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The world is losing the war against climate change

241 points by sethbannon 8y ago

317070 8y ago
Legitimate question: will there be a point where we speak about this war in the past tense, as in `The world lost the war against climate change'? How do we determine that turning point?
- WhompingWindows 8y ago
  There was an article in the NYTimes stating that we have already lost the war, but since climate changes in a continuous and highly complex fashion, I personally doubt there'll be an agreed-upon point where things changed from not lost -> lost.
- imgabe 8y ago
  Based on the wars on drugs and terror: no.
  - ebbv 8y ago
    Not exactly the same because at some point climate change will make the planet uninhabitable.
    - pas 8y ago
      How? What does that mean? Habitability is not a binary thing.
      - Tade0 8y ago
        Actually, it is. For most mammals a temperature over around 31C at 100% humidity is lethal after no more than six hours of exposure. Go beyond that and everyone dies.
        crankylinuxuser 8y ago
        You're right to a point. The hotter it gets on average, the faster the less fit die due to various heat related reasons. Once it hits 31c@100% relative humidity, land mammals die. So it's on a rolling scale up to 31C. At or past, yeah its a binary cliff.
        PeterisP 8y ago
        I haven't seen any projected warming scenario where it'd be 31C everywhere. There's a gradual change in habitability as the habitable zone becomes smaller and smaller. Perhaps our descendants will be farming Antarctica.
        pas 8y ago
        Sure, but will humans just sit idle by and wait for extinction, or will they do whatever it is necessary to keep the ecosystem from boiling away? Of course it depends on how severe the problem is, but in general we have the means to affect climate. (Solar shade comes to mind and large scale GHG capture.)
    - gus_massa 8y ago
      Even the worst case models predict that Earth will be habitable for humans for a long time. IIRC the worst that can happen in the next 100 years is that the sea will raise a few foots and flood some costal cities, change the sites where you can cultivate some food and cause hunger in some places, more floods and drought in many places, and kill many animals and plants. The worst case prediction is a huge huge huge disaster but it is still faraway from the point it is uninhabitable for us (and uninhabitable for roaches (and uninhabitable for bacteria)).
- pas 8y ago
  History is written by the victors. However, we already lost it - in a very real sense - because we failed to convince enough humans that it's important, that they ought to demand tougher legislation, policies, treaties, mandates, cleaner air, better waste management, more energy efficiency, instant order of nuclear and renewable plants to phase out CO2 producing energy sources as soon as possible, etc. We should be building 20km long hydro T-s, electrifying more and more railways, capturing as much emission as we can (chemical plants, big freighter ships, etc.) Instead we are building walls on borders, blabbering about secession, killing/jailing/maiming/kidnapping/torturing each other in an organized fashion all around the planet. We're simply late to efficiently manage a lot of things. But humanity is very likely to survive, so in that sense as long as someone can ask that question we don't have to use past tense.
- btrettel 8y ago
  I wonder if future generations will think people were even serious about solving the problem. In this respect the war was lost long ago. The vast majority of people who believe climate change will have large negative consequences make no major changes to their lifestyles. As someone who rides bike for transportation largely to save money and stay in shape (I think climate change is a lost cause), the environmental crowd seems to think I am doing something saint-like. But it really isn't anywhere near as difficult as they believe. They rarely adopt cycling to work, and at least part of the reason why seems to me that their environmentalism is not entirely sincere. This is speculation, but I think most people stop at signalling that climate change is bad. They rarely take effective action.
  - eropple 8y ago
    A large part of it is that it is a collective action problem. If you want to talk about "effective action"? You're talking about shutting down coal plants, not going after the man or woman on the street. A person needing a car to get to work is, both in real and proportional terms, causing overwhelmingly less damage to the environment than industrial-scale polluters. If everybody who could switch to a bike instead of a car (which is fewer people, at least in America, than you might realize), you would see a blip on the graph. Calling into question the sincerity of people concerned about climate change but also concerned about actually getting to work on time and not stinking and getting fired because their bosses don't care is just some nasty, uncharitable stuff. And it's also counterproductive. It's the "but Al Gore flies in jets!" thing all over again, discrediting what state actors need to be doing because of the actions of private citizens. Don't do that. It's bad for you and bad for us.
    - Retric 8y ago
      Commuting using a 50+MPG vehicle is an option for the vast majority of humanity and would make a huge difference. So, it's not like the average person has zero options. People drive ~3.22 trillion miles in the US using 142.85 billion gallons = ~22MPG so a 50% reduction is completely viable. Further the first 50% reduction is the lowest hanging fruit. We don't need to get to 100% to make a huge difference over time.
- Tade0 8y ago
  Look up "wet bulb temperature". ELI5: if the temperature of a wet thermometer(which would normally be colder due to evaporation) in a given place goes over around 31C this area becomes uninhabitable for almost all mammals. Burning all the known fossil fuels would be enough to make it so for some places on earth, but the big unknown is what about the other sources of GHG's like thawing permafrost or clathrates lying under the sea?
- SamUK96 8y ago
  Hard to say. I don't think there will be a well-defined turning point. The thing is, the climate changes on long scales, and humans only pay attention to the immediate details, like children analyzing the stock market. The climate will get _gradually_ worse, and people will be forced to migrate north where the environment is more livable. This is obviously what is happening now, and isn't fully sustainable. A little patch of green (Europe) can't feed the world, in slightly over-the-top terms. However, I will say this. If anyone has ever been in a large storm, or a drought, you'll be shockingly aware at how quickly a small announcement about "sold-out water" or "store stock issues" turns into absolute, utter, pure, _pandemonium_. Once _that_ happens often enough, I think people will begin to admit that we lost _something_, for sure. To answer your question though, it's generally believed that it will be a gradually-growing sense of despair and dread, and a growing struggle. Migration into the northern hemisphere as it slowly becomes the last livable place on Earth. Ever played musical chairs in the later stages of the game? Yeah. Honestly, it's remarkably similar to the mechanics behind the French Revolution, but instead of just rich vs poor, it's some kind of crazy triadic chaos-war between rich, poor, and nature, all made more ironic that nukes have a triadic motif.
- mmphosis 8y ago
  War is in the past. The war on drugs. The war on whatever. We are not waging war. War doesn't work. War is what has exacerbated the problem. We needn't dwell on the past but maybe learn from it. I agree that wording is important. Talking about climate changes is important. We need an effort, perhaps greater than the war effort in world war 2 to make the changes necessary because whether we do nothing or make needed changes for the better, change is coming. There is no turning point. The Great Turning is a shift from the Industrial Growth Society to a life-sustaining civilization.
- mattygh 8y ago
  It's all about changing the goalposts. We have probably lost the war against 1.5 deg C climate change, as even if we were to freeze emissions now, I believe we would hit that (need fact check on that). We are currently losing the war against 2 deg C climate change. The next war is against 3 or 4 deg C climate change. All of these milestones have severe consequences more significant than the last, so all are worth fighting.
- aurailious 8y ago
  We have almost certainly already lost. The challenge now is to adapt to the change. Paris was not about bringing global temp change to 0C, just limiting it to 2C. Fortunately planet Earth won't be bothered by us too much. The cycles of ice ages we are in will "correct" most anything we do. The loss of biodiversity will probably be our only legacy.
  - bmarkovic 8y ago
    Biodiversity will recover on a planetary timescale. Our civilization will probably be lost tho.
- jandrese 8y ago
  We've lost the war when everyone is dead.
  - rabidrat 8y ago
    I say we've lost the war when global civilization is over. People can survive Mad Max style but that's a colossal failure in my book.
- carry_bit 8y ago
  When we accept the change instead of fight to prevent/reverse it.
angersock 8y ago
We have nuclear power, but people are bad at evaluating risks, so here we are.
- ythn 8y ago
  > people are bad at evaluating risks People are easily emotionally manipulated. Show some pictures of cancer or disfigured babies and you can get everyone to rail against nuclear. Media does it all the time to skew our priorities. Think medical malpractice and healthcare is a big source of death in the US? Think again, bump stocks and crappy 3d printed plastic guns are the types of killers you should be worried about according to the media. Rinse and repeat.
- 21 8y ago
  We were told that Fukushima will NEVER happen. So yeah, some people are very bad at evaluating risks.
  - losvedir 8y ago
    Well, what happened? Last I heard the outcome is some land lost, no immediate deaths, and about 100 deaths due to cancer over the next 50 years. A tragedy, but not apocalyptic. (And minuscule compared to the deaths and destruction from the earthquake/tsunami itself.)
    - 21 8y ago
      > A private think tank says the total cost of the Fukushima disaster could reach ¥70 trillion ($626 billion), or more than three times the government’s latest estimate. But I guess you'll say that $626 bil is just 15% of Japan's GDP, totally manageable over the long term. I'm sure the communities where future nuclear plants are to be build will love this argument: "if disaster strikes, remember, it's for the greater good"
      - carry_bit 8y ago
        What's the cost of rising sea levels over the long term?
okket 8y ago
I don't know if the "war against" theme fits here. There is no enemy but ourselves.
- bhhaskin 8y ago
  I agree with you, as it also implies that we can shift the blame one else.
- the_cat_kittles 8y ago
  well, the enemy is clearly those of us who decided its a hoax, or that it doesn't matter.
- strainer 8y ago
  Agreed, describing essential struggles and challenges as wars, promotes the ruthless traumatic destructiveness which actual war necessitates. The idea of making war should be repulsive, sadly it is freely glorified and normalised - and made.
- aurailious 8y ago
  How many times have we fought wars not against ourselves?
- codeafin 8y ago
  The war is between those who wish to act on it, and those who wish to ignore it.
  - rcMgD2BwE72F 8y ago
    What other title would you give it instead, then?
  - moduspol 8y ago
    Framing it as binary serves only political ends. At best, you could frame it as "people willing to act sufficiently to meaningfully combat global warming" and "everyone else," but the former group is far smaller than "those who wish to act on it." Put plainly: It will take far more dramatic action than most climate alarmists advocate to even have a measurable impact on (let alone solve) global warming. The opposing side isn't just "those who ignore it," it's most people who rationally evaluate policy claiming to be capable of a significant effect.
PunchTornado 8y ago
is there a proof somewhere that these wild fires are linked to climate change? For example the really bad one in Greece happened because someone decided to burn some wood. (I'm convinced that climate change is real and we're responsible)
- artimaeis 8y ago
  I'll see if I can get some citations later -- but the general idea of wildfires and climate change is that climate change has caused more intense periods of drought in ares that haven't experienced those sorts of conditions before. As such - when wildfires start (regardless of origin of the fire), they tend to spread more rapidly and more intensely.
- btrettel 8y ago
  There is no conclusive proof. Likely climate change is a factor, but forest management practices are as well. I can recall reading that not allowing forest fires to occur in the past can lead to an increase in dead plant matter on the ground, which makes future forest fires worse.
- Arcten 8y ago
  I haven't found an academic source for this, but the suggestion is that even though triggers for fires may be unrelated, the scope and intensity of the fires are intensified due to the effects of climate change. This article discusses some of this background https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/11/science/climate-change-forest-fires.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/11/science/climate-change-fo...
- fabricexpert 8y ago
  Trying to link individual, recent news events to climate change is generally a bad idea. You're taking a long term term trend (climate change) and comparing it with short term extreme events - there may or may not be a direct link, it's hard to say. This makes it easy for climate change deniers to give cherrypicked examples of outliers that tune to emotional responses, rather than factual evidence. It's better to look at overall trends over time to see the impact of climate change, e.g. are we getting more of the extreme weather scenarios? Yes. Are temperatures globally going up? Yes. Are sea levels rising? Yes. Are the polar ice caps melting? Yes. etc.
konschubert 8y ago
Do we know what will happen if we keep burning all fossil we can find, at today's rate?
- andy_ppp 8y ago
  Sort of... https://edition.cnn.com/2015/05/21/opinions/sutter-6-degrees-climate/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2015/05/21/opinions/sutter-6-degrees... I worry that all the sink holes appearing in Russia are massive methane deposits which are probably are not factored into estimates. It being this hot in Europe and specifically the UK for this long is insane.
  - chosenbreed 8y ago
    Yep. That could be a bit of a problem. The land mass affected appears to be huge...
WhompingWindows 8y ago
If you look at global power sector emissions from 1998 to 2018, you'll see that while we have dramatically improved upon the energy intensity (energy/capita) and even are making improvements on carbon intensity (carbon/capita), but the sad reality is this: we are still using around 35% coal power in 2018, the same as we did in 1998. And the power sector is the easiest sector to decarbonize, by the way. If you look at electric vehicles, even if we had the most rapid, insane ramp-up that's beyond even Elon's crazy predictions, we'd still have massive fossil fuel use for non vehicle uses of petroleum for chemical industries, airplanes, plastic production, and for the numerous numbers of legacy cars that will be leftover that are not EV. We need massive innovation across all our uses of fossil fuel. We can not rest on our laurels, saying PV and wind are so cheap now. They are still around 4% of total energy consumption, and when you factor in the decline of nuclear and relative decline of hydropower in the ever-increasing industrial energy base, we see that fossil fuels are basically the same % of our energy mix as they were before 2000. For an energy realist, I recommend checking out Vaclav Smil, who has long been predicting 21st century as the century of natural gas, and who has been skeptical of renewables taking over instantly. It will take us until the 22nd century to truly decarbonize, and by then the seas will have risen over Miami and Shanghai on a regular basis. It's a truly scary future. Get innovating, in your personal lives and in your professional careers, everyone!
- the_cat_kittles 8y ago
  i dont understand. you completely omit laws in your suggested solution. we need to pass laws that prevent businesses from fucking everything up worse than they already have. you can innovate all you want, but i think you should also not elect people who are fucking STUPID about climate change.
  - chosenbreed 8y ago
    > but i think you should also not elect people who are fucking STUPID about climate change. Sure...but that would require getting enough people who are not "fucking STUPID about climate" to vote appropriately :-)
  - 8y ago
acd 8y ago
We should switch to a carbon/anti pollution based crypto currency that is mined in a earth friendly way. All goods and transports and all other pollution is such a system should be accounted for. As it now with the current economic system it is too easy to offset the cost on somebody else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons
- kang 8y ago
  solar mining in space and beaming the results to earth https://twitter.com/peterktodd/status/897631806899597312 https://twitter.com/peterktodd/status/897631806899597312
  - samfriedman 8y ago
    I think orbital solar collection is interesting, but I'm not sure why it needs to be used to mine BitCoin: can't we just use the energy to power a microwave beam to collectors on the surface? Not sure what the economics of that is vs. the cost of launching a geostationary satellite though.
  - DoctorOetker 8y ago
    there is no fundamental reason cryptocurrency "mining" should be energy-intensive, it was & is merely an unnecessary side-effect of the first cryptocurrency (Bitcoin) and its spin-off's / copycats. Sadly a large fraction of the crypto proponent "community" misinterprets the unnecessary energy expenditure as the source of "value", while the majority of the crypto opponents similarily consider it an unavoidable side-effect of cryptocurrencies and hence an argument against cryptocurrencies in general... check out the Algorand papers to learn more
Reason077 8y ago
Is there even a "war" against climate change? If there is, it's barely gotten started. For the most part, politicians are at best apathetic and at worst, actively hostile to the idea of "fighting" such a war.
- anoplus 8y ago
  From the activism I follow in my country in last decade, I learned that politicians are apathetic, and a good activism is needed to make them move. That's how lazy governments work. So I think until we fix governments performance we need to engage in efficient activism. What is efficient activism? This question interests me.
  - TOGoS 8y ago
    Workplace organizing. It's a lot easier to get people to fight for something when they know they'll benefit from it directly (via higher wages, better working conditions, etc). A unified working class is the most effective tool we have for fighting countering the power of bug business, who would rather let the world burn than stop building pipelines. Most people don't like what's happening to the world -- they just feel powerless to stop it. So let's change that.
    - a_tractor 8y ago
      We already have "the power." People just don't want to accept the responsibility of their own contribution to the demand of said pipelines. While big business doesn't want to stop building pipelines, nobody wants to stop buying whatever comes out of them, either. It would be fun to see you try to convince the "working class" of the developing world to stop what they are doing and cease their from-behind pursuit of material wealth. You could try to bribe them but I'm not sure if that is what I would call sustainable. With "workplace organizing" the benefits are immediate and obvious, and the eventual consequences, negative or otherwise, are not. Kind of thing where a wage increase is obvious, but the eventual outsourcing of your job for cheaper labor, or the eventual bankruptcy of the business when the pensions are due, is not. We face the opposite problem here, since the effort involved (lifestyle changes) and the negative effects (higher taxes) are immediately obvious, while the benefits are neither immediate nor obvious. Its more like you are trying to convince people to demand lower wages... The problem itself (specific to AGW) is not even immediately obvious, apparently you need PhDs from multiple disciplines to understand the problem or you are dismissed with the Courtier's reply, leaving you reliant on an Appeal to Authority. That isn't necessarily wrong, but that is what you are dealing with. Manifesting change then depends on establishing complete faith in that authority or consensus, and, in contrast to a pay raise, the only thing you can utilize as motivation for change is guilt and fear. Then you have to be ensure that bad actors won't try to manipulate that fear via groupthink for less noble purposes... We don't have a great track record for that. Anyway, I sort of think the seemingly fanatical calls for massive top-down solutions to this problem tends to do more to defeat or demoralize individual or bottom-up efforts, as you might promote, and seems designed to evoke increased permissiveness to those who seek mainly to centralize and expand corporate and government power.
nonbel 8y ago
"War against" ("War on") seems to mean it is a never-ending boondoggle that, at best, wastes a bunch of resources. Is there any example of these "wars" being a success? The three that come to mind are: War on drugs: fail War on cancer: fail War on poverty: fail Why is the economist trying to link climate change to this?
- SamUK96 8y ago
  War on cancer has been...not completely a fail? Certainly made harder by profiteering, but, y'know. Also, I find "War on poverty" hilarious. Like a country saying it's "making crime illegal".
  - nonbel 8y ago
    The war on cancer is a total fail in my book. They surrendered when they started calling it "many diseases", meaning there will never be a "cure for cancer" by definition.
    - heyitsguay 8y ago
      Cancer is many diseases, that all happen to be characterized by uncontrolled cell growth. A "cure for cancer" is like a "cure for fever".
      - nonbel 8y ago
        Responded here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17698877 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17698877
    - jandrese 8y ago
      Huh? You consider it a fail because we learned that there are many different kinds of Cancers? Yes a "one magic pill" option will probably never exist, but we can chip away at all forms of Cancer until they all have a cure. But realistically, this is not a war I think we can win in my lifetime. It's much bigger than people may have originally thought.
Sol- 8y ago
Was there a serious attempt to begin with? Yes, there are some efficiency gains and in some developed nations CO2 emissions seemed to stagnate, but much of that seems incidental (for instance partly caused by the Great Recession 10 years ago) and rarely part of a coordinated effort. Though I guess you can at least partly credit the rise of renewable energy like Solar to some government programs. Wonder how much faster the effort would have been if we had an actual cap-and-trade system that encompasses the global economy instead of the lackluster attempts which aren't legally binding, only cover limited industries or have an oversupply of emission certificates to render the system useless (like the European one). But it's pointless to ponder about that. It's not there's a lack of ideas regarding possible solutions, it's a just lack of foresight by humanity. We probably can't even blame previous generations, because we would have acted the same in their situation.
- maze-le 8y ago
  Its not that much, but it's a start: https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/international/negotiations/paris_en https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/international/negotiatio...
biznickman 8y ago
Yet another article that emphasizes how absolutely garbage our politicians are. They are also actively complicit in Trump's war against environmental protection and the continued apathy that began before Trump. The problem is that environmental driven campaigns have been incredibly ineffective. Perhaps it's our responsibility to generate noise the same level of that with Net Neutrality?
rc_bhg 8y ago
Climate Change has the Republican army on its side destroying the environment at any chance they get.
cletus 8y ago
So in the last month or so I stumbled across SFIA [1]. This guy has produced 150+ videos about futuristic topics but grounded in science. Everything from how to get into space cheaper to the Fermi Paradox to Black Hole civilizations. Anyway, one thing I like about it is the optimism. This guy is genuinely optimistic about the future. And he has pretty good reason. Like this planet can realistically be home to trillions of people with not much more tech than we have right now. But a recurring topic is the subject of fusion and how much of a game-changer it will be if we can do it in any kind of economic fashion. Now I'd previously somewhat dismissed this because of the naive view that it is free energy. Well the fuel might essentially be free (even that depends on what the fuel is; deuterium is common enough to essentially be free, Helium-3 not so much) but the plant itself costs money, has a power output, requires maintenance and we still need power lines and the like. But he points out some of the reasons why this is a complete game changer and why certain problems simply cease to be. One of these is the greenhouse gas problem. Why? Because as soon as you have energy cheaper than hydrocarbons you simply use your power to make hydrocarbons from the CO2 in the atmosphere. This is pretty simple chemistry and we can do that now. There's just no point because we'd be powering the process largely with hydrocarbons (solar and wind notwithstanding). I should also point out that I remain somewhat skeptical about nuclear fusion being economic because of the neutron problem (in that neutrons quickly destroy the container). This works fine for stars, not so well for superconducting magnets. But (as Isaac Arthur points out) you don't even need fusion for some of these rosier outcomes. You just need cheaper than what we have now and there's good reason to think that solar may get us there, particularly if we can mass produce solar collectors in low Earth orbit (these produce about seven times the power of Earth bound collectors). And there's actually pretty good reasons to be optimistic about that. The human condition is one of exaggeration, unfortunately. Namely that both fear and optimism tend to be overstated. You see this in markets all the time. The counterargument against radical changes to combat climate change tends to revolve around the idea that markets will eventually solve that problem (for those that admit there's even a problem at any rate). And it makes me somewhat uncomfortable to admit that this idea probably isn't 100% wrong. [1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZFipeZtQM5CKUjx6grh54g https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZFipeZtQM5CKUjx6grh54g
- mattygh 8y ago
ryanx435 8y ago
"Climate change" is the athiests' version of Armageddon.
- batteryhorse 8y ago
  It's true. Climate change really is modern day religion. A volcanic eruption is more likely to cause the climate to change. The war on climate change suggests that humans are capable of preventing a volcano from erupting. The poles are shifting as well. Pollution is a separate issue, of course we should keep everything clean, but when the climate stops changing, that probably means the planet is dead, like Mars (setting up a colony on Mars makes absolutely no sense either)
  - DoctorOetker 8y ago
    the number of volcanos erupting in some interval (say 10 years) is large enough that you can roughly treat it as a constant source of CO2, but at the same time the volcano is emitting igneous rock (i.e. the magma with CO2 removed), which will reabsorb the CO2 over a very long timespan... so yes volcanos emit large amounts of CO2, and commensurate amounts of CO2 absorbing igneous rock, in geological timescales they cancel
- sctb 8y ago
  We said we'd ban you if you kept posting like this, so we have.
  - ryanx435 8y ago
    9 years of user history and banned for an analogy that goes against hn group think. Lol
alkonaut 8y ago
So we need a quick plan B. The required goals from nations won’t be met and people won’t change lifestyle to do something about it. We need to also do something that ensures warming stops without any sacrifice made by people (other than taxe to fund the massive programs) Maybe we could turn things around in 10 or 30 years but the damage done may either be irreversible or runaway. So a short term solution that ensures no temperature increase for the next 30 years would be great. But what is it? Carbon capture? Artificial Whitening of oceans? Is there any solution that is even remotely viable?
- rcMgD2BwE72F 8y ago
  We haven't done $%# to try and execute Plan A i.e. reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It's the cheapest and easiest plan by far, so why do you think we can afford to switch to some fanciful plan B? Most alternative are either distractions by/for those who can't accept the harsh reality, Get-rich-quick schemes by some industrialists or science-fiction by/for those who prefer to dream of a nice future rather than doing something now. "The American way of life is not up for negotiations. Period." -- The People In Charge.
  - alkonaut 8y ago
    > It's the cheapest and easiest plan by far, It’s the simplest plan, but I’ll argue we are seeing it’s pretty difficult as it requires changing the behavior of a lot of people, if even just a little abd/or changing policies of a lot of countries. I’m not saying plan A should be somehow abandoned or slowed (so perhaps B is a bad name because it’s typically used when A is abandoned) But it should be complemented. We should also investigate the stupidly sci-fi get-rich-quick (or perhaps lose weight fast?) schemes. Technological solutions might at least buy some time for the slow change we are seeing in behavior and policy. And yes, I realize there is a hazard that some of these schemes risk giving an impression that the problem is being solved, and plan A isn’t necessary. That can’t happen. I also realize that anything other than simply limiting emissions is a complex and expensive plan, but even a complex and expensive plan is better than a simple and cheap plan that is politically impossible.
desireco42 8y ago
Maybe instead of going to war, we should come to peace with our environment. I think mindset is important in looking into this issue.
safgasCVS 8y ago
The article fees cheaply alarmist to me. Its incredibly difficult to make good predictions even 2-3 years into the future let alone whats going to happen globally decades from now. We have only started to see the effects of global warming but the really bad stuff has yet to happen - and when it does the reaction wont be linear as whats being projected here.
vowelless 8y ago
I am a little out of the loop and so I have a few questions: 1. At what point in time can we arrest ocean temperature rise purely by reducing emissions? 2. Even if we stopped further rise in temperature, is the current temperature (land and ocean) sustainable, or is a chain reaction already underway that will increasingly lead to more and more turbulent weather? 3. Are there viable ways to extract greenhouses gasses from the atmosphere? Will extraction necessarily lead to lowering of temperature? 4. Are there risk factors in extracting greenhouse gasses? Could we trigger excessive cooling? 5. Alternatively, is the Futurama approach of dropping a massive icecube in the ocean a viable approach? 6. Are there long term benefits of warming?
- StavrosK 8y ago
  How are we going to make the ice cube? Where's all the heat from cooling the water going to go? Back in the atmosphere? Maybe we should just make a massive solar array, power a large laser with it, and shoot the beam into space.
  - pjc50 8y ago
    There was actually a very clever paper on nano materials which, instead of emitting IR on the blackbody spectrum, emit it in a band the atmosphere is transparent to. Reversing the greenhouse at ground level.
    - StavrosK 8y ago
      Oh huh, that's interesting... So we could just lay down large sheets of that material on a desert or something?
      - marmadukester39 8y ago
        Or cover all non- solar generating roofs with it, and all roads...
  - Bouncingsoul1 8y ago
ataturk 8y ago
Kill 4 billion people.
fokinsean 8y ago
Is there an agreed upon consensus on when SHTF? I've been trying to limit my climate change/collapse reading (keeping away from /r/collapse), but this article triggered my anxiety again. I know things aren't looking good, but is there any hope? Are we completely fucked?
- mikestew 8y ago
  Is there an agreed upon consensus on when SHTF? The only consensus is that the shit will hit you in dribbles. So much so, you might not even notice until you just kind of become used to smelling a little bit like shit. As the stench becomes overwhelming, perhaps you might look back and think, "you know, I don't remember always smelling like shit."
Proven 8y ago
Haha, more globalist nonsense from the jokers at the Economist.
randomThoughts9 8y ago
Not even the people that pretend to care are putting in the minimum necessary effort to fight this. So where does the war in the title come from? "War on/against x" is becoming a meaningless expression. As far as I can see, our only real plan is: we'll invent something. The rest is just rhetoric.
- Brakenshire 8y ago
  We will invent things, the question is the market conditions which will allow inventions to arise and then quickly gain market share. Even with the amazing progress in solar, wind and electric batteries, it’s still not enough. We need some meaningful pricing of carbon to allow the market to solve the problem.
sparkling 8y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade Thank me later.
nitrix 8y ago
The war? It's not about war, but symbiosis.
FrozenVoid 8y ago
The loss is because we invent half-solutions that only delay the inevitable(reducing/storing/filtering emissions instead of removing sources), but are more profitable for the industry/economy in the short term vs renewables.
rb808 8y ago
The war is unwinnable. Global warming can only be reversed if we stop all Co2 and methane emissions, and then start net carbon capture to reduce current co2 levels. Its just not going to happen. No one ever says that out loud. There is noise about reducing carbon emissions - in reality this is a lot of argument about reducing carbon emissions in wealthy countries. We can't even do that. Meanwhile even my greeny-lefty friends enjoy their central heating, imported food, masses of electronics and vacations in foreign countries. There is little hope in getting the world's peoples to reduce their quality of life. Generally everyone is happy to just blame Americans/China/Big Business/Coal/etc and keep on living as they please. Realistically not much is going to change. It might be possible to slow down the warming a little. But its going to get much more uncomfortable, its probably worth moving to somewhere cooler.
- vowelless 8y ago
  That is indeed what it seems like. We need a 10x improvement in this space. That can only happen with carbon capture and ability to regulate CO2 in the atmosphere. Not "planting trees", for God's sake. The whole conversation around emissions and the massive politicization of this is disappointing. Emissions reduction doesn't seem to do much. We need a Manhattan project to produce carbon and weather manipulation technology.
  - cryoshon 8y ago
    we have the technology already: the cyanobacteria which produced the oxygen that ultimately became the earth's atmosphere. they're even better than trees because they're easier to multiplex and they don't catch on fire. all you need is clean-ish seawater. i even drew up a few designs myself a few months ago. what we lack is the will to put the plans we know will work into action.
    - marmadukester39 8y ago
      I’ve wondered whether this could be tried in a contained/containable area, like the Black Sea, to minimize potential unintended consequences.
hacknat 8y ago
Losing? We already lost. It's probably too late to save modern civilization, the new war on climate change is about making sure we don't make the planet uninhabitable for almost ever land animal. But, our chances of accomplishing that are pretty good (of keeping the planet habitable, not failing to do so), especially as we lose billions of people that will die because of catastrophic climate change.
snissn 8y ago
Is there an optimistic argument to be made that we are winning the war on climate change?
- hacknat 8y ago
  It depends on what your goals are. If it is human survival, then yes. If it is about maintaining the current global economy and modern civilization then absolutely not.
- Brakenshire 8y ago
  One optimistic way of looking at it is that the models for success already exist. The US 2050 target for per-head CO2 emissions is to get to the same as France today. And France has just as industrial an economy, and a similar population density to a lot of US states. So, the idea cutting emissions is impossible or will inevitably lead to massive damage to the economy or reductions in quality of life is obviously not correct. And that doesn’t even take into account the technological developments which can occur to make the transition easier again. The problems are to do with politics, economic models, and technology development, there are no fundamental barriers. Also, the economy functions at scale, so if the majority of rich countries follow a transition other countries will likely follow by default. It’s a matter of pushing enough technologies over the tipping point where they take over even if you assume the value of the atmosphere is zero.
gorpomon 8y ago
Serious question: whatever happened to mechanical solutions like seeding the atmosphere with a chemical that will reflect light? Are those things considered too risky to try? I remember hearing about those solutions some years ago, but they seem to have fallen out of vogue now.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
fancyfish 8y ago
In the US we've been having this "debate" and talking about the "war" since at least the late 1970s. Even that long ago it was nearly impossible in our country to garner the political will to fight climate change. Our question now is, how do we best stall the inevitable? But the political will is still sorely lacking. The idea of a globally effective Paris Accord with teeth is laughable. From the NYT Magazine: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/clim...? The scientists knew the consequences of warming: "When, at Charney’s request, Hansen programmed his model to consider a future of doubled carbon dioxide, it predicted a temperature increase of four degrees Celsius. That was twice as much warming as the prediction made by the most prominent climate modeler, Syukuro Manabe, whose government lab at Princeton was the first to model the greenhouse effect. The difference between the two predictions — between warming of two degrees Celsius and four degrees Celsius — was the difference between damaged coral reefs and no reefs whatsoever, between thinning forests and forests enveloped by desert, between catastrophe and chaos." When the dire climate forecasts were established science, the foremost American scientists, senators, industry representatives, etc met to discuss what to do about it. They started their conference - in 1980 - with this: “We might start out with an emotional question,” proposed Thomas Waltz, an economist at the National Climate Program. “The question is fundamental to being a human being: Do we care?” This provoked huffy consternation. “In caring or not caring,” said John Laurmann, a Stanford engineer, “I would think the main thing is the timing.” It was not an emotional question, in other words, but an economic one: How much did we value the future? We have less time than we realize, said an M.I.T. nuclear engineer named David Rose, who studied how civilizations responded to large technological crises. “People leave their problems until the 11th hour, the 59th minute,” he said. “And then: ‘Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani?’ ” — “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” It was a promising beginning, Pomerance thought. Urgent, detailed, cleareyed. The attendees seemed to share a sincere interest in finding solutions. They agreed that some kind of international treaty would ultimately be needed to keep atmospheric carbon dioxide at a safe level. But nobody could agree on what that level was."
luord 8y ago
Improved education and quality of living tends to have an inverse proportion with birth rates. With that in mind, maybe the way to win the "war" could be killing poverty: No more poor people, and the population is going to decrease. Looking at Japan, according to the estimates and trends, they would no longer be around anymore in roughly 100 years. So, we still would go extinct (eventually, in a long time from now), but the planet will keep on living, so there's that.
forapurpose 8y ago
I think Americans have a special responsibility: Not only have they probably contributed more GHG than anyone else,[0] they have the power (and thus responsibility) to do the most about climate change, and they are the chief obstacle (see below). People are dying, and will die in greater numbers. Most people who will die didn't benefit from those GHG (the people in wealthy nations, such as the U.S., benefited), in countries where they can't afford to mitigate the problem. Is it ok to do that, to watch people die, and to be a bystander? As much as people on HN don't like to politicize issues, sometimes the problem is political and to talk about other causes and solutions is misleading. There is one powerful political entity standing in the world's way, the U.S. Republican Party; the rest of the world is generally united. The solution isn't technical or scientific, but political: Organize against them and vote them out of office if you are American. [0] I think China may produce more GHG now, but that's just recent history; I would guess that the U.S. is the all-time leader by a good margin.
marcosdumay 8y ago
Hum... Solar prices are comparable to coal nowadays, and getting lower by the month. Besides, where is that investment in solar or wind stalled? I haven't seen any place like that. Instead, I only see people talking more and more about solar, even to the point that some want to get off-grid for economical reasons (I don't agree with their calculations). I would really like to see some study about how long will solar power need to ramp-up until coal becomes uneconomical. I would also like to see some study about how much oil, gas and coal we can actually use, with what levels of energy returns. Instead, here it is that sensationalist piece based on basically no data at all, claiming the end of the world... At the economist.com. Journalism used to be better.
api 8y ago
I'm not optimistic about this for game theoretic reasons. It would require a global scale all-cooperate scenario, since any single defector gets massive economic benefit from defecting and using cheaper energy to undercut everyone else. The only hope we have is the development of post-carbon energy sources that are cheaper than fossil fuels. If we can't do that I do not see a plausible scenario where we don't burn every bit of profitably accessible carbon.
artemisyna 8y ago
It sucks that we're in such a bad place right now, but I'd probably bet money that there are going to be some big geoengineering startups in the next couple of years.
Bachoglider 8y ago
Hey guys, Let me present the project our team have created for tree planting https://treespond.com/ https://treespond.com/ - treespond is a web platform where one can offset Trump's ignorant Twitter quotes by planting trees. - the twist is simple: the more ignorant the phrase, the more trees are treesponded. Your feedback is huuugly helpful Thanks!
sir_brickalot 8y ago
Humanity is the problem. Address it! One focus should be on the root cause: The human population is the reason for our environmental problems, all-of-them. And the population growth rate is frightening [0]. It renders any other approach almost impossible to succeed. So even if it is an ethically difficult topic it should be addressed! The conclusion of this line of thinking could be less human population means less environmental problems and more prospects of success for every other approach to stopping climate change. So why not try to think of ways to incentivise birth control? Is it really to much to ask to stop producing more than 2 offsprings per family? This would bring population growth down. I'm sure otherwise human future is doomed. To support this you could install tax reduction for no/one/two child/ren. As any solution has to be globally installed, maybe something similar to emission trading with birth rights. Shrinking countries may need more growth, developing countries might need financial help and so on. I know this is drastic, but you know the saying... [1] [0] https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth [1] https://www.theidioms.com/drastic-times-call-for-drastic-measures/ https://www.theidioms.com/drastic-times-call-for-drastic-mea...

241 points by sethbannon 8y ago

Legitimate question: will there be a point where we speak about this war in the past tense, as in `The world lost the war against climate change'? How do we determine that turning point?

WhompingWindows 8y ago
There was an article in the NYTimes stating that we have already lost the war, but since climate changes in a continuous and highly complex fashion, I personally doubt there'll be an agreed-upon point where things changed from not lost -> lost.
imgabe 8y ago
Based on the wars on drugs and terror: no.
- ebbv 8y ago
  Not exactly the same because at some point climate change will make the planet uninhabitable.
  - pas 8y ago
    How? What does that mean? Habitability is not a binary thing.
    - Tade0 8y ago
      Actually, it is. For most mammals a temperature over around 31C at 100% humidity is lethal after no more than six hours of exposure. Go beyond that and everyone dies.
      - crankylinuxuser 8y ago
        You're right to a point. The hotter it gets on average, the faster the less fit die due to various heat related reasons. Once it hits 31c@100% relative humidity, land mammals die. So it's on a rolling scale up to 31C. At or past, yeah its a binary cliff.
      - PeterisP 8y ago
        I haven't seen any projected warming scenario where it'd be 31C everywhere. There's a gradual change in habitability as the habitable zone becomes smaller and smaller. Perhaps our descendants will be farming Antarctica.
      - pas 8y ago
        Sure, but will humans just sit idle by and wait for extinction, or will they do whatever it is necessary to keep the ecosystem from boiling away? Of course it depends on how severe the problem is, but in general we have the means to affect climate. (Solar shade comes to mind and large scale GHG capture.)
  - gus_massa 8y ago
    Even the worst case models predict that Earth will be habitable for humans for a long time. IIRC the worst that can happen in the next 100 years is that the sea will raise a few foots and flood some costal cities, change the sites where you can cultivate some food and cause hunger in some places, more floods and drought in many places, and kill many animals and plants. The worst case prediction is a huge huge huge disaster but it is still faraway from the point it is uninhabitable for us (and uninhabitable for roaches (and uninhabitable for bacteria)).
pas 8y ago
History is written by the victors. However, we already lost it - in a very real sense - because we failed to convince enough humans that it's important, that they ought to demand tougher legislation, policies, treaties, mandates, cleaner air, better waste management, more energy efficiency, instant order of nuclear and renewable plants to phase out CO2 producing energy sources as soon as possible, etc. We should be building 20km long hydro T-s, electrifying more and more railways, capturing as much emission as we can (chemical plants, big freighter ships, etc.) Instead we are building walls on borders, blabbering about secession, killing/jailing/maiming/kidnapping/torturing each other in an organized fashion all around the planet. We're simply late to efficiently manage a lot of things. But humanity is very likely to survive, so in that sense as long as someone can ask that question we don't have to use past tense.
btrettel 8y ago
I wonder if future generations will think people were even serious about solving the problem. In this respect the war was lost long ago. The vast majority of people who believe climate change will have large negative consequences make no major changes to their lifestyles. As someone who rides bike for transportation largely to save money and stay in shape (I think climate change is a lost cause), the environmental crowd seems to think I am doing something saint-like. But it really isn't anywhere near as difficult as they believe. They rarely adopt cycling to work, and at least part of the reason why seems to me that their environmentalism is not entirely sincere. This is speculation, but I think most people stop at signalling that climate change is bad. They rarely take effective action.
- eropple 8y ago
  A large part of it is that it is a collective action problem. If you want to talk about "effective action"? You're talking about shutting down coal plants, not going after the man or woman on the street. A person needing a car to get to work is, both in real and proportional terms, causing overwhelmingly less damage to the environment than industrial-scale polluters. If everybody who could switch to a bike instead of a car (which is fewer people, at least in America, than you might realize), you would see a blip on the graph. Calling into question the sincerity of people concerned about climate change but also concerned about actually getting to work on time and not stinking and getting fired because their bosses don't care is just some nasty, uncharitable stuff. And it's also counterproductive. It's the "but Al Gore flies in jets!" thing all over again, discrediting what state actors need to be doing because of the actions of private citizens. Don't do that. It's bad for you and bad for us.
  - Retric 8y ago
    Commuting using a 50+MPG vehicle is an option for the vast majority of humanity and would make a huge difference. So, it's not like the average person has zero options. People drive ~3.22 trillion miles in the US using 142.85 billion gallons = ~22MPG so a 50% reduction is completely viable. Further the first 50% reduction is the lowest hanging fruit. We don't need to get to 100% to make a huge difference over time.
Tade0 8y ago
Look up "wet bulb temperature". ELI5: if the temperature of a wet thermometer(which would normally be colder due to evaporation) in a given place goes over around 31C this area becomes uninhabitable for almost all mammals. Burning all the known fossil fuels would be enough to make it so for some places on earth, but the big unknown is what about the other sources of GHG's like thawing permafrost or clathrates lying under the sea?
SamUK96 8y ago
Hard to say. I don't think there will be a well-defined turning point. The thing is, the climate changes on long scales, and humans only pay attention to the immediate details, like children analyzing the stock market. The climate will get _gradually_ worse, and people will be forced to migrate north where the environment is more livable. This is obviously what is happening now, and isn't fully sustainable. A little patch of green (Europe) can't feed the world, in slightly over-the-top terms. However, I will say this. If anyone has ever been in a large storm, or a drought, you'll be shockingly aware at how quickly a small announcement about "sold-out water" or "store stock issues" turns into absolute, utter, pure, _pandemonium_. Once _that_ happens often enough, I think people will begin to admit that we lost _something_, for sure. To answer your question though, it's generally believed that it will be a gradually-growing sense of despair and dread, and a growing struggle. Migration into the northern hemisphere as it slowly becomes the last livable place on Earth. Ever played musical chairs in the later stages of the game? Yeah. Honestly, it's remarkably similar to the mechanics behind the French Revolution, but instead of just rich vs poor, it's some kind of crazy triadic chaos-war between rich, poor, and nature, all made more ironic that nukes have a triadic motif.
mmphosis 8y ago
War is in the past. The war on drugs. The war on whatever. We are not waging war. War doesn't work. War is what has exacerbated the problem. We needn't dwell on the past but maybe learn from it. I agree that wording is important. Talking about climate changes is important. We need an effort, perhaps greater than the war effort in world war 2 to make the changes necessary because whether we do nothing or make needed changes for the better, change is coming. There is no turning point. The Great Turning is a shift from the Industrial Growth Society to a life-sustaining civilization.
mattygh 8y ago
It's all about changing the goalposts. We have probably lost the war against 1.5 deg C climate change, as even if we were to freeze emissions now, I believe we would hit that (need fact check on that). We are currently losing the war against 2 deg C climate change. The next war is against 3 or 4 deg C climate change. All of these milestones have severe consequences more significant than the last, so all are worth fighting.
aurailious 8y ago
We have almost certainly already lost. The challenge now is to adapt to the change. Paris was not about bringing global temp change to 0C, just limiting it to 2C. Fortunately planet Earth won't be bothered by us too much. The cycles of ice ages we are in will "correct" most anything we do. The loss of biodiversity will probably be our only legacy.
- bmarkovic 8y ago
  Biodiversity will recover on a planetary timescale. Our civilization will probably be lost tho.
jandrese 8y ago
We've lost the war when everyone is dead.
- rabidrat 8y ago
  I say we've lost the war when global civilization is over. People can survive Mad Max style but that's a colossal failure in my book.
carry_bit 8y ago
When we accept the change instead of fight to prevent/reverse it.

angersock 8y ago

We have nuclear power, but people are bad at evaluating risks, so here we are.

ythn 8y ago
> people are bad at evaluating risks People are easily emotionally manipulated. Show some pictures of cancer or disfigured babies and you can get everyone to rail against nuclear. Media does it all the time to skew our priorities. Think medical malpractice and healthcare is a big source of death in the US? Think again, bump stocks and crappy 3d printed plastic guns are the types of killers you should be worried about according to the media. Rinse and repeat.
21 8y ago
We were told that Fukushima will NEVER happen. So yeah, some people are very bad at evaluating risks.
- losvedir 8y ago
  Well, what happened? Last I heard the outcome is some land lost, no immediate deaths, and about 100 deaths due to cancer over the next 50 years. A tragedy, but not apocalyptic. (And minuscule compared to the deaths and destruction from the earthquake/tsunami itself.)
  - 21 8y ago
    > A private think tank says the total cost of the Fukushima disaster could reach ¥70 trillion ($626 billion), or more than three times the government’s latest estimate. But I guess you'll say that $626 bil is just 15% of Japan's GDP, totally manageable over the long term. I'm sure the communities where future nuclear plants are to be build will love this argument: "if disaster strikes, remember, it's for the greater good"
    - carry_bit 8y ago
      What's the cost of rising sea levels over the long term?

okket 8y ago

I don't know if the "war against" theme fits here. There is no enemy but ourselves.

bhhaskin 8y ago
I agree with you, as it also implies that we can shift the blame one else.
the_cat_kittles 8y ago
well, the enemy is clearly those of us who decided its a hoax, or that it doesn't matter.
strainer 8y ago
Agreed, describing essential struggles and challenges as wars, promotes the ruthless traumatic destructiveness which actual war necessitates. The idea of making war should be repulsive, sadly it is freely glorified and normalised - and made.
aurailious 8y ago
How many times have we fought wars not against ourselves?
codeafin 8y ago
The war is between those who wish to act on it, and those who wish to ignore it.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 8y ago
  What other title would you give it instead, then?
- moduspol 8y ago
  Framing it as binary serves only political ends. At best, you could frame it as "people willing to act sufficiently to meaningfully combat global warming" and "everyone else," but the former group is far smaller than "those who wish to act on it." Put plainly: It will take far more dramatic action than most climate alarmists advocate to even have a measurable impact on (let alone solve) global warming. The opposing side isn't just "those who ignore it," it's most people who rationally evaluate policy claiming to be capable of a significant effect.

PunchTornado 8y ago

is there a proof somewhere that these wild fires are linked to climate change? For example the really bad one in Greece happened because someone decided to burn some wood. (I'm convinced that climate change is real and we're responsible)

artimaeis 8y ago
I'll see if I can get some citations later -- but the general idea of wildfires and climate change is that climate change has caused more intense periods of drought in ares that haven't experienced those sorts of conditions before. As such - when wildfires start (regardless of origin of the fire), they tend to spread more rapidly and more intensely.
btrettel 8y ago
There is no conclusive proof. Likely climate change is a factor, but forest management practices are as well. I can recall reading that not allowing forest fires to occur in the past can lead to an increase in dead plant matter on the ground, which makes future forest fires worse.
Arcten 8y ago
I haven't found an academic source for this, but the suggestion is that even though triggers for fires may be unrelated, the scope and intensity of the fires are intensified due to the effects of climate change. This article discusses some of this background https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/11/science/climate-change-forest-fires.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/11/science/climate-change-fo...
fabricexpert 8y ago
Trying to link individual, recent news events to climate change is generally a bad idea. You're taking a long term term trend (climate change) and comparing it with short term extreme events - there may or may not be a direct link, it's hard to say. This makes it easy for climate change deniers to give cherrypicked examples of outliers that tune to emotional responses, rather than factual evidence. It's better to look at overall trends over time to see the impact of climate change, e.g. are we getting more of the extreme weather scenarios? Yes. Are temperatures globally going up? Yes. Are sea levels rising? Yes. Are the polar ice caps melting? Yes. etc.

konschubert 8y ago

Do we know what will happen if we keep burning all fossil we can find, at today's rate?

andy_ppp 8y ago
Sort of... https://edition.cnn.com/2015/05/21/opinions/sutter-6-degrees-climate/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2015/05/21/opinions/sutter-6-degrees... I worry that all the sink holes appearing in Russia are massive methane deposits which are probably are not factored into estimates. It being this hot in Europe and specifically the UK for this long is insane.
- chosenbreed 8y ago
  Yep. That could be a bit of a problem. The land mass affected appears to be huge...

WhompingWindows 8y ago

If you look at global power sector emissions from 1998 to 2018, you'll see that while we have dramatically improved upon the energy intensity (energy/capita) and even are making improvements on carbon intensity (carbon/capita), but the sad reality is this: we are still using around 35% coal power in 2018, the same as we did in 1998. And the power sector is the easiest sector to decarbonize, by the way. If you look at electric vehicles, even if we had the most rapid, insane ramp-up that's beyond even Elon's crazy predictions, we'd still have massive fossil fuel use for non vehicle uses of petroleum for chemical industries, airplanes, plastic production, and for the numerous numbers of legacy cars that will be leftover that are not EV. We need massive innovation across all our uses of fossil fuel. We can not rest on our laurels, saying PV and wind are so cheap now. They are still around 4% of total energy consumption, and when you factor in the decline of nuclear and relative decline of hydropower in the ever-increasing industrial energy base, we see that fossil fuels are basically the same % of our energy mix as they were before 2000. For an energy realist, I recommend checking out Vaclav Smil, who has long been predicting 21st century as the century of natural gas, and who has been skeptical of renewables taking over instantly. It will take us until the 22nd century to truly decarbonize, and by then the seas will have risen over Miami and Shanghai on a regular basis. It's a truly scary future. Get innovating, in your personal lives and in your professional careers, everyone!

the_cat_kittles 8y ago
i dont understand. you completely omit laws in your suggested solution. we need to pass laws that prevent businesses from fucking everything up worse than they already have. you can innovate all you want, but i think you should also not elect people who are fucking STUPID about climate change.
- chosenbreed 8y ago
  > but i think you should also not elect people who are fucking STUPID about climate change. Sure...but that would require getting enough people who are not "fucking STUPID about climate" to vote appropriately :-)
- 8y ago

acd 8y ago

We should switch to a carbon/anti pollution based crypto currency that is mined in a earth friendly way. All goods and transports and all other pollution is such a system should be accounted for. As it now with the current economic system it is too easy to offset the cost on somebody else. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

kang 8y ago
solar mining in space and beaming the results to earth https://twitter.com/peterktodd/status/897631806899597312 https://twitter.com/peterktodd/status/897631806899597312
- samfriedman 8y ago
  I think orbital solar collection is interesting, but I'm not sure why it needs to be used to mine BitCoin: can't we just use the energy to power a microwave beam to collectors on the surface? Not sure what the economics of that is vs. the cost of launching a geostationary satellite though.
- DoctorOetker 8y ago
  there is no fundamental reason cryptocurrency "mining" should be energy-intensive, it was & is merely an unnecessary side-effect of the first cryptocurrency (Bitcoin) and its spin-off's / copycats. Sadly a large fraction of the crypto proponent "community" misinterprets the unnecessary energy expenditure as the source of "value", while the majority of the crypto opponents similarily consider it an unavoidable side-effect of cryptocurrencies and hence an argument against cryptocurrencies in general... check out the Algorand papers to learn more

Reason077 8y ago

Is there even a "war" against climate change? If there is, it's barely gotten started. For the most part, politicians are at best apathetic and at worst, actively hostile to the idea of "fighting" such a war.

anoplus 8y ago
From the activism I follow in my country in last decade, I learned that politicians are apathetic, and a good activism is needed to make them move. That's how lazy governments work. So I think until we fix governments performance we need to engage in efficient activism. What is efficient activism? This question interests me.
- TOGoS 8y ago
  Workplace organizing. It's a lot easier to get people to fight for something when they know they'll benefit from it directly (via higher wages, better working conditions, etc). A unified working class is the most effective tool we have for fighting countering the power of bug business, who would rather let the world burn than stop building pipelines. Most people don't like what's happening to the world -- they just feel powerless to stop it. So let's change that.
  - a_tractor 8y ago
    We already have "the power." People just don't want to accept the responsibility of their own contribution to the demand of said pipelines. While big business doesn't want to stop building pipelines, nobody wants to stop buying whatever comes out of them, either. It would be fun to see you try to convince the "working class" of the developing world to stop what they are doing and cease their from-behind pursuit of material wealth. You could try to bribe them but I'm not sure if that is what I would call sustainable. With "workplace organizing" the benefits are immediate and obvious, and the eventual consequences, negative or otherwise, are not. Kind of thing where a wage increase is obvious, but the eventual outsourcing of your job for cheaper labor, or the eventual bankruptcy of the business when the pensions are due, is not. We face the opposite problem here, since the effort involved (lifestyle changes) and the negative effects (higher taxes) are immediately obvious, while the benefits are neither immediate nor obvious. Its more like you are trying to convince people to demand lower wages... The problem itself (specific to AGW) is not even immediately obvious, apparently you need PhDs from multiple disciplines to understand the problem or you are dismissed with the Courtier's reply, leaving you reliant on an Appeal to Authority. That isn't necessarily wrong, but that is what you are dealing with. Manifesting change then depends on establishing complete faith in that authority or consensus, and, in contrast to a pay raise, the only thing you can utilize as motivation for change is guilt and fear. Then you have to be ensure that bad actors won't try to manipulate that fear via groupthink for less noble purposes... We don't have a great track record for that. Anyway, I sort of think the seemingly fanatical calls for massive top-down solutions to this problem tends to do more to defeat or demoralize individual or bottom-up efforts, as you might promote, and seems designed to evoke increased permissiveness to those who seek mainly to centralize and expand corporate and government power.

nonbel 8y ago

"War against" ("War on") seems to mean it is a never-ending boondoggle that, at best, wastes a bunch of resources. Is there any example of these "wars" being a success? The three that come to mind are: War on drugs: fail War on cancer: fail War on poverty: fail Why is the economist trying to link climate change to this?

SamUK96 8y ago
War on cancer has been...not completely a fail? Certainly made harder by profiteering, but, y'know. Also, I find "War on poverty" hilarious. Like a country saying it's "making crime illegal".
- nonbel 8y ago
  The war on cancer is a total fail in my book. They surrendered when they started calling it "many diseases", meaning there will never be a "cure for cancer" by definition.
  - heyitsguay 8y ago
    Cancer is many diseases, that all happen to be characterized by uncontrolled cell growth. A "cure for cancer" is like a "cure for fever".
    - nonbel 8y ago
      Responded here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17698877 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17698877
  - jandrese 8y ago
    Huh? You consider it a fail because we learned that there are many different kinds of Cancers? Yes a "one magic pill" option will probably never exist, but we can chip away at all forms of Cancer until they all have a cure. But realistically, this is not a war I think we can win in my lifetime. It's much bigger than people may have originally thought.

Sol- 8y ago

Was there a serious attempt to begin with? Yes, there are some efficiency gains and in some developed nations CO2 emissions seemed to stagnate, but much of that seems incidental (for instance partly caused by the Great Recession 10 years ago) and rarely part of a coordinated effort. Though I guess you can at least partly credit the rise of renewable energy like Solar to some government programs. Wonder how much faster the effort would have been if we had an actual cap-and-trade system that encompasses the global economy instead of the lackluster attempts which aren't legally binding, only cover limited industries or have an oversupply of emission certificates to render the system useless (like the European one). But it's pointless to ponder about that. It's not there's a lack of ideas regarding possible solutions, it's a just lack of foresight by humanity. We probably can't even blame previous generations, because we would have acted the same in their situation.

maze-le 8y ago
Its not that much, but it's a start: https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/international/negotiations/paris_en https://ec.europa.eu/clima/policies/international/negotiatio...

biznickman 8y ago

Yet another article that emphasizes how absolutely garbage our politicians are. They are also actively complicit in Trump's war against environmental protection and the continued apathy that began before Trump. The problem is that environmental driven campaigns have been incredibly ineffective. Perhaps it's our responsibility to generate noise the same level of that with Net Neutrality?

rc_bhg 8y ago

Climate Change has the Republican army on its side destroying the environment at any chance they get.

cletus 8y ago

So in the last month or so I stumbled across SFIA [1]. This guy has produced 150+ videos about futuristic topics but grounded in science. Everything from how to get into space cheaper to the Fermi Paradox to Black Hole civilizations. Anyway, one thing I like about it is the optimism. This guy is genuinely optimistic about the future. And he has pretty good reason. Like this planet can realistically be home to trillions of people with not much more tech than we have right now. But a recurring topic is the subject of fusion and how much of a game-changer it will be if we can do it in any kind of economic fashion. Now I'd previously somewhat dismissed this because of the naive view that it is free energy. Well the fuel might essentially be free (even that depends on what the fuel is; deuterium is common enough to essentially be free, Helium-3 not so much) but the plant itself costs money, has a power output, requires maintenance and we still need power lines and the like. But he points out some of the reasons why this is a complete game changer and why certain problems simply cease to be. One of these is the greenhouse gas problem. Why? Because as soon as you have energy cheaper than hydrocarbons you simply use your power to make hydrocarbons from the CO2 in the atmosphere. This is pretty simple chemistry and we can do that now. There's just no point because we'd be powering the process largely with hydrocarbons (solar and wind notwithstanding). I should also point out that I remain somewhat skeptical about nuclear fusion being economic because of the neutron problem (in that neutrons quickly destroy the container). This works fine for stars, not so well for superconducting magnets. But (as Isaac Arthur points out) you don't even need fusion for some of these rosier outcomes. You just need cheaper than what we have now and there's good reason to think that solar may get us there, particularly if we can mass produce solar collectors in low Earth orbit (these produce about seven times the power of Earth bound collectors). And there's actually pretty good reasons to be optimistic about that. The human condition is one of exaggeration, unfortunately. Namely that both fear and optimism tend to be overstated. You see this in markets all the time. The counterargument against radical changes to combat climate change tends to revolve around the idea that markets will eventually solve that problem (for those that admit there's even a problem at any rate). And it makes me somewhat uncomfortable to admit that this idea probably isn't 100% wrong. [1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZFipeZtQM5CKUjx6grh54g https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZFipeZtQM5CKUjx6grh54g

mattygh 8y ago

ryanx435 8y ago

"Climate change" is the athiests' version of Armageddon.

batteryhorse 8y ago
It's true. Climate change really is modern day religion. A volcanic eruption is more likely to cause the climate to change. The war on climate change suggests that humans are capable of preventing a volcano from erupting. The poles are shifting as well. Pollution is a separate issue, of course we should keep everything clean, but when the climate stops changing, that probably means the planet is dead, like Mars (setting up a colony on Mars makes absolutely no sense either)
- DoctorOetker 8y ago
  the number of volcanos erupting in some interval (say 10 years) is large enough that you can roughly treat it as a constant source of CO2, but at the same time the volcano is emitting igneous rock (i.e. the magma with CO2 removed), which will reabsorb the CO2 over a very long timespan... so yes volcanos emit large amounts of CO2, and commensurate amounts of CO2 absorbing igneous rock, in geological timescales they cancel
sctb 8y ago
We said we'd ban you if you kept posting like this, so we have.
- ryanx435 8y ago
  9 years of user history and banned for an analogy that goes against hn group think. Lol

alkonaut 8y ago

So we need a quick plan B. The required goals from nations won’t be met and people won’t change lifestyle to do something about it. We need to also do something that ensures warming stops without any sacrifice made by people (other than taxe to fund the massive programs) Maybe we could turn things around in 10 or 30 years but the damage done may either be irreversible or runaway. So a short term solution that ensures no temperature increase for the next 30 years would be great. But what is it? Carbon capture? Artificial Whitening of oceans? Is there any solution that is even remotely viable?

rcMgD2BwE72F 8y ago
We haven't done $%# to try and execute Plan A i.e. reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It's the cheapest and easiest plan by far, so why do you think we can afford to switch to some fanciful plan B? Most alternative are either distractions by/for those who can't accept the harsh reality, Get-rich-quick schemes by some industrialists or science-fiction by/for those who prefer to dream of a nice future rather than doing something now. "The American way of life is not up for negotiations. Period." -- The People In Charge.
- alkonaut 8y ago
  > It's the cheapest and easiest plan by far, It’s the simplest plan, but I’ll argue we are seeing it’s pretty difficult as it requires changing the behavior of a lot of people, if even just a little abd/or changing policies of a lot of countries. I’m not saying plan A should be somehow abandoned or slowed (so perhaps B is a bad name because it’s typically used when A is abandoned) But it should be complemented. We should also investigate the stupidly sci-fi get-rich-quick (or perhaps lose weight fast?) schemes. Technological solutions might at least buy some time for the slow change we are seeing in behavior and policy. And yes, I realize there is a hazard that some of these schemes risk giving an impression that the problem is being solved, and plan A isn’t necessary. That can’t happen. I also realize that anything other than simply limiting emissions is a complex and expensive plan, but even a complex and expensive plan is better than a simple and cheap plan that is politically impossible.

desireco42 8y ago

Maybe instead of going to war, we should come to peace with our environment. I think mindset is important in looking into this issue.

safgasCVS 8y ago

The article fees cheaply alarmist to me. Its incredibly difficult to make good predictions even 2-3 years into the future let alone whats going to happen globally decades from now. We have only started to see the effects of global warming but the really bad stuff has yet to happen - and when it does the reaction wont be linear as whats being projected here.

vowelless 8y ago

I am a little out of the loop and so I have a few questions: 1. At what point in time can we arrest ocean temperature rise purely by reducing emissions? 2. Even if we stopped further rise in temperature, is the current temperature (land and ocean) sustainable, or is a chain reaction already underway that will increasingly lead to more and more turbulent weather? 3. Are there viable ways to extract greenhouses gasses from the atmosphere? Will extraction necessarily lead to lowering of temperature? 4. Are there risk factors in extracting greenhouse gasses? Could we trigger excessive cooling? 5. Alternatively, is the Futurama approach of dropping a massive icecube in the ocean a viable approach? 6. Are there long term benefits of warming?

StavrosK 8y ago
How are we going to make the ice cube? Where's all the heat from cooling the water going to go? Back in the atmosphere? Maybe we should just make a massive solar array, power a large laser with it, and shoot the beam into space.
- pjc50 8y ago
  There was actually a very clever paper on nano materials which, instead of emitting IR on the blackbody spectrum, emit it in a band the atmosphere is transparent to. Reversing the greenhouse at ground level.
  - StavrosK 8y ago
    Oh huh, that's interesting... So we could just lay down large sheets of that material on a desert or something?
    - marmadukester39 8y ago
      Or cover all non- solar generating roofs with it, and all roads...
- Bouncingsoul1 8y ago

ataturk 8y ago

Kill 4 billion people.

fokinsean 8y ago

Is there an agreed upon consensus on when SHTF? I've been trying to limit my climate change/collapse reading (keeping away from /r/collapse), but this article triggered my anxiety again. I know things aren't looking good, but is there any hope? Are we completely fucked?

mikestew 8y ago
Is there an agreed upon consensus on when SHTF? The only consensus is that the shit will hit you in dribbles. So much so, you might not even notice until you just kind of become used to smelling a little bit like shit. As the stench becomes overwhelming, perhaps you might look back and think, "you know, I don't remember always smelling like shit."

Proven 8y ago

Haha, more globalist nonsense from the jokers at the Economist.

randomThoughts9 8y ago

Not even the people that pretend to care are putting in the minimum necessary effort to fight this. So where does the war in the title come from? "War on/against x" is becoming a meaningless expression. As far as I can see, our only real plan is: we'll invent something. The rest is just rhetoric.

Brakenshire 8y ago
We will invent things, the question is the market conditions which will allow inventions to arise and then quickly gain market share. Even with the amazing progress in solar, wind and electric batteries, it’s still not enough. We need some meaningful pricing of carbon to allow the market to solve the problem.

sparkling 8y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade Thank me later.

nitrix 8y ago

The war? It's not about war, but symbiosis.

FrozenVoid 8y ago

The loss is because we invent half-solutions that only delay the inevitable(reducing/storing/filtering emissions instead of removing sources), but are more profitable for the industry/economy in the short term vs renewables.

rb808 8y ago

The war is unwinnable. Global warming can only be reversed if we stop all Co2 and methane emissions, and then start net carbon capture to reduce current co2 levels. Its just not going to happen. No one ever says that out loud. There is noise about reducing carbon emissions - in reality this is a lot of argument about reducing carbon emissions in wealthy countries. We can't even do that. Meanwhile even my greeny-lefty friends enjoy their central heating, imported food, masses of electronics and vacations in foreign countries. There is little hope in getting the world's peoples to reduce their quality of life. Generally everyone is happy to just blame Americans/China/Big Business/Coal/etc and keep on living as they please. Realistically not much is going to change. It might be possible to slow down the warming a little. But its going to get much more uncomfortable, its probably worth moving to somewhere cooler.

vowelless 8y ago
That is indeed what it seems like. We need a 10x improvement in this space. That can only happen with carbon capture and ability to regulate CO2 in the atmosphere. Not "planting trees", for God's sake. The whole conversation around emissions and the massive politicization of this is disappointing. Emissions reduction doesn't seem to do much. We need a Manhattan project to produce carbon and weather manipulation technology.
- cryoshon 8y ago
  we have the technology already: the cyanobacteria which produced the oxygen that ultimately became the earth's atmosphere. they're even better than trees because they're easier to multiplex and they don't catch on fire. all you need is clean-ish seawater. i even drew up a few designs myself a few months ago. what we lack is the will to put the plans we know will work into action.
  - marmadukester39 8y ago
    I’ve wondered whether this could be tried in a contained/containable area, like the Black Sea, to minimize potential unintended consequences.

hacknat 8y ago

Losing? We already lost. It's probably too late to save modern civilization, the new war on climate change is about making sure we don't make the planet uninhabitable for almost ever land animal. But, our chances of accomplishing that are pretty good (of keeping the planet habitable, not failing to do so), especially as we lose billions of people that will die because of catastrophic climate change.

snissn 8y ago

Is there an optimistic argument to be made that we are winning the war on climate change?

hacknat 8y ago
It depends on what your goals are. If it is human survival, then yes. If it is about maintaining the current global economy and modern civilization then absolutely not.
Brakenshire 8y ago
One optimistic way of looking at it is that the models for success already exist. The US 2050 target for per-head CO2 emissions is to get to the same as France today. And France has just as industrial an economy, and a similar population density to a lot of US states. So, the idea cutting emissions is impossible or will inevitably lead to massive damage to the economy or reductions in quality of life is obviously not correct. And that doesn’t even take into account the technological developments which can occur to make the transition easier again. The problems are to do with politics, economic models, and technology development, there are no fundamental barriers. Also, the economy functions at scale, so if the majority of rich countries follow a transition other countries will likely follow by default. It’s a matter of pushing enough technologies over the tipping point where they take over even if you assume the value of the atmosphere is zero.

gorpomon 8y ago

Serious question: whatever happened to mechanical solutions like seeding the atmosphere with a chemical that will reflect light? Are those things considered too risky to try? I remember hearing about those solutions some years ago, but they seem to have fallen out of vogue now.

deleted 8y ago

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fancyfish 8y ago

In the US we've been having this "debate" and talking about the "war" since at least the late 1970s. Even that long ago it was nearly impossible in our country to garner the political will to fight climate change. Our question now is, how do we best stall the inevitable? But the political will is still sorely lacking. The idea of a globally effective Paris Accord with teeth is laughable. From the NYT Magazine: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/clim...? The scientists knew the consequences of warming: "When, at Charney’s request, Hansen programmed his model to consider a future of doubled carbon dioxide, it predicted a temperature increase of four degrees Celsius. That was twice as much warming as the prediction made by the most prominent climate modeler, Syukuro Manabe, whose government lab at Princeton was the first to model the greenhouse effect. The difference between the two predictions — between warming of two degrees Celsius and four degrees Celsius — was the difference between damaged coral reefs and no reefs whatsoever, between thinning forests and forests enveloped by desert, between catastrophe and chaos." When the dire climate forecasts were established science, the foremost American scientists, senators, industry representatives, etc met to discuss what to do about it. They started their conference - in 1980 - with this: “We might start out with an emotional question,” proposed Thomas Waltz, an economist at the National Climate Program. “The question is fundamental to being a human being: Do we care?” This provoked huffy consternation. “In caring or not caring,” said John Laurmann, a Stanford engineer, “I would think the main thing is the timing.” It was not an emotional question, in other words, but an economic one: How much did we value the future? We have less time than we realize, said an M.I.T. nuclear engineer named David Rose, who studied how civilizations responded to large technological crises. “People leave their problems until the 11th hour, the 59th minute,” he said. “And then: ‘Eloi, Eloi, Lama Sabachthani?’ ” — “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” It was a promising beginning, Pomerance thought. Urgent, detailed, cleareyed. The attendees seemed to share a sincere interest in finding solutions. They agreed that some kind of international treaty would ultimately be needed to keep atmospheric carbon dioxide at a safe level. But nobody could agree on what that level was."

luord 8y ago

Improved education and quality of living tends to have an inverse proportion with birth rates. With that in mind, maybe the way to win the "war" could be killing poverty: No more poor people, and the population is going to decrease. Looking at Japan, according to the estimates and trends, they would no longer be around anymore in roughly 100 years. So, we still would go extinct (eventually, in a long time from now), but the planet will keep on living, so there's that.

forapurpose 8y ago

I think Americans have a special responsibility: Not only have they probably contributed more GHG than anyone else,[0] they have the power (and thus responsibility) to do the most about climate change, and they are the chief obstacle (see below). People are dying, and will die in greater numbers. Most people who will die didn't benefit from those GHG (the people in wealthy nations, such as the U.S., benefited), in countries where they can't afford to mitigate the problem. Is it ok to do that, to watch people die, and to be a bystander? As much as people on HN don't like to politicize issues, sometimes the problem is political and to talk about other causes and solutions is misleading. There is one powerful political entity standing in the world's way, the U.S. Republican Party; the rest of the world is generally united. The solution isn't technical or scientific, but political: Organize against them and vote them out of office if you are American. [0] I think China may produce more GHG now, but that's just recent history; I would guess that the U.S. is the all-time leader by a good margin.

marcosdumay 8y ago

Hum... Solar prices are comparable to coal nowadays, and getting lower by the month. Besides, where is that investment in solar or wind stalled? I haven't seen any place like that. Instead, I only see people talking more and more about solar, even to the point that some want to get off-grid for economical reasons (I don't agree with their calculations). I would really like to see some study about how long will solar power need to ramp-up until coal becomes uneconomical. I would also like to see some study about how much oil, gas and coal we can actually use, with what levels of energy returns. Instead, here it is that sensationalist piece based on basically no data at all, claiming the end of the world... At the economist.com. Journalism used to be better.

api 8y ago

I'm not optimistic about this for game theoretic reasons. It would require a global scale all-cooperate scenario, since any single defector gets massive economic benefit from defecting and using cheaper energy to undercut everyone else. The only hope we have is the development of post-carbon energy sources that are cheaper than fossil fuels. If we can't do that I do not see a plausible scenario where we don't burn every bit of profitably accessible carbon.

artemisyna 8y ago

It sucks that we're in such a bad place right now, but I'd probably bet money that there are going to be some big geoengineering startups in the next couple of years.

Bachoglider 8y ago

Hey guys, Let me present the project our team have created for tree planting https://treespond.com/ https://treespond.com/ - treespond is a web platform where one can offset Trump's ignorant Twitter quotes by planting trees. - the twist is simple: the more ignorant the phrase, the more trees are treesponded. Your feedback is huuugly helpful Thanks!

sir_brickalot 8y ago

Humanity is the problem. Address it! One focus should be on the root cause: The human population is the reason for our environmental problems, all-of-them. And the population growth rate is frightening [0]. It renders any other approach almost impossible to succeed. So even if it is an ethically difficult topic it should be addressed! The conclusion of this line of thinking could be less human population means less environmental problems and more prospects of success for every other approach to stopping climate change. So why not try to think of ways to incentivise birth control? Is it really to much to ask to stop producing more than 2 offsprings per family? This would bring population growth down. I'm sure otherwise human future is doomed. To support this you could install tax reduction for no/one/two child/ren. As any solution has to be globally installed, maybe something similar to emission trading with birth rights. Shrinking countries may need more growth, developing countries might need financial help and so on. I know this is drastic, but you know the saying... [1] [0] https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth [1] https://www.theidioms.com/drastic-times-call-for-drastic-measures/ https://www.theidioms.com/drastic-times-call-for-drastic-mea...