11 ms·

It sounds very grim, is there any chance/hope of us getting out of this situation or is it just beyond any action at this point? I get the feeling from the arti

It sounds very grim, is there any chance/hope of us getting out of this situation or is it just beyond any action at this point? I get the feeling from the article we're doomed.

phkahler 9y ago
Don't worry, this is a pure climate alarmist. You can tell by this quote and others: "But no matter how well-informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough." This person is literally saying we need to be alarmed. I really didn't understand the part where they said methane has 34 times the greenhouse effect as carbon over a period of time and then changes the timeframe to bring the multiplier put to 84 times. To me it felt a lot like when congress talks about deficits over a decade - well actually they talk about reductions over a decade so it's times 10 and increases are just annual. Anyway, there is a difference between methane and CO2 but to try to make it sound worse by talking about time is just another alarmist tactic. Regardless of your stance, this article is intended to be alarmist and even says so. IMHO it is not worthy of HN.
- jackmott 9y ago
  your post reminds me of when actual bad guys call the investigation against them a witch hunt.
- cbennett 9y ago
  >> This person is literally saying we need to be alarmed. And why shouldn't we (he) be doing that? Actually the author's goal is transparent, to shake up perception, to provide fodder in the imagination of folks to ultimately change how urgently we treat this in public forums. I thought this was a quite trenchant point (from the article): >>Over the past decades, our culture has gone apocalyptic with zombie movies and Mad Max dystopias, perhaps the collective result of displaced climate anxiety, and yet when it comes to contemplating real-world warming dangers, we suffer from an incredible failure of imagination. The reasons for that are many: the timid language of scientific probabilities, which the climatologist James Hansen once called “scientific reticence” in a paper chastising scientists for editing their own observations so conscientiously that they failed to communicate how dire the threat really was; the fact that the country is dominated by a group of technocrats who believe any problem can be solved and an opposing culture that doesn’t even see warming as a problem worth addressing; Back to you: >>I really didn't understand the part where they said methane has 34 times the greenhouse effect as carbon over a period of time and then changes the timeframe to bring the multiplier put to 84 times. I also thought this statement was scientifically unclear, but I think the author was trying to say that the rate of methane release increases, thus, the impact on climate systems multiplies relative to an equivalent release of CO2 in that period (100 yrs v 24 yrs). If someone else can mention exactly how he got from 34x to 84x though, id love to hear it; i didn't get it.. I do want to mention, however the 30x GHG effect number is not set in stone. In fact, depending on the rate of release, there may be 'force multipliers' depending on how (quickly) ecosystems can absorb and use these gases. Ominously, this multiplier seems to go up anyways as temps rise. [1] [1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v507/n7493/full/nature13164.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v507/n7493/full/nature1...
  - epall 9y ago
    Methane deteriorates in the upper atmosphere fairly quickly, whereas CO2 sticks around. Methane is a dramatically better insulator than CO2, so in the short run its impact is higher, but when you stretch out the timescale, your methane is deteriorating while the CO2 sticks around, so the relative impact tilts slowly toward CO2.
    - cbennett 9y ago
      While you are right that methane wont naturally stick around for ever, and that it breaks down sooner than CO2. After googling around a little, I finally managed to find the source of the author's two numbers, and in the end I am more troubled than ever :/ >>At issue is the global warming potential (GWP), a number that allows experts to compare methane with its better-known cousin, carbon dioxide. While CO2 persists in the atmosphere for centuries, or even millennia, methane warms the planet on steroids for a decade or two before decaying to CO2. In those short decades, methane warms the planet by 86 times as much as CO2, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But policymakers typically ignore methane's warming potential over 20 years (GWP20) when assembling a nation's emissions inventory. Instead, they stretch out methane's warming impacts over a century, which makes the gas appear more benign than it is, experts said. The 100-year warming potential (GWP100) of methane is 34, according to the IPCC.[1] Doesn't 'reducing' (really, normalizing) the GWP for the ~80 yrs of the 100yr period (when it is not existing) seem sort of like an accounting trick? In other words, if 20GT of CH4 were released next year from the Bering Sea into the atmosphere (this would be spectacularly bad), the overall shock to the climate/atmosphere systems is precisely the same. [1]https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-bad-of-a-greenhouse-gas-is-methane/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-bad-of-a-gree...
- nickthemagicman 9y ago
  I got the same feeling. It's a pretty sensational article that leaves out a lot of details but simultaneously has some really good information.
  - joloka 9y ago
    Sensationalism is not a firm basis for serious debate or serious action. If anything is going to save the human race, it is technology, but to hear these breathless alarmists talk, they are anti-technology, anti-progress, and apparently want us all to live stacked up in massive cities with no real quality of life at all. I tend to see this as either an exhibition of control-freak tendencies or simply full-on communism. Either way, it sucks.
    - Oletros 9y ago
      Full-communism? Who is advocating for that?
    - cbennett 9y ago
      >>to hear these breathless alarmists talk, they are anti-technology, anti-progress, and apparently want us all to live stacked up in massive cities with no real quality of life at all. I tend to see this as either an exhibition of control-freak tendencies or simply full-on communism. Where is the second half of the article where, after discussing at length many bad possible outcomes, the guy goes on to propose detailed social engineering schemes to solve the looming planetary crisis?? Either you did not read this article closely, or you are simply trolling. In my opinion, the real ending of the piece was marvelously open-ended. The author concludes by highlighting the irrational , but quintessential human, tendency to see some bright-side to the whole thing-- here are our climate scientists like Hansen and others, that know the most and see of everyone how screwed we are, still maintaining some faith we'll figure it out. And they didn't need 'communism', 'mega city' or some other nebulous concept to help them to that conclusion-- it was/is either habitual, or fantastical.
      - joloka 9y ago
- joloka 9y ago
  Why the downvote? The article is clearly concern trolling. Look, if you are worried about overpopulation, the US isn't your primary area of concern. The US is not overpopulated and probably never will be. Maybe some US cities are, but compared to China, India, and Indonesia, we have no overpopulation problem. I'm not sure that "being alarmed" is a good state of mind to be in--Americans suffer from crisis fatigue as it is. The human race isn't going to solve its problems without either leaving the earth or having a massive die-off. You first.
  - Oletros 9y ago
    The article has nothing to do with overpopulation
    - joloka 9y ago
      Everything described by the fearmongers has to do with too much human activity. How is that not related to nearly 8 billion people on earth?
      - Oletros 9y ago
        Fearmongers? > Everything described by the fearmongers has to do with too much human activity Then should read better, because it is not the case. Or perhaps you can give us links to those "fearmongers". And by fearmongers youre not talking about climate scientists, isn't?
        joloka 9y ago
        Yes, the article is blatant fear mongering. Every time a climate issue comes up it mentions human activity as the cause of all our problems. Outside of a Hail Mary technological solution, there is only one way to reduce human activity and that is to have fewer humans.
        Oletros 9y ago
        > Every time a climate issue comes up it mentions human activity as the cause of all our problems Still waiting any source, but I suppose youd don't have any
awjr 9y ago
It's the little things the author mentions, that impressed me. For example the prevalence of Malaria. A higher temperature can increase the lifecycle rate of the parasite by a factor of 10. I was also unaware that higher temperatures increased sport fouls and criminal behaviour.
- phkahler 9y ago
  >> I was also unaware that higher temperatures increased sport fouls and criminal behaviour. They also cause an increase in air traffic.
cbennett 9y ago
First off, the author is prodding people into action by scaring/alarming them. Thus, the entire point of this article is to highlight many of the bad long-tails (note I did not say WORST long tails, eg Clathrate Gun, or phytoplankton crash leading to global anoxia, because they almost instantly wipe out human life), which could give the impression we are more screwed than we are; In other words, all of these happening is not a probable outcome (the article is not based on a statistical inference or climate model). However, as we climb up the \delta +C ladder, all of these effects/implications become increasingly probable. If you crank up \delta +C to +5C for instance, at least half if not all of these will occur (due to positive feedbacks eg albedo); I would not say we are beyond the hope of any action at this point. There are two sub-sets of conventional actions being discussed in the context of official orgs, eg UNFCCC at the moment: -Mitigation- reduce emissions directly,- eg turn off coal plants or plan to do so to dozens within the next few years, massively scale up solar adoption -Adaptation- take actions now to reduce devastation from past [inertial] and unavoidable future emissions, e.g, invest in heat-proof seeds and crops for certain tropical biomes Broadly, both are still possible. The former is notably more susceptible to political landmines and fossil fuel monopoly blocking than the latter, so a lot of climate scientists are urging folks to focus on the latter. Is it enough to save us? In terms of physics and climate systems--no, but metaphorically it could reduce pain like palliative care for the swathes of humanity, largely from tropical regions, who probably wont make it. The real heartbreaker here: mitigation is crucial to avoiding all the evil long-tails, but our poltical and economic systems seem allergic to it. How about just a little mitigation- eg lukewarm Paris implementation-- do we still miss some of the worst evils? Very unclear-- now we need to consult the statistical physicists. There's a third bin too which I would call pure engineering solutions; These could involve for instance, building plants to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere [1], seeding the oceans with certain chemicals to increase Co2 oceanic uptake [2], or straight up engineering the atmosphere [3]. I listed those in increasing order of possible risk/backfiring (complexity of the climate engineering operation). I invite anyone to clarify or add to which they think are feasible and infeasible amongst these; I listed this all for context, and not to advance a particular legal, moral, or political argument, although clearly there are a litany to be made. [1] http://www.climeworks.com/ http://www.climeworks.com/ [2] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/06/070608142214.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/06/070608142214.h... [3] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Stratospheric_aerosol_injection_(climate_engineering) https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Stratospheric_aerosol_injection_...
paulpauper 9y ago
If it is any solace, people have been predicting he end of the world for a very long time; all predictions thus far have failed.
- philbo 9y ago
  In geological terms, people have been predicting the end of the world for a very short time.
- ChrisLomont 9y ago
  They've never had the amount of data, the power of modern science, and computer modeling to show how it plays out, to back up the claims before.
  - paulpauper 9y ago
    but modern humans have better technology to possibly prevent, mitigate, and or delay crisis
    - tonyedgecombe 9y ago
      We don't seem to be deploying it that much, carbon emissions are continuing to rise.
    - Daishiman 9y ago
      And it's not enough. It just isn't.
    - ChrisLomont 9y ago
      The current estimates take that into account. Continually claiming "technology will solve it" eventually fails to basic laws of physics, and cannot be the solution to every problem.
- stupidcar 9y ago
  People claimed to know what caused sickness, and how to cure it, for a very long time. They claimed to know how the Earth was created. They claimed to know the fundamental elements which combined to form all matter. All of these pre-scientific theories were wrong. But we don't reject modern medicine, cosmology and atomic theory because of it. Humanity's history of doomsday predictions has no more bearing on the science of climate change than the former practice of leeching has on modern treatment of septicaemia.
coldpie 9y ago
It's especially frustrating, because I genuinely feel we could actually solve this problem with relatively minor economic impact if we wanted to. There are dozens of realistic proposals around for limiting warming to 2-3 degrees. We just need to choose to do them. Instead the world's leading nation continues to elect anti-science morons to positions of power, and so we do nothing but head down this road to destruction. The 2100s are going to be super ugly, and frankly I'm glad I won't be around to see them.

It sounds very grim, is there any chance/hope of us getting out of this situation or is it just beyond any action at this point? I get the feeling from the article we're doomed.

phkahler 9y ago

Don't worry, this is a pure climate alarmist. You can tell by this quote and others: "But no matter how well-informed you are, you are surely not alarmed enough." This person is literally saying we need to be alarmed. I really didn't understand the part where they said methane has 34 times the greenhouse effect as carbon over a period of time and then changes the timeframe to bring the multiplier put to 84 times. To me it felt a lot like when congress talks about deficits over a decade - well actually they talk about reductions over a decade so it's times 10 and increases are just annual. Anyway, there is a difference between methane and CO2 but to try to make it sound worse by talking about time is just another alarmist tactic. Regardless of your stance, this article is intended to be alarmist and even says so. IMHO it is not worthy of HN.

jackmott 9y ago
your post reminds me of when actual bad guys call the investigation against them a witch hunt.
cbennett 9y ago
>> This person is literally saying we need to be alarmed. And why shouldn't we (he) be doing that? Actually the author's goal is transparent, to shake up perception, to provide fodder in the imagination of folks to ultimately change how urgently we treat this in public forums. I thought this was a quite trenchant point (from the article): >>Over the past decades, our culture has gone apocalyptic with zombie movies and Mad Max dystopias, perhaps the collective result of displaced climate anxiety, and yet when it comes to contemplating real-world warming dangers, we suffer from an incredible failure of imagination. The reasons for that are many: the timid language of scientific probabilities, which the climatologist James Hansen once called “scientific reticence” in a paper chastising scientists for editing their own observations so conscientiously that they failed to communicate how dire the threat really was; the fact that the country is dominated by a group of technocrats who believe any problem can be solved and an opposing culture that doesn’t even see warming as a problem worth addressing; Back to you: >>I really didn't understand the part where they said methane has 34 times the greenhouse effect as carbon over a period of time and then changes the timeframe to bring the multiplier put to 84 times. I also thought this statement was scientifically unclear, but I think the author was trying to say that the rate of methane release increases, thus, the impact on climate systems multiplies relative to an equivalent release of CO2 in that period (100 yrs v 24 yrs). If someone else can mention exactly how he got from 34x to 84x though, id love to hear it; i didn't get it.. I do want to mention, however the 30x GHG effect number is not set in stone. In fact, depending on the rate of release, there may be 'force multipliers' depending on how (quickly) ecosystems can absorb and use these gases. Ominously, this multiplier seems to go up anyways as temps rise. [1] [1] http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v507/n7493/full/nature13164.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v507/n7493/full/nature1...
- epall 9y ago
  Methane deteriorates in the upper atmosphere fairly quickly, whereas CO2 sticks around. Methane is a dramatically better insulator than CO2, so in the short run its impact is higher, but when you stretch out the timescale, your methane is deteriorating while the CO2 sticks around, so the relative impact tilts slowly toward CO2.
  - cbennett 9y ago
    While you are right that methane wont naturally stick around for ever, and that it breaks down sooner than CO2. After googling around a little, I finally managed to find the source of the author's two numbers, and in the end I am more troubled than ever :/ >>At issue is the global warming potential (GWP), a number that allows experts to compare methane with its better-known cousin, carbon dioxide. While CO2 persists in the atmosphere for centuries, or even millennia, methane warms the planet on steroids for a decade or two before decaying to CO2. In those short decades, methane warms the planet by 86 times as much as CO2, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But policymakers typically ignore methane's warming potential over 20 years (GWP20) when assembling a nation's emissions inventory. Instead, they stretch out methane's warming impacts over a century, which makes the gas appear more benign than it is, experts said. The 100-year warming potential (GWP100) of methane is 34, according to the IPCC.[1] Doesn't 'reducing' (really, normalizing) the GWP for the ~80 yrs of the 100yr period (when it is not existing) seem sort of like an accounting trick? In other words, if 20GT of CH4 were released next year from the Bering Sea into the atmosphere (this would be spectacularly bad), the overall shock to the climate/atmosphere systems is precisely the same. [1]https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-bad-of-a-greenhouse-gas-is-methane/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-bad-of-a-gree...
nickthemagicman 9y ago
I got the same feeling. It's a pretty sensational article that leaves out a lot of details but simultaneously has some really good information.
- joloka 9y ago
  Sensationalism is not a firm basis for serious debate or serious action. If anything is going to save the human race, it is technology, but to hear these breathless alarmists talk, they are anti-technology, anti-progress, and apparently want us all to live stacked up in massive cities with no real quality of life at all. I tend to see this as either an exhibition of control-freak tendencies or simply full-on communism. Either way, it sucks.
  - Oletros 9y ago
    Full-communism? Who is advocating for that?
  - cbennett 9y ago
    >>to hear these breathless alarmists talk, they are anti-technology, anti-progress, and apparently want us all to live stacked up in massive cities with no real quality of life at all. I tend to see this as either an exhibition of control-freak tendencies or simply full-on communism. Where is the second half of the article where, after discussing at length many bad possible outcomes, the guy goes on to propose detailed social engineering schemes to solve the looming planetary crisis?? Either you did not read this article closely, or you are simply trolling. In my opinion, the real ending of the piece was marvelously open-ended. The author concludes by highlighting the irrational , but quintessential human, tendency to see some bright-side to the whole thing-- here are our climate scientists like Hansen and others, that know the most and see of everyone how screwed we are, still maintaining some faith we'll figure it out. And they didn't need 'communism', 'mega city' or some other nebulous concept to help them to that conclusion-- it was/is either habitual, or fantastical.
    - joloka 9y ago
joloka 9y ago
Why the downvote? The article is clearly concern trolling. Look, if you are worried about overpopulation, the US isn't your primary area of concern. The US is not overpopulated and probably never will be. Maybe some US cities are, but compared to China, India, and Indonesia, we have no overpopulation problem. I'm not sure that "being alarmed" is a good state of mind to be in--Americans suffer from crisis fatigue as it is. The human race isn't going to solve its problems without either leaving the earth or having a massive die-off. You first.
- Oletros 9y ago
  The article has nothing to do with overpopulation
  - joloka 9y ago
    Everything described by the fearmongers has to do with too much human activity. How is that not related to nearly 8 billion people on earth?
    - Oletros 9y ago
      Fearmongers? > Everything described by the fearmongers has to do with too much human activity Then should read better, because it is not the case. Or perhaps you can give us links to those "fearmongers". And by fearmongers youre not talking about climate scientists, isn't?
      - joloka 9y ago
        Yes, the article is blatant fear mongering. Every time a climate issue comes up it mentions human activity as the cause of all our problems. Outside of a Hail Mary technological solution, there is only one way to reduce human activity and that is to have fewer humans.
        Oletros 9y ago
        > Every time a climate issue comes up it mentions human activity as the cause of all our problems Still waiting any source, but I suppose youd don't have any

awjr 9y ago

It's the little things the author mentions, that impressed me. For example the prevalence of Malaria. A higher temperature can increase the lifecycle rate of the parasite by a factor of 10. I was also unaware that higher temperatures increased sport fouls and criminal behaviour.

phkahler 9y ago
>> I was also unaware that higher temperatures increased sport fouls and criminal behaviour. They also cause an increase in air traffic.

cbennett 9y ago

First off, the author is prodding people into action by scaring/alarming them. Thus, the entire point of this article is to highlight many of the bad long-tails (note I did not say WORST long tails, eg Clathrate Gun, or phytoplankton crash leading to global anoxia, because they almost instantly wipe out human life), which could give the impression we are more screwed than we are; In other words, all of these happening is not a probable outcome (the article is not based on a statistical inference or climate model). However, as we climb up the \delta +C ladder, all of these effects/implications become increasingly probable. If you crank up \delta +C to +5C for instance, at least half if not all of these will occur (due to positive feedbacks eg albedo); I would not say we are beyond the hope of any action at this point. There are two sub-sets of conventional actions being discussed in the context of official orgs, eg UNFCCC at the moment: -Mitigation- reduce emissions directly,- eg turn off coal plants or plan to do so to dozens within the next few years, massively scale up solar adoption -Adaptation- take actions now to reduce devastation from past [inertial] and unavoidable future emissions, e.g, invest in heat-proof seeds and crops for certain tropical biomes Broadly, both are still possible. The former is notably more susceptible to political landmines and fossil fuel monopoly blocking than the latter, so a lot of climate scientists are urging folks to focus on the latter. Is it enough to save us? In terms of physics and climate systems--no, but metaphorically it could reduce pain like palliative care for the swathes of humanity, largely from tropical regions, who probably wont make it. The real heartbreaker here: mitigation is crucial to avoiding all the evil long-tails, but our poltical and economic systems seem allergic to it. How about just a little mitigation- eg lukewarm Paris implementation-- do we still miss some of the worst evils? Very unclear-- now we need to consult the statistical physicists. There's a third bin too which I would call pure engineering solutions; These could involve for instance, building plants to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere [1], seeding the oceans with certain chemicals to increase Co2 oceanic uptake [2], or straight up engineering the atmosphere [3]. I listed those in increasing order of possible risk/backfiring (complexity of the climate engineering operation). I invite anyone to clarify or add to which they think are feasible and infeasible amongst these; I listed this all for context, and not to advance a particular legal, moral, or political argument, although clearly there are a litany to be made. [1] http://www.climeworks.com/ http://www.climeworks.com/ [2] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/06/070608142214.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/06/070608142214.h... [3] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Stratospheric_aerosol_injection_(climate_engineering) https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Stratospheric_aerosol_injection_...

paulpauper 9y ago

If it is any solace, people have been predicting he end of the world for a very long time; all predictions thus far have failed.

philbo 9y ago
In geological terms, people have been predicting the end of the world for a very short time.
ChrisLomont 9y ago
They've never had the amount of data, the power of modern science, and computer modeling to show how it plays out, to back up the claims before.
- paulpauper 9y ago
  but modern humans have better technology to possibly prevent, mitigate, and or delay crisis
  - tonyedgecombe 9y ago
    We don't seem to be deploying it that much, carbon emissions are continuing to rise.
  - Daishiman 9y ago
    And it's not enough. It just isn't.
  - ChrisLomont 9y ago
    The current estimates take that into account. Continually claiming "technology will solve it" eventually fails to basic laws of physics, and cannot be the solution to every problem.
stupidcar 9y ago
People claimed to know what caused sickness, and how to cure it, for a very long time. They claimed to know how the Earth was created. They claimed to know the fundamental elements which combined to form all matter. All of these pre-scientific theories were wrong. But we don't reject modern medicine, cosmology and atomic theory because of it. Humanity's history of doomsday predictions has no more bearing on the science of climate change than the former practice of leeching has on modern treatment of septicaemia.

coldpie 9y ago

It's especially frustrating, because I genuinely feel we could actually solve this problem with relatively minor economic impact if we wanted to. There are dozens of realistic proposals around for limiting warming to 2-3 degrees. We just need to choose to do them. Instead the world's leading nation continues to elect anti-science morons to positions of power, and so we do nothing but head down this road to destruction. The 2100s are going to be super ugly, and frankly I'm glad I won't be around to see them.