8 ms·

I feel like this article underestimates the difficulty of stopping climate change. Would China have remained poor, if in the 1980's a better anti-climate-change

by lacker 8y ago

I feel like this article underestimates the difficulty of stopping climate change. Would China have remained poor, if in the 1980's a better anti-climate-change treaty had been signed? Would the world have discovered better clean technology? There is a tendency to assume that treaties just solve the problem. I suspect that a different treaty would have failed, just like current negotiations are failing, because of the immense cost of slowing climate change.

Aloha 8y ago
I feel much the same. I think the concerns about climate change are wildly overstated for the developed world. There are some more concerns when subsistence farming is the primary way of living, but humans (and humanity) adapt, and we adapt with great alacrity.
- throwaway5752 8y ago
  "concerns about climate change are wildly overstated for the developed world" Can I ask you why you think that is the case? Why would industrialized farming and the food supply chain that feeds the developed world do better?
  - stale2002 8y ago
    The simple answer is because modern day society has a lot of money, and decades in the future we are going to have even MORE money. Compound interest is a hell of a drug, and GDP growth. is showing no signs of slowing. What I mean by this is that we as a society arent fully exploiting our land even CLOSE to as much as it could be. Our food production system operates in the normal economic model of marginal costs. We could produce way more food if we wanted, it would just cost more. And in the future, if global warming has reduced our food production capacity, we wouldn't run out of food. The only thing that would do is force us to use these more expensive methods of food production. And we have more than enough money now, and definitely in the future, to pay for it. Food is a small percentage of everyone's paychecks. Costs going up by 20% doesn't mean much.
    - throwaway5752 8y ago
      What are those methods of production that will feed 8B people in a world that is 5 deg C warmer? I think you are just hand-waving around hard, unsolved, and possibly intractable problems.
      - stale2002 8y ago
        Firstly, 5 degrees C is a much larger degree of warming than anyone is predicting for any of their worst case scenarios in the next 200 years. So 200 years from now, the problem will likely sound laughable. But to answer your question anyway, yes I think that we could solve that problem today with current technology. There are a couple reasons why. For 1, increasing temperatures also opens up unused land in cold places, that werent bring used before. Potentially, it might produce MORE arable land than it removes, once we get all the infrastructure up, of course. And 2, it's not about "technology". There are tons of land that we "could" be using for food right now. We aren't using that land, because it is mountainous or has a bad climate, and would therefore produce lower yields. But just because a mountainous area or a bad climate produces low yeilds doesn't mean that it would produce literally 0 food. It would produce SOME food, and the only reason we aren't using it now is because it is more expensive. So the answer is the tons and tons of land that we aren't using for farming right now, but we could be using.
        throwaway5752 8y ago
        https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/spmsspm-projections-of.html https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/spmsspm...
- titzer 8y ago
  Well, AC does help. But fast forward 100, 200, 500 years. After the food riots, the protests, political meltdown, the scarcity of clean water, the wars, the starvation and pandemics, the loss of coastal cities, the collapse of ocean ecosystems, loss of the ice caps, forests, deserts spreading, we'll be lucky if 10 million people survive living...underground.
andrewjl 8y ago
I agree with your assessment on the difficulty of the problem. Where I differ is my (somewhat optimistic, admittedly) view that an existential climate crisis is the kind of exogenous shock needed to force humanity to cooperate against a "common enemy" so to speak. We've had models before with the CFC / Montreal Treaty, and on a national scale with WW2, and the Sputnik / Apollo missions. There are very few problems humanity cannot solve by coordinated effort. The trick is to force that coordination, and I don't see that happening in the near future.
WhompingWindows 8y ago
I do agree - climate change is a massive problem with thousands of facets, trillions of dollars at stake, and stakeholders including everyone from all global citizens, all global creatures/environments, and all businesses/governments. It's truly the biggest crisis we've ever faced as a species. In my view, on rich vs poor nations, if China handled its emissions much earlier and more aggressively, we'd still have massive historical emissions and massive per capita emissions in North America and Europe. Rich people tend to decry those not using renewables and not transitioning quickly, however it's easier to transition/decarbonize with EVs and solar PV and energy efficiency when your economy is already developed. Long commutes, western diets, leisure travel, copious heating and air conditioning, and many other factors are not present in other countries which still have "dirty" economies with longer ways to go to both energize their entire populace AND to clean up said energy sources. So, westerners should look in the mirror before they criticize those people just getting electricity or their first car in the last decade. The rays of hope I see for climate change come from the potential for energizing nations to skip over total fossil fuel dependence in their industrialization and modernization schemes. Furthermore, there are bright spots in electric buses (huge wave of these will come in next decade), in renewable deployments (~2/3 of capacity additions in recent years in USA), and in overall business movement towards low carbon solutions. While national and state policy-makers could move more quickly, surely, there is a lot of innovation occurring in the private and local levels. Long term, even if we decarbonize very quickly due to technological innovations and S-curves, I foresee needing to use environmental engineering techniques to cool the planet. While risky, I think the level of economic and societal harm from the heating/expansions of the oceans and further ice melt will necessitate some sort of artificial cooling of the planet. While some may deem this as unethical or playing God with our planet, IMO we've already irrevocably changed our planet's heat content. We need to not only pull our foots of the accelerator, reducing emissions of GH gases, but we also need to put our foots on the brake, somehow cooling the planet and/or sequestering previous emissions. If we don't take these latter steps, no amount of decarbonization will prevent catastrophes of hurricanes, fires, flooding, desertification, and sea-level-rise in the next countless generations.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

by lacker 8y ago

Aloha 8y ago

I feel much the same. I think the concerns about climate change are wildly overstated for the developed world. There are some more concerns when subsistence farming is the primary way of living, but humans (and humanity) adapt, and we adapt with great alacrity.

throwaway5752 8y ago
"concerns about climate change are wildly overstated for the developed world" Can I ask you why you think that is the case? Why would industrialized farming and the food supply chain that feeds the developed world do better?
- stale2002 8y ago
  The simple answer is because modern day society has a lot of money, and decades in the future we are going to have even MORE money. Compound interest is a hell of a drug, and GDP growth. is showing no signs of slowing. What I mean by this is that we as a society arent fully exploiting our land even CLOSE to as much as it could be. Our food production system operates in the normal economic model of marginal costs. We could produce way more food if we wanted, it would just cost more. And in the future, if global warming has reduced our food production capacity, we wouldn't run out of food. The only thing that would do is force us to use these more expensive methods of food production. And we have more than enough money now, and definitely in the future, to pay for it. Food is a small percentage of everyone's paychecks. Costs going up by 20% doesn't mean much.
  - throwaway5752 8y ago
    What are those methods of production that will feed 8B people in a world that is 5 deg C warmer? I think you are just hand-waving around hard, unsolved, and possibly intractable problems.
    - stale2002 8y ago
      Firstly, 5 degrees C is a much larger degree of warming than anyone is predicting for any of their worst case scenarios in the next 200 years. So 200 years from now, the problem will likely sound laughable. But to answer your question anyway, yes I think that we could solve that problem today with current technology. There are a couple reasons why. For 1, increasing temperatures also opens up unused land in cold places, that werent bring used before. Potentially, it might produce MORE arable land than it removes, once we get all the infrastructure up, of course. And 2, it's not about "technology". There are tons of land that we "could" be using for food right now. We aren't using that land, because it is mountainous or has a bad climate, and would therefore produce lower yields. But just because a mountainous area or a bad climate produces low yeilds doesn't mean that it would produce literally 0 food. It would produce SOME food, and the only reason we aren't using it now is because it is more expensive. So the answer is the tons and tons of land that we aren't using for farming right now, but we could be using.
      - throwaway5752 8y ago
        https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/spmsspm-projections-of.html https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/spmsspm...
titzer 8y ago
Well, AC does help. But fast forward 100, 200, 500 years. After the food riots, the protests, political meltdown, the scarcity of clean water, the wars, the starvation and pandemics, the loss of coastal cities, the collapse of ocean ecosystems, loss of the ice caps, forests, deserts spreading, we'll be lucky if 10 million people survive living...underground.

andrewjl 8y ago

I agree with your assessment on the difficulty of the problem. Where I differ is my (somewhat optimistic, admittedly) view that an existential climate crisis is the kind of exogenous shock needed to force humanity to cooperate against a "common enemy" so to speak. We've had models before with the CFC / Montreal Treaty, and on a national scale with WW2, and the Sputnik / Apollo missions. There are very few problems humanity cannot solve by coordinated effort. The trick is to force that coordination, and I don't see that happening in the near future.

WhompingWindows 8y ago

I do agree - climate change is a massive problem with thousands of facets, trillions of dollars at stake, and stakeholders including everyone from all global citizens, all global creatures/environments, and all businesses/governments. It's truly the biggest crisis we've ever faced as a species. In my view, on rich vs poor nations, if China handled its emissions much earlier and more aggressively, we'd still have massive historical emissions and massive per capita emissions in North America and Europe. Rich people tend to decry those not using renewables and not transitioning quickly, however it's easier to transition/decarbonize with EVs and solar PV and energy efficiency when your economy is already developed. Long commutes, western diets, leisure travel, copious heating and air conditioning, and many other factors are not present in other countries which still have "dirty" economies with longer ways to go to both energize their entire populace AND to clean up said energy sources. So, westerners should look in the mirror before they criticize those people just getting electricity or their first car in the last decade. The rays of hope I see for climate change come from the potential for energizing nations to skip over total fossil fuel dependence in their industrialization and modernization schemes. Furthermore, there are bright spots in electric buses (huge wave of these will come in next decade), in renewable deployments (~2/3 of capacity additions in recent years in USA), and in overall business movement towards low carbon solutions. While national and state policy-makers could move more quickly, surely, there is a lot of innovation occurring in the private and local levels. Long term, even if we decarbonize very quickly due to technological innovations and S-curves, I foresee needing to use environmental engineering techniques to cool the planet. While risky, I think the level of economic and societal harm from the heating/expansions of the oceans and further ice melt will necessitate some sort of artificial cooling of the planet. While some may deem this as unethical or playing God with our planet, IMO we've already irrevocably changed our planet's heat content. We need to not only pull our foots of the accelerator, reducing emissions of GH gases, but we also need to put our foots on the brake, somehow cooling the planet and/or sequestering previous emissions. If we don't take these latter steps, no amount of decarbonization will prevent catastrophes of hurricanes, fires, flooding, desertification, and sea-level-rise in the next countless generations.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]