Also, if one is doing a cost benefit analysis - one has to include things like political instability caused by oil dependence(see Middle East politics), funding of extremist groups, and health benefits due to reduction of air pollution.
- nonbel 9y ago
  It sounds like Pascal's wager: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager It is not a good sign if your worldview rests on reasoning like this...
  - Stanish 9y ago
    It's not as simple as that. Our economic model is objectively destroying life-giving and stability-maintaining ecosystems in many different ways. We really do need to rethink everything at a fundamental level to stop destroying the web of life. You think climate change is scary, talk to a soil scientist about what agriculture is doing to topsoil in the US, which developed over hundreds of thousands of years to be in some cases several hundred feet deep, and is now measured in inches... I don't accept every single catastrophic outcome predicted by many scientists, and I cede that there is great political gain to be made from catastrophic prediction in the name of grant funding, but the issue of whether we need to drastically change how we conceptualize the natural world and our place in it (starting with the often false distinctions drawn between natural and artificial, conservation and agriculture, urban and rural, etc.) is easy to see in my eyes. Many of the ways the current population of 7-10 billion humans live are objectively imperiling the life support systems of the planet, and that is a huge problem for us all. Each broken link makes the network more fragile and less capable of buffering shock events, producing clean water, air, food, medicine, fuel, etc. Additionally, as apex species, we have an enormously outsize effect on how these systems work (or don't). Thus our changing habits will have huge ramifications through that network, good or bad. It's like we are hanging from a tangle of threads above a ravine, and each thread that is broken brings us closer to falling, though no single one will certainly do it. Taken from a sufficiently atomistic perspective, and assuming the regeneration of those threads, breaking almost any single thread is acceptable. Taken as whole, the idea of breaking any of those threads is absurd and completely outweighed by the increased risk of falling. This is a mistake made by our current economic models which too often assume complete fungibility, regeneration, and replicability of natural systems (or don't even consider them at all). Tragedy of the commons. I guess my point is that it really doesn't boil down to Pascal's Wager except in the sense that everything does!
ekianjo 9y ago
> end up being wrong, and are left with a clean and sustainable economy Transformation has costs, it's not a free ride. The investment that you do there is not being done somewhere else.
- rainbowmverse 9y ago
  We're still reaping benefits of the Apollo project almost half a century later, and it cost less than what governments have spent pushing advances in clean energy that are already paying off in real economic terms. There is quite a bit of money flowing around the world, and it tends to produce more when spent. There's no shortage of money.
  - ekianjo 9y ago
    > We're still reaping benefits of the Apollo project almost half a century later, Care to elaborate about the benefits of the Apollo project?
    - rainbowmverse 9y ago
      NASA has helpfully provided pages on this exact subject under spinoff.nasa.gov. For Apollo in particular: https://spinoff.nasa.gov/flyers/apollo.htm https://spinoff.nasa.gov/flyers/apollo.htm Good search query for finding more detailed analyses (not in a snarky LMGTFY way, there's just so much to list either as a direct benefit or as something made possible by those early innovations): apollo spin off technologies
moduspol 9y ago
This talking point really only works as long as "we do all this work" is vague. If it's replaced by what alarmists actually claim is necessary, it becomes very clear why it's not that simple.
oh_sigh 9y ago
This is essentially Pascal's wager and comes with all the problems associated with it. Another way to put your statement would be 'Imagine if we pay tens of trillions of dollars for something which only costs 500 billion dollars'
- xexers 9y ago
  This statement is getting closer... but the numbers are still off... At this point green solutions are probably only about 30% more expensive than non-green(and getting cheaper every year).
  - caseysoftware 9y ago
    And that's the thing.. if they're getting cheaper every day, eventually they'll become the rational alternative. I look forward to home solar and the supporting technology. The prices aren't quite there for me but I think they will be in the next five years. In the meantime, I grew up being told "turn off the lights to save electricity!" and now with more efficient bulbs, power consumption is down about 80-90% to where energy for lighting is rounding error.
joyofdata 9y ago
very good point! just think about it - all the panic and then nothing - but then we are stuck with solar power, more vegetarians, less pollution in the ocean and on and on ... terrible! waiting until the very last moment is the only feasible strategy
IsaacL 9y ago
The pros and cons are rarely made clear: imagine if removing cheap sources of energy makes our standard of living much worse. This should be of interest: http://industrialprogress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/MCFF-two_sheet_20170315.pdf http://industrialprogress.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/MCF... The unmet need for cheap, plentiful, reliable energy: There are 7 billion people in the world who need cheap, plentiful, reliable energy to flourish. Some 3 billion have virtually no energy by our standards, which means we need vastly more energy. It is extremely difficult to produce cheap, plentiful, reliable energy. In the entire history of humanity, only three industries have achieved this on any scale: the hydrocarbon (fossil fuel) industry, the nuclear industry, and the hydroelectric power industry.
- rainbowmverse 9y ago
  The root page is not making me optimistic about this organization's bias-checking capacity: >> For the last 40 years, so-called environmentalists have held back industrial progress around the world. That's why we're helping industry fight for its freedom, with new ideas, arguments, and policies that will improve our economy and our environment.
  - IsaacL 9y ago
    Look at his actual arguments and data. He cites sources thoroughly IIRC.
    - rainbowmverse 9y ago
      I have to use heuristics to sort through the enormous volume of information trying to make its way into my head these days. Such blatant bias is enough to send anything from this organization to the mental blocklist.
    - soundwave106 9y ago
      Alex Epstein unfortunately is well known for being heavily biased in the climate-change denial direction. I don't think anyone would argue against the idea that fossil fuels have helped technological progress over the last century and a half, which seems like the core of his thrust. The problem is the almost dismissive attitude about the future prediction consensus. Generally, the scientific consensus is against his statement: "The [future] warming impact of CO2 is mild and quite possibly positive". From there, it seems like he is selectively framing his arguments. For instance, higher CO2 concentrations does increase crop yields (as stated), but scientists believe this will be offset by higher temperatures and drier conditions. (https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/nasa-study-rising-carbon-dioxide-levels-will-help-and-hurt-crops https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/nasa-study-rising-...). Statements like "Warming is almost universally desired among civilizations" seem to ignore that there is such a thing as too hot for the human body, let alone for other things such as food or having a reliable water supply (http://www.fao.org/3/a-i5188e.pdf http://www.fao.org/3/a-i5188e.pdf). It seems like a strange bias to think that there is zero room to improve our energy pattern and sources compared to what we have now. Or that only three industries (hydro, fossil fuel, nuclear) will possibly ever exist to provide cheap, plentiful energy. (For a start, I'll ding him an additional point for forgetting about the original cheap, plentiful energy source humans used: "traditional biomass". EG: wood, crop waste, dung, etc.)
kcorbitt 9y ago
There's also the bonus that if we switch to renewables before sucking every drop of chemical energy out of the earth's crust, the leftovers will be a nice gift to our great great grandchildren if we accidentally destroy civilization and they have to bootstrap it from scratch.

averagewall 9y ago

You have the assumption that is will be bad as long as it happens. It won't be bad if it happens slowly. 100 years or a few generations is more than enough to get out of the way. Just look at the population growth in the past 100 years. All those extra people somehow found a place to live and fitted in. We can find them a new place to live just as slowly and just as easily.

InitialLastName 9y ago
> We can find them a new place to live just as slowly and just as easily. See, for example, the current state of migration from Syria, Iraq, and Northern Africa. Slow and easy, right?

johan_larson 9y ago

I'm betting we are not going to be able to prevent substantial climate change. The effects are too slow and diffuse, and the changes required too costly. We could do it, but we'd only do it if we were scared, and we're not scared yet. Some time during the 21st century there will be a critical event that prods us into dramatic action, some real disaster that even the critics won't be able to deny. After that, things will be different. It may be the first time we have to abandon a major city. Perhaps Miami. Unfortunately, at that point, it will be too late to stop many large-scale effects.